- I originally budgeted about 100 hrs for it to drop within 2,000 PW4 2F runs, doing the runs during DAR boost periods. This effectively made the drop rate about 1/10K before any lucks boosts.
- The runs were done in One Person Mode, for obvious reasons.
- Each run I would crack open the 14 boxes to find mats/grinders/high hit non rares/etc. and junk items after every 5 runs, give or take.
- Each run, starting from the lobby and ending up back to the lobby to start the next one would take about 2 minutes each.
- Due to variability, I settled on awarding myself 25 runs cleared every hour I clocked. I did not want to manually track or spare much effort to precise tracking of the runs so I went with the formula of 25 runs an hour. I was very diligent about tracking time I may have AFK'ed though.
- June 2nd was when I started to do runs on the regular, averaging about 100 on most days I logged in.
- By the time the 2nd Anniversary event started, I was very close to 2,000 runs cleared. I think I was at least 1,700 in.
- Of course, gamblers fallacy ticking real hard, I thought to myself: "No big deal, I'll just 'finish' the hunt within the first week of the event and move on to the even itself!"
- Event 15% RDR boost kicked in, I was around 2,200 cleared runs.
- 2nd event 15% RDR boost kicked in, now granting +30% RDR total and thus knocking the drop rate down to around 1/7,800, I think I had around 3,000 runs-- give or take.
- Final week of the event, I was sitting around 4,500 runs, and I had done virtually no event runs. Already missed out on leveling my other characters, I got fed up and decided to bum rush the 25K personal kills milestone prize for the Photon Sphere.
- Managed to take my HUcaseal from 171 to 190 spamming the ever living shit out of Temple, looking for Aura Fields and a shot at a Syncesta. Found some good Aura Fields, no Syncesta.
- Took my RAcaseal from 126 to 150 doing Spaceship thinking how ironic it would be if I could find a Guld on a whim. Didn't happen.
- Got my 25K event kills with about 2 days remaining before the event was supposed to end: I planned a final push on the SJS that involved me running until the event was taken down.
- I ran for 28 hours straight, clearing well over 600 runs, before I saw the event was being extended for one more day. I crashed hard from there, and got back on roughly 5 hrs before the event was pulled to bang out another 100 runs.
Ultimately, I spent nearly all of my time during the 2nd anniversary event hunting the damn sword, only to be spit in the face. I sacrificed so many huge opportunities. And finally, about 400 runs post event, during DAR boosts, I finally got my sword to drop. I paid a very huge price for this drop. But in the end, I have no regrets because I have succeeded.
Final run count was 5,550 boosted runs with a side of 650 non boosted, totaling to 6,200. That translates to at least 31,000 Gi Gue kills, and since I cleared over 3,000 runs during the event with RDR boosts, I can safely claim I exceeded the aggregated drop rate four times over.
