Major Combat Trophy materials and LUCK

[DrHoon]

So I’ve read through the Dev post and various threads here and other resources trying to figure out the answer to a specific question: does the amount of luck affect whether the major combat trophy mats (totem, seal, mandible, etc) drop?

I think I pretty much understand the integer based roll system. I understand the buckets. The confusion for me is around which bucket the trophy mats sit in and the relationship to what this game calls luck. Luck is not actually ‘luck’ but a change in the level of access a player has to specific loot tables where there is then an RNG roll for perks or items.

Are the legendary combat trophy mats named items from named (ie elite) enemies? They are not necessarily legendary trophy mats as per a craft item as they do not drop from chests (but they could be?). We know luck is meant to assist with whether named items can drop from named enemies. So do legendary combat trophy mats fit in this category or not?

There is apparent confusion or at least a lack of clarity around what ‘lucksafe’ means (see discussion in this reddit thread). Data miners used to have a consensus assumption that it meant luck did not affect the loot roll. (Has there been any further clarity around this? Like I imagine players once though that luck did not affect drops in dungeons, but now the devs have indicated it does affect named drops.) Does it affect the loot table roll in this circumstance?

I am asking as I was speaking to a player as we were farming Mordici who insisted he had got three corrupted totems with zero luck after farming the pit lord for 10 hours. This would indicate that luck is not required to access the major combat trophy mat table. They suggested there is a flat 1% chance of the legendary mat dropping. I asked for evidence but they could not provide. Their view was that there was a loot table roll to trophy mats from any of the bosses and that it either drops the basic or the legendary mat and the chance is pure RNG. This may or may not be true.

[Ryanaslett]

So, yeah, luck does affect the drop rate. However, it is very, very likely that the drop rate is not affected very much.

One misconception, there is only one thing in the whole game that requires some loot luck: void essences from elite chests. Everything else is obtainable with, or without luck.

Okay, so a quick deep dive with maybe some guestimated odds.

Lets start with the LootBucket in question: CreatureTrophyArtifacts and work our way backwards from there.

There are 9 things in that bucket: The major and minor artifact for each of the 4 mob types (beast artifacts drop from skinning wolves and bears). Each of the 4 majors are tagged with the specific boss that can drop them, and the minors are tagged with a level and mobtype that can drop them. All “lost/angry earth/corrupted/ancient” enemies over level 36 have the potential to drop the basic (barkflesh/corrupted totem/ancient femur/ectoplasmic essence).

There is 1 extra little insult in there, the ancient skull, which is just a candleholder part, drops from ancients over level 56.

So, luck doesnt have any effect on which item gets picked from whats possible in the bucket, just the tags, and then equal weight to each thing.

So each of the 4 named mobs can drop both major and minor mats, except surgeon, which gets the major, minor and that goddamn insulting skull.

The main loot table that gets used when you kill a mob starts with "what kind of creature is this “common”, “elite”, or “named”. The CreatureTrophyArtifacts loot bucket is reachable from two different entries in the main loot table. It can be hit on the Common enemies, and also on the “Elite” enemies. “Named” enemies do not have a chance to drop creature trophy mats.

Now, there was a time that these major mats did not drop at all. Thats because all the mobs they tagged are “Named”. Except pit lord. For some reason he was both “Common” and “Named”, so corrupted totem has been around since the beginning. When they ‘fixed’ this, instead of making creature trophy artifacts reachable from the Named table, instead, they tagged Baines, Pitlord, Surgeon, and Mordici as “Elites”.

So what this means is that Pit lord actually has both paths to the loot bucket (its also why he drops so much crap when he does drop stuff. He’s like killing 3 mobs at once)

So next, is the path to the bucket.
For CreatureLootCommon, which is marked “lucksafe”, CreatureTrophyArtifacts is the last entry in the table with 99500/100000 being the required roll to hit the table. So pit lord starts out with a 0.5% chance to hit the bucket, and then 1/2 chance its corrupted totem. So, a 0.25% chance for pitlord, which we’ll add to the other chance later.

For CreatureLootElite we have roughly the same thing. 99500/100000 so Mordici/Baines end up with a 0.25% chance of getting ephemeral seal/glowing sap, and we add the other 0.25% chance for pit lord, so we really have about a 0.5% chance of getting one from pit lord. (There is a 1/16000 chance that pit lord will drop two corrupted totems). Surgeon gets that extra skull “bonus”, so he only drops a mat 0.16667% of the time.

Now, there are two more things to consider here. These are the chances when there is a bag. Whether or not a bag drops is an entirely other mysterious bundle of bullshit. Mostly baines drops every time, and surgeon/mordici/pit lord are supposed to drop 2/3 times. Pit lord seems to be much less, but that could be the game calculating the number of “groups” nearby to include every ori farmer who happens to be nearby, and every person up top doing pvp quests for faction points.

The other thing is luck.

We thought lucksafe meant “no luck at all”
Now we dont know what it means at all, because the dev’s were cagey and said that it allows things to “scale in a controlled manner” which is meaningless.

The only thing we do have to go off of is that there are lucksafe tables in fishing, that we have 100% beyond a doubt decoded. The way luck works there is to subtly shift the ratio’s for things to happen. It does this by subtracting your luck from both the max roll and required threshold.

In fishing this changes things a lot, because you can have a lot of fishing luck.

In normal loot tables where you are on a 100000 max roll table, and probably about 5500 max luck (55%), it has much less of an impact.

If we assume that this is how it is implemented, then what we have, for somebody with 50% luck (5000) is 94500/95000 instead of 99500/100000. which works out to be 0.526% chance instead of .5% chance. so, 0.263% for baines/mordici.

All told that means your 1/200 chances on pit lord become 1/190, and your 1/400 chances on baines become 1/380. Surgeon goes from 1/600 to 1/570.

So, with a full blown luck suit going, you save yourself a sliver of time. Maybe. If my assumptions are correct. But given that people do not seem to believe luck helps, this would certainly explain it.

[DrHoon]

Fantastic, thank you. It answers my question. I am would be grateful if there are any dissenting views to be posted but this seems comprehensive and aligns totally with my partial understanding of all these things. Plus it answers three subsequent follow up questions for me:

Is it worth it to wear my full luck outfit/weapons etc, when I farm these bosses? Yes.

Is it worth farming them (other than pit lord) beyond doing gypsum rotations? Probably not.

Hence, is it worth buying the trophy mats if you have the gold? I think, yes.