Would be nice if For Absent Friends could pop more frequently?

Multiple times now I've been in instances of Bozja for 100-120 minutes and not seen it once. It is kinda ridiculous.

It's really hard to try to get the last note I need (Sartauvoir) when the required Skirmish never shows up. Even if I wanted to just do the duel, I still need FaF to pop for that to be even possible.

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Originally Posted by Sera-Methos

Multiple times now I've been in instances of Bozja for 100-120 minutes and not seen it once. It is kinda ridiculous.

It's really hard to try to get the last note I need (Sartauvoir) when the required Skirmish never shows up. Even if I wanted to just do the duel, I still need FaF to pop for that to be even possible.

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Are you actively farming scorpions or just opening your map and waiting for call outs? If you are farming anything other than scorpions, with a party or solo, you are actively pushing the faf spawn to the back of the queue

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sera-Methos

Multiple times now I've been in instances of Bozja for 100-120 minutes and not seen it once. It is kinda ridiculous.

It's really hard to try to get the last note I need (Sartauvoir) when the required Skirmish never shows up. Even if I wanted to just do the duel, I still need FaF to pop for that to be even possible.

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Try to kill Magitek monsters in the area. Some skirmishes requires you to kill 40-50 of such monsters to spawn (different monster ranks spawn different skirmishes). They normally spawn much faster if there is a cluster farming party.

To spawn for absent friends you need to kill somewhere around 60 scorpions.
However
As only 1 critical engagement can spawn at a time, any skirmish that leads into a critical engagement, a critical engagement itself, or a duel can not be up. If the requirements are met to spawn another skirmish or CE, for absent friends is pushed to the back of the line.
So, kill your scorpions. Don’t help frag farm parties. Despawn skirmishes that lead into other critical engagements

I'm aware of the whole scorpion killing thing, and I'm constantly seeing other people kill them as well. Hell I'm in one now and there's half a dozen people standing around to kill them. So I don't think that's the issue. I can't demand the other 71 people in the instance stop doing skirmishes, so it'd be nice if FaF's priority could get adjusted.

I don't think it's unreasonable to see FaF pop at least once an instance without needing to spend 60 minutes killing the same two mobs over and over and/or waiting for 30-ish people to be locked in Castrum so that skirmishes slow down.

Those notes are quite literally the only reason I ever bother going into Bozja Southern Front any more. I'll do a CLL to kill time if there wasn't already a group farming, then camp a scorp and murder it over and over again. FAF finally spawned after I was in the current instance tonight for about two hours.

Something like this should either have a low drop rate, or a lot pop rate, but not both!

for absent friends, followed by of steel and flame is actually a bit weird in that regard.

It seems that it has a lower priority than other fates - I've had countless 180 min lockouts while farming scorpions, that had not spawned a single faf. It seems, that farming different fates in Z3 by just randomly pulling all the mobs in the water area helps spawn the other fates which block FaF and followups.

Also the droprate is a mess considering how rare the chain, CE and Duel is. FR14, the only one missing now.... farming for months

Its the queue system of fates that can be a problem.

Absent of friends is a CE fate chain. Which means it can not pop if theres currently an ongoing CE or a chain fate leading up to a CE.
There is 10 CE's some spawn directly but many of them have a chain fate leading up to them and some have the duel at the end.

Its very straightforward technically you kill 20-30 scorps and absent of fate will pop ... So whats the problem, espacially clusters farms can throw a huge wrench into the "just kill some scorps" part. Because a cluster farm will grab mobs that are spawning different CE's all over the place.

Its entirely possible that you killed your scorpions and still have to wait over an hour since theres so many fates in the queue that qualified before yours.
If you ever find yourself in a zone with a premade clusterfarm of 16 ppl who farm all 3 zones at the same time ... its gonna be CE's back to back ... but theres no telling when yours will pop.

Took me seven weeks of camping note 14 to get it to drop for me... it was about six and a half weeks too long. But it's over now.

It occurred to me that we fight him again in Dalriuda. It seems like an oversight that the notes don't also drop there, considering he's not a 2-parter like Lyon or Dabog.

If people are pulling all magiteck and not just scorpions it can mess up the spawn. Typically the way I got it was to get in a fresh instance and to start farming before others start grabbing other stuff. Even so with a 14% drop rate you eventually do it just to get the CE to spawn to do the duel.