Remove all ads & support the site - Go PurePremium!

Ring of Royal Grandeur Farming Exploit?

The [wiki]Ring of Royal Grandeur[/wiki] (armory) has become the most sought after item in Diablo 3, as its legendary affix is basically mandatory for all end game gearing decisions, given the power of partial Item Set bonuses. The hard part is finding one, as it’s one of the five legendary items that can only be … Read more

You want? You take!
You want? You take!
The [wiki]Ring of Royal Grandeur[/wiki] (armory) has become the most sought after item in Diablo 3, as its legendary affix is basically mandatory for all end game gearing decisions, given the power of partial Item Set bonuses. The hard part is finding one, as it’s one of the five legendary items that can only be obtained from Act One Horadric Caches. This is good in a way, as it’s the sole remaining item/profit-based reason players have to do *anything* other than RiftRiftRift. (Given the game’s design direction in recent months, I’m frankly surprised the RoRG hasn’t been turned into a Greater Rift Guardian drop.)

Most players hunt RoRGs with brute force, by grinding hundreds of Act One bounties as quickly as possible, which usually means split-farming on Normal difficulty. That’ll work, eventually, but is there a better way? A user in our Diablo 3 community forum named Horadrimm says yes, there’s a trick to it, by following a method players are calling the “Junger Rules.” Quote:

I got 5 RORGS with very minimal effort and so can you!!

How it works: The game has a pity timer, meaning that if you don’t get a legendary within an hour or so it drops one for you automatically. The goal the aforementioned method of farming is to ensure that pity drop is in your horadric cache and not in the world.

What to do:

  • Do not kill any mobs except those required for objectives.
  • Do not kill goblins.
  • Do not open chests including resplendent chests.
  • Do not destroy breakables (pots, barrels, looting bodies etc).
  • Do not pop fortune shrines.
  • Do not kill mobs from required cursed chest and shrine event objectives until the timer has run out.
  • Avoiding a legendary drop in the world increases the chance the pity timer drops one in your cache.

    First off, the guy who invented this was apparently named Junger, so now it’s called the “Junger Rules.” Which is fine, but how the hell did they avoid the obvious pun and call it the “Junger Games?” So that’s what I’m calling it, since I’m all about obvious puns.

    As for the technique, the theory is that since the game has a “pity timer” that increases your chances of finding a legendary item the longer you go without finding one, you can exploit this by obtaining a Horadric Cache after not finding any Legendaries for some time. Hence not killing Goblins, not opening golden chests, avoiding random Elites, etc. This is a sacrifice since it’ll lower your total legendaries found, but boost your chances of finding that all-important RoRG.

    Does it work? Some players swear it does, others say it doesn’t. And thus we’re plunged back into the conspiracy theories that are inevitably spawned by item hunting in a game where we don’t know exactly how item drops work. I think the principle is sound, as the pity timer is real, but I’m not at all sure the stated rules are how it should be done.

    First of all, we don’t know when items in a Horadric Cache are determined. The Junger Gamers say the legendary pity timer works when you find the Cache, but that seems contrary to what we know about how Horadric Caches determine their item drops. Remember early in RoS, when players were storing Caches up in Normal and opening them on Torment 6? That was a real exploit, easily observed since it caused Imperial Gems to drop from Caches found in Normal. (Which made it seem that items in Caches were determined when the Cache was opened. NOT when it was found.)

    Blizzard confirmed that exploit by hotfixing it and adding an internal tag to unopened Caches that tracked what [wiki]difficulty[/wiki] level they were found on, and the level of the character that farmed them. (So if you find bags with a lvl 70 and open with a lvl 60, all the items will be lvl 70.) Bliz later expanded on that in Patch 2.0.5 when they boosted the chances for legendary items to drop from Caches found on Torment 2 and higher.

    Furthermore, Bliz recently confirmed that items from Caches roll their smart drop according to the class of the character that opens the cache. It doesn’t matter who farms the cache in terms of what items drop. That matches my experience and testing as well, as I once farmed a bunch of caches with my DH and my Barb, and then opened them with a WD and got almost all INT gear, plus several Witch Doctor-restricted items.

    Given those facts, it seems unlikely that caches would determine the quality of items when they are found, but not roll their stats until they are opened. AFAIK, the game rolls the type and stats for an item at the same time, and we know the stats are rolled to the class that opens the cache, not the one that finds it.

    The other issue is the legendary pity drop, which is also only imperfectly explained/understood. From what Blizzard has said in the past, after some amount of time without finding a legendary, a timer starts counting up that increases the chances of a leg dropping. Blizzard has that players should very seldom go over 2 hours without finding a legendary, so presumably the timer starts at 60-90m and by 120m the odds are approaching 100%.

    All that stated… how can we exploit use the pity drop timer to find more RoRGs? The way the Junger Gamers are doing it now seems viable, as they are playing in a way to minimize legendary finds while opening Act One Caches. Thus boosting the odds that they’ll find a legendary item from the Cache. But 1) they might find a leg by accident, 2) the pity timer gets reset every time they do, 3) and it seems more likely that what matters is when you open the cache, not when you get it from Tyrael.

    Testing, Because Science

    Happily, this should be easy to test. Save up a bunch of A1 Caches but don’t open them. Then one day when you’re around your computer but can’t actually play (because work, homework, bad lag, etc), just leave your character sitting in town for a couple of hours (you’d have to Alt+Tab back to move once in a while so you don’t get disconnected) and after a couple of hours, start opening up Horadric Caches. (Edit: This wouldn’t work, as commenters pointed out that Bliz said the pity timer doesn’t run while AFK. See the new {wiki]Legendary Pity Timer[/wiki] wiki article for blue quotes.)

    Another way to try this. Just play normally, and sometime when you get a long run of bad luck and haven’t seen a legendary for a couple of hours, pop back to town and open up caches until you get one.

    In either case, you should see a leg from a cache quickly, if the pity timer works to boost cache legendaries. (If it doesn’t, the whole Junger Games thing is without function.) The general consensus on “legs from caches” is around 1 per 10 caches, so anything considerably/consistently higher than that from trying to exploit the pity timer should be pretty visible. Of course the timer resets each time you find a leg, so testing this would take a while.

    Anyone tried it already? Got your own theories about when and how legendary items drop from caches? And has anyone farmed a bunch of caches on high Torment level and noticed increased leg drop rates from them? If offends me that split farming on Normal is the best way to find anything.