heralds vs super uniques

I see that many many people are complaining hard about the drop rate of the heralds. But according to Maxroll, the drop rates (e.g. Griffon) is comparable, say 1/3, to act bosses. I am not saying that people should not complain, but I am wondering what makes such a huge disagreement among the players??

you killed any heralds?

xuehang1985 wrote: 18 hours ago

I see that many many people are complaining hard about the drop rate of the heralds. But according to Maxroll, the drop rates (e.g. Griffon) is comparable, say 1/3, to act bosses. I am not saying that people should not complain, but I am wondering what makes such a huge disagreement among the players??

I killed 5 Heralds earlier today. Got a rare normal item from one

Herald and the other 4 dropped blue items that weren't worth picking up.

I'm a very casual player. I don't care much about finding awesome stuff, it's nice when it happens, but I don't feel entitled to it. I'm just noticing that after the recent patch, the

Herald drops are consistently underwhelming.

It's one thing to get rare items that suck. At least they're worth picking up to identify. But the normal magic items? Not worth the time.

Ah well. I like the way they spawn much more.

I have definitely noticed significantly fewer drops from T5 heralds after the patch.

Before the patch, I would routinely get 3-4 uniques off a single T5

Herald. 1-2 uniques per kill and another 1-2 after horking the corpse.

Now, I routinely kill T5 heralds and they drop nothing but blues.

I also got 3 sunders in a two week period prior to the patch but haven't found *anything* noteworthy off a

Herald since the patch.

Note: My MF is 451 and 600+ after swap when horking

Killed numerous Heralds they all dropped garbage NOTHING of value yet. I don't chase the heralds if they pop I kill them. now that they drop them right on you is a bit much because the long string of perks they have can be the equivalent of the old Multi shot Lightning Elites you can be screwed before you even have time to get ready.

It is true that most of the heralds give trash. But isn't this the case across the game? We used to farm

Pindleskin like crazy, and it could happen that 1000 runs gives nothing. We also used to run Chaos, and a couple of hundreds of runs could still yield nothing. I just don't understand why only the heralds get the complaints.

Schnorki wrote: 8 hours ago

xuehang1985 wrote: 15 hours ago

It is true that most of the heralds give trash. But isn't this the case across the game? We used to farm

Pindleskin like crazy, and it could happen that 1000 runs gives nothing. We also used to run Chaos, and a couple of hundreds of runs could still yield nothing. I just don't understand why only the heralds get the complaints.

At least from my experience since the patch, both in kills and from horking them, their drops are now significantly worse than a normal elite and generally just blue trash.

That's not only a massive nerf from pre-patch, really only based on PTR specific "excessive loot issues" caused by the 2-

Herald-insta-spawn that isn't a thing anymore anyways.
But it also seems to be significantly worse than what they had actually announced with their "drops like a super unique".

Those two are then likely where the complaints are coming from.

This. We are not only talking about drop reality, but expectation management. If Heralds are heralded as the next big thing, but the drops after a chain of 15 Heralds amount to 15

Pindleskin or Eldritch runs on bad days, while being significantly harder to defeat than those, it's underwhelming, to say the least.

After killing about 40 of them since 3.2 dropped (1 sunder drop from a

Herald and 1 sunder from a random champion), they seem to be one-drop wonders or no-drop disappointments. Sunder or nothing. Like

The Summoner (

Key of Hate or nothing)

Patch 3.2.0 did significantly reduce Heralds' Quality Factors (which determines the base chance - before mf - that items become magic/set/unique). There's one Quality Factor per quality level.

According to Pavke:

• the patch reduced Heralds' Unique Quality Factor from 989 to 800
• the patch reduced Heralds' Rare Quality Factor from 972 to 850

The numbers may seem a bit arbitrary and at a glance it's not easy to make sense of them, but the consequence is that the majority of drops from Heralds will be of magic quality. I.e., the effect is that the they will drop far less unique and rare items, even with high MF. I think the Set Quality Factor was changed too, but I'm not sure from/to what number.

If you want to read more about MF and how these Quality Factors come into play, you can check out Pavke's excellent technical guide on how MF works: https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo2/commen ... _advanced/

This is an image from the article specifying the quality factors for various monsters:
(note that

Andariel's values have been reduced in RotW, so the image is not correct for her - she now has the same Unique Quality Factor as all the other act bosses)

So as you can see,

• Heralds used to have a Unique Quality Factor slightly better than act bosses, and now it's the same as regular elite monsters.
• Heralds used to have the same Rare Quality Factor as super uniques, and now it's much lower than super uniques, but slightly better than random uniques & champions.

mikelessar wrote: 6 hours ago

After killing about 40 of them since 3.2 dropped (1 sunder drop from a

Herald and 1 sunder from a random champion), they seem to be one-drop wonders or no-drop disappointments. Sunder or nothing. Like

The Summoner (

Key of Hate or nothing)

In my experience more like

Duriel before patch than Summoner. Sometimes only scrolls, but once In a while can be like a loot goblin.

By the way, found nice trick: since you know where Heralds are going to spawn with whole pack, dropping Sigil:Rancor on that place leads to very nice results and soften whole pack. Possibly barbarians are already doing same with their

Grim Ward .

Duriel is worst regarding drops. I had 3 tp scrolls and 4 indentify scrolls drop from it thats it

Do these heralds actually drop something? I killed a couple of them and all they dropped were potions lol