Offline herald spawning logic - test and observations

I'm a SSF player and in previous version spawning heralds on single player was quite hard compared to online. I was hoping new patch will change that, as Blizzard was promising that it will make it easier for solo players. But first 2-3h of playing were pretty dissapointing, it was not better than before, maybe even harder. I initially thought my game is bugged as I was not able to spawn any Herald, I found few posts on reddit and some forums where people reported similar issues, but then I found first Herald maybe after 2-2.5h. So I decided to look how they changed spawning chances compared to previous version.

Initially we had 2% chance to draw Herald ire, then 1% chance co convert etc. Now configs look like this:
That looks like input for sigmoid function, I initially thought that it defines a chance to spawn based on area level and that function would look like that: So I created a dummy mod to check that. I Increased chance drastically but without effects. Even with 30% chance for 90 area level I was not able to spawn heralds.

Then I remembered that Blizzard said that chance to spawn Herald will increase with every monster we kill in TZ. So I checked if that is not based on area level but on kill count in TZ. I modified my mod to give 0% chance untill 20, and then increase it to 30% at 30. I tested it by terrorizing A1 and clearing Blood Moor one monster after another and it looked promising, I was not able to spawn Herald before killing 25-30 monsters, and soon after hitting threshold of 30-35 Herald was spawning. But then I started testing it on other locations and results were different, I needed to kill 50-60, sometimes more monsters for Herald to spawn. That means it was not kill-based, but somehow tied to killing monsters, as I was getting consistent number of kills per specific zone before Herald spawn - the bigger the zone the bigger the number.

So right now my hypothesis is that spawn chance function is based on % of monsters in zone killed. That brings few questions:
1. If it is true does it mean that unless we will kill around 50% of monsters in area we won't be able to spawn Herald (chance grows over 0% after 56%)? - So far I was unable to do so, heralds always spawned after clearing 70-100% of map, but maybe I was unlucky?
2. If we move to other area, what happens with our accumulated "clearing" - according to my tests it is counted separately for each area (or maybe TZ area group) - even if I cleared half of 3-4 maps, I had to clear almost whole 5th to spawn Herald.
3. Can we spawn multiple heralds on same map? Again I was unable to, to spawn T2 Herald I always needed to clear 2nd area, but maybe I just did not test it enough (until now I cleared maybe 40-50 areas with different settings).

There is also a question of other property they added in 3.2 - "zone_completion_weight" - each TZ area has this property, it varies from 0.5, through 1.0, 2.0 up to 3.0, what may suggest that calculation for some areas may be different, but I also tested it by giving Den of Evil different values (from 0.01 to 500.0) and was unable to find any relation between that value and chance to spawn Herald.

Does anyone else did some tests on that? Or maybe knows something I missed?

I guess that most people play online, especially that early in season, and we know from last season that logic for online games and offline ones can differ. But if there are some SSF players - what are your experiences with heralds in 3.2 offline? Were you able to spawn Herald right after entering some area or spawning multiple ones in one?

It seems that on single player the best way to get sunders is to do Andariel runs. Doesn't need to be terrorized. If you have a good map and use p3-p5 and skip prebuffs then u can do 3 runs per minute with a fire sorc(fire is kryptonite to andy) and accumulate some sunders. I got andy to drop 2 sunders at once! But I can spend hours without finding one also. I found 14 total during this 3 day weekend. Highly recommended. Black Cleft specifically has almost the same odds from andy as tier 5 Herald. Andy is the only way to smart farm a Black Cleft. I found 4 there in 3 days.

Tip: If using a fire sorc use Cure/ Prayer with Infinity on merc. The Cure will make Prayer work immediately so u can regenerate enough without prebuffs to not need potions.

with the new mechanics, if a Herald hunts you (spawns) can another one hunt you if you never killed the first one?

ShadowHeart wrote: 2 months ago

[..]

Grushkovy wrote: 2 months ago

1. If it is true does it mean that unless we will kill around 50% of monsters in area we won't be able to spawn Herald (chance grows over 0% after 56%)? - So far I was unable to do so, heralds always spawned after clearing 70-100% of map, but maybe I was unlucky?

I'm not 100% sure, but I belive you can get a Herald sooner than clearing half the zone - but it's all down to RNG, and the chance is fairly low when the map is largely unexplored. But I haven't done so much testing myself.
[..]

Obviously still just somewhat guessing here myself and not sure about the exact cut-off but it does very much feel like spawning a Herald before x% is cleared is indeed impossible. Or at the very least extremely unlikely.

Pre-patch, I reliably got stray ires just by teleporting to act bosses as my merc/demon/whomever took out an elite along the way. Similarly, actually clearing elites resulted in "early ires/heralds" often enough.
Whether you still had room to proc that ire is a different story of course.

Now, since the patch, I have seen exactly 0 early heralds, despite playing a fair bit. None from "drive-by-killing". But also none from actual clearing of a decent number of mobs (e.g. CS runs with an area-clearing class that takes out the entire seal wing, rather than just the boss).
CS runs might be the perfect example actually...running that with my lock (who has gotten more action again since the patch), I tend to clear most of each of the 3 wings, simply because he always blows up an entire area. That's a fair few mobs. And across a fair number of runs by now, it adds up to a ton of mobs. And yet, it yielded exactly 0 heralds. More likely than not because even with it being a ton of mobs, it still remains a relatively small percentage of CS as the entire entryway is left mostly untouched, as are the inner areas around the center circle. If there wasn't some "minimum clearing percentage", I dare say I should've realistically seen quite a few heralds inside CS by now. At least certainly not 0. Same goes for a few other zones though CS is an easy example for reliable multi-clearing across a larger number of runs.

At the same time however, I did get zones inside shard games where a Herald popped rather early. So it might not be as simple as "clear x% of zone minimum" but might be (at least in combination with) a running kill counter that spans across multiple zones. Otherwise you should never see an early Herald in a new zone, even in longer-running shard games.

Can confirm the multiple heralds per zone as well as heralds off any non-elite mob though, just to add more evidence to that. Undeniable proof of both: I got 2 heralds inside a single Den of Evil. And that place only has 1 elite in it (which I hadn't even reached yet).

badg wrote: 2 months ago

with the new mechanics, if a Herald hunts you (spawns) can another one hunt you if you never killed the first one?

I can confirm its possible, it happened to me. Two simultaneous spawns one next to the other. First one hasn't fully appeared yet, only had the thunderstorm animation playing, while second started his thunderstorm.

badg wrote: 2 months ago

with the new mechanics, if a Herald hunts you (spawns) can another one hunt you if you never killed the first one?

Yes it can happen, you can have two or more heralds of same tier. I spawned cold and physical immune Herald so neither my cold soso nor my mercenary could kill him, so I ignored it. On next area new Herald of same tier spawned. When testing with higher chance I was also able to spawn 3-4 heralds at the same time (when killing bigger group of monsters) but all that heralds are same tier, unless you will kill one of them you wont be able to spawn higher tier one.

badg wrote: 2 months ago

with the new mechanics, if a Herald hunts you (spawns) can another one hunt you if you never killed the first one?

Not only can they spawn for different people in different places without killing the first, they can spawn back to back for you yourself off the same pack kill, despite blizz's claims to the opposite.

Just learned that the hard way while also learning that Hephasto can indeed die after all. And die fast at that. Like...instantly...

Killed a few mobs next to Nihlathak and ended up with a T5 Succubus Herald and a T5 slayer Herald stacked fully on top of one another. And on top of her casting amp all over, they ended up with Thorns, fana, conc and Nihlathak's Corpse Explosion from behind them.
Turns out that combination is enough to instantly blow up a full health TZ96 Hephasto, despite him otherwise being all but immortal to any other Herald I've come across with him. :O

Grushkovy wrote: 2 months ago

badg wrote: 2 months ago

with the new mechanics, if a Herald hunts you (spawns) can another one hunt you if you never killed the first one?

Yes it can happen, you can have two or more heralds of same tier. I spawned cold and physical immune Herald so neither my cold soso nor my mercenary could kill him, so I ignored it. On next area new Herald of same tier spawned. When testing with higher chance I was also able to spawn 3-4 heralds at the same time (when killing bigger group of monsters) but all that heralds are same tier, unless you will kill one of them you wont be able to spawn higher tier one.

This might be a stupid question but how do you know what tier they are besides counting them manually?

badg wrote: 2 months ago

This might be a stupid question but how do you know what tier they are besides counting them manually?

You can track through the message log. Each spawn increases the tier. Or you can look at the name of the Herald you are fighting.

Herald of Fright = T1
Herald of Dread = T2
Herald of Fear = T3
Herald of Horror = T4
Herald of Terror = T5