We have never had Transcendance shoulders.
Ever.

Naxx progress sucks when your warrior and priest drops look like this:
3 warriors with 8/8 wrath, rest in 4-6
0 Priests in 8/8 transcendance, most in 4-7

The token system helps avoid your raid being shafted on gearcheck fightes because you dont have 4 warrirors in full wrath, let alone all on at the same time and all specced prot.

I'm fairly certain loot is determined when the mob is spawned. A few patches ago some humanoid mobs would actually be wearing weapons that they would about to drop. People were using this to get relatively easy epics since they could see the model of the weapon on the mob before they killed it. I'm not sure how long that actually lasted, I do remember seeing screenshots from people explaining how to 'farm' some world epic drops.

At the risk of getting my head axed in two I would like to ressurect this topic. I have only started trolling this place a week ago and am actually using the search function an awful lot to get input on various things.

Now I do admit I was never one to support the myth of good or bad seeds, as to me stuff was random enough. Though I can not help, but say there are certain patterns. Yes of course, maybe that's just my head messing. But if you lead raids day in, day out for 12 months and your guild has never gotten a bloody binding from Geddon. Or after killing Onyxia about 80 times you have gotten 40 Wrath helms, but only 3 Stormrage ones, it just seems a little too un-random (or plain too unlucky). Certain things do not drop when I am in a raid. Never once a Heavy Dark Iron ring. Other guilds disenchant them plentyful. Never once gotten Ashkandi, but 50% chance of Staff of Shadow Flame from Nef.

Of course does not help we really never had a Legendary drop (in 12 months of constantly clearing out MC every week, even by the time we moved onto AQ40 already I do find that bad luck). Then our MT said "I will do invites, I will do it on my seed". 6 Might pieces dropped, 2 other very decent tanking items, and a Legendary we had never seen. It's just weird isn't it?

So that being the reason I even used the search function in regards to seeds (they are still rnaomd, but why is it some little MC guild on my realm just had their fourth binding in 2 months when we had... 1 ever).

But then i read some very interesting posts here, think I can draw most of my own conclusions, as some very qualified statements were given.

One thing I am curious about however is the "loot is determined before drop, on rolled back servers bosses would drop the exact same again". Do trash mobs not class as the same? We only had a minor rollback a little while ago. Basically we were only at Luci, but then had to start all over again. On the way to Luci we cleared trash as per normal. After reset we did again, first mob dropped a BoE. If this has been set before we went in there... why did it not drop first time? Or are random trash mobs on other random loot patterns?

Sorry, hope noone will kill me for resurrecting or asking a blonde question, but I am quite curious and I don't think i will find a decent anywer anywhere else but here.

*runs for cover*

You probably would have been better off starting a new thread - this one is pretty toxic.

If there is a difference between boss mobs and trash mobs, consider the other fundamental difference between them: Trash mobs drop a random amount of items, sometimes (often with trash mobs) nothing at all. Bosses always generate the same number of items. Perhaps then, the loot id/seed/whatever is generated on spawning, but whether a creature actually generates the loot if there is a chance they won't at all is random.

I will bet WoW gold against anybody who will give me odds different from what they would be if drops were selected uniformly at random from the drop table.

That doesn't mean anything though.

The simple act of observing the mob's loot could generate the drops for it, rather than the drops being determined at spawn time. GMs can't tell whether the loot existed or not before they observed it. It's like Schroedinger's Epic Battlecat.

Or the mob might have been given a random number at spawn, pointing to mobs loot table.

Having prerolled random number on mob makes a lot more sense than doing some O(n^2) query in loot tables when mob dies. Why would you do 2 nested loops with rand() in the end of each? All you need is 1 random number and 1 table. It's not like you're wasting valuable resources or random numbers if you assing a random number to every mob that's spawned.

A random number that serves as a pointer to a loot table has one problem: You have to store every possible combination of loot, to which the number points, rather than just storing the items that can drop, their sub-tables, and their drop rates.

If a mob has 10 possible items he can drop, two at a time, 1 from the first 5 and 1 from the second five, then under your model, you'd need 25 records in the database to be able to just roll a random 1-25 and get a loot drop. This doesn't consider "trash" items, or world drops, either.

Where do you get O(n^2) for the loot drop calculations from?

Pre-calculating loot makes no sense. The only instance you'd ever want to pre-calculate it is in the case of a GM previewing loot, and then you just generate a random set, cache it, and return it when the mob is killed. Otherwise, you're wasting RAM. Why would the programmer, GM, or player care? There is no functional advantage to pre-loaded loot, and there are technical disadvantages.

"Eager loading" is only appropriate when you're guaranteed to use the data. In any given spawn, especially in instances, data may and often will go unused. That's wasted resources. Lazy loaded loot makes sense, both practically and philosohpically.

A year and a half ago, when Shattered Hand had horrific lag every raiding night, it was not uncommon for the instance server to crash (with players being stuck in the cast animation with access to /1 and having a nice chat for 30 minutes beforehand the final crash) and for a boss that was already killed to be respawned. This happened to my guild at least 4 times.

The loot was never the same. Ever. If people were getting the same loot, it was probably... random.

Damn, I just noticed I bumped a zombie topic. Oh well.

I am inclined to believe that boss drops are calculated at least slightly differently from trash loots simply because bosses do not respawn.

And who said anything about blizzard needing to make sense? That assumes too much; from observation, it would appear that their system works more like "make stuff on the user's end look good as fast as possible, fix the code later".

You also probably should've started a new thread; this one is filled with people screaming "RANDOM HURRR!" without stopping to think about other possibilities.

Yes, but that's exactly what it is also. Weird.

Random means random, not equal distribution. Say you have a 1% chance of getting an item from a boss. If you kill him 100 times does not mean you'll get one item.

Same with your example, you have a X/8 chance of getting "your" set item from a boss (X is how many set items they drop), and they're in no way connected.. eg, Just because Golemagg's first chest drop was an Arcanist, doesn't mean that the second is more or less likely to be arcanist. It's still 1/8 that it will be Arcanist, same as all other sets.


Generally, everyone who's trying to "prove" something by changing something arbitrary fails on one thing, they can't recreate the events and get the same "interesting" results the next week. It's just a freakish act of randomness, which is the core of randomness really, it's random and unpredictable.

Of course, all the times changing who's doing the invites/zones in first/picks their nose first/etc does not yield any significant change in loot seen are never mentioned. Just the very few "ohh we did this and suddenly everything changed!!!" are reported, hence people (who aren't geeks and know how randomness works) will see it as proof.