Wolves with no skulls

Wicked Feedback
1

my solo self found Cerim needs a wolf skull to upgrade her dagger. it’s 5 levels below what’s dropping. i’ve killed 20ish wolves - no skulls. including the torn wolves.

it’s like somehow the wolves are getting stabbed in a way that obliterates the cranium.

it’s been many hours.

i’ve tried crafting a new weapon but RNG’d the level even lower. because the character is SSF i don’t have a huge stash to lean on for spare weapons or temporary upgrades - build depends on a very specific enchantment on weapon and it’s a huge waste of scarce resources to craft a temp weapon.

and you know how important the weapon is to the character’s identity

please. i know it’s supposed to be not easy. but 20 wolves should yield ar least one skull.

at this point i’m doing a wolf census on the island

p.s. i know i chose to do SSF but a new player would absolutely experience this. bears apparently don’t have skulls most of the time either. i’ve tried all the vendors including Seneschal already, over multiple days

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Any old skull won’t do – we’re just rather picky about the elegant curve to the brow ridge on these skulls. Crafting is delicate work. Only the Sayer knows how I’m turning spruce planks into a yew longbow (which is shorter than a shortbow).

Jokes aside, I agree with your comment about scarcity. Bear paws, bear skulls, wolf skulls and a handful of others are crafting/upgrading bottlenecks. In multiplayer foes don’t seem to drop more of these, foe numbers aren’t much higher, and everyone needs the same items around the same point, exacerbating the shortage.

That said, I think you’re especially unlucky or speaking hyperbolically. The droprates are 27% or 43% according to data exports (could be outdated), so the chances of no skull after 20 kills are below 0.185%. I do get a bear skull roughly half the time, bears are just very rare. Crafting a bunch of bear items for a specific facet is rough.

Overly long further thoughts

This may be by design, as farming means replayed content and oberabundance means having everything immediately. In multiplayer we bandied about some ideas like taking on a bounty to slay some juiced-up bears with a reward of bonus paws/skulls at the end. We’ve also noticed that lower-tier mats end up in large stockpiles before long, so maybe when T4 to T6 are released bear and wolf mats will be abundant.

Irmgard can trade up mats but comes online only at the end of the current experience. Pure speculation, but maybe she’s a stopgap due to T3 being the end for now.

Some items have no recourse. I wanted to try a plagued bow and couldn’t get a facet or gem to save my life for a week despite checking stores, Finley, Seneschal, and fishing actively. Grabbed the spell from shroudcleaver in the end.

On the other hand I have hundreds of unused items of some types (mostly consumables and raw ingredients), to the point I dunk them in whispers or campfires or sell stacks for copper or have to construct storage ’cause I can’t hold all these mushrooms.

Maybe these could be thrown into a recycling recipe, ideally one that generates more gameplay, like donating them to the city to generate targeted bounties.

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yes the sacred ancient art of crafting 8 whole planks of birch, 6 bars of silver, and 2 stag antlers, into a tiny wand that shoots electric bolts. it’s a process where density approaching neutron’s is achieved through pressing the materials together using the strength of a cerim.

if you rinse pestilence, you end up with materials overflow, but this is no good for early progression

my luck is so terrible i’m starting to suspect the drops being tied to game state and quest progress or char level.

sure enough though, as soon as i don’t need it anymore, i’m sure every wolf will be dropping 2 skulls per kill just to spite me

1 Like
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today i killed 11 more wolves (i got lucky and the cave spawned beasts)
one of them dropped one wolf skull
assuming yesterday i had killed 20 and not more, that’s 1 skull in 31 wolves which makes it 3% observed chance to drop !
i feel like hoarding the skull to upgrade my dagger when i finally get the facet it want

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This could be true. I’m confident it is the case for gems and embers. Since I’ll start a new low-level character in a fresh hardcore world today, I’ll keep a tally of wolves and skulls by level. I think the earliest wolves are in the quarry, or rarely in bounties or the small cave north of Sage Road.

(Not helpful early on again, but one of the merchants in Marin seems to have a guaranteed wolf, bear, and boar skull every day.)

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Tangentially: You can trade lower tier wolf items for skulls at the old lady north in marin village.

I think my drop rate’s higher, more like 1/10 though I don’t know why.

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yes you can ! but you need the merin questline done for that, and if you need a wolf skull to upgrade weapon lvl 6→7, that’s going to be one tough adventure with your outdated weapon. merin is lvl 25 area ? i would expect to go in there with a lvl 10 weapon