Wailing Caves has four full collections:

Plain beetles
Spotted beetles
Striped beetles
Iridescent beetles

In addition, you can collect shattered, weathered and cracked orc bones there.

I sat in the dungeons and collected until I received the full set of all beetles.

Here are the stats:

129 ?’s harvested in total
57 of them were bones
72 of them were beetles

Of the 57 bones I found:
9 cracked orc bone
20 shattered orc bone
28 weathered orc bone

Of the 72 beetles:
11 were striped
18 were spotted
32 were plain

Singles at the end of the run:
20 were green of which one was striped
18 were spotted of which one was purple and one was yellow
10 were black of which one was striped

I had duplicates of all beetles except those above (green striped, purple spotted, yellow spotted, black striped).

The black striped beetle was the last one of the set I collected.

Analysis

Ulija, full-time templar and occasional mathmo, did some number crunching and to our bemusement, she found that the expected number of “?” you need to pick up to get a full set is 72. Perfect!

However, she warns:

These give an unusual distribution and it’s essentially because of this: your chances of getting the last missing beetle per ? doesn’t get any better no matter how many you have already. This means the distribution has a LONG tail. If they all drop equally then to be 99% sure you’ve got the lot, you’d need to collect 149. It gets much much worse if there’s a rare.

After collating the data, I remained in the zone and harvested half a dozen more sparklies … and got another black striped. I was almost tempted to try to get a second set but then sanity kicked in.

Conclusion

I really don’t think this collection is worth it. I completed the set so that Paxmar would have it as she really can’t afford to skip any. In general I don’t think I would bother.

Posted by Taymar on http://proof.mmorpg-info.org.