A couple questions about sleek wands:

You can find your amber and sienna at level 30, and black at level 35--right?

Do you have to be in the room when the mob dies, or just in the area, for the wand to actually show up? If I fled out of the room and the mob died to my groupmate, would the sleek have showed up?

If I stand in an area and have someone else look around (like a thief peeking at the inventory of a mob) or looking in a container, would they see the sleek, or is it not until I'm in the actual room and/or when the mob dies?

Sleeks, and most limited wands, can't be seeing via peek whether or not you're with the thief. If you identify them, it'll say something like the item is easily concealed, which also means you can't find it with locate object. I haven't played a thief in over a decade now, but I'm fairly certain that you can't steal sleeks for the same reason.

As for when the sleek spawns.. I feel like it spawns on the corpse only with you in the room. I can't recall ever finding a sleek that wasn't mine in the corpse of a mob I killed, while such a thing does occur on container drops (oblivious or busy mage walks past his container location and doesn't pick it up, leaving the rod there for an unknown amount of time).

In either case (container or mobile drop), you need to be in the specific room rather than just the area for the rod to spawn. On a mob, a rod will spawn if either you or a groupmate lands the killing blow. If your groupmate is also a mage, and the location is also his, whoever lands the killing blow gets the associated cooldown (IIRC) on spawning a rod, so collecting sleeks with a mage partner won't screw someone over for 20-30 ticks.

If it's on a mob, it has to die, and you have to kill it.

Rule of thumb, if you didn't get XP (as in, even if it's 0) when the mob dies, it's no good to you for sleek purposes.

I have played many mages since hanging up my rager helm and I have accumulated a decent knowledge of rods. I know of 21 sienna locations that I have either found or helped find. My last 4 mages have obviously had the 2nd location as they never found their sienna.

My questions are these:
1) Have I just had awesomely bad luck that the last 4 mages I have had never found the sienna rod despite this knowledge?

2) How many sienna locations are there? It is is 30 then I wont feel quite so jipped.

Cheers,

I don't remember the exact number, but 30 is in the ballpark.