Hello everyone, I would like to know how long played the current Black Kat event and how many Black Kats did you kill to find a Book of Dark Rituals if you found one?
Looking at the current player statistics, I believe less than 5% of players even found a Book as I don't see anyone selling the Margrel slots. This alone tells me that no one has found the Book until now. Besides, even if you found a Book, how many Black Kats did you kill to find a Book?
Don't you think this event is broken regarding the drop rates as I've always assumed this is the worst event Spiral Knights has ever released because of their insane RNG drop rates and that is why no one likes to farm this event, which totally makes sense.
I hope they improve the Black Kats spawn rate and also increase the Book drop to at least 1% but not 0.5% if I'm right.
Update: I found a book after playing solo on Elite Difficulty for 4 hours on the 8-1 Weight of Darkness mission. I've had 597 Ancient pages (199 Black Kat kills) to be accurate when I found a Book which is close to the Book drop rate of 1/250.
To answer your first question, I found my first Book after only a few black kats, during the first Kataclysmic Konfrontation. This experience seems to be far from typical.
There have been many threads over the years, in which players express their frustration at the low odds of finding the Books (and hence some of the most powerful gear in the game). It makes everything too dependent on luck.
There have also been threads where players gather data needed to estimate the Book drop rates. The data sets need to be pretty big to constrain the Book drop rate, because the chances are so low.
If you want to find some of these threads, search Google for something like "black kat book chances site:forums.spiralknights.com" (without the quotation marks).
I have not seen any recent large-scale studies of Book drop rates, so I don't have any reason to believe that the drop rates have changed.