Can't find Iboga petals for the life of me....

Well, I was farming Ibogi (correct pluralization?) for a couple hours, and killed countless numbers of them. I wasn't really getting any experience, but I want to complete it nonetheless. It took me about 20 minutes to find the drake meat- running along the coast, and the skalefins were easy as hell. But I must've killed over 100 Iboga plants (between all the fanged, killer, and beautiful) and according to the guild.wiki they're supposed to be the most common. Sometimes when they die- I see white text flash on them and disappear in what seems like just a couple of frames- or a small fraction of a second. It instills some kind of hope that it's going to drop, but even if I wait till their corpse disappears I'm left with more disappointment.
This is very, very frustrating as I feel like I wasted my time collecting the other items for the quest and what should be the easiest one is holding me back. I've done every other side-quest available at this point before I continue on with my main quest and killed, as I said, countless Ibogi along the way. Still nothing. I'm wondering if this is a bug, if I'm extremely unlucky, or if the drop rate for these items are unreasonably low.
This game and it's expansions have been out for a while now, and even though I only paid 20 bucks for the game I'm really hoping letdowns like this are not consistent, and more so that the game's support can help with these types of problems promptly. I'm sure my issue is probably the lowest priority for the administrators, but I would like to stress that beginning quests like the aforementioned not working for people starting out or trying the game reflects poorly on peoples' impressions of the game and/or their desire to play it at all. When the most time-consuming quest (let alone how rewarding it is) you've played so far is impossible to complete, it makes me wonder how many more quests like this will make me feel like I've wasted my time after being spoiled by other yet similar games that inherently reward persistence and dedication to the completion of what seems like such an easy task.
Hence, my questions:
Is this a bug?
Is there a workaround?
Am I just unlucky?
Does the game really require multiple hours of hunting the same type of creep for something that's (apparently) not going to drop?
Are reports of this nature common in any later stages of the game?

Thank you.

The white text you see flash on them is probably "Corpse of <monster name>", drops are always logged in the chat log (except for gold) and drop immediately on the death of the monster.

I just went outside Kamadan and killed about 8 fanged iboga and got 2 petals. If you need them PM me at Judge Judas.

Also, party size decreases the chance of loot drops for most kinds of loot. So farming stuff is usually best done solo. Level 1 iboga shouldn't pose a thread to anyone.

It's known that drake meat stuff have very low drop rate since it used to craft drakes cabob that gives small bonus. Iboga Petals are used to make Pahnai Salad. So i'm guessing they've set low drop rate on those to discourage mass farming. Why? Don't know.
I hope you're solo farming those and not using h/h. Eventually you'll stumble on some petals.

Aha.
Thank you both much.
I will try to solo for a moment and if it proves fruitless, I will pm you Dzjudz.
+rep&
+rep

yea heros and henchmen absolutley kill your drop rate of trophies and things like that.
but yea if your farming ibogi( im guessing mid continent or noob island?) then i would deffinatley go w/out heros or henchman. there nto that hard so it isnt too bad

Unless other people are finding that iboga petals aren't dropping for them either then no it's not a bug, you're just unlucky.

The workaround is to ask on trade chat in Kamadan "WTB iboga petals" - or to leave the quest active in your log and carry on with other quests and hope that a couple drop for you during the course of your normal adventuring. You should find you can complete the quest before you leave the starter island, and yes it can take that long before all the feast items drop for you sometimes! (I tend to make new characters a lot, so what I do with annoying-to-find quest items, like the feast ones and juvenile termite legs, and inscribed shards and giant tusks later on in the game, is to put spares in storage ready for the next character.)

The fortunate thing about GW is that there are far more quests than you need in order to level up and gain ranks, and as there's no limit to the number of active quests you can have in your log, if any are particularly annoying to complete you can just leave them sitting in your log indefinitely or abandon them and never do them at all. There's no title for quest completion, sadly. So, whilst a few of them *might* require you to spend hours killing stuff in the hopes of getting the right drops, it's only a very few, and you're not obliged to do it all in one go - or to even do those quests at all if you don't want to.