This has become a bit of a running gag between myself and Lyranica over the course of this week. As players need color coordinated sets of gear now, I’ve spent almost the entirety of week farming the first dungeon, Dragonguard Depths, in search of a new set of green Guard’s Gloves.
What I haven’t found in hundreds of runs in the dungeon (almost have the 500 run achievement! ) is any colored Guard’s Gloves.
What I have found is dozens upon dozens of Guard Belts. They rain like candy. So much so, I could have easily fashioned multiple complete outfits for Lulu in FF X by now.
Tonight, though, has really just been absurd. I had the Mother-of-all-Chest pulls on my last run for the night, as pictured below.
That’s right. I pulled FOUR Guard’s Belts from a single treasure chest. Pulling 1 or 2 in many Iron or higher treasure chests was already eyerolling. But, four in a single chest? That’s a bit beyond being “cursed” with bad RNG luck and into suspicion that something isn’t right with this dungeon’s loot table.
This brings back memories! I spent about a month farming for bone rings and just got bone masks. Tons of bone masks. Mask after mask after mask. It was both hilarious and infuriating.
I’ve made sure with the Team the Guard’s Gloves are in the drop tables and set to the correct drop rate. However, the chests roll to see if an accessory or armor piece will drop and there is only one accessory in the Guard’s set and that is the belt which is why you’re finding so many.
Just a disclaimer: This is how the chests currently check which loot you will receive, however, it is possible the way the chests work can change in future. We’re still in Early Access so very little regarding drop chances and balancing is set in stone and everything regarding balance is still subject to change.
Number of Rare (3-star) Guard Gloves of any color obtained: Still on zero
I have obtained a small number of 1 and 2 star gloves, however. Holding onto 6 copies of 2-star gloves in the event that Rare upgrade relics someday are not rarer than Legendary upgrade relics to gamble on some color dice rolls
Thinking on this line of logic and my observations over the multiple hundreds of chests that have been opened that could have qualified to drop the gloves (Iron and higher), I have a deep suspicion regarding loot rolling behavior being the culprit here.
The issue, I believe, is the compounding effect of rolling on multiple sub-tables.
For example, for the exact item I am looking for from this dungeon, the loot logic probably looks like this:
Roll on base loot table for dungeon to determine what type of loot will drop.
If Gear is rolled, roll on the the Dungeon Gear sub-table to determine which piece of Gear will drop.
If Gloves (or any Gear for that matter) are rolled, then roll on the Rarity sub-table to determine the rarity level of the Gloves (or other Gear piece) that will be awarded.
If the Rarity level of the Gear rolled is at least 3 (Rare), roll on the Element Color sub-table to determine which element color will be assigned to the Gear piece.
Award the combined result to the Player.
So, to get the desired piece I want, all four rolls in order have to go exactly a very specific way.
Throwing some math on this highlights the potential issue here.
Purely for illustrative very over-simplistic purposes, I’ve going to assume the following:
There is a 10% chance per loot roll that a piece of Gear will be rolled (this is probably generously high)
There are three pieces of Gear in the set offered in the dungeon (Armor, Pauldron, Gloves), with equal chances of being rolled (33%).
When gear is rolled, there is a 10% chance that the Gear will be rolled at Rare of higher Rarity.
All five colors are equally distributed when rolled (20%).
So, the odds of me rolling a Green Rare Guard’s Gloves are:
1 in [1 / (0.1 * 0.33 * 0.1 * 0.2)]
= 1 in [1 / 0.00066]
= 1 in 1515.15
That’s worse odds than attempting to pull a Mythic with a single key in GoW, and keys are significantly rarer here in PQ3.
Although greatly oversimplified and surely off-base by some degree, that would perhaps explain why I never succeeded on a the third roll down the loot table through all of my runs. Very unlucky? Perhaps; it’s always a possibility. Three loot table multiplications, however, might make such odds in 500 runs actually just normal below average luck given the very low multiplicative odds of the desired result I want.
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So… what, then?
The “low-hanging fruit” solution would be to un-nest the tables and just have one giant loot table for each dungeon. However, that’s not an elegant solution, because for every new potential thing that has to be added to the game, the loot tables for the dungeons have to be recalculated and wasn’t that kind of bloat the reason cited why the Flux system from 0.34 was scrapped?
Well then, what about potentially biasing loot rolls in dungeons towards the character class being played? That doesn’t address the multiplicative loot table rolling issue at all, plus it requires making a copy of the loot table for every dungeon for every current (and future)class which means bloat as well. That’s very probably a nope, as well.
Ok, well, if the player’s goal is simply to obtain a specific colored piece of gear from a Dungeon, should “rolling” for Element Colors via increased availability Rare Relics be an encouraged thing to work around this issue and possibly be used to encourage/train newer accounts about obtaining color coordinated Gear and using Relics for upgrades (as Rare is the first Rarity that requires Relics and level 15 is still in the very early stages of the game)? Maybe? Maybe not?
From the stream with Sirrian, there the “chewing the fat” possibility of a future follower that could assign desired colors to a piece of uncolored gear? No idea if that is still even a desired thing by the dev team.
I can’t think of any other way to workaround the situation, at least with the publicly known constraints of how the game currently operates.
What if upgrading an item to rare provided the choice of element color - where as random drops were, well, random
Give’s players the incentive to upgrade items, rather than just adding in randomness to crafting
) is any colored Guard’s Gloves.
