NPC time addon question

[shanker]

i see alot of the rarer mount farming guides mentioning this addon regard zones being dead, active. so i loaded the addon. none actually say how to tell what the status of the zone you are farming in when you scroll on mobs to get times

i go to a zone some mobs show 3 days, other zone 14 hours, other zone mobs are mixed in 4 to 11 hours, what should i be looking for? high times mean it was inactive with low mount chance due to spawn timers? lower more active with increased chance?

 

[Azeroh]

basically yes on the activity part, on the chances of getting some mount being greater or lower depending on activity idk.

if there was any it doesn’t have anything to do with the drops themselves, that will always be a dice roll on kill independent of anything. it’s more if you’re looking for some rare which has a long spawn timer and roams, if the mobs around its path have been killed somewhat frequently (low spawn timer) you can presume that the rare was killed

 

[cletus]

i see alot of the rarer mount farming guides mentioning this addon regard zones being dead, active. so i loaded the addon. none actually say how to tell what the status of the zone you are farming in when you scroll on mobs to get times

i go to a zone some mobs show 3 days, other zone 14 hours, other zone mobs are mixed in 4 to 11 hours, what should i be looking for? high times mean it was inactive with low mount chance due to spawn timers? lower more active with increased chance?

Let me use an example where this addon is necessary: the Time Lost Proto Drake ("TLPD").

The basic version is there is a single spawn for Vyragosa that takes (IIRC) 2-10 hours to spawn. About 10% of the time its the TLPD. Before zone resets you'd just go to the Storm Peaks and hope for the best on low pop realms. But that doesn't work anymore because if a zone is empty, the zone gets deleted and if you go there the counter starts again for 0. Put another way: if you go to Storm Peaks and the NPC Time addon says X seconds or X minutes you know you have a MINIMUM wait of 2 hours for EITHER Vyragosa or the TLPD to pop up. So you plant yourself in a useful spot where Silver Dragon will HOPEFULLY trigger when either spawns. And you wait.

If you afk and forget and log out you're fine as long as you log back in within ~15 minutes. But NPC Time will immediately tell you if you've screwed up and been logged out too long.

If you go to Storm Peaks and it says 7 hours on a random NPC then Vyragosa/TLPD might be up but it might also mean someone else is waiting OR they were waiting and it's been killed so you might be waiting 10 hours for nothing.

The point is that NPC Time will immediately tell you the situation. That's why you need it.

The whole zone clean up thing complicates a bunch of mount farming too, particularly in WoD. It completely changes how you farm the Voidtalon of the Dark Star, for example. For some reason Shadowmoon Valley NEVER cleans up. You might say "it's becuase Lunarfall is there" but if that were the case Frostridge would also never clean up but it does. So it's a mystery.

 

[shanker]

i was in SP for TLPD. i click on a dark iron dwarf they are varied, some as low as 4 min some 2-4 hours at a spot recommended to wait. from there i click on some harpies they vary 11-14 hours. do a red path loop and mechanical mobs across from ulduar where you get jeeves recipe are varied 4+ hours. so i take it you go with the highest times you see, meaning others have been there 11-14 hours, and odds for TLPD are poor?

started voidtalon farm yesterday, latest video guide on that says what you say about shadowmoon valley, recommends just farming there with players WM on and off, CT, and on various servers

 

[cletus]

i was in SP for TLPD. i click on a dark iron dwarf they are varied, some as low as 4 min some 2-4 hours at a spot recommended to wait. from there i click on some harpies they vary 11-14 hours. do a red path loop and mechanical mobs across from ulduar where you get jeeves recipe are varied 4+ hours. so i take it you go with the highest times you see, meaning others have been there 11-14 hours, and odds for TLPD are poor?

It could be just that people are doing Storm Peaks quests but I just wouldn't trust what's going on there. Was Vyragosa killed 5 minutes ago or 12 hours ago? Is someone else camping him?

For this kind of thing I will go low pop RP realms (WM on and off). CT doesn't really help because you'd need to Party Syunc and kill Vyragosa. I don't know how that goes when you're the same level.

It took me about a week to get when I really tried. I'd use f2p accounts on realms I had toons and just park them in Storm Peaks. If Vyragosa or TLPD ever spawned I can log in a toon on the same realm.

started voidtalon farm yesterday, latest video guide on that says what you say about shadowmoon valley, recommends just farming there with players WM on and off, CT, and on various servers

This is exactly correct. When I did this there was a bug where Party Sync caused you not to get the mount when you killed the thing in the portal. No idea if this has been fixed. So I would stick to CT off if you can't get confirmation.

 

[Yura]

i click on a dark iron dwarf they are varied, some as low as 4 min some 2-4 hours at a spot recommended to wait.

maybe I'm a late, but the answer is: you should check the npc time on npcs that usually do not die, like a flightmaster, neutral questgiver or battle pet trainer.
npc time shows the time since the npc spawned, meaning that mobs that die and later respawn will "reset" their timer. a flightmaster for example spawns when the server shard is created and will (most likely) not die after that, so it is the best indicator for when the shard popped into existence.

so i take it you go with the highest times you see, meaning others have been there 11-14 hours, and odds for TLPD are poor?

basically yes, and the npcs i mentioned will always show the highest time.