"This is one of the few cases where we will not be sharing details."

[Leih]

Sharing drop mechanics = people math out the "most efficient" way to grind gear.

Blizzard really really does not want that in any of their loot-based games.

Agreed with this, can very much understand why they wouldn't want to give out the exact chances and mechanics. They want the majority of people to play the game and have loot be the potential reward, not for everyone to obsess over which things is most rewarding, math it out, and ignore all the rest of the content.

They also don't want people "gaming" the bad luck protection.

[Deleted]

Give it 2 weeks after launch, when people can find enough info on the amory about the titanforged gear and you will get a decent estimate of the chances.

The fact they won't tell us is simple, people would either hate them for a system that has too low chances to provide upgrades from lower ilevel content and people feel lied to when they were told upgrades can happen anywhere, since most people see a 0.001% chance or lower not as something that would ever happen.
Or people would figure out the fastest way to gear up within mere days and then blizzard has the problem of: People already have out-gear most of the content.


For the people who like tinfoil on their heads:

Maybe it's because the system works completely differently then they described it.
Instead of consecutive rolls until fail, maybe they just roll ALL upgrades and just add up the ones that rolled an upgrade.

Difference for a 20% Chance for a +50 ilevel roll and a cap of +80:

Consecutive: 0.2 ^ 10 = 0.0000001024 (= 0.0001024%)
One Shot: ( 16! * (0.2^10) ) / (10! * 6!) = (16! * 0.0000001024) / 10! * 6! ) = 2142493,685 / 10! * 6! = 8,200192 * 10^-4 = 0,0008200192 (= 0.082%)

Or they just have two rolles, one for if an upgrade happens and one for how many. So 20% of one side of a 16 sided dice
0.2 * 0.0625 = 0,0125 (=1.25% for any upgrade)

[Raiju]

You.... hadn't heard of thottbot eh?

Except even then we could only speculate droprates to some level of accuracy - blizzard has only once or twice given out exact droprate information in the entirety of the game.

F.ex we have mounts we KNOW are 1% - blizzard confirmed - and yet show 0.7% on wowhead. That's a significant discrepancy at that level (it's the same as 50% showing as 35%) - despite having 1000 recorded loots over more than 120000 kills.

[BiggestNoob]

RNG ontop of a fixed loot system is a good balance IMO.
You know exactly which areas to target, and theres a chance you can get a better item.
It gives you a reason to see content again, rather than a 1 stop shop for the item, and never having any reason to return.

A system that lets you actually work for upgrades instead of randomly getting them is better. It's also a way to make crafting relevant outside of making gold, and it is good for guild longevity because new players can be funneled late into a tier, which can't be done with WF/TF/socket RNG. It accomplishes the same thing without the eventual letdown that 99% of people get which effectively turns people off from both competition and even remaining around once they're done with the content. If you knew that in the next 4-5 weeks you could actually reach BiS, you'd probably do the raid just so you can rekt the meters in full BiS and be strong going into the next tier.

If it took a group of 20 around 6 months of fully clearing the raid to be in full BiS, I don't see a problem with that, because Blizzard's goal should be that there are no content gaps longer than that.

But they've only really added more and more RNG...Because they need more longevity, and this system provides it. A constant scaling reward system keeps world quests relevant all xpac long for example, that's huge. The investment in content now will last them ALL xpac, not including the new content they'll roll out...

It's a great way to make things relevant and not be as repetitive as dailies.

There are what? 0 people who currently have full WF/socket gear? That's a full year of 1 tier, and this is the longest tier in WoW's history. We don't need more longevity. We need something that doesn't have the punishing side effect of being a complete waste of time if you DON'T get lucky.

[Demoneq]

Well say CTA is up, it's extra incentive.

Unless they fixed the CTA (to give you the extra reward upon completing the dungeon, if CTA was there when you signed up), it's not, because the reward might well just not be there when you finish it, never was worth it for me.

[Raiju]

Unless they fixed the CTA (to give you the extra reward upon completing the dungeon, if CTA was there when you signed up), it's not, because the reward might well just not be there when you finish it, never was worth it for me.

CTA was fixed this way long ago I believe. I've never had an issue in WoD even if the CTA was gone after I was done.

[emilylorange]

In case you didn't know: droprates, calculated by WowHead - are just average numbers. Blizzard don't guarantee you any particular droprate. The only info, Blizzard provide about droprates - is how rare specified item is. And Blizzard have a right to change droprates, how they want and when they want - at any moment. That's why item with 12% droprate, indicated on WowHead, can refuse to drop within 100 and even 200 tries on your server, while average number of tries, needed to obtain this item, for 12% droprate - is 8.

In a completely unrelated matter, I still think they should replace the high school requirements for calculus with statistics to help a broader range of people with their paranoia of probability.

- - - Updated - - -

F.ex we have mounts we KNOW are 1% - blizzard confirmed - and yet show 0.7% on wowhead. That's a significant discrepancy at that level (it's the same as 50% showing as 35%) - despite having 1000 recorded loots over more than 120000 kills.

legit question - are you using the term 'significant' correctly? Because I'm dubious.

There's math out there that will tell you if you're data is out of an ordinary expected range. I'd be rather surprised if .3% difference in the rate of occurrence is literally statistically significant. But I'd love to see your analysis.

Blizzard doesn't go around checking to make sure 1% of lich king kills have invincible drops. It's subject to probability, reporting biases, and luck.

Hell I'd be more surprised if it were exactly 1%.

[Raiju]

legit question - are you using the term 'significant' correctly? Because I'm dubious.

There's math out there that will tell you if you're data is out of an ordinary expected range. I'd be rather surprised if .3% difference in the rate of occurrence is literally statistically significant. But I'd love to see your analysis.

Blizzard doesn't go around checking to make sure 1% of lich king kills have invincible drops. It's subject to probability, reporting biases, and luck.

Hell I'd be more surprised if it were exactly 1%.

It is significant, if you understand standard deviation. You don't apply a 'universal range' and say "Well blizzard said its' 1% but we have 1000000 kills with no mount, but it's only 1% difference so that's clearly in line statistically"

It's very different to work out for a 1% drop rate infact - it's a 30% difference for a 0.7% reported droprate, over 120000 samples. That's only evidence that wowheads data will never be that reliable. You'll know it's a rare drop or a common drop, or an extremely rare drop. Not much past that.

This leads to my point that A) blizzard don't give numbers and B) even when they have, wowheads data has shown to be an unreliable factor (and thottbots was even worse) that can only give you an 'impression' and nothing more. The fact that even over what is relatively a very large sample size for wowhead is evidence of this (for reference the mount I'm using is the deathcharger's reins from stratholme, confirmed by blizzard to be upped to 1% - I believe in 3.0. Long before any recent wowhead purge.

[emilylorange]

This leads to my point that A) blizzard don't give numbers and B) even when they have, wowheads data has shown to be an unreliable factor (and thottbots was even worse) that can only give you an 'impression' and nothing more.

Cool, I defer to you then, I think you're smarter than me, I haven't touched this stuff in.... 5 years now?

What I will say is, in the absence of 'official' knowledge, the unreliable factor is king. Blizzard has no obligation to tell us anything, yet I still prefer people bring me imperfect answers than 'don't worry about it, just trust it's a benefit to you' from a someone trying to sell me a game mechanic.

If the rate appears to stink by consensus, then it's not a factor in my decision making.

[Maudib]

from a random Heroic boss drop

if you dident get the joke he said its from random heroic, but it says right on the ffing picture its from mythic, so no he dident roll a perfect 50

Apparently you don't know how this works... it was a random Heroic Dungeon... BECAUSE it procc'd so high it gave it the Mythic level moniker.

[FelPlague]

Apparently you don't know how this works... it was a random Heroic Dungeon... BECAUSE it procc'd so high it gave it the Mythic level moniker.

hm weird, never seen that, i got the same situation, heroic dungeon, procced to 850 no mythic modifier, just says heroic titanforged

[AvCloudy]

In case you didn't know: droprates, calculated by WowHead - are just average numbers. Blizzard don't guarantee you any particular droprate. The only info, Blizzard provide about droprates - is how rare specified item is. And Blizzard have a right to change droprates, how they want and when they want - at any moment. That's why item with 12% droprate, indicated on WowHead, can refuse to drop within 100 and even 200 tries on your server, while average number of tries, needed to obtain this item, for 12% droprate - is 8.

That's...nonsense. Drop rate is a statistical average, which approximates the internal Blizzard PRNG. Blizzard doesn't arbitrarily change drop rates, that's just how statistics work.

[wing5wong]

In case you didn't know: droprates, calculated by WowHead - are just average numbers. Blizzard don't guarantee you any particular droprate. The only info, Blizzard provide about droprates - is how rare specified item is. And Blizzard have a right to change droprates, how they want and when they want - at any moment. That's why item with 12% droprate, indicated on WowHead, can refuse to drop within 100 and even 200 tries on your server, while average number of tries, needed to obtain this item, for 12% droprate - is 8.

The chance for you to have recieved an item with 12% dropd chance after 8 kills is 64%. (it would take 37 kills to have over 99% chacne of having seen it in that many kills)
each kill is statistically independant of the last. every kill offers the same 12% chance.

You can calculate it yourself with the following

1 - ( ( 1 - x ) ^ y )

where x is the drop chance and y is the number of runs.

[WowIsDead64]

The chance for you to have recieved an item with 12% dropd chance after 8 kills is 64%. (it would take 37 kills to have over 99% chacne of having seen it in that many kills)
each kill is statistically independant of the last. every kill offers the same 12% chance.

You can calculate it yourself with the following

where x is the drop chance and y is the number of runs.

I know statistics well and I talk about expected value of number of tries, i.e. most probable number of tries, required to obtain item - 1/0.12 = 8.33. I.e. yeah, 100 or even 200 tries - can happen, but it's extremely unlikely to happen. If we'd take 100 people, 40 of them would obtain item on 8th try.

[Deleted]

I'll tell you why they don't say percentages. Because there are no static percentages. The RNG has been rigged for a few expansions now.

They just said officially a few days ago that they have "bad luck protection" in several aspects of the game including this.

I was pretty sure they had that kind of thing since WotLK since someone spilled some quest items had BLProtection.

[Shadow Fox]

Have they ever shared drop rates? I mean some things can be found through the armory but they mostly keep silent on this

Also the poster Celestalon responded to did not in any way ask what the drop rate is. He asked how bad luck protection works (if the rate is in any way adjusted for past events) as well as if the probability for all items in a class is equal or if it varies.

There was a time when they did, and a few addons gave out drop rate chances as well. Blizzard has since removed, and requested addon authors to not use drop chance math in their addons to be displayed in game. (They have mentioned nothing that I know of about sites like WoWhead for listing Dropchances.)

[emilylorange]

I'll tell you why they don't say percentages. Because there are no static percentages. The RNG has been rigged for a few expansions now.

They just said officially a few days ago that they have "bad luck protection" in several aspects of the game including this.

I was pretty sure they had that kind of thing since WotLK since someone spilled some quest items had BLProtection.

We're....starting a conspiracy theory over them trying to make sure it didn't take 30 zhevras to get 4 hooves?

[Deleted]

I know statistics well and I talk about expected value of number of tries, i.e. most probable number of tries, required to obtain item - 1/0.12 = 8.33. I.e. yeah, 100 or even 200 tries - can happen, but it's extremely unlikely to happen. If we'd take 100 people, 40 of them would obtain item on 8th try.

Probability and Statistics are fine and well, if the system uses true randomness, and I don't mean the random number generator might have a deterministic seed. Some aspects of the game just have rigged RNG. We have official confirmation again that several aspects of Legion will have bad luck protection and I would not be surprised if that includes raid gear, warforged too maybe (I'm almost certain even WoD's personal loot has bad luck protection, it was curious how easy it was to get a weapon with personal loot when no good weapon was had by the character and then no weapon dropped again).

- - - Updated - - -

We're....starting a conspiracy theory over them trying to make sure it didn't take 30 zhevras to get 4 hooves?

Huh? It's an official statement of the devs that there is bad luck protection. It's even extremely recent, on the Q&A panels of Legion with Lore.

[Deleted]

The thing is, many would be very interested to know HOW bad luck protection works. There are many ways to make it work after all.

Well, truth be told, the extra layer of secrecy exists to keep the game more ..interesting. That is of course a bit subjective. I do believe some people find it more fun to have some more determinism in the game.

Though they are probably right, from a business perspective because I believe they probably made a market research about it and figured out people prefer randomness/not knowing from knowing.

[Shadow Fox]

The thing is, many would be very interested to know HOW bad luck protection works. There are many ways to make it work after all.

Draenor was suppose to have Bad Luck Protection... Yet, I believe it was stated that it resets for every new instance ID... So I literally ran all wings of HFC in LFR without getting any loot, because each wing is a different instance ID.

Forgot what it was, but had a post in a thread somewhere were I had posted from a TitanPanel broken addon that showed 117 bosses killed with no boss drops since the instance ID was changing every 3-4 kills. :S

So far in the Legion Beta, it does seem to be tuned a lot better. (Almost seems like they used the Diablo 3 bad-luck protection system... Wouldn't surprise me since they nearly copied the Diablo 3 team and their code into WoW by this point.)