More, better bad luck protection added to holiday boss drops with the Midsummer Fire Festival

Starting today with the Midsummer Fire Festival, bad luck protection is being added to holiday boss drops in World of Warcraft. This isn’t exactly a new system, but rather, an update to that “first kill of the day” drop rate bonus that’s already in the game. The first time you kill a holiday boss each day on any character in your account, you get a significantly higher drop rate — and with this new update, that drop rate will get even higher each time you fail.

One of the main activities players are stuck with during every holiday event is killing seasonal bosses for their loot — and the most coveted items are usually mounts, often with exceedingly low drop rates. However, in recent patches, the WoW developers have been taking measures to make acquiring those mounts less of a grind, and rewarding players’ persistence. With the aforementioned “first kill of the day” system, even the infamous X-45 Heartbreaker finally started dropping for a higher number of players.

The new bad luck protection expands upon that previous system, as explained by Blizzard on a blog post:

Basically, each time you fail to get loot from a holiday boss, your “first kill of the day” bonus increases, so your chances will be higher on your first attempt the next day. This bonus is cumulative, and while we don’t have the numbers, it should ensure that it gets easier and easier to acquire those coveted loot drops as long as you keep diligently killing the holiday bosses.

The caveat here is that subsequent kills on the same day can no longer drop the item — which means that running an army of alts through the holiday boss in order to get a mount is no longer possible. This change effectively normalizes drop rates across all players, no matter how many characters they have on their accounts.

This is a change that shows respect to players’ time, rewarding them for their perseverance. It still allows someone to get lucky and obtain a desired drop sooner than others, but it makes things considerably less frustrating for the majority of players who aren’t that lucky — they know that even if they fail, they’re still slowly building towards something, and as long as they keep at it, their drop will become mathematically closer to them.