Why do some zones have 'reset timers', and how does this affect rares?

Community General Discussion
1

I’m fairly late to the farming game, tbh, but I’ve just found out about ‘reset timers’ mentioned in the comments on the TLPD wowhead page.

If I understand it correctly, if a rare has a four hour spawn time in a zone that resets, that means that if i kill it, log out for four hours and no one enters the zone while I’m gone, then log back in, i still have to sit there for four hours and wait for it?

This seems like a really bad deal for players. What’s the benefit conferred by zone resets, and is there a workaround for long-timer rares? I don’t mind waiting around or flying around for half hour/hour rares, i guess, but if I want to kill something with a four hour spawn time, do I need to find four hours of my day to just…sit in the zone and wait?

Is this new, or is it several years/expansions old and I’m just now hearing about it? It just doesn’t seem like a great idea for rare spawns, but i guess there must have been a technical perspective reason for it.

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I mean… I highly doubt any zones will ever be completely player-free for any longer than like, 30 minutes. Any dragonflight zones will absolutely not be empty at this point.

But yeah idk why they exist. TIL they exist.

3

It’s indeed very annoying, and it exists since a few years: on realms with small crz (and I have plenty in eu) it was a joke to find for example the easiest wod rares, as in pathrunner, gorok and luk’hok, there could be 3 up at once at a time, despite several hours respawn!

But since they introduced this zone reset timer, which must’ve been a few years before your comment, that’s no longer a thing, in fact for those rares I find that small crz are no longer the best bet, now medium crz are better, and as you can imagine, rares don’t last too long there cause there’s high enough population that they get killed often.