Skyfire Drakes, Where Art Thou?

[Fox the Clever]

Over time, I've read numerous threads on this board about how monsters can sometimes be stingy in regards to desired dropped items. However, has anyone ever encountered a problem with the monsters themselves not showing up?

Here's a case in point. If I'm not in a group or attending a raid, I prefer to solo using the task system, usually taking said tasks from the task masters in the Overthere. One time, one of the tasks I undertook sent my character to the Skyfire Mountains. The first part involved me killing ten elder wyverns. O.K., no problem for this level 59 magician. Those critters roam throughout the northern area of the zone, and I can pull them from the front of the Temple of Veeshan if I can't find a convenient roamer.

Then, upon the completion of that part of the task, I discovered that I now had to dispatch ten skyfire drakes. Once again, I headed out and quickly found three of them and brought them down. Then, the fun began.

For no apparent reason, suddenly I couldn't find a skyfire drake anywhere, no matter how far I looked. I found plenty of skycinder drakes (and dropped them for the lack of anything better to do), but the skyfire drakes remained elusive. What the heck? Did the skyfire drakes suddenly think "Oh no, that psycho mage is back! Hide until he leaves!" (yes, I come here very often).

Please bear in mind that I am aware that killing a particular critter too often results in them replaced by other monster types, and I was bringing down various wurms, wyverns, skycinder drakes, and even one of those yucky mature chromodracs in order to help the skyfire drakes spawn. Nevertheless, it took many, many hours until I finally completed that part of the task.

So what about the rest of you? Has anybody here ever encountered a time where particular critters you sought simply him themselves away from you?

[Redi]

I ran into this with Skyfire Drakes, actually. They're needed for the second part of the Gnome DoN cultural master's level books, and I had a hell of a time finding any of em. I ended up clearing the other drakes and misc other stuff and eventually got a few to spawn.

[sikle]

Sometimes they get trapped under the world.

Though when that happens it's usually more than just 1 type of mob.

[Mehlindi]

Once on 7th Hammer with my cleric I had a problem like that. I believe it was East Commonlands, while hunting bears for HQ Pelts. End to end found no bears, and then finally after covering every inch of the zone and returning back to Freeport I saw a bear Kodiak hovering near the tops of the trees.

Seeing this once with spiderlings I zapped him to pull him or just kill him with multiple zaps forcing him to land. Too bad it was a Kodiak and inside him was about 20 other bears... which ended my hunt for awhile, or at leaste until I could run back and claim my still warm if not still twitching corpse. After that though the zone was fine until server reset. Problem was fixed later by the devs.

[Wyvernwill]

LOL that bug was hillarious. Nothing was better than having 4-10 mobs all spawned ontop of one another and there was no way for you to tell which was which until after the pull and they did kind of a shadow fan out lol.

[thrashette]

once...

A long time ago, when i was farming essense of sunlight, I completely depopulated Skyfire of Chromodracs. I killed every single one, and every spawn was replaced by something else.

I had to slaughter random things and wait 20 minutes for repops to get even a few chromodracs to spawn.

[Catha]

Quite a while ago, in North Karana, one of the gypsies was 'trapping' all of the willowisps. Since I could track, I could track 30 or 40 wisps right to the same spot as the gypsy, although you couldn't actually see them. And if you stood close to her, you could hear a buzz like a hive of bees. :P

[Mehlindi]

I also remember the ocean of tears one, where all fo the mobs were in the sky, not in the water. Getting chased by a land shark was interesting.

[Silound]

Assuming nothing has changed in the past year or so since I quit:

Skyfire trash mobs, like most other zones, are in a random respawn queue. X mobs will be up at any time, and the next one that spawns is pulled from the front of a spawn queue which is randomly generated from an internal spawn table. As a mob dies, the next queued mob pops, and a new random mob is added at the back of the spawn queue.

I don't know how big these queues are in terms of mobs next up, they can range from next mob queues to having several hundred randomly selected and ready to spawn.

[Eggborn]

I remember soloing there during my late 50's early 60's when that zone was the last place in the game I could still use my old fear kiting ways.

Some days it would be all moths, others nearly all wurms. I reallly hated the mothy days; they made me leave.

Try doing something else for a while and coming back to the zone. It's sort of like a slot machine on what you get spawn wise.