I've been camping Lord Grimrot for so long I'm now max ally with Priests of Life

[countytime]

...without ever having done the faction quest. I do kill the putrid skeletons for faction sometimes (or I used to), but not always, and rarely more than once per PH spawn cycle.

I've killed Ghanex Drah so many times that I discovered many rare items he drops, including one that wasn't even in the wiki. (Crysknife, 4/21 piercer.) I've killed so many skeletons that I've filled multiple backpacks with bone chips.

I didn't know it would be this bad when I started or I wouldn't have. I just saw the item on the Cleric wiki page and thought, neat, I'll do that. I was further fooled by a ridiculous guide on the wiki that said that if you killed the PH at certain times you had a 20% chance of the undead Grimrot popping. (Since I knew "certain times" was nonsense, I interpreted this to mean that he was probably a night spawn.) Nonetheless, the number 20% was promising, even for such a long spawn. Boy was I wrong.

Here's what we know:

• According to this dev post there is no special spawn script for him. Meaning that he simply has a flat chance of spawning or not; no other conditions apply. (Except for day/night variance, but that supposedly does not apply to him. More on that below.)
  
  
• According to the Jan 18th, 2014 patch notes: "There is a greater chance of encountering the living and undead versions of Grimrot."
  
  
• The smallest chance a mob has to spawn in Everquest is 1%, because spawn chances are represented by an integer from 1 to 100.
  
  
• Therefore if the patch notes are true, the lowest chance undead Grimrot has to spawn is 2%*.
  
  I think this is his true spawn percentage. This is based on my own experiences of having not seen him yet in over two weeks, posts by people with similar experiences, and on this post, which claims a former Everquest dev confirmed it was 2%.
  
  This makes the Jan 18th, 2014 patch notes true-- but, cruelly, true by the smallest margin possible.
  
  
• This all assumes that there is no day/night variance. If a mob is a night-only spawn it could have an effective spawn chance of less than 1% (!). But people say that he is not limited to night time, and I'm taking that as true for now. If someone could confirm they've seen him spawn during daylight hours that would be great. That is the last piece of the puzzle needed to firmly nail his spawn chance at 2%.
  
  
• The PH spawns once every 192 minutes.
  
  
• There are 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 30 days in an average month. 60*24*30 = 43200 minutes in a month. Divided by 192 gives us exactly 225 spawn chances per month. (Assuming the PH is instantly killed every time he pops, 24 hours a day, which is of course not possible.)

So if the PH is killed instantly every time he pops, that means we should see the undead Grimrot an average of 4.5 times per month. Per month. Given that it's not possible to kill the PH instantly every time, and it sometimes sits up for hours in the wee hours of the morning, I think we can realistically drop that estimate to 4 times at most. And that still assumes people are paying attention to the camp and killing the PH as much as they are able, not simply doing it when they pass by.



I should stop. It's not worth it. If it had 100 hps/mana it wouldn't be worth it. It's more a matter of principle now. I've sank two and a half weeks into it, killing every spawn for 16+ hours a day. If I stop now that time's just wasted. And it will nag at me, probably for the rest of my EQ career.