I've just killed the last, fourteenth Herald in my open game where I've cleared absolutely everything I could.
Some stragglers aside, I must have killed 99.9% of the monsters through the 5 acts (including terrorized Cows).
I was very lucky to get a 14th Herald, as the only area with monsters left was the Spider Cavern. I had the ire, but I was running out of monsters
But upon entering the Cavern, it spawned!
Now here I sit. Practically no monsters left to kill. I couldn't chain another Herald even if I wanted to.
The highlight was the 5th Herald, which dropped a Latent Cold Rupture! Other than that, only some low lvl uniques. On the bright side, I've killed so many monsters that I've found my first Dracul's Grasp! I'm playing SSF and just started farming Hell Torches, so that was also very lucky.
Now to the not-so-fun part: how long did it take?
TWO WHOLE DAYS of not touching grass, not being with loved ones, not exercising, not doing anything but the most basic stuff like eating, showering, etc. Two days of wake up -> Diablo -> sleep -> repeat. That must be around the 23–24h mark.
That means that if you play 1h a day, you must leave your PC on for more than 3 weeks. Man, they need to add some Herald progression feature or something like that. At least in Single Player it is feasible to save your streak. Or make Heralds 1–3 drop Sunders too on SP just like on Battle.net, idk.
(I was playing
/Players 8 but with a well-equipped Echoing Strike build, so I was indeed clearing the areas kinda quickly — could be quicker because I was running some Magic Find, but still very quickly!)Now let's calculate the odds of dropping at least one Sunder in 14 Herald kills (two whole days of playing).
(Math source):
1 in 23.6 (approx. 0.04237) for each level 5 Herald.
(I'm not considering the odds for the 4th Herald as I couldn't find that info, so it's an approximation.)
The probability of not dropping one at each Herald is 1 - 0.04237 = 0.95763.
So the chance of never dropping one in 14 kills is 0.95763^14 = approx. 0.545.
The chance of dropping at least one is then 1 - 0.545 = approx. 0.455.
The odds for a 20- Herald chain (which may even not be feasible considering the limit of monsters in the game) of dropping at least one Sunder rise only to approx. 0.579. So, yeah, as everyone knows by now, either the drops or the chaining mechanics need adjustments.
Well, that's it! Happy Herald Hunting!
EDIT: Just discovered my Chronicle was emptied
crocorinho
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