We had a large discussion of this on Discord, but I’m posting it here because Discord is really bad for reporting bugs.
The phone drop that starts the mission Fog and Mirrors seems like it’s RNG based. You might get it, you might not. It’s possible to get no phone drop which has happened to me today. So I’m effectively locked out of doing Fog and Mirrors today. This is an event-only mission. There should be no RNG. We had this happen once before and Funcom assured us that there would be no more RNG for event missions. Of course, that was in TSW so maybe it went out the window along with the promise of “no lockboxes, ever.”
I can also confirm that killing champions while they are on CD will NOT drop the phone. I farmed a few for a while. The phone drop should be guaranteed from the first champion you kill in a day whether it’s on CD or not.
So far i’m at >1 per side mission, having run 3 sides and 4 fog & mirrors. I did fully complete fog & mirrors while the side mission was in progress though so I never had 2 phones at once.
I didn’t for the first few, so I had also assumed it dropped based on the mission rather than randomly until I started hearing others say differently. Then I started getting drops earlier than 4. I haven’t gone through all 9 without getting a phone yet, but if it is random then it would clearly be possible, and as we see people are reporting that it did happen. We also don’t have any indication the phone can drop from champions that are on cooldown.
When you have a dozen zombies and a 1 in 5 chance for one to drop a mission and they respawn quickly, I don’t mind missions being put behind odds like that especially for a permanent mission. For a seasonal mission the requirements to pick up the mission should be fixed so no one is getting left out on bad luck. It’s not like I can pick up a dozen phones and trade them to people with bad luck like with Hel summoning components.
*And if the odds are meant to be so good that this shouldn’t be possible, then this is just a bug report rather than a feature complaint.
This shouldn’t even be necessary since running the mission twice in a day requires you to only kill 4 at a time (with a 5th as a backup if you don’t get the phone) and not going nuts and killing all 9. That loses you the 2 presents from the bounty mission just to get the two from the investigation which is pointless.
