concrete data on titanite slab drop rates

• 0 humanity: 0.212%
  
  
• 1 humanity: 0.304%
  
  
• 2 humanity: 0.317%
  
  
• 10 humanity: 0.404%
  
  
• 0 humanity, CGSR/SoA: 0.539%
  
  
• 10 humanity, CGSR/SoA: 0.679%
  

Shakie666 wrote:Is it just me, or does everyone seem to get more slabs by accident then when intentionally farming? I remember the very first time I killed a darkwraith, it dropped a slab, which I didn't even realise you could get anywhere other than by killing the stray demon. These days I just wear the CGSR whenever I go through new londo, farming or not.

EDIT: It would take a lot of work, but it would be quite nice to have info like this for all rare drops, not just slabs. Though with DkS2 just around the corner, it probably wouldn't be worth doing now.

retro wrote:I would love to find out the drop rate of more rare items, but I don't have the PC version. Specifically, the Balder Side Sword, Ghost Blade, and Trident would be cool to know.

For anyone with the knowledge, you can look at the disassembled memory in [redacted] or whatever around the area of DATA.exe+0x7FAD7 to investigate further.

First, a number determined by your item discovery value is calculated. I didn't bother to determine exactly how to calculate it, but at 0 humanity it's 10,000, at 1 it's 11,250, and at 2 it's 11,437, and it continues increasing for higher item discovery values. Next, a random floating point value between 0 and 1 is generated, and multiplied by the previous value. The result of this is rounded down to an integer and is our 'roll value'.

That cmp edx,ecx instruction compares your roll against (the value needed to obtain the drop - my words).

However, not only does the roll value change based on item discovery value, but the required values for the items change too.

(At 0 humanity), the drop chance values for the halberd (from the) Black Knight are 7500 and 9500; any roll value below 7500 means nothing gets dropped, anything between 7500 and 9499 (inclusive) means the halberd is dropped, and anything equal to or above 9500 means the shield is dropped.

If you multiply a random number between 0 and 1 by 10,000, the result has approx 20% chance of being between 7500 and 9499.

At 1 humanity the values are different and the range of values for the BKH is 3000 instead. Therefore, the actual drop rate at 1 humanity should be 3000 / 11250 which is 26.7%.

retro wrote:

Shakie666 wrote:Is it just me, or does everyone seem to get more slabs by accident then when intentionally farming? I remember the very first time I killed a darkwraith, it dropped a slab, which I didn't even realise you could get anywhere other than by killing the stray demon. These days I just wear the CGSR whenever I go through new londo, farming or not.

EDIT: It would take a lot of work, but it would be quite nice to have info like this for all rare drops, not just slabs. Though with DkS2 just around the corner, it probably wouldn't be worth doing now.

For the former, I'm confident it's just confirmation bias. The game most likely has no way of knowing whether you're farming or not. You'll notice all the times you get one by surprise as an outstanding event, biasing your perspective by not balancing it correctly with all the times you don't get one. Then if you're farming the statistical likelihood of getting lucky 'over and over' plummets. The more you do it, the more your experienced drop rate should average closer to 1 / 148 (assuming max item discovery), meaning there will also be times where you'll go long stretches without getting one.

I would love to find out the drop rate of more rare items, but I don't have the PC version. Specifically, the Balder Side Sword, Ghost Blade, and Trident would be cool to know.

retro wrote:No, it's done by poking around into the data. Here's what he had to say (slightly restructured since his post is edited and a bit scattered). It's a bit over my head, especially since I have no context or anything to look at to see if I can see what he's talking about:

For anyone with the knowledge, you can look at the disassembled memory in [redacted] or whatever around the area of DATA.exe+0x7FAD7 to investigate further.

First, a number determined by your item discovery value is calculated. I didn't bother to determine exactly how to calculate it, but at 0 humanity it's 10,000, at 1 it's 11,250, and at 2 it's 11,437, and it continues increasing for higher item discovery values. Next, a random floating point value between 0 and 1 is generated, and multiplied by the previous value. The result of this is rounded down to an integer and is our 'roll value'.

That cmp edx,ecx instruction compares your roll against (the value needed to obtain the drop - my words).

However, not only does the roll value change based on item discovery value, but the required values for the items change too.

(At 0 humanity), the drop chance values for the halberd (from the) Black Knight are 7500 and 9500; any roll value below 7500 means nothing gets dropped, anything between 7500 and 9499 (inclusive) means the halberd is dropped, and anything equal to or above 9500 means the shield is dropped.

If you multiply a random number between 0 and 1 by 10,000, the result has approx 20% chance of being between 7500 and 9499.

At 1 humanity the values are different and the range of values for the BKH is 3000 instead. Therefore, the actual drop rate at 1 humanity should be 3000 / 11250 which is 26.7%.

If this makes more sense to anyone else, it'd be great to see if we could determine the drop rate of more items (perhaps both at base and max item discovery).

DyingAce wrote:You are aware of the item discovery stat? That is the luck stat you can change with humanity and the gold serpent ring. One character finding things often versus another doesn't mean that character has more inherent luck, it means you were more fortunate at times. I'm assuming both characters were at max item discovery of 410. But there could be hidden data for all I know. Chance works out strangely sometimes.

Flankydizzle wrote:I also remember EpicNameBro saying in his experience that if you manage to get a slab then keep farming because another one probably isn't far away.

Flankydizzle wrote:I really think there are other factors in between farming like resting at bonfires, reloading the game, and maybe some other things that affect drop rates with anything. You can try for an hour with 410 discovery to get a slab with no luck and then just randomly get one with no humanity in the meter or anything.

I also remember EpicNameBro saying in his experience that if you manage to get a slab then keep farming because another one probably isn't far away.

befowler wrote:I also think there's more to it than the item discovery rate.  I have one character that is noticeably luckier than my other ones, and have had other folks tell me the same thing.  The difference is hard to miss -- when I first took this guy through the Burg, he got a BK shield and sword off the knight, with a chunk thrown in for good measure, then a slab off the crystal lizard outside the Taurus gate (which some folks claim isn't even possible, although I saw it happen).  He then got a full balder set drop -- every piece of armor, the shield, and a BSS -- off the knight standing in the Parish doorway the first time he got there.  A single traipse through the Chasm can net 15+ humanity, and his bottomless box now has so much stuff in it it takes forever to find anything.  There may be some fancy statistical concept to suggest it's all in my head, but the difference when I switch to a "regular" character, even one wearing the gold serpent ring, is so extreme that I refuse to farm with any other character.  It's faster to farm with the lucky one and find someone willing to port the items over, than to farm with the character that needs it in the first place.

Shakie666 wrote:

befowler wrote:I also think there's more to it than the item discovery rate.  I have one character that is noticeably luckier than my other ones, and have had other folks tell me the same thing.  The difference is hard to miss -- when I first took this guy through the Burg, he got a BK shield and sword off the knight, with a chunk thrown in for good measure, then a slab off the crystal lizard outside the Taurus gate (which some folks claim isn't even possible, although I saw it happen).  He then got a full balder set drop -- every piece of armor, the shield, and a BSS -- off the knight standing in the Parish doorway the first time he got there.  A single traipse through the Chasm can net 15+ humanity, and his bottomless box now has so much stuff in it it takes forever to find anything.  There may be some fancy statistical concept to suggest it's all in my head, but the difference when I switch to a "regular" character, even one wearing the gold serpent ring, is so extreme that I refuse to farm with any other character.  It's faster to farm with the lucky one and find someone willing to port the items over, than to farm with the character that needs it in the first place.

No offence, but I find this hard to believe. The thing is that when the probability of a certain event is very small, anomalous results are more likely to occur. As the probability of an event decreases, the number of trials required to ensure a high degree of accuracy grows exponentially. Not only that, but when certain 'lucky' events happen, you're more likely to remember them than mundane ones - your drop of a full set of balder gear is a good example. Can you remember how many times you've killed them and not gotten a full set? Probably not, because such events are unremarkable and thus are ignored.

Shakie666 wrote:

Flankydizzle wrote:I also remember EpicNameBro saying in his experience that if you manage to get a slab then keep farming because another one probably isn't far away.

Poisson clumping. Look it up.

Soul of Stray Demon wrote:

Shakie666 wrote:

Flankydizzle wrote:I also remember EpicNameBro saying in his experience that if you manage to get a slab then keep farming because another one probably isn't far away.

Poisson clumping. Look it up.

I would agree, except for the fact that these "random" events aren't random, but are instead being made by a computer. So it all depends on how the developers designed their random numbers table, and algorithms. 

It's quite possible that the "good" numbers are clumped up together, and cause such a phenomenon to occur.

I personally believe there is another hidden value at play, because over all my time playing, I have seen a pattern where the my characters that get rare drops, tend to get a lot of them, while the characters that don't get any, well, don't get any, compared to a true randomness, which would have them more equally spread out among all my characters.

Now true, my sample size is small for this, but I have talked to other players, and they have reported the same occurrence, and I wouldn't put it past the developers to put something in (maybe not knowingly) that could directly or indirectly affect the numbers table, and so called "luck" based off character.

Maybe when a character is made, the numbers table it uses is chosen then, and is never changed since, and maybe most of the numbers table don't actually happen to be as fairly distributed as they probably should be.