Spiral Knights - I had hoped there might be a change to the BK event this year...

I had hoped there might be a change to the BK event this year...

12 replies [Last post]

Mon, 01/28/2019 - 22:34

Holy-Nightmare

I have all the Kat cowls that can possibly be gotten without using Whiskers.... along with the BK hood (3* version)

Each Cowl takes 200 tokens to obtain and craft with Kat tribe fetishes included.... for all 3 that means you have to have 600 tokens.....

Add in the 70 tokens for the BK hood and your grand total comes to 670

Add in my unused 141 other tokens and you come to the conclusion that I have met and killed approximately 270 kats (math isn't even because I have farmed at different depths)

I have never seen a Book of Dark rituals.... in all my days of play... from way back in the days of Mist energy....

And the fact that all of the Kat armors require you to have Wicked Whiskers is just salt in the wound......

I'm tired... I'm spent..... and I'm probably done with this game for a while....

Mon, 01/28/2019 - 22:57

Fallconn

You aren't special

Mon, 01/28/2019 - 23:22

Sir-Pandabear

Yup. I've gotten thousands of pages and same story here.

I wonder how many other knights found this event depressing enough to quit playing.

The devs have of course no incentive to make the event bearable. You can get a book right now if you really want! How? Just shell out 10-20k energy, or the now bumped up 3.5k energy for the privelige of joining a party that's fighting Margel.

How do you get those energy? By paying Gray Havens.

Tue, 01/29/2019 - 06:11

Goofio

The last time I played this event, I farmed 332 kats before I found a book. This time, I found a book after 38 kats. I think the chances are around 0.5-1%, so it is fairly typical to farm hundreds of black kats and not find a book.

I still think this event would be better if the BKC was craftable like the BKR, and the books were a bit easier to find. However, with the current drop rate, the book is certainly a chase item. If you find one, you will be rich.

Tue, 01/29/2019 - 08:48

Sir-Pandabear

38 kats is very lucky, wouldn't you say?

And yet, if you consider this from the perspective of a reasonable game, it's actually horrible. I'd say on average it takes 15 minutes to find one kat, if you run that one specific level over and over. However, let's be excessively lenient and say you find a kat every 8 minutes.

In your excessively lucky streak finding a kat every 8 minutes and getting a book on the 38th one, you spent 5 hours.

Can you imagine a single player game asking you to spend 5 hours on just obtaining one item? Of course not. That's awful game design. And yet, kat hunting in Spiral Knights is a single player game.

Here's some things I'd rather spend 5-6 hours doing:
- Play through the entirety of one or more good games that are fun and value your time like Undertale, Iconoclasts, Shinobi, Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda, Metal Gear Rising, etc
- Watch a movie trilogy
- Write angry forum posts
- Work my office job earning enough money to buy CE for over 20 Margel spots, if I felt like rewarding the game designers for their contemptuous game design
- Play Dungeon Keeper Mobile
- Watch 5 speedruns of awesome games
- Play the fun parts of Spiral Knights and pretend that neither this event nor its gear exists
- Be stuck in traffic

Tue, 01/29/2019 - 09:39

Goofio

I agree, when taken alone, 38 kats is lucky. But the last time I tried, it took 332 black kats, which is pretty unlucky. So it averages out.

You are right, it is a tremendous grind. When I'm farming kats, I turn the game sound off and listen to podcasts. That's the only way I can tolerate it. If I run out of podcasts, I won't farm.

And I actually burnt out on the game after the 332 kat debacle. After that grind, I stopped playing SK for ~1.5 years.

Tue, 01/29/2019 - 16:01

Skepticraven

↑↑↓↓←→←→ba

Obligatory data.
Earliest, most thorough data suggested book drop rate was ~0.2-0.5% given a BK. Spookat to BK rate of 0.6-1.7% (~21 per candlestick depth, so about 1 every 4 depths).

On average, you're better off doing something fun if you find this at all annoying. Assuming you hit the average rate and can manage speedrunning depths efficiently (2 minutes/depth), you're looking at around 19hrs of farming. Average.

0/5*. Would not recommend.

Tue, 02/05/2019 - 13:27

Holy-Nightmare

.....

UPDATE:

337 pages and still no book

Tue, 02/05/2019 - 16:14

Zero-Chill

meow

I found my first book after killing 381 black kats and only 3 books were found at 666 black kats killed… The event after I found a book after about 240 black kats… I've become the American police of spiral knights... But yeah the droprate is total BS and the spawnrate is dreadful as well (you have no idea how many times I went into 20 consecutive runs without finding a single black kat).

Tue, 02/05/2019 - 17:20

Sgt-Brownie

"Erecting a Handgun Dispenser."

Honestly, the moment I heard of the earliest found probabilities Skepticraven mentioned, I never even bothered to hunt for ritual books since.

As a point of reference, unless my math is wrong -- odds are it is, but stick with me for a sec here -- you're *almost* likely to find 5 whole Shiny Pokémon from Gen 6 onwards in the time it'd take for a Black Kat with a Book of Dark Rituals drop to spawn in your face (0,024% Base Shiny spawn chance VS 0,005% chance for Black Kat spawn + ritual book drop), and even before Gen 6 you'd still be likely to find 2 Shinies in that same amount of time (0,012% base chance before Gen 6).

Frankly, the chance of you getting a ritual book might as well have been left to a lottery machine rather than from raw grinding, because even I can tell the odds are massively stacked in the House's hands, and unless I have the choice to go for bluffing games (read: you never do against the House), I'd never play such awful hands.

You're much better off just doing the event for the novelty factor than for any sort of item hunting.

Tue, 02/05/2019 - 20:01

#10

Zero-Chill

meow

I remember doing some calculations and the amount of crowns you get from using the book (considering you run a candlestic keep in 3 mins avg) is the same as what it'd take you to do vana (considering you take 20 mins avg per run) for the same amount of playtime as well as the same as farming the first floor of sewer stash (considering you run with a partner fully equipped with acherons and vh msi and you kill all lichens before they fuse). But you might wanna do one thing over the other for example sewer stash has elite and advanced orbs, vana has radiant crystals and eternal orbs and if you found a book you will skip the pain of trying to find margrel slots and you also get tokens you can exchange for some underpowered stuff.

Tue, 02/05/2019 - 21:39

#11

Sir-Pandabear

You meant to say "has a chance of being the same".

No. Sorry. That was arrogant.

In your calculations, how many kats are you assuming is needed in order to get a book?

Tue, 02/05/2019 - 22:22

#12

Goofio

I've decided to throw in the towel 1 day early. Results this time:

- 238 black kats found
- 714 pages farmed
- 2 books found (38th and 156th kat)

Pretty good luck this time, but I'm definitely feeling burnt out on this event.

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I had hoped there might be a change to the BK event this year...