Skoll Tips- Please Help!

[Splaticus]

Forgive me, I tried searching the forums but it was hard to wade through everything because Skoll is mentioned left and right in posts that are unhelpful to me.

Skoll is the one rare that keeps eluding me and my most favorite. I've even tamed the wretched Madexx before I am able to find this creature. Does anyone have tips on where exactly his spawn points are. I would really appreciate this because I swear wow head changed the spawn points on the map for Skoll since I last played (I had taken a break for a few months). I feel like I am just running around storm peaks like a lost puppy. There is a plethora of information out there that just doesn't seem to help and it's a daunting task to wade through it.

Please someone just give me a concise answer to his spawn points, spawn timer doesn't even matter because I'm not the type to hunt I just do fly bys every so often.

Thanks in advance :>

[Kokiron]

I see this guy out almost every time I go to the storm peaks. One spot is right above the blue ladies quest hub Brunnhildar whatever it's called. You'll see this funky metal disc on the ground at the cliff that overlooks the village where the blue protodrakes fly around. Another is at the frozen lake in Bor's Breath, right on the side of it in that big snowy patch. The other is next to the entrance to the cave in Snowdrift Plains, he wanders around in some trees to the left hand side of the cave entrance.

Here's a guesstimate map:

http://www.wowhead.com/maps?data=67:462627309640272528

[Splaticus]

Thank you so much. At least now I know I've been looking in the right places recently (but disheartening to know I hadn't been before hand since wrath).

[Kokiron]

Thank you so much. At least now I know I've been looking in the right places recently (but disheartening to know I hadn't been before hand since wrath).

I actually went to the Storm Peaks after I posted here to look for Time-Lost and of course Skoll was there. He was, however, deceased. I assume someone leveling out there did it /shrug.

And then I got a heart attack from Vyragosa's corpse setting off my mod so I just went back to Stormwind, lol.

Anyway, you shouldn't have much trouble running into him. Check late at night, since you're even less likely to run into people questing at that hour who might kill it.

[Splaticus]

I've been going around looking for pity tames of the few unique skins I don't have. I've gotten 4 unique skins in the past 24 hours, which is ridiculous luck, but there will always be that one that will elude you forever. Skoll will probably end up being my own personal Moby Dick.

[Nanluin]

I did much the same as you are doing: I was out of the game for several months, came back and decided to round out my Spirit Beast collection prior to moving on the Cataclysm and now Firelands additions of unique-skinned rares.

For the first time, I also took advantage of the add-ons _NPCScan and in particular to your situation, _NPCScan_Overlay. This second will put colored overlays of the paths / spawn areas for each of the rares in a given zone both on your main map and your mini-map (options selectable). For the WotLK rares, theses maps were pretty accurate, gaining me Arcturis, Gondria, and Skoll within a week or so (Loque'nahak I had already). On our server, these guys are still sought after by hunters (or killed by others) pretty regularly, but patrolling their paths from time to time, particularly during low-population times of the day, will eventually yield them for you.

(personally, I love Skoll's 'lightning / electrical spark' animation, but as with the old-style bears, I *hate* the open-mouthed, lock-jawed face. Why the heck can't they let these beasts close their mouths from time to time!)

Best of luck to you,

-- Nanluin

[Splaticus]

I had had npc scan before but got rid of it when my own pets kept randomly setting it off and scaring me half to death, I didn't know about npc scan overlay though. Its amazing, thank you for bringing it to my attention.

[Wark]

Depending on how religiously you clear out your creaturecache file, you might consider clearing it once, logging on on your hunter WITHOUT npcscan turned on, pulling all your rarespawns out of the stables, then relogging to turn npcscan on. Alternatively, if you have no reason to keep scanning for the mobs you've tamed, just tell npcscan to stop looking for them.

I just started looking for Skoll myself, a few days ago, although not too hard-- pretty sure an extended camp would kill me. I'm becoming increasingly tempted to haul my insomniac friends out to Northrend to kill other rares during off-peak hours. The "kill the other rares" trick netted me my beetle, but I'm paranoid that the minute I haul off around Northrend he'll pop up. Nnnngh.

Well, fingers crossed for wolves for EVERYONE! It has to show up eventually, right? Right. Yes.

[Sukurachi]

Ive been in the market for a wolf for the last week, and sadly, it seems our electric wolf supplier is completely out of stock

Happily, on another of my alts, I just found ghosty-wolf from Twilight Highlands.
"Just found"... HA! makes it sound so casual.
That's "just found" logging in every hour, for the last 4 days, even setting my alarm clock in the middle of the night to go check. I have SUCH puffy eyes right now!

[Thwip]

Ok, for those of you still hunting Skoll and have never camped for the Time-Lost Proto. Here is a small tip on how rares work in Northrend.

There is at least a 3 rare cap minimum. If there are at least that many up at one time, nothing else will spawn. Since Northrend is SO dead nowadays it's going to make your camping sessions a lot harder and the timers much more skewed. The best way to do it is to fly through each zone and peg the rares on your way through, aside from hunter tamables or have a friend do it while you path. This way it will either "force" a spawn or at least shorten their timer. My server's Skoll seems to be stuck on a 12-24hr timer since no one is ever in Northrend anymore and he's much sought after.

Having said that. I spent three weeks camping the TLPD with my husband. We took turns sleeping, so there was always at least one of us at the computer. [And yes, by the end of our camp, we got two TLPDs.] During this time we saw MORE Vyragosa's then Skolls. Making me wonder if he was even more rare then a few of the others. Granted, all the tamables were harder to find then the non-tamables. I will have to say that while dead, we still do have people questing in Storm Peaks during the day, so I do agree that it would be best to hunt between 12pm to 6am.

It might take a lot longer for you to tame your blue puppeh then it did in Wrath, but don't give up just yet. You'll get him eventually. Heck you might even score a Time Lost while you wait. Ya never know.

[Nanluin]

There is at least a 3 rare cap minimum. If there are at least that many up at one time, nothing else will spawn. Since Northrend is SO dead nowadays it's going to make your camping sessions a lot harder and the timers much more skewed. The best way to do it is to fly through each zone and peg the rares on your way through, aside from hunter tamables or have a friend do it while you path. This way it will either "force" a spawn or at least shorten their timer. My server's Skoll seems to be stuck on a 12-24hr timer since no one is ever in Northrend anymore and he's much sought after.

Where did this 'continental rare cap' idea come from? Has it been confirmed? How so?

Pardon my skepticism, but this sounds more like urban myth than an actual game mechanic. Blizzard knows that the zones no longer on the 'leading edge' of the game will suffer from low populations, so building in a game mechanic that *requires* high populations in the zone (and high rare kill rates) doesn't make sense to me.

The easiest way to keep the "rares" actually rare (rather than permitting an entire empty zone with every one of them up simultaneously) is to give each rare a "lifetime", a period of time that they can exist before despawning again. Once the despawn occurs, their timer is reset and another spawn period has to pass before the rare can spawn again (IOW the despawn does the same thing as a kill/tame). In this way, your rare population in a given area remains low, but also *variable* over time, all by itself and with no player interaction required. This seems a more plausible mechanic.

-- Nanluin

[Thwip]

There is at least a 3 rare cap minimum. If there are at least that many up at one time, nothing else will spawn. Since Northrend is SO dead nowadays it's going to make your camping sessions a lot harder and the timers much more skewed. The best way to do it is to fly through each zone and peg the rares on your way through, aside from hunter tamables or have a friend do it while you path. This way it will either "force" a spawn or at least shorten their timer. My server's Skoll seems to be stuck on a 12-24hr timer since no one is ever in Northrend anymore and he's much sought after.

Where did this 'continental rare cap' idea come from? Has it been confirmed? How so?

Pardon my skepticism, but this sounds more like urban myth than an actual game mechanic. Blizzard knows that the zones no longer on the 'leading edge' of the game will suffer from low populations, so building in a game mechanic that *requires* high populations in the zone (and high rare kill rates) doesn't make sense to me.

The easiest way to keep the "rares" actually rare (rather than permitting an entire empty zone with every one of them up simultaneously) is to give each rare a "lifetime", a period of time that they can exist before despawning again. Once the despawn occurs, their timer is reset and another spawn period has to pass before the rare can spawn again (IOW the despawn does the same thing as a kill/tame). In this way, your rare population in a given area remains low, but also *variable* over time, all by itself and with no player interaction required. This seems a more plausible mechanic.

-- Nanluin

If you would like the direct link send me a note and I will be happy to send you over to where I get my info. This person has done multiple studies during Wrath and Cata on how the rares of Northrend work. He's caught over 20+ TLPDs with his theories and hasn't let me down either. I've caught three.

1. i wanted to ask you about your "rare spawn cap" theory that only 3 rare elites can be spawned over all of northrend at once, because i noticed on your kill times there was a point where vyra spawned less than 6 hours from her last spawn time

First, concerning the rare spawn cap I speak of. This has been mentioned and discussed on forums - I don't have the patience to go back and find links for examples, but I will however explain how we explored this theory and tested it for ourselves. During the time in Storm Peaks on Undermine and the following weeks of helping other campers get what they were after, we met people who were going after Frostbitten. Various discussions including the theorized rare spawn cap took place and we decided to plan a night to get as many people online as we could and drop an entire night into seeing if we could figure this out.

There were a little over 25 of us, I forget exactly how many. We spent the first hour locating some rares, found 3. Luckily they weren't tameable so we were able to pay people off to not kill them and sat on them while we checked rare spots in the zones we were covering. The 3 rares were watched as the rest of us flew around trying to find any other rares for a good 9 hours. Nothing new. So we killed crystalbark, and within just a handfull of minutes bonecarver spawned out in grizzly hills. We killed another and the zul'drak sentinel spawned shortly after. We waited an hour with those 3 up before killing more, not finding anything. Then we killed one and very shortly after another spawned. So, regardless of people claiming 5, we think it's 3. Well, I do. A few people argued it could al just be chance but barely any of us wanted to do that again. After all, it was a lot of dead time.

And even though I believe it's 3, I put 3-5 on the facts page just so hopefully I wont get angry emails or comments in-game that I'm an idiot and it's 5. Sigh.

If the rare cap in northrend is met (I swear it is 2, others say 3-5), vyra and tlpd (and all other rares for that matter) will not spawn until one or more of the rares that are currently up in northrend are killed. Here is a map with locations and a flight path for tagging as many as you can find.

The rare cap is no longer 2 as of 4.1. I checked after the shattering and even 4.0.6 and couldn't locate more than 2 up after hours of looking while parking on 2. Recently, post 4.1, I found 4 up at the same time. - Thanks to all of you who contacted with info on tons of rares being up at the same time prompting me to go look at it again.

They've also had recent reports of seeing some of these rares, such as Vyra, spawning between 3-5hrs as of late on higher populated servers.

[Sukurachi]

Don't lose hope.
Last night I went and tamed STD-kitty on one of my alts, and this morning... TA-DAH! Electro-puppy!

So, not only did I finally get my static-emitting furball, I ALSO got one of my alts a spirit beast (he had none in his stable at the time).

[Morven]

I think it's entirely likely that they've changed the spawn mechanics in 4.x. Once something's no longer top-end content, Blizzard seem to be willing to make it easier to get.

[Thwip]

I think it's entirely likely that they've changed the spawn mechanics in 4.x. Once something's no longer top-end content, Blizzard seem to be willing to make it easier to get.

This I don't doubt. Like they changed all the spirit beasts to non-elites this go around. I'm a bit sad to see that, honestly, me and a guildie caught Skoll getting ganked by a lowbie mage last week, well....cause they could do it a little easier now. Sad thing, but yeah. On the other side, I've had nights where I take friends out and walk away with almost the whole set from Northrend AND Cata.

[Splaticus]

Finally I have him at long last!!!!!!!!! I almost can't believe it, I almost choked when npcscan went off!
Thanks guys for the tips and words of encouragement!

[Thwip]

Congrats! Glad you didn't give up and, my god, that it a big puppeh. [You BElfs are so tiny] Matches your hair perfectly.~ <3

[Wark]

/highfive!

Enjoy your electicalupus, and welcome to the club.

[Rhyela]

Congratulations!!! I don't normally like Skoll, but he looks quite fantastic with you, honestly!