Highly Notorious Monsters

[Alhanelem]

I used to think time sinks like HNM spawns served no purpose, but it did, it made items a lot more exclusive, if Simurgh spawned once every 2-3 hours everyone and their grandmother would've had Strider boots. It serves a bigger purpose then being a big inconvenience to you.

Drop rates, my friend, drop rates. Or force pops that aren't easy to obtain.

Also, this is less about the time it takes from one spawn to the next and more about the time you end up waiting even when you know it's coming. A 24 hour NM that just pops every 24 hours is fine. A 24 hour NM where you have to wait for 3 hours, checking every 30 minutes, for it to pop or not pop is NOT fine.

the "3 kings" in FFXI were changed to force pops. Since these force pops were tied to 99 kindred seal BCNMs, they were not exactly in huge abundance, and the drops from the HNMs actually became more rare as a result. You don't have to have spawn windows or huge wait times to keep an item relatively rare.

If you want certain items to be and STAY really exclusive and valuable, you should do so by making the fight itsself hard,

This.

The hard mode rivenroad fight is a good example. Not everyone could beat that- so even though you could challenge it as much as you wanted, you didn't see every single player running around with white ravens on.