Herald Spawn Q (Meh aspect of it)

Schnorki wrote: 9 hours ago

retepnap wrote: 2 days ago

There is one very important thing to notice - if you leave the area (taking a TP or just "activating" a new area by crossing over) - a reset is done.
[..]

Sorry but that is simply incorrect.

Easy enough to test:
1) Make a new game
2) Keep it a solo game for ease of testing/certainty
3) Go to TZ
4) Kill some stuff (not enough to trigger a

Herald but enough to get close)
5) TP to town
6) Come back
7) Kill one more mob/small pack
8.1) Repeat steps 5-7 until you get a

Herald spawn
8.2) If you don't get a

Herald by the time the TZ is cleared, go back to step 1

If TPing caused a reset, you would never - ever - see a

Herald spawn in the above approach as the 1 mob/pack after coming back would always follow a reset and would never be enough to push you past the T1

Herald mark by itself. And yet, if you do actually run that test (which yes, I just did - twice, to be sure), you will eventually get a

Herald spawn off the first kill after coming back from town. TPing hence cannot trigger a reset or that

Herald would've never happened.

You are hence free to TP and stash your loot as often as you want to, without losing

Herald progression for doing so.
Anecdotally, I already knew that was the case and the reset claim was untrue but for the sake of this post, I did go ahead and specifically test it, just to be certain.

I am not willing to change my mind based on such kind of testing. Testing something only two times means absolutely nothing in a game with this much RNG. Getting a lucky spawn after comming back from town is just a classic false positive. Hitting that lucky roll on a fresh tile and mistake it for a preserved zone counter - is not something I would expect from a veteran with your knowledge.

For context, I have been grinding like crazy for the past 2 weeks, pushing 6 new builds towards level 96 (currently at 94, 94, 93, 90, 1, 1).

Because I am "powerleveling" (or at least trying my best) - I am actively trying not to make heralds spawn. Those T5 fights simply ruins the xp-per-hour efficiency. My thoughts on this are based on hundreds of runs, not just a couple of isolated tests.

Here is my "logical" reasoning:

Pavkes 3.2 guide shows that the spawns depend entirely on zone completion percentages. To my understanding, when you use a town portal or cross into a different zone, you leave the active map area. This break, in your run, disconnects you from that specific map tracking, dropping the kill counter back to zero.

The "crazy" randomness of the game completely backs this up, because a simple straight line tracker does not explain what actually happens when we play:

First, look at the full-clear issue. Everyone (I assume), has tried to clear a zone completely and yet no

Herald spawned (not thinking of zones where there are more than 1 area connected). Failing to spawn at maximum threshold kinda defies the logic of the new completion system? Even if a single

Skeleton was left behind somewhere, and the clearance was 99% ish ...

Second, the systems intense RNG makes small tests unreliable. During eg. my pure TZ96 P8 Chaos runs, while soloing this zone, I have had a

Herald spawn right in the beginning (at the end of the main entrance) and leaving that behind, killing one or two small groups just a few yards away, made another

Herald spawn. If I had taken a TP between those 2 spawns, you would claim that it "proved" the counter was not reset.

In reality, it just shows how wildly random a single run can be, especially since a third

Herald spawned at the end of that clearance. The exact opposite happens often too, where you get "dry streaks".

To see what was actually making a difference, I used public TZ96 P8 Chaos runs for an experiment, during my many hours of grinding. We ran 85 games in a row. During the first runs, we hit a relatively long streak with no spawns, so I asked the others to stop using TP's and heralds almost immediately started spawning on a regular basis, sometimes more than once per run. When I play solo, I deliberately test this by opening TP for every 15-20% clearance and i get way fewer heralds spawning. Similary, on most of my solo runs in A5, entering a cave/dungeon upon spotting it and then comming back to the main map later, also causes way fewer heralds to spawn.

Maybe this is somehow isolated to my specific games? But others, even in this thread, and several other high-level players i talk to, notice the exact same drop in spawns, whenever players are using TP or switch areas before finishing.