Three Not So Little Grophets

The datacron on Rishi is definitely one of the more memorable ones for me. Back in the day before datacrons gave legacy-wide credit, I got it on quite a few alts... usually by someone else offering to summon people there whenever it was uncovered. I also got trapped under the rock that usually hides it at least once:

However, beyond the whole vanishing rock thing, I had no idea what was involved in revealing it, other than that I had overheard some talk about farming grophets, and that the special drops from them were easy to mistake for vendor trash (might be that they were even grey items originally, but I'm not sure about that one).

Then during a guild datacron hunt in 2021, we did the whole sequence to unlock the datacron in Raider's Cove, and I was the lucky one who won the roll to reveal the datacron and get the achievement using data packets that someone else had farmed.

I didn't really think about it again until a day in September when I was questing in Rishi's PvP instance on one of my alts. I don't generally use the PvP instance most of the time, but sometimes I switch my focus to PvP when I'm dealing with some sort of quest objective that's overfarmed, and then I often forget to switch back until I actually run into an enemy player. Anyway, on this occasion I didn't run into an enemy player... but while making my way to the pirate ship west of Raider's Cove, I came across a ginormous grophet with a name.

I instantly twigged that I must have run into one of the rare grophets related to the Rishi datacron, and like any good MMO player who discovers a rare and strange creature, I immediately went to kill it. I was surprised to actually see an achievement pop up too because I didn't know that there were any related to this.

Now I was intrigued. I'd always heard that getting the rare grophets to spawn was a horrible grind, but apparently you could just... randomly come across them in the world now? So I consulted the old Dulfy guide on the matter to learn where they spawn, just so I could, you know... check in on them if I happened to be in the area. I quickly decided that even if I didn't find them in their dedicated spots, I was at least going to kill the "placeholder grophets" from now on whenever I passed them, just to at least give the rares a chance to spawn, even if it was ultimately for someone else.

And what do you know, the other week I came across both Wudd and Breck on different characters. There was a bit of a hiccup with Breck as on re-checking the guide I realised that I'd actually read the map wrong and had been killing the wrong group of grophets the entire time (d'oh), but I got lucky after relocating to the correct place and got Breck to spawn after only a couple of visits. I was on my Sorc when I once again killed the placeholders, got a warzone pop and took it, and when I reappeared on Rishi after the match, there was Breck.

So now, more than eight years after it was added, I've finally seen every part of the Rishi datacron journey (not to mention that I earned a bunch of new achievements and the "Wolf of Rishi" legacy title). I really like it when old content still reveals new secrets to me. And I'm going to hold on to those data packets so that I can pay it forward and let someone else get the achievement for handing them in whenever a guild datacron hunt visits Rishi again.