Something is wrong with Ironhoof Destroyer drop chance

[Goramathras-silvermoon]

Just to clarify something 1st:

• I know that RNG means you can never get specific item, since the dice never takes into account how many attempts you had.
  Chance is the same no matter how many times you roll.

• I know only a fraction of players use Wowdb profiler. (If anyone wonders - I don’t)

• The purpose of data I referenced is statistical, and whole subject takes only statistics into account, instead of personal opinion.

• I know I’m odd and boring, but I didn’t come here to entertain.

• I didn’t come here to whine about bad luck, nor did I come for encouragement, I’m here to:

1. Share what I know
2. Ask Blizzard to look into the issue
3. Encourage reasonable readers among you to provide more information, as well as ideas, and to ultimately help me direct some of Blizzard’s attention at this issue

So, here’s what’s at hand:
Some characters may be ineligible to loot Ironhoof Destroyer from Blackhand.
There is a consistent commonality among players who actually got this mount during BfA - fresh characters. I talked to all players I could find who got it during BfA and reported their drop in wowsecrets discord. People show off their new mounts there all day, every day, there’s thousands of these screenshots, but only 8 or so reports with Ironhoof Destroyer in them. They have various numbers of attempts, but they all got it on characters who were new to farming Blackhand, in some cases these players couldn’t get the drop even with 300+ attempts, until they added some new characters to rotation. One thing that’s common to these new characters could be the quest with ID=38068, they either ran the script to check and it was false, or they didn’t answer me.
I met many players with extraordinarily high number of attempts, one of them stopped trying after 2,084 kills. I’m personally “only” at 820, and this inspired me to write here, since I don’t know what happens to those BugReports I’ve been sending and GM tickets I wrote that all received condescending replies describing that RNG means random number generator blah blah

What’s the big deal with this quest, it’s related to Music Roll that drops from same boss… Maybe nothing, otherwise there could be a chance a mistake was made and it could affect the mount.
If you farmed Blackhand during Legion, you might remember this Music Roll had very high drop chance, it would drop pretty often. It would also drop even if you had it learned on that character. It would get annoying after a while, and what better way to remember such an irrelevant thing.
Anyway - this is no longer the case. I’m not sure when this change was made exactly, somewhere around the early days of BfA, but the Music Roll stopped dropping for characters who have it learned.
So we know a change is made to the loot table around the time when BfA started.
Around the same time, people started farming Blackhand on way more characters than before, since it became faster due to bigger level difference. We knew it could take some time so we didn’t pay much attention, we just did our runs and moved to next weekly task. Time went on, we’re now in July, so let’s look back:

• Take a look at current wowhead page for this mount, in “Dropped by” tab, there is a column with header “Count” and below it says 2,551 drops out of 55,866 kills. This is All-Time data. As beforehand mentioned, these stats are only for players with Wowdb profiler.
• Now find the same page on archive(.)org, from 14th October 2018. It says 2466 / 12474
  So what does this mean? It means there was 43,392 kills in almost 9 months, but only 85 drops. It’s good enough sample size so it’s relevant. When put through calculator, it comes down to around 1 drop in 510 kills.

Unfortunately there are no snapshots of this page since 14th October, else I could probably see more precisely when the drop number slowed the rate at which it’s increasing.

[Vintoleth-ghostlands (Vintoleth)]

@Goramathras-silvermoon

GM tickets I wrote that all received condescending replies

seeing this more and more. i think the gm’s need to go on a refresher course on how to treat people and do their job.

@Goramathras-silvermoon

one of them stopped trying after 2,084 kills

see, i dont care what ANYONE says about “rarity” or “exclusivity” when you have to farm an item more this amount of times AND IT STILL DONT DROP there is something wrong with your game.
2084 kills would be:

• killing the boss on 1 toon, every reset, for 40 years~
• killing the boss on 50 toons, every reset, for 40 weeks.

or, as mythic opened on 2015-02-10, which is roughly 230 weeks ago, that could be closer to:

• killing the boss on 9 toons, every reset, since 2015-02-10.

obviously, this would not be feasible, as most people would not have been able to kill blackhand mythic in 6.1. in fact, while there would have been groups killing blackhand mythic throughout Legion, most people would not have been able to solo him until towards the end of Legion in 7.2 or 7.3 probably. before that, you had to share any dropped mounts between the people in the raid. and not many more would have done it in pre 7.2. so, this would mean less weeks tried, so more toons used.
most likely, to reach 2000+ kills of blackhand, you would probably have been doing this every week with 20+ toons.

how on earth is this deemed as fair reward for time invested.

ALSO note,

@Goramathras-silvermoon

it says 2,551 drops out of 55,866 kills

remember, a number of those drops COULD be coming from people who got the mount 100% drop rate during 6.1.

SOOOO, the number of people who ACTUALLY have had the mount drop when its drop rate fell to <0.1% might be tiny, only a fraction of that 2,551 players, like literally, a couple dozen people in nearly 4 years~.

THIS is also why blizzard should release ACCURATE data for all drops in the game, and not rely on sites like wowhead guessing on things. (that isn’t wowheads fault, its the best they can do when blizz keeps everything secret.)

EDIT:
i have just looked at wowprogress for T17 (6.0+6.1). there are 2,026 guilds that killed blackhand. many guilds it seems, only killed one boss in the whole tier… mythic blackhand!!!

now, as i understand it, once a tier/season is over, the stats stay the same. so even if you killed mythic blackhand in 6.2, it should not register for wowprogress’s 6.1 stats.
ie. all 2,026 guilds listed as killing blackhand, DID so during 6.1.
ie. all 2,026 guilds got at least 1 100% mount drop.

SO… of the 2,551 mounts dropped, 2,026 could be from these guilds. and after killing him once, they would have killed him again. while some guilds would only have killed him the once, method are listed as killing him 18 times.

YES. i know not every person who got a mount at 100% from those 2,026 guilds are for sure on wowhead to give data, but i would guess that quite a few may be as they are in the top end of raiding.

even still, this means that a tiny tiny TINY amount of people have possibly gotten the mount to drop post 6.1.

this is terrible if you want to change out minds, release clear and accurate data blizzard!

[Goramathras-silvermoon]

It certainly dropped way more than 2551 times on total, but bigger part of those drops wasn’t recorded, since most people don’t run Wowdb profiler. I agree that an average raider is more likely to have it running, but only by a margin, on average.

2551 drops includes WoD, Legion and BfA until now. it was 2466 in October, almost 9 months ago. Drop chance was 1-5% during Legion and that was fine, but data suggests that during BfA something went wrong.

There is ~60 more snapshots on archive(.)org, so see what you can gather from there

[Vintoleth-ghostlands (Vintoleth)]

i think one of the biggest problems is blizzard just likes keeping too many secrets and im talking about ingame here. im not going to even start on company secrets.