I'm curious if this idea for a rare tracking addon is possible/plausible.
On the surface, it would behave like NPCScan w/NPCScanOverlay, except instead of using your local machine's cache, it would use an internal database of Rares:
- List out all rare mobs in the game
- Group rares together if they have a shared spawn timer
- When a rare is spotted and either Killed or Tamed by a Hunter, mark the rare as unavailable, remove the overlay blob(s) from the map, and start a timer that, once it counts down the spawn time, makes the mob pop back up on the map as an overlay blob.
- Enable communication (similar to the way the addon Nauticus works) to allow all users of the addon to share their rare-spotted times
- If I use this addon, and another player also uses it, and that player kills a rare on the other side of Azeroth, the overlay blob would disappear off of my map & the timer would start ticking to track when the blob will reappear to show the rare as re-spawned
This would (theoretically) allow you to pull up your map for the area you want to go look for a rare and see (with some accuracy) whether that rare has been killed or spotted recently. If the overlay blob is not showing, it would give you a heads-up that that rare is most likely not there, and you can save the trip to that zone to look for it.
There could also be a LDB plugin that would show a list of rares (maybe sortable by zone/continent) with the estimated time until spawn.