Are pearlescents really only in General Knoxx's dlc?!

see title. I didn’t know this until looking up “borderlands pearlescents” just now. :frowning:

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Yes. And only from badass enemies, the giant acid-spewing sand spiders (launcher and shotgun), and the Crimson Lance chests but not the standard red boxes. Best time to hunt is PT2.5, with the “It’s Like Christmas” quest from Marcus. And even then they’re stupid rare. Happy hunting

Also, from Crawmerax, if you can beat him.

idk if this is 100% accurate or not but it’s close at least. Note that drifters can drop serpens as well (they have the same loot pool as baddass bruisers, which is why they almost always drop crappy white gear )

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thanks!

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This is not exactly on topic, but close enough. Has anyone else found pearls to be more rare in the GOTY/Remastered edition? It seems to me that they are. I have farmed Craw and the farmory for literally 3 days of playing time now (I finished the main story and Knoxx in a little over 24 hours of play time on my character, and now have 4.5 days of play time), and I have only gotten 3 pearls in that time frame. In the same amount of play time (4.5 days) on another character on the X360 version, I had over 10 pearls drop.

I understand that it could just be RNG at play here, but still, it makes me wonder whether the fact that Gearbox added the new Gearbox weapons to Craw’s loot pool crowded his loot pool, thereby making pearls more rare without changing the actual drop rates for pearls generally.

Has anyone else experienced this same issue?

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I get dry runs all the time in original. In the last something like 100 runs I’ve seen 1 decent stalker and one terrible ironclad. So who knows. I won’t be playing the remaster. It’s just such a fail to me in so many ways and by the time I get a new system 3 will be out. Also …3 days (72 hours) is really a drop in the bucket rng wise

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I don’t know, sometimes I get 3 in a day, sometimes 3 days of nothing, usually I get a pearl every second day, mostly 1-2 hours of farming daily. And I’m farming Armory most of the time, because Craw is a stingy bstrd…

Yeah, Craw can be stingy, but most of the pearls I have gotten have come from him. One day last week I decided to count the number of Craw kills until I got a pearl. I stopped counting at 100. Literally. I have played this game a long time, so I understand RNG, but pearls in GOTY seem waaaaaay more rare than they were before.

It just occurred to me that it theoretically is possible that by adding the Gearbox weapons, Gearbox inadvertently did to Craw what they did to BNK3R and Hyperius - crowded loot pools.

I read somwhere that with those new Gearbox Legendaries added to Craw Loot Pool and one of them being auto-loot, it left less room for other Legendaries to spawn and by the way, for Pearlescent too…

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This was exactly my theory. I play on XBone, so I have no way to prove it as I cannot dig into the code. But it seems to me based upon my playing experience to this point that pearls are much more rare in GOTY, at least from Craw. I never documented it in the old game, but it has never, ever taken me 100+ kills to get just one pearl from Craw. That is nuts. I would say the most it ever took on the original BL edition before I got a pearl from Craw was about 30-50.

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That’s why I seldom farm Craw. No, Armory is far more efficient for farming pearls…!

Here’s what the original game stats look like:

I honestly would not want to try and repeat that study - I’m not particularly fond or either crab or lobster!

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Wow, that is amazing information! Thanks so much for linking it.

To relate this to what I personally have found, it seems to me that Craw drops somewhere around 60-65 weapons per kill. So when I killed him 100 times (which was how many before I stopped counting), that means that he dropped about 6,000-6,500 weapons/items. According to the data I saw in the thread you linked (assuming I read it correctly), it seemed to indicate that pearl rarity should be about 1 : 5,000 or so (give or take here). I am going off my memory of the thread’s data here, so I apologize if that is incorrect.

My Craw pearl farming in GOTY has been quite a bit drier than 1 : 5000, so based upon what I have seen in GOTY so far, it does seem like maybe pearls could (emphasize “could”) be more rare now. But good lord, I am not testing that theory against anything I read in that thread. I definitely don’t have the patience for that!

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Yes, 1/5000 is what I saw. While I did have a pretty large set of data, the overall number of pearls is still small and there’s a lot of plus-or-minus in that number.

Unless someone keeps track over a huge amount of kills it will always be anecdotes and speculation.

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