For things in the first 6 months of everquest finding anything at all is rare because fan sites were just then cropping up. Finding something as specific as drop rates which take hundreds if not thousands of entries to confirm you’ve done a good job at shaking potential RNG skewing effects, is just not feasible for this type of legacy item. Trust me, I’ve done a lot of EverQuest research in my day. Finding something this specific this early from EQs lifespan just isn’t feasible.
As evidence of this, all the quotes you pulled from the google group are from dates after the item removal was confirmed via patch note. So all of those people who are claiming the item is now uber rare are mistaken and it actually got removed. Brad has a post confirming the removal of the item and later planar Nerf.
I think the fact that literally every other analogous rare creature from vanilla has a similar drop rate distribution of their common and rare drops is extremely telling. If there were some outliers that would be one thing. We are talking about the hundreds of named across 30+ zones that follow this pattern. Common 80-60%, Rare 20-40%. I get that the item is unique and was removed but when they originally launched with all of these unique items like JBoots, Quillmane Cloak, Guise, FBSS/Mithril 2hs (only group haste items prior to kedge revamp) etc. you find that even those items also follow the above drop distribution.
I would think in the absence of specific evidence this should be set to match the norm for all the other items which is what I’m suggesting. Rather than setting the item to the extremely rare chance it is currently.
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