Kapuras

In the last couple of days, I was thinking about

„Why is the loot so often identical?“
„How work the loot table?


So in the beginning, I was looking on our own DKP System and compare the loots from identical Bosses. I came to the conclusion: “Whenever Item X drops, Item Y won’t drop!”


What does that mean?

For instance, let us take Rage Winterchill. As everybody know, his loot table contains 12 Items, namely

Blessed Adamantite Bracers, Blood-stained Pauldrons, Bracers of the Pathfinder, Deadly Cuffs, Furious Shackles, Tracker's Blade, Bracers of Martyrdom, Chronicle of Dark Secrets, Cuffs of Devastation, Howling Wind Bracers, Rejuvenating Bracers, Stillwater Boots


I was creating two Item pools, based on our previous Rage Winterchill loots:


Pool A: Blessed Adamantite Bracers, Blood-stained Pauldrons, Bracers of the Pathfinder, Deadly Cuffs, Furious Shackles, Tracker's Blade

Pool B: Bracers of Martyrdom, Chronicle of Dark Secrets, Cuffs of Devastation, Howling Wind Bracers, Rejuvenating Bracers, Stillwater Boots


As we knew, Rage Winterchill will drop two Items.

My thesis is: “One Item from Pool A and the other from Pool B will drop!”


That means, you can killing Rage Winterchill over million times, but you will never see on a kill, that two Items from the same pool will drop!

For example: Blessed Adamantite Bracers and Blood-stained Pauldrons. Both will never drop on a Rage Winterchill Kill.

So I checked my thesis with our own previous Rage Winterchill loots and they corespond to a hundred per cent. A comparison with my thesis and the DKP System from well known Raids (like Nihilum, Last Resort, Forte etc.) shows a match of hundred per cent.

After that, I created these Item pools for every Black Temple and Hyjal Summit Boss and compared them with our DKP System and with the Drops from the same well known raids, . The result was no deviation from my thesis.

I hope i’m getting feedback, which make my thesis weatherproof or not!



Following are the item pools for each Black Temple & Hyjal Summit Boss


PS: I hope you overlook my bad english, because learning english in school is a long time ago.

 

• Playered

This was proven pre-TBC and was also done for Kara and Gruuls I think (on these boards), so yes thats pretty much how it works, nice to see a list for the MH & BT bosses, they dont conflict with any memories I have from kills.

edit: on Gurtogg you have Girdle of Mighty Resolve up twice, one in each pool, intentional?

 

Baconslicer

The theory of different pools is spot on, I think. I remember seeing a list like this for Karazhan some months ago. Nice to see one for tier 6 content though.

 

Kapuras

Yes I am. according to our own Kills & Loots and comparing with Kills from well known raids.

 

Nurru

There was a big thread about this Pre-BC that listed what items were on what pool if I recall.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Kapuras

Thanks, good to know. I don't search the whole "Public Discussion Archives". So i will take a deeper look into the archive.

 

• Navaash

I'm interested in how the pools work now with the non-token T5 bosses with the 3-per change.

 

◊ Praetorian

Yep, not groundbreaking but it's still interesting information -- thanks for putting this together.

 

PSGarak

Minor revision to how you state it:
This implies that certain sets of tokens are mutually exclusive. All three tokens are in one pool, from which two are taken, which is why you still have duplicate tokens, but not duplicates of any other loot. So it would look something like (for illidan):

 

Baconslicer

Not necessarily. It's possible for the same item to be in multiple pools. This would look like:

Pool A: [Chestguard of the Forgotten Protector][Chestguard of the Forgotten Conqueror][Chestguard of the Forgotten Vanquisher]
Pool B: [Chestguard of the Forgotten Protector][Chestguard of the Forgotten Conqueror][Chestguard of the Forgotten Vanquisher]
Pool C: Cursed Vision of Sargeras, Black Bow of the Betrayer, Bulwark of Azzinoth, Faceplate of the Impenetrable, Shard of Azzinoth, Stormrage Signet Ring
Pool D: Cowl of the Illidari High Lord, Crystal Spire of Karabor, Memento of Tyrande, Shroud of the Higborne, The Skull of Gul'dan, Zhar'doom, Greatstaff of the Devourer
Pool E: Warglaive of Azzinoth (MH), Warglaive of Azzinoth (OH), nothing

 

• Icetro

Yeah, I'll buy that explanation.

 

UnholY_Prince

The post is ancient, can be found here. Im going to copy and paste the loot tables of the Pre-Hyjal bosses for reference. Please note I take NO credit for this information, simply am reposting it.

I'd also be interested to see how the new 3 drops per non-tier boss works, I imagine it takes 1 drop from A, 1 drop from B, and 1 drop from either A or B though.

 

epiphenom

I did this analysis for myself a little while ago, and some of my results don't agree with yours.

For Naj'entus I found that Boots of Oceanic Fury fell into pool B, making his loot split 6/8 instead of 7/7. Akama also seems to split 6/8, with Flashfire Girdle falling into your pool A.

 

Opioid

Has it ever been demonstrated past conjecture when drops are determined? (on zone in, at the time of kill, or whatever)

 

Ribeye

I'm sure i'm completely wrong, but it would seem dangerous for the loot to be decided and loaded in before a boss is actually killed. I seem to remember talk of a program in Everquest that would tell you what every mob in an area was loaded with.

 

Howard Roark

On two occasions we've only gotten 1 loot from Lurker.

 

Junpei

The old list is inaccurate in places with the loot change in SSC/TK

A quick browse around for Solarian (including our own data for tonight)

Table A - Star-Soul Breeches, Worldstorm Gauntlets, Star-Strider Boots, Girdle of the Righteous Path, Vambraces of Ending
Table B - Ethereum Life-Staff, Wand of the Forgotten Star, Trousers of the Astromancer, Heartrazor
Table C - Solarian's Sapphire, Boots of the Resilient, Void Star Talisman, Greaves of the Bloodwarder

Atm this is more then likely completely inaccurate, as the sample was quite small (11 guild killlists). Our loot tonight was Girdle of the Righteous Path, Wand of the Forgotten Star, Solarian's Sapphire. Either way, the old lists would need to be reworked for SSC/TK in regards to the 3 drop change

 

◊ Penguin

I recall hearing the story of a GM that was fired for revealing the loot drops to a BWL raid before they got to the boss.

However, it was 2nd hand and quite a while ago.

 

• Bazazu

I realize this is straying from the topic a bit, and of course, it's been discounted a million times, but I'm still convinced that "seeding" is 100% legit and completely broken.

Typically for our raids I start invites. Going back to when we started Karazhan, SSC/TK, and even T6 content, we noticed *insanely* obviously streaks in loot. Basically anytime I started raid invites, we would see the same 4 items per boss. it was like clockwork. When another officer would do invites (Trouble, some of you probably know him on these boards) we would see a distinct shift in loot. Not much, but some.

So about a month ago we changed things up. For 3 weeks, we ran with completely different raid leaders. Grabbed a random paladin to "seed", had our hunter officer seed, and there was a 3rd who I forget now, probably one of our other shadow priests.

The difference? Suddenly after months of seeing the same shit, we started seeing loot tables that were complete flips.

Examples include... Seeing 80% defender token drops for the first 3-4 months of farming ssc/tk. Soon as we switched raid leaders, our mages were praising jebus for finally getting their tokens.

Azgalor dropped the exactly same loot forever. Swapped raid leaders, got a ton of new loot.

And to reinforce this, for the past 2-3 weeks I've been starting raids again and it went right back into our old loot tables that we used to see 2-3 months ago.


So I guess to wrap this up, yes, we see the same thing with items holding a specific loot slot in the table. But in addition to that, I'm pretty pissed off that the loot system is so fucked up that you end up getting the same shit all the time because they can't figure out a creative way to distribute loot evenly.



The fact that some guilds are working on their *third set* of warglaives, and guilds such as ours, EJ(at least, this is what I've heard), and many others have yet to see a single legendary, is complete bullshit.

 

Loomax

Its hard to say how it works in instances, so i wont try to reflect from the following statement to how it works there.
But there are mobs in Blasted Lands called Shadowsworn Adpet's (Shadowsworn Adept - NPCs - World of Warcraft). They usually run around with a staff in their hands, as you can see on the screenshot of the wowhead link. Now if these mobs will drop any weapon, they will have it equipped already and you can see it in their hands instead of the staff they normally wield. This would lead to believe that, atleast outdoors, mobs will have their loot set once they spawn.

Reclaimer: I havent been to Blasted Lands since pre-TBC so it might have changed, but i wouldnt guess so.

 

Bliss

Our last 2 kills were:
Wand of the Forgotten Star, Heartrazor and Star-Strider Boots
Greaves of the Bloodwarder, Ethereum Life-Staff and Trousers of the Astromancer

So something in your table B is off.

 

PSGarak

Bacon: yes, a completely equivalent way of looking at it, and probably more in line with what's going on under the hood.

Opioid: One story comes to mind, from way the hell back in the day (when MC was cutting-edge), was when some raid's boss got tagged by the warrior's shield spike and registered as tagged to about half the raid. The boss was unlootable when killed. They contacted a GM and explained their situation; the GM told them what dropped and let them decide who was supposed to get it.
The boss dropped some vendor trash and maybe a lava core.
It was well-known at that point that there was some way in which bosses would know whether not to drop pally loot, or not to drop shammy loot. This incident led to the conclusion that mob drops are determined no earlier than when the mob is tapped. The spike is neither ally nor horde, so it failed to load either drop table and just had the default trash drops.

In order to make this jive with the above Table A/B/C stuff above, assume that there are five tables:
Aa: Alliance A
Ah: Horde B
Ba: Alliance B
Bh: Horde B
T: Vendor Trash
Upon tap, or upon death, it looks at who has the tap. In any case, drop T. If alliance, drop Aa and Ba. If horde, drop Ah and Bh.

Now, this was pre-TBC, and the removal of faction-specific classes may have obviated the need for the coding that led to this scenario. It is entirely up in the air if blizzard would have gutten unnecessary code or left it in and largely nonfuctional.

My assumption is that mobs determine drops upon death, depending on who currently has the tap. This is my only explanation for the current group-loot mechanics, both in and out of instances; the main example is group-loot this-item-starts-a-quest items, which drop for all people present that do not have the quest, but not for people out of range or who do not have the quest available. The fact that the item did not drop, and is not simply invisible, is clearly detectable on any skinnable mob.

 

Glaurong

Why would they go through the extra effort of figuring out some convoluted system that would obviously produce badly distributed loot? The leader of a raid is probably going to be the same from week to week, anyone could see that. I really don't think there is anything more complicated to it than a random number (or several) between X and Y being generated, these index into loot tables. Presto, loot.

And really, if no one, across the millions of people that play wow saw streaks, it wouldn't be random, it would be evenly distributed. There are all sorts of reasons why you remember streaks and why your brain seeks out patterns. This is just another one.

Log Parser for BM Hunters (Right click, save as) - Updated 10/11/2007

 

Skulli

Well your example with rage isnt right atleast.
We got Chronicle of Dark Secrets, Cuffs of Devastation at the same time once.

Vut well that might explains why we never got cloth healing bracers from him in 18 kills.
Our main combo is deadly cuffs/reju bracers.

 

Mideci

Random numbers (even nearly random ones) are random.

There is absolutely positively nothing to this raid-leader seed theory, never was and never will be. This has been proved by reasonable people that understand that in some guilds the exact same raid leader with the same raid start times, blah blah has no streaky loot at all.

In the tons and scads of wow raids out there, some guilds will have streaks of loot. And sometimes that loot will suck.

And that;'s too bad.