BFA Loot System Theorycrafting

[Birdofgerror]

Loot distribution. I've noticed, with now near certainty, that loot is divvied out in the following algorithm: Each boss will drop 1 piece of loot, save the last boss, who will drop 2. Most instances have 4 bosses, and the first 3 bosses will always give loot to different people. The last boss will grant loot to 1 different person as well, but the second loot is random, and can go to someone who already got loot that instance, or to the last person who didn't.

This basically means you can do an instance (let's say a normal) and you want an item from a midboss. If you kill the first boss and get something, you have a 0% chance of getting loot from the midboss you want, and you can leave. However, you have a 25% chance of getting loot if the loot you want is from the LAST boss, and you already looted from the first/second/third boss.

I have tested this about 9 times in Normal Motherlode (and you can check my kill records to prove it) and this seems to check out. This generally means that in these dungeons, you have an 80% chance to get 1 piece of loot, and a 10% chance to get 2 pieces of loot, with a 20% chance to get 0 pieces of loot. There is one instance that has FIVE bosses however, and you are guaranteed 1 piece of loot, with a 20% chance of getting 2 pieces.

The point I flag this as a BIG negative, is that if I get loot from the first or second boss of freehold, I know for a fact my weapon will not drop for me from the third boss. It's literally not possible, it will NOT drop. So to get my weapon from freehold, I get my 80% loot chance and narrow it down to 20% since I only want loot from one boss; the third boss. The third boss can drop 3 things, 2 of which I don't want, so now I'm down to 6.75%. Doing freehold, I have a 6.75% chance of getting my sword. I can only specify one heroic per day, and have to random it the others. Every day I have 1 chance to do a 6.75% chance of getting a heroic weapon.

This isn't counting mythic, which was ALSO a 6.75% chance, but I can only do that once a week, not once a day. I've already done King's Rest, Motherlode, Freehold, and Underrot on mythic, and the math is the same for the last 3 (6.75%) since all of those bosses also dropped 2 other things I didn't need, and weren't last bosses. The exception was the King's Rest final boss, of whom I had a decent chance of getting loot from. I had a 13.50% chance of getting my weapon from him, since he could offer a second chance at loot even if I looted before, and he had 4 items to compete with instead of 3. Unfortunately I got the epic helmet from him instead. It was an improvement, but it wasn't the weapon I wanted.

To this day, since launch, I have been doing Freehold, Underrot, and the Motherlode on heroic, desperately grasping at the 6.75% chance of getting my weapon, and the much more acceptable 13.50% chance cannot be done per day since King's Rest is mythic only. I ended up only getting a 310 weapon from Motherlode normal by spamming the first boss over and over, and leaving if the weapon didn't drop. After another 10 runs, he dropped the 310 weapon for me. I'm at 334 and I still am using that 310 weapon, even as both of my trinkets are 355. I am doing everything logically possible to get one of the 3 weapons I need from heroic. Spamming each of them specifically each day until they lock out, then doing random heroics until the dungeon I want pops up. If it doesn't, I do the first boss and leave so I don't get deserter, then queue again.

The hilarious thing is, I had 2 world quests up with higher than heroic quality, but they were both one handers.

I'm blood.

FML

While, yes, grinding for that ONE PIECE OF LOOT has been a thing since Vanilla, especially horror stories about the Headmaster's Charge, I feel like being able to stare a 0% in the face is extremely disheartening. These problems will be fixed in Mythic +, where the chest will grant a random loot from a random boss in the instance, putting any item you want on equal footing with the rest of the items in the instance, but as it stands now, this system is extremely weird. I UNDERSTAND why they made it this way, but as it stands it doesn't seem very organic.

[Ange]

People forget what a blessing the LEGION weapons really were.

There is a reason pvE players felt the need to do pvP for weapons before legion, because of the importance of weapons and the few ways to get them.

Good luck getting your weapon soon, I did all my M0's, 3 day of random and targeted heroics with a green weapon.

[Deleted]

I'm sorry but that's not true. I've gotten 3 items from 1 mythic that had 4 bosses. Got loot from bosses 1, 2 and 4.

[r3gul8r]

I agree with the OP. But most runs/randoms I do are with friends, so I never leave.

I won't leave a Mythic because sometimes there's a chance at the mount towards the end and I know it'll be a pain for the group to replace me.

But I 100% agree.