Very Rare Loot in Dragonflight Season 2
Morgan Day recently answered a question about “Very Rare” items in Maximum’s Interview.
Here’s what he says on the topic:
Morgan Day
I would say two high level adjustments when it came to “Very Rare” loot. The first you pointed out and it was a very intentional design change where in Season, you wanted 30 Eranog rings and 30 Icons, but you don’t want 30 Dragonscales in Season 2. I think in terms of that design change, we were looking to create interesting options. An example, Neltharion trinkets were pretty close to hitting the mark of where we would aim for in Season 3. There were exciting for some specs and classes, but they were universally everyone needs this thing so then when they’re “Very Rare” they could create some potential problems there. In terms of where they’re going in Season 3, I think we’re pretty close to where we would want to be right now in terms of the expected power, or who they might appeal to.
The other major thing that we made an adjustment to with Season 2 is, how do you get them? We increased the chance to get them off the bosses, like when you kill the creature and loot the corpse they’re a lot more common there, but then we adjusted the tuning of the drop rate from other sources like Great Vault, some of the boxes you get from the Weekly Events so they were less likely to come from those sources. Overall, they’re still very rare, we just shifted the source of where you’re going to get them from. It’s too soon to say if Very Rare loot is something we would carry into future expansions. We still really like the concept and still feel like it’s hitting a lot of our goals and there are still problems, but the problems that we’ve identified, we think those are solvable and we’re going to continue to make adjustments into Season 3 with that.
Very Rare Drop Chance in Season 2
With the reveal that Very Items drop chance was increased, let’s take a loot at some data to speculate on what the new drop chances of items are and compare them to Season 1.
The following assumes that items have a static drop rate, Very Rare items having a % drop rate of regular items. Stats collected by the community are estimates and only Blizzard knows the exact drop chances.
Season 1 Boss Drops
On each of the following Vault of Incarnates bosses, you can scroll down to the loot section to see what drops have been recorded by the Wowhead Looter. This is far from perfect as it also takes into account profession patterns and other abnormal drops, but it does help estimate the drop chance.
There’s some margin of error here, but it looks like Very Rare items have roughly 50% the drop rate of any other item in Season 1.
With Eranog having 1 Very Rare item and 8 normal items, each slot would have roughly 11.76% drop chance for each regular item and 5.88% drop chance for the Eranog ring.
With 4 item drops on Mythic, this would result in a rough estimation of 21.5% chance of seeing at least one Eranog ring on each kill, compared to 39.4% of seeing at least one of any other specific item on a kill.
Season 1 Vault
Unfortunately, we don’t have any data on Season 1 Vaults, only anecdotal evidence. As mentioned in this article by Theun, many raiders just did 2/8 Vault of the Incarnates runs to try to get Very Rare items and the drop chance seemed very high. Many players were speculating that the drop chance of Very Rare items was equivalent to other items from the Great Vault.
The best thing we can use is anecdotal evidence. How many Vaults do you remember with a Very Rare item from your Season 1 Vault? Personally, I can remember quite a few!
Season 2 Boss Drops
Similarly, on each of the following Aberrus bosses, you can scroll down to the loot section to see what drops have been recorded by the Wowhead Looter. This is far from perfect as it also takes into account profession patterns and other abnormal drops, but it does help estimate the drop chance.
Mythic has not been included due to lack of data.
There’s a wider margin of error here, but it looks like Very Rare items have roughly 80% the drop rate of any other item in Season 2.
With Neltharion having 3 Very Rare item and 7 normal items, each slot would have roughly 10.64% drop chance for each regular item and 8.51% drop chance for each individual Class Trinket.
With only 2 item drops on Mythic, this would result in a rough estimation of 16.30% chance of seeing at least one specific class trinket on each kill, compared to 20.15% of seeing at least one of any other specific item on a kill. Next week with 3 item drops on Mythic, this would result in a rough estimation of 23.42% chance of seeing at least one specific class trinket on each kill, compared to 29.64% of seeing at least one of any other specific item on a kill.
Season 2 Vault
We have some Season 2 Vault data thanks to Seriallos from Raidbots. Thanks to Raidbots being able to sim your Great Vault, he provided us with some numbers!
He checked 56,177 Vaults and let us know that 3,770 Vaults had a Etchings of the Captive Revenant and 1,544 had a Screaming Black Dragonscale (Very Rare). These items were picked because they can both be looted by ANY spec and are off the first boss which will be possible to loot in every Vault. By this sample, only 41% of the Very Rare items were looted compared to the normal item — and finding it unlikely that a non-round number would be chosen, we can probably estimate the drop chance of Very Rare items in the Vault to be around 40% of a typical item.
Let’s take Devastation Evoker as an example. There are 28 items on the regular loot table and 3 Very Rare items excluding Tier. It’s unknown exactly how Tier items work this expansion in the Great Vault, so we’re just going to exclude them from the calculation and just assume that the chance will be lower than this amount. This works out to be each normal item having a 3.4% chance in appearing in each slot, and each Very Rare item having a 1.36% chance in appearing in each slot (assuming the above 40% is true). In 3 Vault slots, this results in a 9.86% chance of at least one slot containing a specific normal item and a 4.02% chance of at least one slot containing a specific Very rare item. Assuming Tier also factors into the calculation, the odds would be even lower than 9.86% and 4.02% per item.
Conclusion
While increasing the drop rate of Very Rare items seems like a buff, I do think this is slightly misleading due to one major factor: The number of drops per bosses has increased overall – e.g. 8 for Eranog and 11 for Kazzara. In general, “Very Rare” items might actually be more rare in Season 2 — it’s significantly harder to get from the Vault and about the same to get from bosses.
Vaults
I think most players will agree that the Season 2 Vaults feel like they drop a lot less Very Rare items. However, this is likely due to multiple factors:
- Lower Drop Rate. ~40% of a general item.
- Increased number of bosses for a base vault – Was previously 2, now 3 which leads to an increase in the loot pool.
- Increased number of loot per boss – Eranog and Primal Council had 1-3 pieces of loot per boss. Kazzara, Amalgamation and Assault have 3-4.
Due to these two factors, Very Rare pieces in the Great Vault have significantly less chance due to a lower “Very Rare” drop rate and a lower drop rate of each individual piece as well.
Boss Drops
Morgan Day mentions that this is offset by an increase in drop rate of Very Rare loot. While this does appear to be true (50% -> 80%), this looks like it works out to about net neutral when you consider there are more drops per boss (which is important in a Master Loot world). Taking a look at the Season 2 Very Rare drops, Screaming Black Dragonscale has a 20% drop rate as recorded by us and the other Very Rare items are dropping at <16% which is actually less than the Vault of Incarnates drop rates of ~17%.
So despite the drop rate of Very Rare items going up, the overall chance of you seeing that Very Rare item from the Boss might actually be staying the same compared to Season 1 due to more items on the loot table!
