Diablo 4's new season, Death Awakening, kicked off on June 30 with some highly anticipated adjustments to the game's rarest loot, now called "Iconic" Mythics. The TLDR is that Mythic Uniques now come with two guaranteed powers that synergize with the item's unique abilities, replacing the completely random rolls that garnered so much controversy in the PTR, but even if Blizzard's compromise with players completely restored the community's goodwill (it didn't), it seems there's a whole new pain point emerging: drop rates.
According to one extremely thorough study from Diablo 4 content creator wudijo, Death Awakening's drop rates for Iconic Mythics are pretty darn stingy. In a new 20-minute video, wudijo says he spent "20 hours non-stop farming bosses" to bag himself some Iconic Mythics – in particular the El'Druin Sword of Justice – to no avail.
Wudijo spent most of two full real-world days farming Helltides, "not doing anything else in-between," and ended up with 850 lair keys, 900 greater lair keys, and 127 superior lair keys. Using those farming those bosses netted him a little over 100 Mythics, five Mythic Seals, and more than five billion gold, but unfortunately, not a single Iconic Mythic.
Even after salvaging "almost all" of the Mythics he looted at the blacksmith and trading them for Resplendent Sparks to make new items, "I just don't have that item, with all of my effort with all of the crafting, with all of the Sparks, and all of these lair bosses... so this is what happened here, and I am very sad," says wudijo.
Acknowledging that farming Helltides is an "extremely good" way to rack up regular Mythics and Mythic Seals, wudijo concludes that if you're looking for a specific Iconic Mythic, or really any Iconic, "this is definitely kind of disappointing."
It doesn't help that, in his experience, farming for a Mythic version of a Unique that otherwise fits your build often ends in disappointment.
"Most of the time you will have found so many good Uniques that, by the time that you have any realistic hope of getting the Mythic version, that the Mythic most often just ends up being worse, or at least not much of an upgrade in the first place," wudijo says.
As an example, wudijo says he found a particularly viable Unique Eaglehorn bow and wanted to see if he could find a better Mythic version for his Rogue build, but by the time a Mythic Eaglehorn actually dropped, it wasn't as good as the normal Unique one because "it rolled two bad stats," and since Diablo 4's reworked loot system only lets you re-roll one of a Mythic item's powers, his Mythic Eaglehorn went to the blacksmith for salvaging.
Wudijo is far from the only Diablo 4 player feeling unhappy with Iconic Mythic drop rates in season 14, with one heavily upvoted Reddit thread calling them "broken." Having fond memories spending entire summers as a kid chasing the rarest items in the games, I think there's value in having items so rare that they genuinely feel mythical when encountered, but at the same time, one of the new Diablo 4 season's biggest focuses is the Mythic rework, so it does seem peculiar that there's an item class eluding players as dedicated as wudijo, especially when Diablo seasons only last about three months. We'll see if and how Blizzard responds to the latest kerfuffle from the Diablo community.
