As a precursor, I have been genuinely loved Dragonflight, and for the most part have been very glad to see big improvements with developers listening to the community and weighing their feedback and making changes to make the game more enjoyable for everyone… Which is why the current state of Zaralek Caverns is such a colossal disappointment. I understand that the emptiness is a complex issue and not as easy as a hotfix to solve, but I desperately hope that the current plan is not the endgame. I have sat now in Zaralek Caverns-Proudmoore for an hour and a half and not a single rare has spawned, not spawned then de-spawned mind you, not spawned at all, period. This has been a trend across alts across multiple days, where you zone in to nothing up and wait around for upwards of an hour for absolutely nothing to spawn. From the perspective of someone just attempting to collect the dragon manuscripts from a few rares, this is monumentally frustrating. Increased drop rate doesn’t matter if your window for even attempting is miniscule to not at all. I don’t know if this is working as intended or bugged due to the “fix” but please make it probable to obtain these again. Content often naturally gets harder to farm once it isn’t immediately current sure, but this was literally last tier, and still the same expansion, it isn’t fixed it’s worse than it’s ever been. From someone who genuinely just wants to play your game, please help solve this.
Their “fix” for the issue months ago just made them shoot themselves in the foot, so what did they do to correct it? Reloaded and fired again.
ZC is in such a sorry state and I refuse to ever touch it again until meaningful fixes are made.
I only went there to get the Profession Knowledge Points. Haven’t gone back since.
Planned obsolescence that turns the rewards into de facto FOMO. It’s called parasitic development.
A hotfix to remove despawns and make the elites’ hp determined by how many players were attacking them would be exactly what is needed. And not at all a complex thing.
Both valid points, I just understand the issue of botting making population control difficult but still an issue that needs better addressing than… whatever it is we have rn
I don’t think botting had anything to do with this design.
likely, but that was part of their reasoning with rares being up and no one killing them. I don’t know how well they understand the issue, I suspect they just didn’t want the zones to LOOK empty, but killed playability in the process which is immensely disappointing.
I disagree. When Blizzard makes an announcement telling players their rationale for making some change, and it makes no sense, they had some other reason for making that change.
They WANTED to kill playability in that zone. That way players who wanted to farm the rewards and were still managing to do it would have no choice but to participate in the end game content of Blizzard’s choice. Collectors would obviously switch to mythic raiding and pushing high keys, even though they were never into that, and those groups don’t want collectors who are inexperienced. And Blizzard would get a spike to report on their investor reports.
With as many times they have blatantly disregarded feedback in the past I don’t disagree, just hope at the very least enough uproar can push them to make changes even begrudgingly for better community reception. Expect the worst, but hope for better
Oh there has been plenty of pushback and they’ve continued full-force into the headwinds. It’s one of the biggest stains on this expansion.
Ya, I don’t understand why the changed it. My ZC map was always full of rares and now there are none. Now, I’m not sure if it was full due to no groups killing them or just fast respawns, but despawning and slowing the respawn change does not seem like a good solution to me.
The best I can hope for is that Blizz made an internal timetable to watch what is happening after this change, and then change it after analysis and feedback. I like how Darkshore/Arathi are for rares; they need to make them soloable and keep the respawns quicker. More people would come for that I’m willing to bet.
They gave us a nonsense answer on that:
tldr; it was another case of players not playing the zone the way the developers wanted them to (see the “murderball” comment they made) so they doubled-down to make it even worse. Yes, it’s 
worthy.
After re-reading it, it still doesn’t make sense (to me, anyway). I guess they think we are “overwhelmed” seeing so many elites that we just skip over them, and they want us to focus on a handful and start grouping up. So they are going to provide artificial low supply to hopefully drum up demand.
The low supply will just make it even more painful for people that actually do want to kill them for whatever they are looking for. If it in fact does get people to group up, then, well, they will kill the 2-3 they are up and then leave the zone since there are no more.
They should just lower the health and let people flock in.
Yup it’s killed off any hope of me going back there.
This is what’s been asked for 6 months and they did the complete opposite.
Their official statement after we said the change makes no sense: “We like murderballs!”
The rest of us trying to figure out what a murderball is and where our rares went:
Zaralek Caverns Cosmetics Unfarmable
No worries, Im sure we’ll be able to farm them solo in about 6 years from now. 
I loved forbidden reach and the caverns initially, but MAN they know how to screw something good up quick. lol
And we won’t ever be able to solo Storm’s Fury because they made that as unsoloable in every way imaginable to the point that they may as well have just deleted it from the game.
They need to buff the portal progress on those.
Haven’t been to Zaralek since I maxed out renown for the niffen. Never saw anyone doing rares before the spawn changes. I doubt the changes made the area more desirable.
Will probably go back during late TWW or early Midnight to see if I can farm stuff.