About Wyvern Haunches...

What I am saying is

• There is no reliable way to even find one on your first attempt
• The most efficient way to find them in the shortest amount of time is in hopping from low tier overland encounter to low tier overland encounter
  • The low tier of the scene probably lowers meticulous gathering bonus chances as well

I'm saying that the problem possibly isn't the drop rate chances of the animal itself, but the fact that it was never fully brought into the game in the first place and there are too many scene changes and random circumstances involved in hunting for them. A 1/6 drop chance for a haunch doesn't sound that bad to me - what sounds bad to me is the hours spent scene hopping trying to get lucky enough to find enough wyverns to skin.

If the devs just increase the drop chance, sure that fixes part of the problem in the short term, but it doesn't change the fact that there are under-visited scenes in the game, many scnees which could use higher tier animals to increase the xp the scene can yield, and there is real demand for more elite food-yielding creature encounters.

 

Realistically, unless you're using an alt to flip random encounters without exiting to map, you're not going to find or be able to skin enough wyverns in an hour to even guarantee a single haunch. Now, perhaps this artificial scarcity is intended for "reasons" - but it ends up putting wyvern haunches in the same category as most loot - "maybe you'll get lucky" but most of the time, nope. Which is why adventuring is so unsatisfying most of the time. Phoenix has same problem. Obsidian meat may have same drop rates but there's scenes where you can tear through dozens of obsidians in the time you might find a single wyvern. This is what I mean by the arbitrariness of things that get added to the game, without any context or relationship to what already exists. Its frustrating.

 

True, but there's somewhat of a workaround. The scene that spawns wyverns as elites is actually a different scene than the one that spawns a Drakcaller. It might take a few tries, but once you get the correct scene, exit to menu without leaving the scene after you kill the wyverns. Wait at least five minutes for the scene to reset, then re-enter the game. Don't choose to start in Novia/Mistrendur, and you'll be back in a fresh wyvern scene. So if you can kill stuff quick enough, you can kill between 1-3 wyverns every ~10 minutes. Not great, but it beats running all over the map searching for encounters.

That said, I've gone 1-2 hours at a time doing that without getting a haunch.

 

How do you know?

 

Not from taste-testing, that's for damn sure.

 

My method is a bit faster, I think. The cooking pit gives the key to what the elites will be, if I don't see what I want to see, I immediately exit the scene and dash to the next barbarian encounter. There is a specific route I follow, and ironically the only reason Norgard is a part of my route at all is because I take the ferry from Harvest to Estgard, dash halfway to Ironhall and take the ferry back to Novia which seems to reset some of the wandering encounters.


For the past hour I took this to the extreme, no looting anything, no wood chopping or mining, only skinning wyverns - and in this manner, I am averaging a wyvern skinning every 2-3 minutes and a haunch every ~12 minutes. I was only averaging 2 haunches an hour historically taking my time in the scenes, so this is probably 90th percentile of optimized wyvern haunch gathering - and because I am a high level player in a Tier 3 area, I am not really getting any significant xp for my efforts.


TL;DR
So currently, for me, best case scenario is around 6 haunches per hour - or 12 wyvern chops worth of ingredients per hour for a high level player.

What, then should be the best case scenario and what is an appropriate distribution to low level players - and how can the experience be made better for everyone?

 

I suppose it's probably a matter of taste. I was doing it that way for a while, but I seemed to have long streaks of either not finding barbarian encounters, or getting the wrong scene when I found one. I preferred the consistency of camping a scene.

Interesting about the ferry, though I'm not sure it works that way? Or maybe it does if no other players are around. I've always wondered what exactly triggers things like that.

 

Yeah encounter-searching is really hit or miss - and if there's even one more person out there doing the same thing you are, its a no go, now that the overworld is all open mode. It used to be viable before that change. Since wyvern haunches as an end goal is kind of a non viable objective (since you could spend hours and get nothing), I usually stick to ulfheim so at least I'm getting reapers and decent harvesting xp as a consolation prize and "I might get a wyvern haunch."

With regards to acceptable amounts, I think there's differences in what different people are prepared to tolerate, in terms of disappointment thresholds. Certainly a few years ago I was much more tolerant than I am now.

Its a wider issue than wyverns, certainly.
If its a boss tier creature, like a phoenix, or unicorn - the 'meat drop' component should be near 100% as it is with dragons. These things are huge, even if you fill its carcass full of arrows you're still going to walk away with a lot of usable meat.

Wyverns aren't boss tier creatures, but they're certainly more difficult than your average bear-or-wolf, so I'd suggest their drop rates need to be an order of magnitude higher than their obsidian creature brethren to compensate for scarcity of spawn and increased difficulty of kill.

Lastly, I'd suggest that the yield of 'meat' from a carcass be upped to say, 4. They're not quite as big as dragons (which gives 8), but that's still a lot of meat. You're not going to kill something that size and make a single sandwich out of it.

 

I will say i get an ok ammount of haunches.

Ive also gotten 3 wyvern heads since november. There been rare stuff people had trouble with in the past that i had been lucky in getting

and im suspicious because i dont ike grinding things relentessly. I normally kill a few things then move on to go hunt something else. My wyvern killing habbits are along the lines of ima go kill a few wyverns in a barbarian encounter then head to lamech to kill a couple of pirates then go watch anime for half an hour

 

Encounters with wyverns have sulfer nodes around the camp area.

If there is no sulfur they wont spawn

 

This was brought up on a stream this month. I've already looked at these drop rates and increased them. You'll get a haunch 3/4 of the time now instead of 20% on all Tier 10 Wyverns. I doubled the drop rate of the heads for T10, and upcoming T14 and T15 Wyverns Bzus has been working on, head drop rates have been increased for when they start popping in. They'll still be rare for sure, but at least you'll have a lot more haunches for food while you grind. The T14 and T15 ones will almost always drop 1 haunch with a chance to drop a second one. Hope this helps. I've added more loot to them as well. They'll be dropping the first corpse decorations that work like public access chests (as well as other large monsters that can conceivably eat a villager whole ). You'll take those corpses to your carpentry tables if you'd prefer to make a coffin for them, at which point you'll get a closed coffin that can also work like a public access chest for your player quests etc.

 

What tier are the wyverns in Ulfheim?

 

Ulfheim is designated as Tier 8+ , and since the Wyverns are the toughest thing in there - I assume (and I really hate to assume anything) that they are Tier 10.

What say 'ye @Elgarion ?

 

Ding ding ding! You're are correct, Master Angler.