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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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
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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.
Like most farmable things over the years. Give it 2 expansions…
I know you’re being sarcastic but I still felt this needed further emphasis. The fact that the rares are now tied to:
- How many players? are in the zone and for how long.
- The rares despawning after 15min.
- The spawn times are still tied to which WQs are up but nobody knows what the actual quadrants are triggering which spawns.
- The off-quadrant rares have a 4-5 day lockout, but the on-quadrant rares have no lockout. Good luck figuring out which is which.
Means that:
- The motivation to to visit ZC has evaporated since you can no longer hope that a random rare may just happen to be up so you get lucky when you enter the zone.
- The hilariously complicated quadrant WQ system means nobody understands which rares will be up when and what their lockout actually is.
- Next expac there will be even less people in the zone thus reducing the chances of a rare spawn even more.
- Nobody knows the spawn timers even if a rares prerequisites are met.
Conclusion:
I have never seen a zone with such a complex spawn system. Literally no other zone in the entire game has such strings and caveats tied to their rare spawns. So all this means ZC rares are now the hardest rares to find in the entire game. Far harder than TLPD for example. TLPD only has 2 very simple spawn modifiers for example. Whereas all the ZC rares now have at least 4. And the ZC spawn modifiers are lot more opaque than TLPD’s.
The state of ZC for rares is officially the worst in the entire game. No other zone comes close. That’s not hyperbole, that is fact.
What a shemozle.
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The strange part of the timing of the change is that the “map is covered in rares” issue was about to solve itself now that we have 10.2 gear.
I am currently in Zaralek Caverns. Finally a rare spawned so I went over to fight it. I was halfway done and suddenly I got phased into another phase, causing the rare I was in combat with to disappear from my eyes (a Horde player who was also fighting it disappeared, maybe they were lucky and stayed in that phase). So, not only do the rares take forever to spawn, the stupid phasing system can screw you out of a rare, too.
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They said they don’t want people playing in the Zaralek Caverns.
Blizz should of had that in mind before putting it in the damn game and then ruining it further for everyone afterwards.
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