hurhur I got extremely lucky so obviously that invalidates people who have spent more than entire day of real world time trying to get this item hurhurhur
You missed my point.
I would understand if the ring came from a NM that takes 18+ people to kill and only pops once a week, while having a 2% drop rate, but that is not the case.
Besides, I doubt that person really spent that much time doing that. Probably went from 1-2 hours and giving up, then dramatizing it to say why they don't have it, when other people who want it already has theirs.
I doubt that its even less than 1% from brown chests. 5% maybe, but not 1%.
I don't have it.
Of course, I've never killed anything in Zeruhn mines... but still.
I wish I was over-exaggerating, but for the sake of preserving prowess buffs, I'd logged in Zeruhn 3 nights in a row, spending 4 days of play time hoping. I'd long since capped merits at one point with mobs roughly being 70 or so EXP a kill on top of GoV page bonuses and took my NPC from 63 to almost 71. However, 63-65 came before the 3 night stint and I had to take her out for the cap quest. As is, the zone can't really support more than 15 people aggressively killing and the amount of people I see leaving blue chests up doesn't help, either. As an idea of how many mobs I'd killed, I sold 38 stacks of Zeruhn Soot from my mule. How many did I chuck? Dunno. I'd give that 100k up for the ring, though.
30 hours of straight playtime (not all at once, of course) is totally believable. As my sig suggests I zipped around Zeruhn at +37% movement speed with a provoke-esque claim and piercing damage to mulch bats in 20 seconds and it still took about 10 hours. Got my NPC from 70 to 79 in the process. I could very easily see one of the poor hapless souls from whom I mercilessly stole bat after bat from halfway across the universe taking 25-30 hours before giving up in exasperation; I was really only hanging on for the sake of NPC levels.
Carry a huge risk of death? We are talking about killing EP mobs here, if THAT.
30 hours of concentrated play is what, a Trial of the Magian Elemental staff all the way to 90? If you really want something bad enough, you would work for it. Its not like you have to kill AV and PW at the same time here, its something that anybody with a goal can do within a week, a month if there is very very very limited gameplay time involved.
Considering a long grind with a definitive end that logs permanent progress every single kill in any way the same as a long grind involving triggering RNG in hopes of a rare drop with no demarcation of progress along the way is what makes people lose thousands of dollars in Vegas.
I'm saying grinding for Prouesse Ring and grinding for a Magian trial other than a WoE weapon are in no way similar.
Well, not only that, but considering these two distinct types of things to be at all the same is a common error that has brought a great deal of suffering on likely untold millions of people throughout history. So I guess I'm talking about that, too.
EDIT: To be fair though, this is probably an unnecessary tangent because I can say as an owner of a Prouesse Ring that it is mega garbage and any imperceptable increase in skill-up rate provided would be totally eclipsed by the skillups I'd have gotten if I'd spent the time farming for it skilling up instead. One would hope a skillup atma would provide larger benefits than the Ring.