Tactical Observations - Restless Bone Marrows

While I recognized that this won't change in time to help me, thinking about others that will be working on their Alts/Bots through this earring quest given our Covid-19 forced vacations:

Proposal: Remove the No Trade tag for the sub-combine Fermented Restless Bone Marrow. In a perfect world, the Restless Bone Marrows could also be tagged as Heirloom so the ones that were located on peoples mules before they were tagged as No Trade have some potential to be used.

Rationale: As the Tactical Observation task requires you to make a Marrow Hardened Etching Tool, each character would have to pay into the time sink to collect 6 and make the first set of sub-combines. But when the Wrathful earring combine has a trivial of 502, most Alts and Bots are doomed to fail multiple times. By making this sub-combine tradeable, there is a way to use up those stockpiles from before the item was made No Trade.

Why is it a thing that people are asking for things because of Covid? Can we please cut it out? The Bots are one thing and are a blight unto humanity but It's just disingenuous when the current plague unto man makes it's way into the reasoning for a post. People are dying. Let's have a little perspective on the matter.

Just attempted this quest last night. After like 3 hours of killing in Kael, I finally got my 6 marrows. I succeeded in the combine for the marrow hardened etching tool, but failed the final earring combine. I lost the tool.

My JC is 395, according to eqtraders calculators, I have an 85% chance to succeed in the combine.

I have NO PROBLEM with the fact that I failed the combine and lost the marrows -- that's tradeskills for you. But the fact that it takes so many hours to get these 6 marrows to drop is ridiculous imo. Group I used to kill in Kael was monstrous, Sk, Clr, Ber, Ber, BL, Bard.

I don't care if they are made tradable, but the drop raid needs increase or they should be tradable and kept low drop rate for sale to those needing them for the quest.

Did this no problem on 6 toons. Just go back to Kael and farm the things. Sorry, but I have no sympathy for anyone who claims Covid-19 stole my bone marrow.

If anyone Covid is giving people more time than ever to play. Horrible excuse man.

I would have liked it if the step in the quest just accounted for ones already in your bags.. I had 27 when I got to that step.. and they were notrade, so I couldn't start/cancel a trade... finally someone said try a pet.. thankfully that worked as a work around.. but I failed the tool once, so I was glad to have the extras..

I'm going to say no.

At this point you are already getting an item better than most items in the game. It's going to be a grind. And I insist that each character needs to do that grind independently to get an item like this.

I'm being nice by allowing this to be a general drop that one can pre-farm, and NOT have it require that the quest is active.

Well put. And thank for throwing us a bone on prefarming ( pun intended.)

We can't increase the drop rate a bit? I mean I've gone like 100 kills at times without seeing one.

Is killing thousands of mobs in between quests....not enough of a "grind" for you?

Then you have terrible luck. I have a dozen on every alt and like 80 on my main, and I only killed there enough to do hunter and the missions. They are maybe a 1 in 10 to 12 drop rate at worst.

Thanks for the consideration and the quick response Ngreth.

As for current drop rate, a confirmation that the drop rate on Restless Marrows have not been lowered since launch would be appreciated since it sure feels like there was a significant higher drop rate closer to expansion launch (my main has 172 marrows and did not spend any significant amount of time beyond hunter and progression in this zone).

I only wish the drop rate was 1 in every 10 or 12 kills. My experience this last week has been 5 drops in 151 kills during two evenings of chain killing. So either the RNG is a fickle bride, or the drop rate feels like it has been reduced .

Eh, kill the aggressive corpses, they seem to have less hp so you should get them faster. I have hundreds upon hundreds of these.

It was changed in the first month, BUT they were dropping before the quest went live.
The drops were live before the quest was live (I was working on the quest and the zone data went out) It was WAY to high (50%). It changed to 5% (1 in 20... so not your 1 in 10! ) when the quest went live, and I do plan to keep it that way. So yes, some early people got a boon.

I havent looted them since you changed it to no trade, but before that i had looted 115 of them.

Anecdotally these drop much better in the High Priest (middle) area of the zone rather than either north or south extremes.

I had 72 of these on one character and was not looking forward to this part and was all for making them tradeable for obvious reasons.

Yesterday I finally got around to doing this for my main and alt and sitting in the area just outside Vindi I was able to 8 of them to drop by the time I got the second characters final update on the leadership update. While doing the 20 kill count another person in the group was able to get their drops for when they are on the quest.

Sure that area is a bit harder because you can get a few named wolves and 4-5 at a time if lazy pulling.

Only time I left that area for the quest was to go stand in the bone pile for a server tick and run back.

Also worth mentioning, when I did the progression back in December it was this area that I camped in to accumulate the large number I already had of the now no drop ones.

I don't think anything needs to be changed with them now that I went back to do this. Good luck to those trying to get them. This was no harder or longer than any of the other parts of the quest.

They do not have a different drop table... so... the RNG likes it when you are there?

I spent 3 hours last night in HS trying to get Deka to spawn with no luck. During TBL I spent about 4 hours on seer stinger.

Spending 3 hours in one of the best XP zones available is pretty much what normal people do.

If changing anything for the betterment of these types of items... it is to remove planeslayer from the TBL evolver. The only thing worse than having to camp L65 mobs for a L110 item is that I already killed many of them before the ACH system existed. PoInnovation is my favorite zone. I have killed Junk Beast dozens of times and I have to camp him again 17 years later?

At least collections are tradable, drop from trash mobs, and now we have a new way of getting them.