Pet Spawn Question

[Piratewench]

I don't know where exactly to post this but I have a question. Specifically I'm farming the gundrak hatchling (which I know I've collected but have no idea where it went or if I gave it to an alt so I'm getting it again). There are two sides that the gundrak raptors spawn.

My question is this. I'm currently farming one side of the map. If the pet is already spawned on a mob on the opposite side of the map, will it spawn again as I am farming? Or will it only ever spawn on one mob at a time? I need to know if i should circle the whole map or if it is ok to stay in one area....

[Bees]

Drops don't work like that - they are 1) determined at the time you loot the body, 2) you could get 5 raptors in a row.

So, just kill whatever is most convenient, assuming it has enough time to respawn. I did circuits of both sides to allow full respawn.

[Piratewench]

Oh that is really how I was hoping it would work! Thank you so much for answering, this will help me out a lot.

[Veasse]

To be technically accurate, loot is generated the instant the mob spawns. There's a blue post about it on the forums... (see below) What it means, is that when you're farming, and someone ninjas a mob and gets the pet you're farming for... yes, they STOLE it from you. If you'd killed that mob, the pet would have dropped for you.

Originally Posted by Drysc (Blue Tracker)

Loot is generated upon creation. As soon as you step into an instance, or a mob is created in the world, the loot that's going to drop has already been determined.

is it based on some attribute of the players in the raid, or the raid leader?
Heh, no. I believe it uses a time stamp to seed the generator. So, there's nothing you can influence within the game that would alter or coerce the generator.

Does it mean that killing the same boss at the exact same time each week will get players the same loot everytime ?
No, the time it uses to seed would have no real implication into the final outcome of what loot its given. On a long enough generation table, you may see some type of pattern based purely on a random generators inability to truly be random. But we're talking about astronomical numbers, something ridiculous like hundreds of billions of generations. Nothing you would or could see a pattern in during your time playing the game.

What you're seeing is pure and basic laws of probability. Have a few thousand people roll a pair of dice and you're bound to see hundreds of people able to roll snake-eyes 10 times in a row. (not that dice are truly random either)

[Piratewench]

I didn't know where to look for a post like that. Because I have other questions, like when you find the pet on a mob is it reset to certain drop rate, i.e. after 1k kills it will drop, or does the chance of it dropping reset? I think it is the chance of it dropping that resets but I just don't know. I want to farm a pet I already got again for an alt, but don't know if the percentage of it dropping resets or if I have to wait for 1k more kills to get it.

[Domie]

I didn't know where to look for a post like that. Because I have other questions, like when you find the pet on a mob is it reset to certain drop rate, i.e. after 1k kills it will drop, or does the chance of it dropping reset? I think it is the chance of it dropping that resets but I just don't know. I want to farm a pet I already got again for an alt, but don't know if the percentage of it dropping resets or if I have to wait for 1k more kills to get it.

Its all random, so you can get 2 in a row, or have to kill 10 times as many as you did first time

[Piratewench]

thanks for dealing with my noob questions lol...

[Veasse]

Indeed, drop rates do not "reset" - each mob has exactly the same chance of dropping the pet as the previous one you killed. The drop rate simply reflects the average number of mobs killed before the pet drops across all the servers in WoW. Just like some people may get a pet on their first kill, others never will.

There's a really fantastic explanation of this, as well as a clarification on how to figure out how unlucky you've been compared to other players here: http://www.iamcal.com/beating-the-rng/.

Hope this helps!