TDS Ultra rares in herocis is a myth (at least in this thulia HA)

I've killed 50k mobs in Plane of war, and got multiple ultra rare drops. Ac aug, (tho I already had the Grandmaster Kill drop) and the Circle of Life droppable ring.

I also have well WELL over 50k kills in Combine Dredge, and have 1 rare item from that place as well. The very ultra rare tank shield.

I know they drop in TDS, but I also know just how rare they are, Combined to the very Ultra rare items in Plane of War, For me .. at least personally I think it was easily twice as many kills as in plane of war, before I seen any TDS ultra rare drop..

Just my two CP's..

In which combine dredge Heroic Adventure did you get that drop Whulfgar? And when did it happen?

We know they drop in the static TDS zones.

We want a dev to confirm that they DO NOT drop in any of the TDS heroics (cause they don't)

I'm trying to collect as much data as possible from people who claim they have looted a ultra rare item in a HEROIC ADVENTURE in TDS so that whoever takes on the task of checking the database has some stuff to query on.

When I read DBCooper's first response, I thought what he wrote was not applicable. After re-reading what he quoted, I now see that he's correct. There is an important distinction in what we are considering. If I were told that mobs had a 1/5000 (0.0002) of dropping an item and that the results are independent, I could ask the following question: What is the probability that I can go kill 50,000 mobs and not see at least one drop? The answer is about 0.000045, not very likely.

However, if I now go kill 50,000 mobs and don't see a drop, I might ask the following question: What is the probability that I killed 50,000 mobs and didn't see at least one drop? The answer is 1. After I've completed the experiment, the answer can only be 1 or 0. Either I saw at least one drop or I didn't. Of course I could now perform a hypothesis test to say with some amount of certainty whether the drop rate is worse than 1/5000. I'd have to look back in my statistics notes to remember exactly how to do that, though.

To expand a little on what DBCooper was saying, let's now imagine that I'm going to go out and kill 100,000 mobs. Before I start killing, (and with a drop rate of 1/5000), I would expect that the probability I wouldn't see at least one drop is 0.000000002, extremely unlikely. But if I then kill 50,000 mobs and don't see a drop, the probability that I wouldn't see a drop in the next 50,000 mobs is back to 0.000045.

There is a big caveat with all of this, though. We are assuming that all mobs in the HA are statistically independent and that they all have the same probability of dropping a rare item. If these assumptions are woefully incorrect, then the probabilities we've calculated are meaningless. I can think of a few ways to break these assumptions. For the sake of argument, let's say that a given HA can indeed drop a rare item. But the rare only has the possibility to spawn on certain npcs. Let's make it even worse by saying it can only spawn on npcs that do not need to be killed to complete the HA and that someone only kills the npcs required to complete the HA. It wouldn't matter how many times that person completed the HA; they would never see a rare item drop. This is a worst-case scenario.

TLDR;
There is a difference in asking about probabilities before you kill the mobs and after you kill the mobs. Before we can calculate probabilities, we need to know something about the model (e.g. are the mobs statistically independent? Do all the npcs in a given HA have the same probability of dropping a rare?). Unfortunately, only someone with access to the code can tell us what is supposed to be going on.

To the OP, you probably could say something about rare's not being able to drop in that specific HA if you kill every mob. There are ways this could still fail. Since it may be impossible for a rare to drop in that HA, it might not be worth your time to continue killing in it. Hopefully someone with access to the correct code and data will be able to answer your question.

It was in fact Static, I have not done many of the TDS adventures outside of achievements.

Gialana for the sake of this argument we assume they're suppose to drop off every NPC since we've been told they drop in heroics not they drop off certain mobs in heroics. Also they're expansion drops so every mob would have the same drop rate for these unless they go in and alter it on a mob by mob basis.

50,000 is not the real number for how many kills people in this very thread have without seeing a drop. In 9 months I've killed over 50k myself in them.

Forget the math people if these were in fact dropping at a 1/5000 rate more people would be in this thread saying they have seen them drop. If you don't believe me ask in your guild hey anyone seen one drop in a heroic ask in general ask in serverwide channels.

NM

Reluctant to go back into statistics again, but to keep it on point. When looking at statistics, you have to talk about things being within confidence intervals. It doesn't matter if the events are dependent or if some mobs have different probabilities; if the intention was for all of those factors to come together to make a probability of 1/5000, he has a statistically significant data set to say that the intention is not being met (I'm not going to look through confidence tables for an exact figure... resist!).

It could be that he's the one person out of 22,222 people that is prophesied to lose on 50,000 attempts; we've provided him the (putative) maths to establish that fact. Even so, I think he has a decent case that this needs to be looked at because it's no fun at all. Is it just this instance? It might not be. But probability aside, why on Earth would he be motivated to try in a different zone after that madness?

And yeah, I probably picked the wrong root of the statistical problems to quote, I apologise. For some reason I thought it would be a nice mental distraction from work while my PC was locked up running models. How could I have been so stupid?

Sheesh, how are you guys killing 50k mobs especially with bloated TDS mob hp? I can barely do a single TDS HA or some of their progression quests before my fingers hurt. That's dedication to kill that many

When I did start out doing this HA I did it for pieces of eight but after accumulating about 15k or so on each char I just stopped completing it and just killed mobs for the exp.

Now I just quit it when most of the mobs are dead, sure I miss a few in the very back of the pyramid now and then, but for the most part I kill most of the mobs in the zone before I quit out and grab a new one.

So yeah I don't kill "Every" mob in there but enough of them to expect a drop... Is it possible that ultra rare only drops from taell ews behind the pyramid? I guess but it's unlikely...

I know it doesn't help, but I have seen 3 rare drops in plane of war. I have seen 2 rare drops in cotf. I have seen 2 rare drops in Tds. Powar drops were : off a boar in the field, off a goblin in the field and off a gargoyle in the mines. For cotf, 1 was off a ph for Guard Donlan and the other was in an heroic adventure. Its been a while, I don't remember which one or mob. For Tds, a belt off a mob in Combine Dredge while farming Frachessa for the augment and a mask while farming Bonemaw in Arx. I didn't count mobs and wont even approximate. In TDS, I did do a lot of HA's, got spells to drop in some HA's but never a rare.

Got my 3rd buccaneer drop in static degmar last night. I've asked in guild chat and server chat if anyone has ever seen one drop in a TDS HA/Mission. Someone will usually chime in, linking their whatever. I'll ask "Which HA did you get that from?" and they'll say oops, nvm, was from the static zone. /sigh.

So yeah, I'd gamble that whatever dev said they drop in heroics didn't actually look at the DB to confirm. By this point in time, I doubt they even care enough to add them.

To put that in perspective, I've cleared far more mobs in TDS HAs (primarily dredge/arx, though some on dino island), and have never seen nor heard of a drop in an HA in all that time. I have personally, however, looted 3 in static zones, and heard countless others testify to their drops in static zones. Not a single person saying they looted theirs in an HA. It's safe to say they do *not* drop in HAs.

I'm with you devil. When I camp gear for an alt ill kill a lot of mobs before i get it all and I've seen like 4 rares from static zones and none from a heroic even though I've killed easily 10 times as many mobs in them.

The data looks okay. The TDS global rare drop table is configured for drops to show in Thuliasaur heroic adventures and the NPCs that spawn in the HA have global loot drops enabled. The drop rate percentage is low enough that it is very possible to kill tens of thousands of NPCs and not see a drop.

Thank you for looking into it.

Thank you for looking at the data for it Prathun, we assumed the system was turned on and figured the code/data would look like it's working, but we question if it actually works as intended.

Just to be 100% sure it can actually happen in practice and not just in theory, will you pretty please with sugar on top just look up ONE real player that has in fact looted one of these items (in a instanced TDS zone) in the last let's say 6 months? Has it really happened?

If the answer is yes we can put this one to rest and accept that it's just insanely rare in TDS HA's

I assumed they were enabled. The thing I think me and rune are asking is have they actually dropped ? I think we all know it could very well be turned on but something is stopping it from dropping or dropping at the rate it is suppose to. Entire thread of people here and no one has said they have seen one drop in a heroic in the last 6 months.

You need to go back and reread the thread again then.

Even if that log is real, it's still older than 6 months...

I said in the last 6 months that person posted a log of nov in 2014 that was 9 months ago. I've been asking in game for months guild, groups, in general no one has said they have seen one from a TDS heroic. If these items were actually dropping in heroics people would be saying it.