Quote Originally Posted by Runespider View Post
It's a rare drop, one of THE most rare drops infact.

If it was common nobody would care for it much at all, it's a trophy piece. Be glad you have any chance at it, before this update you had pretty much none. I'm in the same position as you btw, I have everything else from kings long ago this being the last.
Before this update I agreed with you. Now I severely disagree. Before the update you had a very slim chance. Now you have realistically none.

For comparison: In a KSNM run, which is already outside of the reach of some players who burned their KS on other things pre-Abyssea, and since have barely made any Kindred's Seals at all, you have a chance of 0.25%, or 1 in 400 to obtain a Defending Ring. That means that only one item will drop for every 400 KS99 done by people, on average.

Before you actually had to go out and camp it, and I've done it recently, there wasn't as much competition as there used to be, only after maintenance. Most people simply didn't wanna go through the trouble. Those who actually wanted to work towards getting it, those were the people standing there and camping it, and it wasn't that many. While it was still a rare chance, at least you could do something about it. After enough camping, even after three years, it could be yours. 400 KS99 on the other hand is completely unrealistic. All they've done is make it accessible to random people who casually try it every now and then, but people who actually wanna put effort into it are likely to be completely unrewarded for it.

400 KS99, I don't believe any player has ever done that many, even considering other people's pops. If you do one KS99 every day, you'd still be on it for over a year. And there's no way you can ever farm that many pops, it takes at the very least 8h 15min to get 100 KS, then do the KS99, then do the NQ, then do the HQ. That chain alone is worth more than one day of effort put into it, and statistically it's more likely to be a three or four day effort, because Kindred's Seals don't always drop that much.

Which means even if you dedicate every day, all day long, every hour you play just to obtaining a Defending Ring, high chance says you'll still be here this time next year, empty handed, and quite possibly for more years after that. If you're a casual player, high chance says you won't get it in a life time (literally one human life time).

Even with a 100% HQ pop I didn't like this idea very much, because it still means I have to get 2,000 KS on average for a Defending Ring (and knowing my luck it'll be more like 10,000 KS), but at least that I could work on. With the current system I won't even bother, because it took me years of playing casually to get ~500 KS. I'm sure as hell not gonna farm 80 times the amount that took me several years to accumulate.

It seems this update had the casual MNKs in mind, and nothing else.