Haha so, heres some fun math.

Black kats are 1/90 normal kats. This means on average youll need to encounter 90 normal kats before you see a single black kat. A book of dark rituals drops 1/250 black kats. Doing some quick math, thats 0.000044% chance each kat encountered will be a black kat that drops a book.

That means on average, youll need to encounter 22,727 kats on average until you get a book of dark rituals. Even with that, there are TONS of people who get books. Tons of margrel runs you can buy into for black kat cloak/hoods, and tons of black kat cowls being traded/sold.

Sure you could get 3 alts, which would mean you only need to encounter 3,246 kats, which is much more reasonable, but its an MMO. Its a grind. Youre not meant to get a book in a day. The pages dont expire, so youre meant to save them up across multiple events.

Dont grind this event with the purpose of finding a book. Play a few levels until you get bored, or just keep running vana to buy black kat gear/margrel slots. There will always be people who can stand to grind 8 hours a day with 3 alts and theyll get 2 or 3 books and brag about it.

@Witelite
Choosing not to play the event and instead subsidizing other players who slave away (and multiply their droprates with an exploit) is wise advice for triaging the symptoms of this event being terrible; nonetheless, the winning move being to completely ignore the event to buy slots and materials from people dumb enough to grind it is a very sad thing to have to say in conjunction and illustrates how poorly structured it is even by MMO best-in-slot grind standards.

"You're not meant to get a book in a day. The pages don't expire, so you're meant to save them up across multiple events." The average player isn't meant to find their very own book, period, at the current rates. The pages have nothing to do with acquiring a book since they cannot be exchanged for one. They're used for the 3* hoods (x50 for non-BK, x70 for BK), for Kat Tribe Fetishes (x50), and for the new Shrouded Crest shield costume (x90). Resold equipment like the 3* hoods and fetishes both being cheap is a byproduct of the book being a requirement for everything past the 3* hoods.

Let's set aside the FOMO psychology of it being a time-limited event with several months between appearances, all of the hullabaloo around it being best-in-slot equipment, and Margrel being wasted content. Let's assume the player is fully informed this is an unhealthy anti-gameplay grind with no pity system, is willing to buy their BKC/Raiment off of someone else wasting literal weeks of their life book-hunting, and thus only wants their own Shrouded Crest which cannot be traded by any means, can very optimistically find a BK every 15 minutes, and does the prestige mission each day of the event, in this case 10 days where the longest the event has run is 14 days. Say the next one is 14 days, too. From fixed rewards, that requires nearly perfect attendance in both runs in order to get the 90 tokens required of the S.Crest - or in the span of this 10 day run, 50 tokens' worth of natural BK spawns.

50/3 rounded up to 17 with 15 minute gaps between BK spawns is still over four hours of not actually playing the game - and that theoretical 15 minutes is pulling a lot of weight, since we're assuming the player is unusually lucky and extremely efficient with their Weight of Darkness / Alone in the Dark restarts. In natural gameplay where the player isn't pulling out all the stops, like a full T3 arcade run that'll spawn maybe one BK on average, this is going to be much slower. This is also completely ignoring the time taken to do the Prestige Missions themselves which have terrible payout from normal drops as they end at D26 and a good chunk of the enemies in the special final fight don't drop anything at all, let alone pages/books. Compare and contrast with Apocrea which is also a slog but has plenty of late-T3 arenas and fairly consistent progress, Tortodrones which have RNG on Ancient Shells for no reason but are roughly set up to be comparable to normal weapon recipe costs if you're partying up for them, and Grinchlin Assault where the hyper-rare drop is a trinket that's strong but not exactly BIS.

What a mess. I have something of a grudge with this event what with it becoming astronomically worse to play the very next run after the game's lead developer went off to make video games instead of grooming gambling addicts into the game's twilight years. Went from a neat social event with big tuning problems to an exceedingly antisocial one with massive problems. This is THE event that made me distrustful of late OOO and GH by extension since it marked a big shift in development philosophy, not just monetization. Was similarly annoyed by the Slime Casino being GH's literal first move after reacquiring it from SEGA but that's its own can of worms and I admittedly wouldn't really give a fig about it if not for it holding an MSI trinket hostage as a 'jackpot.' I'm disappointed nothing's changed so far outside of a couple of bones thrown with the Forge and OCH.

anyway, that's my soapboxing for the morning. There's a suggestions thread up that you might find some camaraderie in, Azur-MMXXVI: https://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/125458

Damn that critique is rough.

Maybe SK wants to be like osrs. Alt abusing and farming insanely rare items is done there, as well as many other MMOs. Im just giving alternatives to spending hours slamming your head against endless kats. Youre much more likely to enjoy your time if you farm/sell stuff and buy the 3* cloak and 5* cowl.

Definitely not a fan of how vacuous the book of dark rituals is, i wish theyd make it for sale for like 1k tokens or something. That, or make black kats encounterable even when the event isnt going, albiet at like a 1/500 chance or something. The only good thing is so many people are farming for them this year, their price is very likely to drop. Plus with margrel slots going for what, 150kcr, its somewhat affordable to get the 3* armors, which are absolutely viable to play endgame content with.

It definitely needs some work as an event, but its grey havens, changing an event past adding a cosmetic shield is too much work for them.

The game doesn't really have enough content to afford letting something be so useless that you don't mind it's one-out-of-one-billion droprate

@Jedwell Excluding certain damage sources like traps and blast blocks, max health and defense haven’t visibly influenced how consistently last pip protection triggers for me. There’s a rumor going around it’s tied to a percentage of your max health, but I’ve had it trigger while pixels above 1 pip. Do you know if anyone has formally studied it?

@Orangeo completely agree; there’s a handful of cases of this across the game, not just things like non-BK raiments. Would be nice if it were at least sane to acquire like the hats were on launch (no whiskers, far less pages)

@Zeddy this got me thinking; “Margrel slots” may be seen as unenforceable, but you know what else is totally legal? Inviting three of your alts. I really don’t think it’s a coincidence there are more 3* kat armors on the market than people willing to sell their slots lol

@Draycos

I've been running around with 3* Black Kat for a while now and I have never had it fail to trigger for me since, except when picking up a high hp vitapod (Which is why I skip them these days). It's definitely related to how much relative damage an attack does to you, and my current estimate from the above is that the hit needs to do roughly 25% of your hp in order for the protection to trigger, but that's still quite vibe based.

I can only offer rumor to you, I'm sorry, but according to other long-time players this information was gained from either some kind of leak or datamining expedition long in the game's past. I don't see any reason to believe they weren't valid at one point but I also have no cause to assure you that they're relevant today - presently all we have left are people sharing their grievances for how few kats they've encountered and (of them,) how few have dropped ritual tomes.

First, thanx for your answer.

But as someone who is curious about where informations came from and how relieable a source is, your reply leaves me unsatisfied unfortunally.
Since - as you stated - it is just another rumor and hearsay.

And on top, the rates itself do not answer all my questions.
So the source would be useful, in hope that there is more to find an learn about the nittigritti.

If I may also add a complaint here, I did get exactly 1 book in 13 years of Black Kat events.
So I am kinda looking forward for some way to be able to improve my chances of obtaining one. Because in my opinion I should be able to get at least a 2nd book in 13 years ;)

Sadly, Jcyrano is completely correct. We also have a lot of reports across the community of tweaks being made historically without any announcement, and the results of those tweaks have only become clear as either the result of community-wide datagathering procedures or at the pressing of GMs on what exactly has been changed.

This isn't to say that the information is completely valueless - but while I am keen to say "all values should be considered guidelines only as their accuracy can't be validated," it also can't be conclusively ruled out. The community does try very hard to determine what the drop odds are by keeping spreadsheets, and (anecdotally though it may be) I just yesterday encountered a player who keeps a running total of kats encountered and books dropped.

As you've seen, from your own personal experience, they are extraordinarily rare drops. Present supposition is that the odds are very slim, whatever they happen to be, and overall the community is dissatisfied with it... but beyond that, I'm truly sorry - there doesn't seem to be a good way to give you concrete facts.

Update: I hopped into Haven 4 just now to see if anyone had any data to share but got pretty much no reply, sadly? I can't say I want to make a habit of doing that so you might have to look deeper into the forum's past to get more info.