A new WoW event boosts ultra-rare item drop rates tenfold, which admittedly isn't a huge difference when the starting number is 0.5%

World of Warcraft is a game where you fight dragons, elementals, demons, that sort of stuff. But the rival I have contended with the most in 18 years of play—the majority of my life, mind you—is the loot table. Player mounts and legendary weapons from old raids, hyper-rare drops that offer no benefit aside from looking dope, are my most coveted prizes.

I'm not alone. An in-game event just kicked off that supercharges these items' drop rates, and players are rushing to run decades-old raids, potentially for the hundredth or thousandth time, to get mounts that only a handful of players have ever added to their collection. But players are also finding that when the odds are less than 1%, you can increase them by 10 times or even 25 times and handily get the same result.

After all, while a tenfold increase to the drop chance sounds pretty crazy on paper, the new Collector's Bounty buff is just a flat 5% increase to a selection of old drops. Given that most old mounts, according to Wowhead, have a drop chance between 0.5% and 1%, it is a tenfold increase for some of them and, according to Blizzard, a 25 times increase for the rarest one.

That also means you still have around a 95% chance to not get most of them with each run. Because of WoW's weekly raid instance lockout, players will have four chances per character (high enough level to run each raid, anyway) before the event is over.

While plenty of players are celebrating the deluge of rare items, others are cheekily pointing out the event doesn't technically guarantee you anything. As MayorDasMoose put it on Reddit, "I can't wait to be 10x more disappointed when mounts don't drop!" Redditor brakndawnt broke the math down, saying that around 53 tries would yield a comfortably high chance of getting an ultra-rare drop. I don't know enough about cumulative probability to check their math at a glance, but I do know I don't have enough characters or time to do every old raid 53 times this month. Here's hoping I'll get lucky!

You can find a list of the mounts and weapons with an increased drop rate on Wowhead. The Collector's Bounty event kicked off today and will last until July 29.