Broken Zerkers in Tactics

[Enrikk]

Hail All!

I've noticed something troubling:

I've cleared all of the soldiers, knights, zerkers, mages, and wizards in tactics a lot lately, and I have not seen even ONE spell quest drop from the zerkers. No belts, no hands.

The soldiers appear to be glitched as well:
Out of 175 drops across my groups, only 30 came from the soldiers. That's about 17%. If the drop rate is the same for all, then I should, more or less, see a similar percentage for drops overall.

With the zerkers dropping nothing, and the soldiers being stingy, I have about 10 characters with everything done but the round ruby.

Possibly a problem?

[Belvino]

Are you wearing a Lucky Flask on any of your characters that keeps them from dropping I believe.

[Enrikk]

No sir, no lucky flasks.

[Enrikk]

Since this post, I have gone on to lay waste to the same mobs time and time again, and the same thing is happening. NOTHING has dropped from the zerkers. Not a single quest drop. Soldiers are similarly being stingy, but I have managed to move a few toons from their drops.

I get rare, I understand it. But, if all have a similar drop percentage, in time, statistically I should have seen more drops.

[Lillu]

Could you please give me exact NPC names with possible "correct" and "incorrect" drop rates from Tactics? I'll compare them.

[Otter620]

Looking at the Web tools a zek solder has a 5% chance to use the table for quest drops and each item has a 50% chance.

A zek berserker has an 8% chance to you the table and 1% chance to drop one of the items.

So just off of the Web tools it is alot more rare to get a drop from the zerkers than from any of the other quest mobs. I remember it taking a long time to complete that portion for all of my toons. Not saying it wasn't frustrating but eq is frustrating at times.

[Enrikk]

I guess you're right.

The "a Zek Beserker" has an odd drop rate for items:

Loot Table
Chance for table to be used: 8%.
# Items Selected From Table: 1

Item Type Item Chance
Belt of the Zerker Gems 1%
Hand of the Zerker Gems 1%



The "a Zek Soldier" has this drop rate:

Loot Table
Chance for table to be used: 5%.
# Items Selected From Table: 1

Item Type Item Chance
Foot of the Soldier Gems 50%
Head of the Soldier Gems 50%



Whereas, "a Zek War Wizard" has this drop rate:

Loot Table
Chance for table to be used: 8%.
# Items Selected From Table: 1

Item Type Item Chance
Blood of the Crow Gems 50%
Feather of the Crow Gems 50%

I think most of the rest of the mobs I'm killing follow the drop rate of the War Wizard, as listed above.

This DOES explain why I see less drops from the soldiers, and then again NO drops from the "beserkers". Now, the only question would be, is this intentional?

[Lillu]

Tyler created the zone and knowing him IRL I can tell it was intentional.

[Enrikk]

Could be, but, I'm thinking he was tired and "fat fingered" his percentage. The others are either 8% or 5% to use the table, and then 50% for the item.

Compare this to an item that is much-camped, the orb of the crimson bull, from Lady Mirenella. http://www.thehiddenforest.org/webtools ... ?id=124077. This has a straight 5% chance to drop, which is rare.

The "Zek Beserker" is 8% to even use the loot table, then 1% to see a drop you need. UNGODLY rare.

Still, if that was the intention, so be it.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Ydiss]

I was just about to post about this (just noticed it today) but did my due diligence and searched first.

I definitely agree that it's less likely this is deliberate considering how crazy rare these items are (0.08%).

For just one spell, you need to probably kill 2,500 zerkers. For our raid, we want 14 spells (out of 18).

That's 35,000 kills!

No one would choose to do that (indeed, the last time we did the zone, we only got a couple spells before we tired of the grind and gave up, having finished everything else in the tier, not just the zone).

The alternative is soldiers (much more reasonable at 1,220 kills but still way over all other requirements in the zone).

All the other drops are the same except these two with a probable kill count of 700 or so to equip 14 toons with just one of the four items required for a spell, which is much closer to reasonable (Blood Raven is 1000 kills total).

Unless the intention was to make these spells some of the rarest items in the game (where you're punished arbitrarily for making the mistake of choosing zerkers instead of soldiers, because you didn't research alla), I really do think this was much more likely an oversight than deliberate

8% a drop, considering you need 4 of each per spell (and four different types of each) feels about right to us.

I'm happy to list the npc and item ids/links if that would help, if you'd please consider changing this. Appreciate totally that you're very busy and probably already have lots on. We'll switch to killing soldiers in the meanwhile.