Even if we don’t get the drop rates for dungeon chests contents, I believe there is something 100% clear about dungeon chest gear drops from our experience: different gear pieces from the same set aren’t evenly distributed as drops. For example, farming season 2.0 dungeons clearly shows how the shoulders and shield drop at a much lower rate than the other pieces. As another example, farming Ruins of Moursaloth dungeon will give you more rings than any other gear piece.
This is not a belief or guess, it is based on multiple observations from multiple players with enough sample sizes to be 100% sure about it, so unless the devs publish their drop rates I won’t believe any answer on the lines of “the drop rates are evenly distributed for all pieces from each set, your observations are just a product of randomness and small sample sizes”.
So, is there any reason behind this? If the distribution of gear drops is even in caches, why is this not happening on dungeon chests? Is this something intended, another way of making farming more difficult and frustrating by making some gear more difficult to get? Or is there a bug that is causing this?
Great initiative posting about this issue, it’s really ruining my farming experience because it leaves a bad taste of the game-is-rigged-against-you whatever I’m trying to get.
The fallen set shoulders are like unicorns, same with the corrupted guard shield or the royal armor and pants and I’m sure folks using sets popular with other classes than mine will have the same feeling.
I can believe there’s an issue with the rings, if any set has rings in it you’ll probably get many more rings that any other slots, maybe there’s something wrong like the dices rolling twice because there’s 2 ring slots but what about the other pieces then?
As Higure mentioned it’s definitely not just a feeling or samples too small to take into consideration, actually I believe it’s been a problem since very early on in the game’s life but now that many of us are trying to get the same mythics since the gear rework it’s clearly highlighted the problem.
Hoping for a constructive discussion on this topic as anything RNG related has given us nothing but mostly vague answers in the past I think it’s time to srsly tackle the problem because the amount of frustration it provokes has reached sky-high levels in the community.
Certainly my feeling too. I end up with more rings than anything else. There are 2 slots but in most cases you use rings from different sets for the set bonuses, so no need to give more ring drops than other pieces.
Here you have an example from my recent farming of Ruins of Morsauloth:
From the last 68 drops, 29 have been rings and 15 swords, these 2 gear types making nearly 2/3s of the drops in a pool of 6 different types. If there was an even distribution we should expect around 11-12 drops of each, but as we can see this isn’t even near with rings droping nearly 3 times more than that. Even if the sample size is not too big, the deviation from the expected result is too high to be a product of chance.
While the the drop rate for “gear” is spread evenly (from what I have been told) between armor, accessories, weapons/shield - because those categories have, as shown above, subcategories with gear having the most (helm, boots, armor, pants) it appears skewed.
As a practical example, take the Dragonguard set: it contains 1x Weapon, 4x Armor pieces, and 1x Accessory.
While Armor & Accessories may have an equal chance to drop, the armor pool is further diluted because there are 4 possible armor pieces vs only 1 possible accessory.
So using Higures table above as another example, we look at it as
Ring - 29
Weapon/Shield - 15
Armor - 24
And not broken down into the Armor subcategories further.
Thanks for the explanation. It more or less explains why we get such numbers, although the numbers don’t match very well to either a 1:1:1 or 6:4:2 distribution. However, to be honest it doesn’t make much sense. Why not do it as with seasonal caches? In seasonal caches the drop rates are adjusted so that every piece has the same %. For example
In season 1.1 ultimate cache there is a 21.59% drop rate for rare armor pieces, which having 5 of them means 4.32% per piece, and then a 4.32% drop rate for rare weapon.
In season 1.2 ultimate cache there is a 12.95% drop rate for rare armor pieces (3x 4.32% pieces), 8.64% for rare accessories (2x 4.32%) and 4.32% for rare weapon.
I believe such a drop rate distribution would be much more appreciated by players. Why not use it? Is there any reason behind keeping the current dungeon drop rate distribution as it is, or is it just that the team initially designed it that way and never saw the need to change it? Because if it is the second, this may be the time to think about updating it to match the seasonal caches. Getting a 6 armor : 4 accessory : 2 weapon/shield distribution may have sense in skirmish and “blank” chests. But dungeon chests really need even distribution of gear drops now that the 3.0 gear rework has made chests much more essential.
I want to raise this topic again, because even if its main focus (slots having wildy different drop rates) was addressed, I am still not convinced about the whole slot drop distribution.
This time I have taken a bigger sample to minimize possible errors, and I have gotten the following for the drop distribution of gear in Dragonguard Depths:
A loadout has 6 armor pieces, 4 accessory pieces, 1 weapon and 1 shield. Why do we get more accessories than anything else? As said in the original post, there has been plenty of observation on this being the case (for example, Royal ring), so with together with the higher sample size I am pretty sure this is a thing. Maybe going for a distribution of 6 : 4 : 2 (armor : accessory : weapon + shield) wouldn’t be too good since it would be difficult to get weapons and shields. But at least if you are using a 4 : 3 : 3 distribution it should be armor the one getting the most, not accessories.
The current way of gear drop distribution is a nightmare for players trying to get legendary or mythic drops from chests. I have been farming Dragonguard Depths for a long time and already lost the count of mythic swords and belts I have gotten, but not a single armor or gloves yet. It is true that for the higher rarities the drop rate is so low that chance has a lot to do, but that also means that a bad drop distribution will affect it more. If it is already difficult to get any of the individual armor pieces due to the way each armor piece takes an even odd within the armor drop rate; if we add that armors have lower drop chance than accessories… The result is that farming for specific pieces becomes truly frustrating unless it is just the one that gets benefitted from the nonsensical drop chances.
Therefore, I want to suggest again that you change chest gear drop distribution to the way seasonal caches work: each of the six pieces having the same chance to drop (1/6th of the chance for gear to drop). That way we avoid silly scenarios like this in which the only accessory slot drops a lot but getting a single specific armor piece is a nightmare. I don’t understand much about game design, but it shouldn’t be so difficult to apply (ultimate caches already do it) and it doesn’t affect anything else (since the overal drop chance for gear is kept the same). But for us it would be a huge improvement.
And if by any reason (that I hope it doesn’t include intentionally making things harder for us) the previous petition isn’t possible, what about at least going for a 1 : 1 : 1 or even better 4 : 3 : 3 distribution on armor : accessory : weapon/shield?
