5th Shawl: Glowing wurm biles

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Im workin on the 8th shawl again.... this time its for my shaman.
I was killing wurms in Great divide to get the biles.

I ran around inside the cave in the middle of the zone for 4 or 5 hours, killing every wurm i could find, probably pushing 200 kills, in hopes to get a glowing one to spawn. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. (Well i got tons of spells and a few armor drops. woo ha)
So i decided to change tactics.
I went ouside the cave and hunted nothing but 'young shardwurms'.
I got all 5 in about 30 minutes.
They all dropped off of young shardwurms only and all outside the cave.

Can anyone remember ever finding a bile on a wurm INSIDE the cave?

If not, maybe the text needs to be updated because on the shawl quest page, it says they can drop off of ANY wurm.

[Hibashira]

Not that my experience is conclusive but I have never gotten any biles from the wurms inside. May be its just on the roamers outside.

[Tebyen Trueheart]

I haven't seen one drop from anything other than the young'ins for a few months. A long while back (sometime last year) I got one off one inside the cave, an ancient if I'm not mistaken.

[Verdandi]

This is one of those things that has been getting asked since the dawn of the shawl quests. The answer has never changed: any kind of wurm in GD can drop biles. They are very rare drops, and our RNG is such that you might spend five hours hunting cave wurms without a drop and then kill two young wurms and get a bile off both. That doesn't mean cave wurms don't have them. Young wurms also have a much larger territory to roam, and are much easier to scan for glowers without actually killing any. They're also easier to kill, so you can do more in the same amount of time. It is theoretically possible that something was changed in a very recent patch...but highly unlikely.

Just like you can go 200 combines without a skill up and then get two in a row. That doesn't mean anything you did (or the time of day or the number of people in the zone, etc) caused the sudden skillups. Just like you can fail ten combines in a row with KEI and then succeed on the next five after KEI drops. That doesn't mean KEI makes it harder to succeed.

See the most recent interation of this discussion in this thread: 5th Shawl correction - bile drops.

I don't mean to sound snippy, I'm just very sure on this fact. Any wurm in GD can drop bile.

[daerkon]

I recently did this quest on several characters. From what I discovered:- I never saw a bile drop from any of the stationary spawns in the caverns. From killing every wurm in sight (including trying Kardakor - very bad idea!) I found that only the 'elder' wurms drop glowing bile (if it drops from other wurms then the probability for a drop from the elders is much higher). The elders typically are only found close to the entrances, 2 in the cavern the water runs through, and wandering the main loop. It took about an hour for this reconnaissance - after which I collected 10 in about 2 hours. (I was multiboxing purely for dps to rush the kills - there are usually players looking for bile, so you need to be efficient and fast)

Hope this helps

[Carmaris]

When I did my cleric's bile hunting a couple months ago, got 3 biles in the caves--elder, ancient, and a young--two outside.

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This is one of those things that has been getting asked since the dawn of the shawl quests. The answer has never changed: any kind of wurm in GD can drop biles. They are very rare drops, and our RNG is such that you might spend five hours hunting cave wurms without a drop and then kill two young wurms and get a bile off both. That doesn't mean cave wurms don't have them. Young wurms also have a much larger territory to roam, and are much easier to scan for glowers without actually killing any. They're also easier to kill, so you can do more in the same amount of time. It is theoretically possible that something was changed in a very recent patch...but highly unlikely.
I don't mean to sound snippy, I'm just very sure on this fact. Any wurm in GD can drop bile.

Trust me, im WELL aware of how the RNG works. It just seemed a bit over-the-top extreme when i cleared probably in excess of 200 wurms of all types, pretty much everything in the loop around inside the cave (except Kardakor) for hours upon hours upon hours (very quickly mind you, well equipped 65 ranger with 48 shaman hasting and throwing rarely needed heals and sucking up all the XP) without a single bile, then getting all 5 within.. oh, 15 kills off of ONE type of wandering mob outside the caves.

Id just like a little more recent, actual, verified confirmation before I write this one off to 'bad luck'.

[Velurian]

I can offer more recent, but not incredibly so -- I did the 5th shawl about 3 months ago and got 1 from an ancient (the only ancient I killed, for what it's worth), 2 from elders and 2 from young. The ancient was the only one that I killed inside the caves.

[Salitorn]

Got all mine outside the south entrance to the caves. Was easier to see which ones had the biles. I also only got them at night, go figure, even though i kept killing the wurms during the day. But I as well got atleast one off of an ancient that wondered out of the cave.

[Hibashira]

Ok I tried this last night, hunting exclusively on young, got all 5 in about 3 hours. Not to say the elders don't drop them but the young ones definately do.

[Saleani]

I spent weeks killing every young and elder shardwurm outside the cave and found the drop rate to be something like 1 in 200+ kills. Inside the caves, I found exactly none on any stationary mobs, but rather found them only on roamers. The drop rate was either drastically increased, or the drop rate inside the caves always was higher.

[Balsen]

I finally got motivated enough to go and finish the 5th shawl this past weekend. I needed three biles and the threads for those three. I spent a little over an hour outside the caves to the south killing everything. I got the first one after about a half hour. At this point, I was pretty much killing them as soon as they popped. Approximately 20 minutes later, I got a second one. I got the third one about 20 minutes after that one. I'm pretty sure it was just a coincidence but it sure seemed strange. I was tempted to keep killing them to see when the next one would drop but I was sick of wurms by this point and wanted to get to Velks. I've also seen one drop from one of the crystalline wurms in the tunnels when we were killing the named.

Balsen
Level 54 paladin

[Gundark Viresdator]

I can confirm that biles drop off wurms in the caves. I had been soloing (58SHM at the time) for a few hours and hadn't seen a single one in the south valley. My warrior guildie came along and insisted that we check inside and I'll be durned if we didn't get two drops in three kills *inside* the caves. Then about five or six kills later a third dropped. That was all I needed for the combine which was successful the first time. I cannot remember if all were young wurms, but I know one was.

Likewise, on the dire wolf whiskers and siren hair, hours without anything, then two drops in a row on both items, and a successful combine at Tailoring 158 the first time.

/hug RNG.
/rude RNG.

I've felt like doing both, often at the same time.

[Nicholaa]

biles in the caves

In 2 nights I looted all 5 of my biles inside the caves. 4 of them were from roamers, and the last one was from a static spawn.\

Asthore McTavish 56 shaman
Nicholaa Kickshaw-Stonefoot 60 druid

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Well, i guess thats enough to convince me that the RNG was out to mess with my head that day. =)