VD was 3 days even. SV is longer at 5 or 7 with variance. I don't recall IV's respawn at all. (I am surprised back to back to back VaDyn kills arent in my logs)
I wanna say VD would respawn instantly on server up, even after crashes. I recall there was always a race to get some easy loot.
Yes, he was definitely 7ish days on Al'Kabor. We had a couple periods of farming him pretty heavily on offnights, and a search through our forums confirms it, as does a pretty detailed write-up of the encounter Slouch did at the time. I should say that I'm not 100% certain he was exactly 6.5 +-12 rather than, say, an even 7 days, but I'm pretty sure similar Luclin encounters used that window so it stands to reason that Shei did as well.
I've seen some things that make me think that AK may have had different timers from PoP era Live. The Dozekar timer on AK is fairly certain, but a lot of comments say that it was longer on Live (7 days), even after AK's time. Respawn timers in a lot of old posts for several bosses are like an extra half day longer than the comments I've been seeing from AK people; makes me think they may have been adjusted to better fit AK's 2 week resets. This is very speculative though. In regards to Shei, the old posts I've seen also said 7 days.
Hobart was pretty upfront about his changes, and as the only dev ever to work on the server, he was pretty disinclined to do a lot of mob-by-mob custom database tinkering. I would be more inclined to think that discrepancies are due to imprecision/inaccuracies in the reporting from Live, AK, or both. Multiple-day spawn windows aren't quick or easy to measure, and even where knowledge is accurate people are prone to rounding (e.g. I really do think LIS, Emp, VT, and Shei were all 6.5 +-12, but most people are just going to say 7 days even if they know there's variance).
I'll back this up, variance is a for-sure. That's why people had parked trackers in those zones and guilds would race for these targets. If they were exact spawns people would just assemble right before they were due. It wasn't hard to find out the last time something died; someone always talks.
Emp has a 48 hour window of variance- I've sat through it. LiS I think is 24 hours of variance VT popping immediately after resets made me think there wasn't any variance;. TVX's were 3 days on the nut for sure.
Weren't we able to squeeze in some 3x VT runs into an AK reset period, if we smooshed the first (Wednesday) daytime?
I don't think so, Lurari, but I wouldn't swear by it. (By I don't think so, I mean I don't think we ever did it; no opinion on whether it was theoretically possible!) I'll defer to Faults' superior memory on Emperor, which of course makes me much less confident about Shei or VT. LIS (also the Praesertum bosses) I am still pretty sure was a 0-24 hour spawn and a 6-7 day respawn.
Shei i also recall some variance on (Dorsia/loh/crew wanted shears) so when we hit it I think there were times we'd show up exactly 6 days later and he wasn't around. I have no logs on shei but a 24 hour window seems pretty likely. Emp has a massive window that I can't forget. 48 hours of variance is one of the cruelest things Sony did to guilds who wanted to race.
What server are these Emperor memories from? For TLP servers they have messed around with respawn windows during Fippy/Vulak and again during Ragefire/Lockjaw. I don't have any specific memories on it from AK since we would only do it once in a blue moon.
EDIT (I played on sol ro - blood of ro) Live - aughts - cuz my friends and i would skip school and sit and wait for spawns (not just emp - priorities were not in order - but emp is the one spawn that sticks out that we waited and waited and waited and waited) On AK I was in the zone quite a bit - I camped 4/6 comm horses for my team. His respawn was not regular there either. And I made a habit of checking track after we went to kill shei vinitras in destiny one day and it was down and I had never checked track. - I can't guarantee on AK he had the 48 window I recall from live - but he certainly had a large variance- I always wanted that sword too
I remember my guild rushing to ssra after a server reset every time it happened. I think the window must have been pretty short after server-up. I remember sitting around waiting on cursed trigger mobs for a couple hours, but I also remember racing other guilds to XTC and AL right away, both guilds at the entrance and leapfrogging all the way to the mobs. There was definitely a few hours variance on the cursed cycle, we scrapped together 20 people at 5AM EST once on a weekday for one of his longer variance spawns.
I'm sure that was the intention - the warders saw through normal invis - but no, there were places it was possible to drag corpses through the walls away from the warders.
Rysia got the first key (and I think Tigertuger the second? I think Gnostica and Cromis got the third and fourth), and did drag everyone in the first couple of times. It just turned out to be unnecessary.
Btw, I'm currently working on the Grimling War script. Now's the time to provide ANY information about this event that you may have. (I have Cromis's writeup already) I don't even have a single screenshot of it. Anything would be helpful, as I've never seen the event I'm kind of working blind here.
This brilliantly designed forum software resizes the images with no way to enlarge. I'm pretty confident that I have Foreman's loot table complete. I believe that I'm missing 1 item each from the Archmage and Witchdoctor tables though.