Comic #934: Rare Mount (Patreon)

The initial spark for this comic was really wanting to do a comic about rare mount drops. Specifically, I wanted a joke where one player had been trying to get the mount for years, and brings along a friend who gets it on the first try.

Try as I might, every iteration I could come up with had the same problem, where you see the punchline coming from a mile away. The issue was you had to setup these two facts: One player has had many attempts to get a mount, one player is coming for the first time. As soon as you setup both of those facts, it's pretty obvious what's going to happen.

I then had the idea to pivot slightly and incorporate another one of my Narya math comics. I played around with some numbers trying to determine how unlucky it would be to get zero drops in X number of kills. Since Ashes of Al'ar are one of the most historically coveted mounts, I decided to think about how many times a person could realistically have cleared that raid since it's release. Tempest Keep releasing about 18 years ago makes 774 clears 43 times a year. Which is INSANE, but not impossible.

That ended up being about 1 in 6 million, as the comic states, and then I hit a bit of a block trying to come up with a punchline. I tried to think of other final panels including events that were equally unlikely but couldn't come up with anything. I then thought of every group member getting a drop, calculated that, and by chance it worked out almost perfectly.

So in the end statistics worked out to give me the punchline I was searching for from the beginning. I only hope I got the math right, or I'm gonna hear about it.