I mean... it could "just" be obscenely rare still.
I can't be the only one who has quite a list of skins - including all the hammers and bows - that they still haven't seen, despite being a few hundred gold items into killing angry cows. The caster stuff on the other hand isn't too hard to get (both here, or in the other good places) if farming for it. I think in all the farming I've done I've had only four shields, yet I must be well over 10 hourglasses now.
I'd also point out that we haven't had a Soulbreaker yet either, and the only reported Sunspear I know of was from a chest. If Chance Encounter wasn't as good as it is, I wouldn't be surprised if the Japan shield proved equally elusive.
If you exclude the Tolkano swords (which are clearly different, dropping at non-gold rarities etc) we haven't identified any location specificity for subsets of the promotional items that "might" drop in that campaign - it's like a creature either drops none of the new items or gives a whole heap (potentially all) of them.
I completely agree with this. I think the Glacial Blade, and for that matter some of the other skins, have a lower weighting, and just drop usually, but we dont have the gift of ACE to help us get them. I've seen Glacial Daggers drop in Norn areas, and I have seen them drop in Shards, so they obviously arent linked to a specific area/mob. I think the same goes for Darksteel and of course the fabled blade too. I personally have got the Darksteel and Daggers outside Boreal.
I have been using the peacekeeper and polar bear as examples within my own circle, but if you think about the drop rate of polar bear being 0.02%, if the blade had a similar weighting your looking at a 1 in 5000 chance to drop, which of course when calculated means you'd have to cycle through 23,000 golds (or mobs depending on how drop chance is calculated) in order to have a 99% chance of getting one. Either way thats a lot of golds/mobs. I personally can kill the Berserkers outside Olaf at about a rate of 100/7mins, and I get anywhere between 0 and 5 golds a run, sometimes a bit more. So lets assume I need to do 1500 runs to meet the 5k golds for the average drop chance, thats 10500 minutes of farming, or 175 hours of straight farming for the average chance. I mean its exactly why the polar bear is still so expensive after being botted to oblivion since it came out lol, because you can do it on like 10 accounts for the whole event and still not see a single one.
Still an interesting drop!
No time to make some fancy photo edits, so just text lists I am afraid.
