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