The drop rate is way too low. Farming like a normal person wont get you anywhere close to it.

((( WARNING : A bit of strong assumptions below. I might as well be incredibly wrong, specially if the calculations from other players \ guilds are incorrect, plus, im very dumb, again, im much more likely to be horribly wrong than correct, plus, i wrote this section below quite fast, you might not understand certain stuff that i could have worded better. )))

Howhever, if you have a crapton of free time, and wants to spend three quarters of your day farming black kats, its, on paper, not that bad.

It seems like, according to many calculations, that the chance is about... 0,5% per Black Kat?

It does, indeed, seem pretty bad. Though, when you think of it ( assuming the calculations gave precise results ), you need to kill a total of 200 randomized black kats on average in order to get a book : If you can no - life the game, getting that ammount is not actually that bad, and its pretty viable to do that in 15ish days, though, the odds are so low for each individual kat is that you are most likely gonna get way past the average, but lets forget this :.

And then there is the fact you can duplicate Black Kats, which cuts the number of black kats to 100, assuming that every BK Encountered is duplicated.

And then, if you do it with an alternate ( non main ) character rather than another player, you can duplicate the Black Kat for your main character, PLUS one extra book for your alt, triplicating each kat, resulting in a total of 66,666... ( aka 66 - 67 ) randomized Black Kats that you need to encounter.

And its not over yet : you can have up to 2 alts : As the party restricts when you go solo, then that means 1 more alt cant do anything else than 2 extra kats. That means double the Black Kat encountered for the main character and one of the alts ( 4 black kats ) plus one from the additional alt that will stay in the party. That means, again, less black kats needed.

The only issue is that you are gonna spend way too much time with a single black kat encounter, which means its a really slight bit less of an advantage then what it seems like above. Though, black kats can be uncommon at times ( I once got through 23 CSKs without a single one, no joke ), you are obviliously gonna win by duplicating kats.

TL'DR : While by normal means it can be somewhat of a pain, if you resort to the somewhat cheaty path and duplicate black kats with alts, you can potentially make it much easier for you to get.

Just before this reply was typed out, I managed to get a book of dark rituals on my 76th Black Kat as well! I could easily calculate it was my 76th as I never played the event before, so I simply took the number of pages minus the prestige rewards and divide it by 3 to find the number of BKs slaughtered.

But yea, I think most people would say that the chance of a BK spawning in place of a normal Kat lies at 1% or just slightly higher. The chance of a book of dark rituals has been pretty debatable, but many would agree the chance is less than 1%.

If you do a little search through the forums and spot some of the old threads, people recall finding the book after farming a few hundred BKs. I've seen someone farmed about 400 to get a book, yet another person found it at about 500, and we have those lucky ones who find it with less than 100 BKs. However from first glance, most people have to farm >100 to get the book, so it is the reason why many speculate the book to be <1% from a BK.
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At the end of the day though, I think most of us can agree that this is the worst of the 3 recurring events that are not holiday themed, largely because this event is so heavily based on luck. The fact you cannot determine and guarantee yourself with the item you are looking for no matter how much you grind makes this event potentially painful for those who farmed hundreds of Black Kats but failed to get the book. It's even worse when you think about the fact that you gotta fight Margrel 6 times to get an armour to 5*, it's scary.

Multiple PCs, unfortunately

In the first event I took part in about a couple years ago I managed to get 3 books. First one on the 381st black kat, second on the 456th and the third on the 605th. Each candlestic keep has an average of 20 kats so you got 20% chance of countering a black kat, however that wasn't quite what have happened for me. I spent some consecutive 10-20 runs sometimes without a single black kat. Only one time though I found 10 black kats worth of loot on the same run, which is the most I think anyone has ever found in a single level. I usually farm with my alt. Basically I found 2 black kats spawning next to each other then I skipped them and continued the level all the way to the party button without clicking on it and managed to find another kat then I went solo and killed the three then continued the level after the party button to find one more kat killed it then joined my alt again to kill the 3 kats getting 6 kats worth of loot because I kept my alt alive all this time.

I remember last year I managed to get only one book by killing around 230 black kats. My conclusion here is that the drop rate of the book is around 0.5% from one kat considering I killed 666 black kats in the first event and around 300 on the second. Using this info... You can estimate how much your time is worth in crowns.

Considering the book to be worth around 2,000,000 crowns and that you have a 0.1% per candlestic keep to find it and that each level takes you on average 5 minutes to complete with the time of going solo and coming back killing black kats taken into account... Your average minute should be worth 600 crowns. Let's compare it to FSC. If you do it with one alt in 30 minutes it gives you around 600 crowns per minute as well. But the difference is.... Relying on profit from books is inconsistent as it's purely based on luck. But FSC will give you around 9-10k crowns every run taking tokens into account not even counting rarities. But when farming black kats I skipped everything. Even boxes right in front of me. These few seconds of looting per level can really rack up when you're doing 1,000+ runs.

Also about the question on alts. You can do it if you have java on the same computer. Just open another window. I suggest setting it's resolution to the least available so the window becomes small and you can switch between controlling your accounts with just one click.

Hi,
I'm keeping stats too. So far I did Alone in the dark 378 times with another player, 79 of those runs had a black kat. With the go solo trick we found a total of 237 BK, no book so far. I can't tell the drop chance of book in my case because I never found one.

more info:
- we speedrun the first depth of the mission and restart after killing the first black kat.
- every run is average 3 minutes restart to restart (we both load very fast)

I just wish they could let us buy a book with pages like aura in the apocrean event or make a new prestige mission with a lot of kats similar to grinch assault for winterfest and solstice ring. They could just take fsc and change all slags into kats. This way even when we speedrun it, we'll get at least 3 tokens for killing the boss at the end of each run.

So far every time I farmed this event it was a complete waste of time. Farming fsc instead is a lot more profitable.

I start to think this is a lottery situation, buying 500 tickets (or in this case doing 500 runs), won't increase your chance of winning the book.

Hi,
my friend is rage quitting the game so I'm done farming this event.
I didn't find a single book.

Summary:
- I farmed only alone in the dark, 608 runs
- 128 of the 608 runs had a black kat, 4 runs had 2 black kat
- we always farmed with two players in the party, and one always went solo to kill the bk twice
- we killed a total of 396 bk between us
- no book
- I wasted a total of 30 hours. Considering an average fsc run of 22 minutes, I would have got 800k cr. Instead, I got virtually nothing.
- I found a bk every 4,75 runs. I went up to 18 runs without finding a single black kat. I have a log file of the runs but I don't want to crunch more stats atm.

Thanks