Shard of the Ring of Spell Storing

[Odysseus2011]

Yep it does exist. I was running Epic Elite ADQ on my main character, with several guild mates, and I was stunned to see this drop in the end chest. I've been looking for this shard for about 7 years and I had previously seen someone else pull it about 3 years ago. 9/11/2016 @ ~8:45 PST.

[Eth]

Wow, gratz.
That's probably still the item with the lowest droprate in DDO.

Hope you have the seal ready.

[NaturalHazard]

please tell me you have the seal?

[NaturalHazard]

I would immediately looted it lol, just in case something happened.........crashed or something, it would be so cruel.


One ring to rule them ALL!!!

[LightBear]

ADQ or ZR?

[Eth]

ADQ or ZR?

Look closely at the screenshot. There are several indicators which one it is. :P

[Saekee]

congratz!
Interesting placement of chat window

[Odysseus2011]

Back in 2009 when I first started playing the game I initially played Drkivorkian, a healbot cleric, which made for easy admittance into groups at the time; and after several months I managed to level him up to 20. After spending some time at level 20 and delving into how the epic loot system worked I created a list of a final set of epic gear after meticulously combing through the wiki pages for every epic chain at the time. My final list included items from almost every epic chain in the game; Vault of Night, Red Fens, House Deneith, House Phiarlan, Chronoscope, and Demon Sands. Little did I know it at the time but the items that I had selected from Demon Sands would be so difficult.

Back then I was a naïve noob with visions of grandeur and I quickly set out to find my rightful gear as soon as possible. Little did I know what I would be getting into, and it soon became apparent that I was woefully unprepared and that these epic quests were actually pretty difficult. My first completion of an epic quest was Chronoscope which I somehow managed to make it through despite not even having heavy fortification!!! I was puzzled as to why bearded devils were nearly insta-killing me with massive 195 attacks. After getting shredded through these meat grinders of quests I started to more of a clue, and I also started getting better gear after several months I had a lot of progress to show for my work, I had been lucky enough to finish my first item, the envenomed cloak, and was making progress on other fronts getting the odd seal or shard here and there.

For the first year or so I spent most of my questing time in the relative safety of the "easy" epics, but soon I realized that I needed to start running the final epic area that I'd been avoiding, I needed to start running Epic Sands quests. We all know what makes getting epic items from demon sands so frustrating, and at the time I had no idea what I was getting into, I scored a few early hits, in Offering of Blood I found a seal of the spectral gloves, and in Demon Queen I pulled a shard of the lion headed buckle, but I never even got a sniff of my most coveted item, the ring of spell storing. I'd heard the tales, I'd talked to people who told me that a friend of a friend's friend had once seen one of the pieces. As a result of this depressing lack of progress and desperate need for more spell points I farmed myself a mysterious bauble, and settled in for the long haul. However just around the corner in 2012 came a game changing event, the level cap increase from 20 up to 25 and as a result the entire epic difficulty mode got upended.

The new system seemed unfamiliar, sometimes vastly more difficult, and most importantly provided new material to run. While there was plenty of new and improved items to be found in the forgotten relms I still wanted that epic spell storing ring and once again began running some of the now "old" demon sands quests. Then through sheer dumb luck my hopes of finding and possibly completing the seemingly impossible changed. I had joined a late night run of Wizard King, the leader was a monk named Dizney, and as soon as he started speaking through voice chat I knew that this fellow was hammered. He could barely complete a sentence and while the party filled he slurred out through the mic that the only reason he was running this quest was to find the scroll of the bracers of deftness. Moreover he told us that he would give us anything for this scroll, at which point I just quipped "Even a seal of the ring of spell storing?". While he never seemed to acknowledge my comment it seemed irrelevant, there was no way I would ever see that seal, I'd been told the drop rate boarded on somewhere between impossible and never. Anyways Dizney was an entertaining and good natured fellow to say the least and I was enjoying the run. Then suddenly and completely unexpectedly I learned the first rule of running epics, dumb luck. We had just reached the top of a tower and killed the guardian, after looting the chest I proceeded to start buffing the group for the next fight, when to my complete shock Dizney linked the seal of the ring of spell storing in party chat. For an entire minute I pleaded with him, he then told me that he had already pulled several seals, and that he didn't need it, so in what seemed like a dream come true he passed the seal to me and we continued on our merry way in what turned out to be the most memorable Wizard King that I have ever run. Ecstatic and overjoyed I scoured through my ingredients bags and eventually asked my best friend and guild mate Hsoftl for the scroll. I gave Dizney the scroll and simply bursting with excitement started seriously posting and joining ADQ/DQ groups. However as I had learned the first rule of epics I was about to find out that there was also a second rule, and it's lesson was fast approaching.

Me and my guild mates had been running ADQ and DQ regularly together, they knew that I needed the shard, and they were all willing to pass it to me in the case that it might drop, and for several months we regularly ran the raid and preraid religiously, hoping that one lucky break and we would obtain the rarest of epic items. However for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction and one day, during the summer of 2013, as three of us were running ADQ we noticed that a DQ group was forming, we had only intended to run the preraid and so we seized this opportunity to reach out to the leader of the group and offered to post the 2nd flagging group for the raid. He accepted our offer and soon both of our groups were full. After completing the quest and popping open the epic chest I saw a shard go flying down the window darkened indicating that it belonged to someone else, and when I read the name my heart skipped about 20 beats. It was the Shard of the Ring of Spell Storing, and then I read the name of the character to whom it had dropped and my heart sank deep into my stomach. The owner wasn't either of my guild mates, Hsoftl and Hegenome, but was instead a sorcerer named SFB. Of course what could I have said to convince him to pass it to me? I pleaded with him, telling him that I already had the seal and that the shard was all I needed, but in the end there was never going to be anything that would persuade him and to my utmost horror he removed it from the chest. Stunned and feeling disoriented I could hardly bring myself to recall and join the raid group. After this gut-wrenching moment I couldn't bring myself to even consider entering the demon sands area and for almost six months I didn't run a single ADQ.

During this period I started focusing on an interesting side project, I had pulled a pinion from caught in the web on my secondary character Afunkymunky, who was more of a test character than anything serious. Deciding to try out a new build that I had run with, I reincarnated him into what would soon become the iconic monkcher class that took the servers by storm. I soon started to realize that I really enjoyed playing this character and decided to start reincarnating him to different classes. In between reincarnations I started running ADQ/DQ again, however I had now vowed to never run it with anyone other than guild mates who would without question pass this shard. During this period I picked up some new friends, Kimbere, Zeeni, and Battlebrood we often quested and raided together and soon we were back to running ADQ/DQ on a regular basis. After a year or two of doing iconic reincarnations, which provided us with the ability to run epic content during our leveling process, I decided to spend time at level cap and focus on obtaining some raid loot. Demon Queen almost became a side note, the raid we would run while we were wasting time, we all knew that there was a possibility of getting that final component to the epic ring, but none of us seriously believed would ever see it again. That moment had already come and passed, and we had lost. However it was still a fun raid, and provided a passing moment of hope, running out to the preraid was exhilarating and addicting in a weird way, I would wonder and hope that perhaps this would be the run where something special might occur then finally getting to the loot only to once again be disappointed, and then saying maybe the raid will drop it. But of course it was all a false hope that I had once again allowed myself to fall into knowing that there never was any hope the whole time, and this whole process was a never ending cycle.

Then suddenly it wasn't, it was an ordinary run that seemed almost routine and monotonous, almost as if I knew what the outcome would be, because it had been the same for so many runs previously. We were going to run out finish the preraid, get letdown, run the raid, get letdown, then go to bed. But this time as I opened the chest I saw a shard fly down the list to the bottom of the window, out of sight, and yet somehow as I watched it scroll down out of sight I knew that this time was different and as I scrolled the list up to see which shard had dropped my mind was so disoriented that I couldn't seem to find the keyboard, I couldn't seem to even find the cognitive ability to make sure that somehow the very action that I had thought impossible a mere 10 seconds ago had somehow come to fruition.

-- Afunkymunky
*(Note that this rough draft will be updated in the near future as it is currently time for me to go to bed)
*(Future updates will include mention of Helter Skelter's designated offering of choice to the loot gods, Hsoftl aka the Halfling Sacrifice Of Future Tradable Loot)

[LightBear]

Wow, gratz.
That's probably still the item with the lowest droprate in DDO.

Hope you have the seal ready.

Yeah, I see it now.

Anyway, congratz to the OP.

[Alisonique]

OP, I applaud your persistence. Bravo!

[Atheok]

Wow, congratz! I, like many others probably, farm for Ross too. I'm yet to decide which piece I want first out of the 3 (base item, seal or shard)

Very nice, it gives me hope :')

[slarden]

Gratz!

I used to get frustrated when people wanted to run the pre-raid on EH and then the raid on EE because I've only ever seen the shard drop in the pre-raid.

there was a time when the devs increased drop rates and the shards were dropping much more - starting the summer before the level cap went to 28.

Then with U21 the drop rate seemed to revert back to the old drop rate and nothing was ever mentioned about it by the devs.

[Ravenwolf1]

Congrats!!!

[HastyPudding]

A clever photoshop. Everyone knows the SS shard is a myth.

[Cetus]

Nice!

[KomradKillMachine]

The best part about this ring is that it fits into a bag

[Odysseus2011]

Over the approximately seven years that it took me to finally complete the Epic Ring of Spell Storing I saw a total of 3 seals (wiz king/ADQ/DQ) and 2 shards (both in ADQ). With me were a handful of guildies (Hsoftl/Hegenome/Kimbere/Battlebrood/Zeeni) who helped me run ADQ/DQ for several years as all I needed at the time was the shard. A rough estimate of the number of times that we looted the epic chests in ADQ is difficult but I would have to guess that it was somewhere north of 1,000. Personally I have heard and truly think that the drop rate is somewhere between 5,000-10,000. Not low enough to be considered statistically impossible, but rare enough to be acquired by a lucky few.

As of 10/8/16 I have seen 4 seals with 1 dropping in Wiz King, another dropping in DQ and 2 dropping in ADQ.

[Andrash]

Rodrak once disclosed raid drop rates, extracted from ddo game files (which may of course be manipulated on the client side as well).

His results were:

In ADQ I you have 1 in 1666 chance for getting that shard.
In ADQ II, you have 1 in 4666, aka lower.

It is not lottery, but neither is it common.

Nice pull though.

[Annex]

What a neat ring. Congratulations!

I have not played nearly as long or consistently as you but in 2014 I started hunting the pieces for an Epic Midnight Greetings and an Epic Golden Guile. Last week I finally found the Shard of the Midnight Greetings and crafted the Epic version. While not nearly as rare as your ring I cheered out loud when I found it.

Good luck to everyone hunting similar items!

[Stoner81]

Congrats OP!

I have exactly 2 epic items which are eAGA and eMG's both of which took forever and a day to get so I can't even begin to imagine the time it took to pull the One Ring

Stoner81.