How long it took to chain 14 Heralds

Greetings!

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

I managed to chain about 9-10 heralds in a much shorter span the other day. Tombs was terrorized and I got 4 (!!!) heralds in the one zone, so I carried it to the next zone and got one more there.

I then decided to terrorize all of act 1 with a shard, and took out the 2-3 zones that popped up while clearing that as well, getting another 5-6 heralds along the way.

Absolutely zero sunder charms though, and this was on P1 SCNL.

When I went to eat lunch I came back 30 minutes later and my connection had been interrupted. Lame. I think the system needs some tweakin'.

Ouch, 14 is really not much.
Recently I posted about my full tz game with 30 heralds (but far worse than yours because no sunder;P) and I think there is a lot you can do about order of clearing to maximize Ire chance.
When doing TZ clearing you should first aim for areas known for high count and/or easy to get to elites.
This means Eldritch/Shenk, Chaos,

Cathedral,

Travincal, to some extent all act bosses and so on.

While charging Ire it would be best to swap elite dense areas to spawn low level Heralds and then come back.
After lvl4 in theory you could first defeat all elites in the game, draw multiple Ires and then go on mass spawning mission (obv not possible literaly).