Updated List - Which gear can upgrade?

[drake178]

what i’ve observed is that the frostfire rares are literally never there with warmode on

That's usually a sign of a "dynamic phase". That is, that particular phase/instance (CT and/or WM) of the zone is recycled when it's empty for 15 minutes. After that, if someone logs into or enters it, a new instance is created fresh. If there are rares with respawn timers, those are typically reset, and they won't be up. There are exceptions, but your description of them never being up implies this explanation.

You can keep the "shard" alive by logging back into it every 15 minutes (a little less for safety is better), but if the rare you're looking for has a long respawn timer it's usually not worth it, especially not if you want to kill them daily. I did use this to farm Rustfeather in Mechagon in CT+WM, as he's practically up on every other login.

You can use this macro to check how long an NPC has been up (or get the addon NPC Time):

/run local _,_,_,_,s,_,t=strsplit("-",UnitGUID("target"));local a=GetServerTime();local b=a-(a%2^23)+bit.band(tonumber(string.sub(t,5),16),0x7fffff);if b>a then b=b-((2^23)-1) end;print("shard:",s,"- alive for:",string.format(SecondsToTime(a-b)));

Running this on a static NPC (e.g. flight master or perma-dead) will tell you how long that particular phase of the zone has been running.