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Oct 28, 2017
5,800
FF11 will always be king of bullshit drop rates. Enemies that spawn weekly, have boss-level difficulty in terms of killing them so you probably need a group unless you're a Beastmaster, and have decimal chances of dropping the item you want.

Nothing can compare.
 

RedSparrows

Prophet of Regret
Member
Feb 22, 2019
6,543
The only time I ever actually contemplated grinding (fuck that) was for an Eye of Shadow in WoW. Winterspring, demonic gorge to the south... 3rd mob. Booyah.
 

Gnorman

Banned
Jan 14, 2018
2,945
This is a great thread but I can't think of any specific grinds. I played Everquest for 7 years and did the Mage epic twice though so I'm sure there are some. šŸ˜‚

The human brain is a weird thing that some of us can find this shit enjoyable. Or at least think the pay off is worth the time.
 

Balbanes

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,213
For single player games, the .01% chance for Seitengrat in FF12 is pretty brutal if you don't manipulate the RNG. Pure Bladestone in Demon's Souls is my other vote.

Otherwise, it's gotta be some FF11 item.
 

aliencowz7

Member
Apr 24, 2018
103
Rarest item I have ever gotten is probably -
WYzvN6q.jpg


Sealed J-Sword in Phantasy Star Online, 1/12604 drop rate on the Skyly section ID from Gi Gue which are very scarce in missions. Dropped on my second tower run and the people I knew that had spent immense amounts of time grinding for it were not happy.
 

OnionPowder

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
9,323
Orlando, FL
lBSi9Js.jpg

Thanks dad. Considering each enemy on that floor drops about 720-750 dollars, that would mean we killed more than 350 enemies fishing for this drop, and most of them were Super Starmen.



I think what makes FFX worse is how all the sidequests open up at the last possible minute, all at once, so you're just flooded with them.

So now who needs the weapon you've grinded enough that you can just punch everything to death no problem.
 

Dark Knight

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,393
I'm almost through getting my Optical Hat in FFXIV and it's just sadistic. Anyone who knows it knows why.
 

sir_crocodile

Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,569
I've been replaying Earthbound with Ketkat since she's never played it before and we've been having a hoot. But after about 15 hours of playing we've come to the lovely point in the game where if you want to get Poo's only usable weapon in the entire game you've gotta grind one specific enemy that only exists on one specific screen, and disappears forever after you beat the boss of the dungeon.

We've been at it for about 2 1/2 hours and I'm pretty much ready to break. It isn't even the worst drop rate in a video game by a looooong margin, at a 1/125 chance, but there's just something about this one that gets under my skin. It might be the way all the funky graphics in Earthbound slowly wear into you , or how wild it is that the item is attainable for such a short period of the game. I dunno.

Anyway, what item in what game takes the cake as the most obnoxious drop?

Easily the Goo King Sword in Breath of Fire 3. There was a time where it was thought to be a hoax. I'm a massive BOF3 fan and replay it every year, I've never seen it. The enemy you get it from, the Goo King, is rare to actually meet, will run from the battle unless you successfully steal from him (an apple, not the sword), and then the drop rate for the sword itself is the lowest in the game, 1/256. I *think* if you use charm it gets halved though, to 1/128.
 

PlanetSmasher

The Abominable Showman
Member
Oct 25, 2017
116,658
Only 18 hours? Try 18 months on Phantasy Star Universe grinding for a Psycho Wand synthesis board. Then on top of that you needed 30 fucking diads to synth it. Fucking 30!!!

That is brutal. Though my grind was 18 hours for one item in a single player story-driven game just to progress the plot.
 
Oct 25, 2017
16,358
Cincinnati
Tons. Zodiac Spear from Final Fantasy 12 was just cruel. King's Field 2 had a couple of weapons, Groundal Blade and Anorium Sword I think both were something like 1/255 chance drops. WoW has a shit ton of mounts that have a 1% drop rate that you can only kill the boss that drops them once a week.
 

Deleted member 34949

Account closed at user request
Banned
Nov 30, 2017
19,101
X's X-Buster upgrade (forgot the actual name of the weapon) in MMX: Command Mission. Has a 1% chance to drop from an enemy in the final area of the game. Actual hell.

Easily the Goo King Sword in Breath of Fire 3. There was a time where it was thought to be a hoax. I'm a massive BOF3 fan and replay it every year, I've never seen it. The enemy you get it from, the Goo King, is rare to actually meet, will run from the battle unless you successfully steal from him (an apple, not the sword), and then the drop rate for the sword itself is the lowest in the game, 1/256. I *think* if you use charm it gets halved though, to 1/128.
Yep, came to mention this. You don't necessarily need it for stuff like Berserker or Archmage since a good formation setup matters more than weapon strength in those cases, but damn is it a pain to get nonetheless.
 

Kangi

Profile Styler
Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,952
Wasn't the Gutsy Bat worse? IIrc there were only 4 Kraken and the drop wasn't defined per kill but 1/128 per *save*.. meaning if you didn't get it, start the game over. I never got it.
The Gutsy Bat drops from Bionic Kraken, which are farmable endgame enemies, not the limited boss mob Kraken. And as far as I know it's per kill.
 

Gifmaker

Banned
Oct 29, 2017
964
How can you stop like that, dammit. Go on!
Well, long story short: there was an equipment item in SoM that was basically programmed, but due to content cuts, was never actually inserted into the game. Like it existed in the database with stats and everything, but was simply unobtainable without cheating.
Now, when the game was translated along with its excellent guide, the translators found the item's name in the database and translated it. But because they could not find it inside the game anywhere, but still wanted to mention it in the item list in the guide, they simply wrote about its location that it was "top secret!!".

Now, go imagine what it would do to young gamers in the 90s, before common internet usage, to see one item in the entire game guide that has a "top secret!!" location. Make an educated guess which item was hands down the most hunted, the most sought after in the entire game, lol. The one that is entirely unobtainable, that's what.
 

Joltik

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,767
In all the times I've replayed Earthbound(15+ time) over the years, I obtained the Sword of Kings once, and that took several hours. At the end it was a moot point since my characters were overpowered such as Ness being at late level 80's after finishing that dungeon. I never bothered getting the other rare drops in that game like the Gutsy Bat, Holy Pan, and the Star Pendant.

That said, the Goo King Sword from the Breath of Fire games as some folks already mentioned is worse. I didn't think it was a thing until several years later after I've played Breath of Fire IV for the first time. If I known about it when I was playing BoF III and IV, I still wouldn't bothered grinding for it seeing that the drop rate for rare items in that series is notoriously low.
 

Agent 47

Banned
Jun 24, 2018
1,840
Orbital tears in Binding of Isaac, might as well restart the game if I accidently pick it up.
 

Shaymin

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,490
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Jeff's equippable ultimate is worse in Earthbound. 1/128 odds from an enemy that explodes upon death, and you have to have insane levels to get it because it comes broken.
 

Alent

"This guy are sick"
Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,749
I remember the Ice Cabbage in Xenoblade really annoyed me. It's a rare, random drop (used to upgrade a town?) and i can vaguely remember it was said to spawn more frequently on this big ice slide, so now whenever i see an ice slide in a game it reminds me of ice cabbages and i get a little bit annoyed.
 

Pau

Self-Appointed Godmother of Bruce Wayne's Children
Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,895
Why I never beat Earthbound. :(
 

abellwillring

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,962
Austin, TX
Items in Everquest back in the day were hell. My Dark Elf mask though was the best item I had (I was a Dwarf) so it was totally worth it. The other stuff from Guk was generally tougher to get though in terms of time component.. the Dark Elf mask got taken out of the game though so phew!
 

Begaria

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,667
At least the Sword of Kings is on the beaten path in Earthbound.

In Vagrant Story, the ultimate weapon in the game, Excalibur (Holy Win five pronged blade), can only be obtained by:

1. Beating the game, hitting NG+, and getting up to the final dungeon of the game again to get certain keys that will get you farther in the secret dungeon.
2. Taking said keys through new areas that are only open in NG+ and beating optional bosses for even more keys.
3. Taking all of those other keys to the secret dungeon and traversing a maze to the secret optional boss of the game.
4. Then have 149 HP or less than maneuvering back to the room prior to the secret optional boss that will allow a single special enemy to spawn.
5. Kill said enemy that has a 3/255 drop rate (same 1% drop rate the Sword of Kings has at 1/128) to drop the Excalibur.

At the very least, that enemy will spawn 100% of the time as long as you've got 149 HP or less, it's just tedious to get to that point, and you have absolutely nothing further to kill with such an incredible overpowered weapon once obtained. At least it has a unique crafting property that anything combined with that blade inherits the blade's overpoweredness and material making that item incredibly overpowered as well, and you can farm multiple Holy Win blades to make ultimate gear.

Sure looks cool tho

game_clear03.jpg
 
Oct 27, 2017
826
Murfreesboro, TN
Q of Hearts in Okage: Shadow King. I spent around six hours in the last dungeon searching for the enemy that drops it so I could finish the platinum, but it never came. Turns out you could also get it from a boss fight several hours beforehand where the same enemy shows up in a group of 4, but I didn't know and never made a save there.
 

SkyOdin

Member
Apr 21, 2018
2,680
I've done a lot of grinding for drops and loot in FFXIV, but the most soul-crushing was the Atma grind. In order to get an Atma, you needed to wait for public quests called FATEs to spawn, then participate and clear them. Each FATE had like a single-digit% chance of dopping an Atma. In order to get an Atma weapon, you need 12 Atmas, each from a different region of the game. Some of those regions were much worse than others to traverse to reach the FATEs.

That was hell. It was only one step in the long, long Zodiac Weapon grind, but it was by far the most RNG dependent.
 
Oct 28, 2017
2,086
FF11 will always be king of bullshit drop rates. Enemies that spawn weekly, have boss-level difficulty in terms of killing them so you probably need a group unless you're a Beastmaster, and have decimal chances of dropping the item you want.

Nothing can compare.

Remember that time SE streamed free roaming camera of their private dev server and we found out there were extra Notorious Monsters that nobody had ever seen because we kept killing the baby versions of them instead of leaving them alone for unknown amounts of time to generate a better monster?

I'm thinking of specifically Rose Garden/Voluptuous Vilma, but I'm sure there are more.

I've been thinking about going back and giving Vana'diel a last hurrah. Seems like you can solo most of the content now thanks to the Trusts system.
 
Oct 28, 2017
5,800
Remember that time SE streamed free roaming camera of their private dev server and we found out there were extra Notorious Monsters that nobody had ever seen because we kept killing the baby versions of them instead of leaving them alone for unknown amounts of time to generate a better monster?

I'm thinking of specifically Rose Garden/Voluptuous Vilma, but I'm sure there are more.

I've been thinking about going back and giving Vana'diel a last hurrah. Seems like you can solo most of the content now thanks to the Trusts system.

I've played during the free weeks they sometimes have and it is 100% doable with Trusts now. Not so sure about things like BCNM's and other tough content, but you can roam the world and do every single story mission solo now.
 

Spinosaurus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,983
Lucky egg in frlg
get it from Chansey
Which you can only find in the Safari zone
To put it into perspective...

You have a 1% chance of finding a Chansey in Safari Zone.
And, since this is Safari Zone, you can't lower her health, you can't use compound eyes to raise the chance of her holding the Lucky Egg and you can't use Thief to steal it. You have to catch her, full health, on a Pokemon with a very low catch rate, with a chance of her running away. You could throw a bait to lessen the chance of her running away but make it hard to catch her, or throw a rock and make it easier to catch her, but much more likely to run away.
AND, if you do manage to catch her, there's only a 5% chance of her even holding the Lucky Egg.
 

Shan

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,976
Rarest item I have ever gotten is probably -
WYzvN6q.jpg


Sealed J-Sword in Phantasy Star Online, 1/12604 drop rate on the Skyly section ID from Gi Gue which are very scarce in missions. Dropped on my second tower run and the people I knew that had spent immense amounts of time grinding for it were not happy.
Damn only the 2nd tower run? I'm on run #701 here, haha.
 

Lindsay

Member
Nov 4, 2017
3,143
Pretty sure Earthbound is the big reason I dun care for extra rare item hunting. I put effort into getting the SoK and Gutsy Bat a few times an always came up empty handed. By the time I made it up to games like PSO an everyone were in rare hunt frenzies, I just didn't care an stuck with standard gear an put zero effort into purposefully hunting stuff.

The Gutsy Bat drops from Bionic Kraken, which are farmable endgame enemies, not the limited boss mob Kraken. And as far as I know it's per kill.
The problem here is that the strategy guide which came with the game says it comes from the Magicant Kraken. Now picture if you will, me and many other players killing those Kraken, not getting the drop, resetting, an repeat over an over again~ ;_;
 

Fugu

Member
Oct 26, 2017
2,748
Outside of some of the PSO drops mentioned (like Psycho Wand), nothing in this thread is even in the same ballpark as Diablo 2's rarest drops.

zod_rune.jpg


The rarest rune in Diablo 2 has about a one in a million chance of dropping from the last boss (1:864212 to be exact), with each attempt at said boss taking at least a few minutes. It's worth noting that this is after the game was patched to significantly increase the odds of rare runes dropping; prior to that patch it was actually about four times rarer. I've been playing Diablo 2 on and off since its release nineteen years ago and I've never seen it drop.

Diablo 2 also has a category of items known as the TC 85 items, which are generally 1:100 000 or rarer drops from boss mobs and somewhere around fifty times rarer from regular monsters. Some players have attempted to collect every unique item in Diablo 2, an endeavor which takes years even with multiple hours of gameplay every day.
 

one of us

Member
Oct 28, 2017
141
The problem here is that the strategy guide which came with the game says it comes from the Magicant Kraken. Now picture if you will, me and many other players killing those Kraken, not getting the drop, resetting, an repeat over an over again~ ;_;
Yea, heh.. imagine that huh? :/ I haven't played it in more than 15 years, but nearly every summer I'd replay that game. And since we're among friends here, safe space, I'll admit that drop was one of the reasons why. What's more obnoxious than the Sword of Kings? How about when you're not even fighting the right friggin' enemy, ha! Some additional irony to point and laugh at.. my entire gaming life that's the only guide I've ever used, because it was fun to read along with. I own a Mach Pizza air freshener. And, I remember the one time I actually called the Nintendo Power hotline. It was about this, in the late 90's.. he not only told me the drop rate, (128 seemed like a wildly random number to me at the time) but basically confirmed the misinformation and said you'd have to restart the game.
 

Seafoam Gaming

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 3, 2017
2,707
I've gotten the sword three times over my four playthroughs. The hallway isn't really that bothersome to respawn over and over again and you can easily skip it if it's a pain (like I do for the many, many other 1/128 items that I find a lot more irritating and not worth the payoff. Sometimes though they end up in my inventory without trying but I forget which ones they were. I do know once in Moonside I got something that seemed kinda rare and I also got this rare bat from a purple Kraken near the end of the game but I never save in the final area so it didn't mean much and I forgot if that bat was even rare or not (other enemies drop handy items in that area too)

That being said the worst drop rate nonsense I dealt with was in Pokemon Sun and Moon. There are certain pokemon that only evolve when holding a specific item, which in all other games were found in spots on the map or sold at a facility. In this game though, they were ONLY dropped by specific pokemon, at a rare percentage. The specific item was a Razor Claw I believe, to evolve my Sneasel. In order to get it I had to steal from a Jangmo-o and see if it had it, and if it didn't I had to wait for it to call for help and summon more (or if i was super lucky, an evolution) to try to steal from them. Then I had to take one out and repeat the cycle until I got it.

I kid you not, the process took well over 5+ hours. Compound Eyes, Thief, I had it all, but those stupid dragons wouldn't give me the claw. The final evo has a 50% chance of dropping it but the spawn rate is so crazy low that it only happened once to me. (and it didn't have the item, go figure) I had to 100% my dex so I couldn't give up, and eventually I got it after hours of boredom. Never again will I do a tedious item hunt in a Pokemon game like that. I'd rather shiny hunt with eggs (equally as boring IMO)
 

Deleted member 3815

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
6,633
Lucky egg in frlg
get it from Chansey
Which you can only find in the Safari zone

Yeah, getting the Lucky Egg prior to gen 5 was a pain now in Gen 5 on wards you get given it by an NPC.

Heck I didn't know that it existed till mid way through gen 4.

To put it into perspective...

You have a 1% chance of finding a Chansey in Safari Zone.
And, since this is Safari Zone, you can't lower her health, you can't use compound eyes to raise the chance of her holding the Lucky Egg and you can't use Thief to steal it. You have to catch her, full health, on a Pokemon with a very low catch rate, with a chance of her running away. You could throw a bait to lessen the chance of her running away but make it hard to catch her, or throw a rock and make it easier to catch her, but much more likely to run away.
AND, if you do manage to catch her, there's only a 5% chance of her even holding the Lucky Egg.

Ability having secondary effect outside of battle didn't become a thing till PokƩmon Emerald so having a PokƩmon with compound eyes wouldn't have helped in the superior Kanto remake.
 

SirNinja

One Winged Slayer
Member
Not exactly a drop rate issue, but In the original FFXII you can get what I think is the most powerful weapon in the game from a seemlingly random chest ONLY if you don't open 4 very specific item chests throughout and starting quite early in the game. There's nothing special about these chests too so I assume 100% of people who didn't know about it would not see this weapon unless they were extremely lucky.

Always felt like an extremely random thing to add for me.
Zodiac Spear from Final Fantasy 12 was just cruel.
PSA: the Zodiac Spear was never actually intended to be acquired by avoiding those random chests in the world; that was either a bug or a dev chest whose despawning condition was messily handled. The issue was fixed for the International version of the game in 2007 (and The Zodiac Age, ofc). Pass it on...

For a truly bullshit drop from FFXII, check out Seitengrat, which usually requires either some heavy RNG manipulation or some lottery-winning luck to find.
 
Last edited:

Vamphuntr

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,301
The Seitengrat in Final Fantasy XII: Zodiac Age. It's an invisible bow with such insane damage that it makes the Zodiac Spear look like a kid's toy.




But in the new XB1 and Switch versions? Nobody has figured out the RNG manipulation yet. Good luck!

If you care about stuff like that so much get the PC version and use cheat engine. There is already a table done so all of the chests only contains the best items and will always spawn so you can have all of the rare items easily including the stupid bow and the stupid shield.

Anyway you don't need them to beat FFXII.