The Cat Guide - 4.3

[crabmousse]

we are disenchanting HC Bone Link Fetish weekly, meanwhile I am using the godawful Blackhorne haste trinket

[ceelion]

My 10m guild raids with me, a rogue and an enh shaman. They both have Vials since week 2 or 5 and I haven't seen one even drop >.<

[Deleted]

I have killed Yor'sahj and Madness every single reset since DS launch, I have not seen either of our weapons drop even once.

[Deleted]

So you are saying that having a 55% chance to see a trinket drop after 6 months is a good droprate? Atleast there are 2 other agi trinkets in DS, so getting a vial is more of a bonus thing. However comparing to the time to get the legendary FL staff, perhaps vial should be orange too ;-)

[traen]

So you are saying that having a 55% chance to see a trinket drop after 6 months is a good droprate? Atleast there are 2 other agi trinkets in DS, so getting a vial is more of a bonus thing. However comparing to the time to get the legendary FL staff, perhaps vial should be orange too ;-)

Well, actually yes. Its not only this trinket, any other non-set item got pretty much the same chance to drop.

I think that 50%+ chance is decent. You should get all bis gear only if you are lucky. Gear is the only thing that motivates you to raid, so after obtaining all the loot you will most likely stop raiding/playing until next expansion. And it will be bad for your guild, for wow and for other players.

[MasterNewbie]

0.5% drop rate in 10man, ~1.5% drop rate in 25man.
6 bosses per week = 3% chance to see it it in 10man and 9% chance in 25man. In 10man you will be the only one rolling for it most likely, while in 25man there will be at least 5+ players. It will take almost twice more time to farm vial for all agility users in 25man than to all agility users in 10man.

3% chance per week is pretty good chance. 11 weeks passed, it means that 30% 10man guilds got it at least once. The chance to not get it after 6 month of farming for particular guild is ~48%, so I would not count for it. There is no reason to bother about gear because you don't really need more gear than you currently have to down all bosses, and you will disenchant this trinket anyway just few days after MoP start.

There is a flaw in your reasoning. First, probability doesn't work additively (among a few other things). Second (the major flaw) is that the events are independent. By that, I mean if you haven't seen it in 11 weeks, you don't have a miraculous 30% chance of seeing it the following week, you still have the abysmal 1.5% chance per boss to see it drop.

[SmokeyIllidan]

What other cats who are progressing on Madness hc 25 going for as secondary stats? just curious, Im going Hit +Exp to cap>>Haste>>Mastery>>Crit.
off topic: Vial trinket is soooooo rare..... didn't even see one in all our guild runs normal or hc -_-" even lfr. lucky kitties are lucky

I'm still doing Hit/Exp > Haste > Mastery > Crit. Swipe the bloods for spellweaving to cleave parasites and whatever else you need. I really don't see crit being higher than mastery when you can bleed the arm tentacle post cataclysm buff.

As for Vial, it's all luck man. Most will hate me for saying but first time we killed Morchok, I get heroic Vial. First time we killed Spine, heroic wrath. And just last week, first time we killed Madness, heroic Kirils. I'm officially a heroic asshole this tier ^^.

[Deleted]

There is a flaw in your reasoning. First, probability doesn't work additively (among a few other things). Second (the major flaw) is that the events are independent. By that, I mean if you haven't seen it in 11 weeks, you don't have a miraculous 30% chance of seeing it the following week, you still have the abysmal 1.5% chance per boss to see it drop.

Just because the flaws with the probability annoy me, too, I wanted to count the real values for them. I used 1.5% drop chance for 25man and 0.5% for 10man. I couldn't find an absolute number for the drop rates but those have to be close enough. Just in case someone's interested...

25man
chance for the trinket to drop from 1 boss: 1.5%
chance for the trinket not to drop from 1 boss: 98.5%
P(Vial drops from 1 run) = 1 - P(Vial doesn't drop from 6 bosses) = 1 - 0.985^6 ≈ 0.8669 ≈ 8.67%
P(Vial drops during 5 weeks, if every boss is killed each week) = 1 - 0.985^(6*5) = 1 - 0.985^30 ≈ 0.3645 ≈ 36.45%

10man
chance for the trinket to drop from 1 boss: 0.5%
chance for the trinket not to drop from 1 boss: 99.5%
P(Vial drops from 1 run) = 1 - P(Vial doesn't drop from 6 bosses) = 1 - 0.995^6 ≈ 0.0296 ≈ 2.96%
P(Vial drops during 5 weeks, if every boss is killed each week) = 1 - 0.995^30 ≈ 13.96%

And you can't just sum the probabilities, as they don't work that way. And, even if you hadn't ever seen the trinket, the probability for it to drop from each boss (or each run) stays the same. And it is still the same even if you had seen the trinket 100 times already. I've also counted the probability for the trinket to drop during 5 weeks of raiding (if every boss is killed each week) so you can see the numbers for those as well.

But after counting these, I have to say that I really feel lucky now. I got our guild's first HC Vial and we haven't seen any more of them since...


TL;DR: The events are independent and can't be summed, just as MasterNewbie said earlier. The chance for the trinket to drop during one DS run is approximately 8.67% in 25man and 2.96% in 10man.

[traen]

There is a flaw in your reasoning. First, probability doesn't work additively (among a few other things). Second (the major flaw) is that the events are independent. By that, I mean if you haven't seen it in 11 weeks, you don't have a miraculous 30% chance of seeing it the following week, you still have the abysmal 1.5% chance per boss to see it drop.

Sure it does not work additively. Its 1 - ((1-0.005)^6) = 2.9627%, make it 3.
I have no idea where you got your "you don't have a miraculous 30% chance of seeing it the following week", I never wrote anything like that. Read my message more carefully.
Drop chance is always 0.5% per boss and there is nothing that can change it.
Obviously you still can calculate the chance to get your item within given number of kills. For 66 kills(11 weeks), chance to see it at least once will be 28%. It means that 28% 10man guilds already got it. And its statistically right.
Also it means that every third rogue/feral have it, making it pretty common item.

---------- Post added 2012-02-27 at 11:18 PM ----------

TL;DR: The events are independent and can't be summed, just as MasterNewbie said earlier. The chance for the trinket to drop during one DS run is approximately 7.2% in 25man and 2.5% in 10man.

You are pretty close. Its 2.96% for 10man and 8.67% for 25man. There are 6 bosses that can drop vial.

[Deleted]

You are pretty close. Its 2.96% for 10man and 8.67% for 25man. There are 6 bosses that can drop vial.

Ah, right... Such a lame fail, sorry... I'll fix that to my post too. Thanks.

[MasterNewbie]

Sure it does not work additively. Its 1 - ((1-0.005)^6) = 2.9627%, make it 3.
I have no idea where you got your "you don't have a miraculous 30% chance of seeing it the following week", I never wrote anything like that. Read my message more carefully.
Drop chance is always 0.5% per boss and there is nothing that can change it.
Obviously you still can calculate the chance to get your item within given number of kills. For 66 kills(11 weeks), chance to see it at least once will be 28%. It means that 28% 10man guilds already got it. And its statistically right.
Also it means that every third rogue/feral have it, making it pretty common item.

Your per-run values I wasn't really arguing with as they were close enough to what I had calculated for them based on the values you provided, however, your 11-week average was off.

I'm not going to claim I know precisely how the shared loot table works for the bosses. I'm just going to assume that each item on the loot table has an equal chance of dropping. If you have more insight to the system I'd be glad to hear it (aside from .5% chance to drop always, as Wowhead data disagrees with that statement)

In 25-man, operating under my assumption, there is a ~68% chance per run to see it drop. (This high value leads me to believe that my assumption is wrong, so let's change it to the tier piece bosses only dropping two non-tier items). Change in assumption results in ~52% chance per run to see it drop. Still a little high, in my opinion. Wowhead data disagrees with my work so I will stop trying to correct you (not to say you are correct; you are wrong, I just cba to get a model that reflects Wowhead data).

Nonetheless, the posts following the one I quoted led me to believe that you and a fellow poster believed that the longer you work at it, the higher your chances of getting it. That is horribly incorrect. Statistically you are more likely to have it, yes, but your chances never improve.

While I'm at it,

You should get all bis gear only if you are lucky. Gear is the only thing that motivates you to raid, so after obtaining all the loot you will most likely stop raiding/playing until next expansion. And it will be bad for your guild, for wow and for other players.

Gear shouldn't be the only thing that motivates people to raid. If it is I feel sorry for their guild. The challenge and overcoming it should be the primary motivation and gear should be seen as a means to that end, not as an end of itself. That's just me I guess.

[Pope]

Oh god no a probability-discussion.
From thousands of wowhead-posts on thousands of rare-mounts and items I can definitely say: These discussions never end well.

[traen]

Nonetheless, the posts following the one I quoted led me to believe that you and a fellow poster believed that the longer you work at it, the higher your chances of getting it. That is horribly incorrect. Statistically you are more likely to have it, yes, but your chances never improve.

I can only suggest you to read our posts again and understand that we never wrote anything like that.
Reading this phrase carefully "Drop chance is always 0.5% per boss and there is nothing that can change it." will be a good beginning.

Gear shouldn't be the only thing that motivates people to raid. If it is I feel sorry for their guild. The challenge and overcoming it should be the primary motivation and gear should be seen as a means to that end, not as an end of itself. That's just me I guess.

It should not. But the truth is... only first kill counts. After first kill boss becomes "on farm". "Farm" means killing it again and again, week by week without any additional reward. Its really boring. And there is no game where its different. And I doubt that you can think off something that will make farm raiding more interesting.

It was a little bit different in the beginning of wow raiding.
In vanilla days gear was epic and rare, so you never had such problem as "I got all gear, I have nothing to do". There were just 2 items per 40 players, so getting ALL gear was almost impossible for ordinary raider. And In vanilla days there always was "harder content". It means that killing easy boss to get gear lead to killing harder boss.

In current content its worse.
a) You don't need gear to down bosses (I think my first madness kill was in 394 gear or so)
b) There is no bosses to gear for. "harder instance" simply does not exists.
c) You know that you will disenchant all your gear just 3-4 month later.

So we know that people raid for gear. I've seen SO MANY people who stopped playing right after they got all the gear.
I got most of the gear and my motivation is close to zero. I could barely make myself go to raid.

Raiding is boring, raiding is easy, but people still farm DS over and over. To get gear. There is no real reason for it, but its the only goal that is left in raiding when you have everything on farm.

Increase drop rates, let people get all(or at least most) of the gear in 1-2 month, and wow will lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

So 50% chance to get item within 6 month of raiding is decent chance, and such drop rate is smart strategy that blizzard should follow in the future.

[Gorelaz]

I'm still doing Hit/Exp > Haste > Mastery > Crit. Swipe the bloods for spellweaving to cleave parasites and whatever else you need. I really don't see crit being higher than mastery when you can bleed the arm tentacle post cataclysm buff.

As for Vial, it's all luck man. Most will hate me for saying but first time we killed Morchok, I get heroic Vial. First time we killed Spine, heroic wrath. And just last week, first time we killed Madness, heroic Kirils. I'm officially a heroic asshole this tier ^^.

You mother@#%!#! :P

PS:Madness hc down

[Deleted]

Just wanna vent, been doing DS every week on my feral (and various alts) including lfr, vial never dropped. This week we got a break so I decided to play resto for a bit in lfr since I've pretty much got every feral gear (at least normal 397s) except trinkets. Yes you guessed it, it finally dropped when I went resto. Really wanted it pre-nerf just to mess around in PvP =s

[Shifthappens]

Just wanna vent, been doing DS every week on my feral (and various alts) including lfr, vial never dropped. This week we got a break so I decided to play resto for a bit in lfr since I've pretty much got every feral gear (at least normal 397s) except trinkets. Yes you guessed it, it finally dropped when I went resto. Really wanted it pre-nerf just to mess around in PvP =s

Vial is still great in PVP even after nerf

[Deleted]

Just wanna vent, been doing DS every week on my feral (and various alts) including lfr, vial never dropped. This week we got a break so I decided to play resto for a bit in lfr since I've pretty much got every feral gear (at least normal 397s) except trinkets. Yes you guessed it, it finally dropped when I went resto. Really wanted it pre-nerf just to mess around in PvP =s

/soothe

It's never dropped for me either, not in LFR or our Heroic runs. I have seen it on an alt though... ¬_¬

[Tavin]

As there's a billion different trinket lists and the one in this thread aint working.

Would you use 397 Matrix Restabilizer (heroic rag) or 384 Vial of Shadows?

4p t12 391+391 off-set head or would you use 4p t13 384+410 morchok shoulders. T13 seems like a better option or?

thanks!

[crabmousse]

we had our first Vial week #1, the Rogue won it. 2nd Vial around December time, and for some reason my raidgroup saw fit to roll for it and to give it to another players Kid, a Hunter (this was when it still did no damage for hunters), who struggled to break 15k dps and had expertise enchant on his gloves. his kid had raided with us before for a couple of weeks and then was banned for not doing his homework. he came back, took the trinket and then was banned from raiding again.

gotta love that Vial.

[ImortalDruid]

we just had 3 h vial drop in the last 2 weeks