Erm, you might want to spend a bit time to research cthat. While true what you say for a single instance, you can calculate the probability of n-iterations of a 5% chance to happen (or not happen). For example, if you have a 0.95 (95%) chance of not getting a warglaive, then 15 times not getting a warglaive is 0.95^15 = 0.4633 = 46.33% so quite probable. That is what Antiarc wrote.

The assumption is 5% and to my knowledge it never happened that MH and OH dropped concurrently.

Care to explain ? It's an event with a base probability of 5% (assumed) each week/iteration. It's independent of the former week so one can easily do calculations of n-runs. I'm pretty sure Antiarc got it basically right, even though I didn't go and calculated it myself to verify.

Sorry about the math necromancy but I was just checking the numbers since it was mentioned a couple posts ago today. Assuming that the drop of a warglaive is a 5% chance independent event and 15 Illidan kills, I make it to be:

0 glaives - 46.33%
1 glaive - 36.58%
2 glaives - 13.48%
3 glaives - 3.07%
4 glaives - 0.49%
5 glaives - 0.056%
6 glaives - 0.0049%

I bring this up is because it's no longer "perfectly expected" that one of 102 guilds killing Illidan would get 6 warglaives in 15 kills. If you add up my numbers (assuming they're right!), you'll find that the chances of a guild getting even 4 or more warglaives in 15 kills is about 0.54%. The calculation I used (where X is the number of glaives):



If you add up Antiarc's numbers and include the 0-warglaive-drop situation (46.33%, confirmed by Cadfael's post immediately above), you end up significantly over 100%. It looks like the calculation that Antiarc did was P(X) = 0.46 ^ X which I don't think is correct.

Your calculation is correct.

So far, in 5 kills of Illidan (Most recent last night), we have had 3 Glaives. Two Main-hands, and 1 Off-hand.

Setting aside the discussion about the RNG, we can collect all the empirical data we want, but it's not going to help us in getting warglaives. Some guilds get 5 in 10 kills, others get none in 40 kills. Some guilds are just lucky, others are unlucky.

Thing is, while killing Illidan 40 times is an awful lot, it's still a ridiculously small sample size in the context of statistics. It's actually interesting to run a hypothesis test against a 2,5% criterion (since we're testing one-sided here; I don't think anyone is complaining about getting TOO MANY glaives).

If we assume the odds of getting either of the warglaives are indeed 5%, one would need to get no warglaives in 72 (SEVENTY-TWO) consecutive kills to be running outside of conventional probabilities. 72 kills is well over a year of killing Illidan weekly and I dont think any guild actually has that many kills under their belt.

Setting the border of "improbable unluckiness" at 1% would increase this number to 90 by the way.

So, statistically speaking, nobody can complain about being unlucky when they're not getting glaives. It may be annoying, sure, but all of this is happening within conventional statistical boundaries.

Interestingly enough, running the test on the other side of the spectrum, shows that getting more than 9 glaives in the same 72 kills is equally unlikely as getting none at all. Now I don't think any guild actually has 10+ glaives, but it'd be interesting to see some high killcount/warglaive ratio's to check if the actual droprate is 5% :-)

We just had our third Illidan kill last night, and our first warglaive. Our server has seen several warglaives drop over the last couple weeks, despite the fact that there's only 4 guilds that have cleared BT. I know that this typically isn't the place for speculation, but is it possible that the glaives had their droprate buffed in 2.4?

Just had another MH on our 4th kill, so pretty much I'm gonna have to go with

Thank you for your very clever and original response. All that I'm saying is that, from my experience and people that I've talked to, there has been an unusually high number of Warglaives dropping over the last few weeks, across multiple guilds, on multiple servers. Could it just be a coincidence? Certainly. But it's absolutely possible that the droprate was changed in the last patch as well. Blizzard's done it before. Especially with all of the other changes made to allow as many players to experience as much content as possible before the next expansion, it wouldn't surprise me that they would do such a thing. Unless you have actual, physical proof that no such change occurred, please keep your trolling comments to yourself.

Actually, the onus is on you to provide proof that the drop-rate of the glaives has been changed. Just saying "multiple guilds, on multiple servers" have seen them since the patch is no proof at all. Unless you can get a comprehensive set of data detailing drop rates pre- and post-patch, or a blue post concerning the drop-rate, than from my perspective you're the one trolling the thread with non-facts and assumptions about drop-rates.

How many guilds are you talking about here? 10? 20? 50? Across a handful of servers? Between US and EU servers there are over 2500 guilds that have killed Illidan. Even if you got statistics from each guild in the world on how many Warglaives they have gotten since 2.4, it would still be too small of a sample size to determine if the drop rate has been increased. Even with all the kills to date we can't say for 100% certainty that the drop rate is 5%.

There was a period of 3 weeks on Blackrock, where if you took the total Illidan kills and the number of Warglaives that dropped and determined the drop rate, it was something like 16%. Over the next 6 weeks it was less then 1%. I assure you there was no change in drop rate during those 9 weeks. It's called random loot.

You ask for proof that no such changed occured and call someone a troll, while posting that a change has occured and offer no proof yourself?

I simply asked a question based on recent trends that I have observed. I made no claim that this was absolute fact. You however, retorted with absolute certainty that this could never be the case. I apologize if, in a thread based on pure speculation and trying to "beat" the RNG system, that you felt like my post had no place here.

It's easy to see only the good and not the bad. While yes, I'm sure lots of guilds have seen what is, to them, an unusually high number of warglaive drops. But there are numerous numerous guilds killing Illidan every week, and many of those guilds have seen 0 warglaive drops over the past few weeks. But you dont' hear about those because it's business as usual for those guilds. It's like this every patch, and it's just a placebo effect. People think "ohh a patch, wonder if drop rates got buffed". They get a drop and this lends more credibility to their thought, so they start to believe it. Then they hear stories from other people also suffering from this placebo effect, and it compounds from there.

In any case, I do believe this is just a coincidence.

I'm postive even outdoor mobs aren't created until somone is near them. There have been numerous times when I land in an area and I'll see 6 mobs all "spawn" at the exact same point and walk out from that point in a random direction.

This has been noted many times, and even confirmed by a CM, if I recall correctly. It's a very simple tactic to save on server resources. For instance, how many people do you think hang out where Kazzak used to be (where Kruul is now)? Given how many mobs are there, you can easily see how much is saved if they're never spawned.

In reference to this particular example, this probably means many servers never even spawn the Kruul world boss in a given reset...

[E] Question needs question mark.

[E2] Perhaps now would be an opportune time to test a spinoff of this experiment: http://elitistjerks.com/f33/t18193-fishy_experiment/

Hm, I can't really follow that equation, my results are different using it.

0 Warglaives:
2 Warglaives:
The (0.05)^(15-X) part seems to be wrong, or am I doing something wrong myself?

In this equation, X is the number of time without warglaives (95% each time) and 15-X the number of time with warglaive. So in fact you computed the 15 warglaives out of 15 kills probability (and 13 out of 15).

I would like hear an explanation how is this even possible - We have killed Illidan three times, and we got OH warglaive from the second and third kill... Is it just GOD DAMN luck or is it really buffed?

Loot is random. It seems pretty silly to ask "how is this even possible" when nothing even seemingly "impossible" has happened at all.

Here's a quick rundown of how this is possible.

First kill - a 20 sided die is rolled. 18 corresponds to Warglaive. You rolled a 17, no drop
Second kill - a 20 sided die is rolled. 18 corresponds to Warglaive. You rolled an 18, drop
Third kill - a 20 sided die is rolled. 18 corresponds to Warglaive. You rolled an 18, drop

Odds of it happening are, FYI, 0,95*0,05*0,05 = 0,0023 which is about 0,23%.

That is if we assume the OH glaive has a 5% chance of dropping of course. It may seem awefully low but on average the same happens to 1 in every 421 guilds. So it's not that much luck.

As I posted before, come back with anomalies when your sample size is 70-80 kills before jumping on conclusions.

So, I'm actually very curious about this. One guild on my server, out of 5 or 6 Illidan kills, has gotten 2 MH Glaives, and 1 OH, and there was speculation that they were toying with the timestamp, or whatever it is that could possibly affect this, to give themselves an increased Glaive drop rate. The most likely thing to me would be that since blues have said that loot is generated on instance/boss spawn, so, maybe the loot IDs themselves are generated for a particular boss spawn, and each time the boss despawns/respawns those loot IDs would either stick with the boss because of raid ID, or for whatever reason, or change when the new boss itself is spawned. Also, excuse me for being a noob, but how do you get the combat log to show the GUID, I think it was, of a mob. Because if this has any validity, testing could at least be done to see the GUID for a certain Illidan mob, and seeing if you could generate the same loot several weeks in a row by despawning/wiping on Illidan until you get the same GUID (and hopefully this would eventually work on Glaives, but you'd have to see a Glaive GUID first, if it works), and can accurately tell that the GUID is related to what he drops that week. Too bad you can only kill Illidan once a week ><

First of all, trash respawns in instances all the time. And when you kill the same trash over and over again after respawns, different stuff drops. Secondly, certain bosses you can kill twice in the same week. It was already mentioned in this thread how you can kill Shade of Aran twice in the same week, although the bug may have been fixed. In any case, when it happens, the same loot was not dropped both times. Thirdly, GUID stands for "globally unique identifier". It is statistically impossible that the same GUID will ever be generated twice not only across two weeks, but across all space and time, ever.

The guild wasn't toying with anything. They got lucky. If it's impossible to get 3 warglaive drops out of 6 illidan kills then it's CERTAINLY impossible to get an Ashes of Al'ar drop from Kael'thas. Yet strangely, people have gotten the drop, and Kael is hardly ever even killed.