v1.0.3 High End Drop Rates Getting Tweaked
Posted 27 June 2012 by FluxHigh end drop rates were tweaked in v1.0.3 to increase the chances of higher ilvl (61-63) items dropping before Act 3-4 of Inferno. This was a change most fans welcomed, as it seemed designed to mitigate the perceived, “you have to get to Act 3 to find the gear you need to complete Act 2″ Inferno issue.
That was the theory. The actuality is that many players are reporting fewer quality item finds, while others are obsessing over the change to the number of “guaranteed” rares from some bosses from NV stacks. Here are the pertinent quotes from Wyatt Cheng’s v1.0.3 design preview, and those figures were repeated in the official v1.0.3 patch notes.
|
Item |
Hell Act III and IV |
Inferno Act I |
Inferno Act II |
Inferno Act III/IV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
iLvl 61 |
9 % |
18% |
19% |
24% |
|
iLvl 62 |
2% |
8% |
12% |
16% |
|
iLvl 63 |
0% |
2% |
4% |
8% |
As you can see, players who would rather murder monsters 4x as fast in Inferno Act I can do so knowing they have a chance at amazing items, and players who want a challenge can kill in Acts III and IV in Inferno and be rewarded with a higher drop rate.
The Nephalem Difference
It’s no secret that our goal for the end-game item hunt is players hunting monsters packs, building to five stacks of Nephalem Valor, and then killing a boss. While we’re seeing a lot of that occurring, what we’re missing is people feeling like it’s worthwhile to continue onward after killing a boss.
To help hit that goal we’re lowering the number of guaranteed Rare items on bosses when you have your full five stacks of Nephalem Valor from two guaranteed Rares to one guaranteed Rare (you still have a very good chance at multiple rares, it’s just no longer guaranteed). In exchange, all champion and rare packs will now drop a bonus guaranteed Rare item when you have your full five stacks of Nephalem Valor. The change benefits players with more overall drops, and a reason to push to continue progressing.
That all sounds reasonable, but in practice it’s leading to tons of whining on the B.net forums (yes, simply a shocking development there) from players with anecdotal “I never find anything good anymore” complaints. The objection seems to be that while the chances for high level gear have been increased earlier, they’re now actually lower in the very end game. But no one knows since Blizzard has never shared the exact item level probability figures (like you see in that table above) for pre-v1.0.3.
These complaints might be stemming largely from perception; we’ve seen plenty of news about human psychology and how it affects our experiences of games, and how one great item find sticks in the mind while 50 okay ones are forgotten, etc. Players who found a couple of useful things in Act 2 pre-v1.0.3 remember that, and might not notice the increased number of high level items they’re finding now, simply because they got luckier on the mods pre-v1.0.3.
In any event, there are several new blue posts saying that the late game lower drop odds will be undone, and that overall high quality item drop rates will be further buffed in a soon-upcoming patch.
Click through for more from that post, and a couple of others on the same topic.
about time 
. well thank u although i wish it was more
Bashiok: No problem, we hope they’re helpful to get out a bit earlier, especially when we know a patch is going to hit. I mean, why not? Of course I can’t promise we’ll be able to get them out early every time.
Patches have a longer development and testing process than I believe many expect them to. For instance, 1.0.3a was already in development before 1.0.3 was released, and some ‘room’ on it (which really means time for development, implementation, testing and localization) was left for any extreme bug fixes should they crop up very shortly after 1.0.3′s release. It’s more efficient to not wait for a patch to launch before starting work on the next one. Changing item drop rates was something that took some time to discuss and decide how we were going to address it, and thus it wasn’t something we could make in time for tomorrow’s patch.
We know drop rates are one of the main changes you guys are looking for, and we’re working to get it into the game as soon as possible. It doesn’t mean we chose the changes for 1.0.3a over drop rate changes, it’s just a matter of timing and them lining up with the next release.
With all the said “development and testing” that goes into these patches, how did the development team not identify the current loot table/drop rate issues? Doesn’t make sense.
Bashiok: The drop rates in 1.0.3 are exactly as they’re listed in the 1.0.3 design preview blog, so there were no issues as far as validity/accuracy of the changes. Obviously a reduction in drop rates later on in favor or increased drop rates earlier on (and overall more high end items circulating in the economy) wasn’t very popular. We agree it was a bad change, so we’ll be correcting it, but it wasn’t a quick enough change to get into 1.0.3a.
So what you’re saying is the team working on D3 is actually ran in such a way that the same people who are making commits to the code base are also in charge of making core game play decisions too?
No, are you thinking the drop rate changes were a bug?
Elsewhere, a fan asked how soon is “soonâ„¢” and gets some clarification from a ban-hammer fingering Lylirra:
“Fixed a bug that was causing Unique monsters to not drop the appropriate amount of loot when slain.”
Lylirra: Due to the quick turnaround, we were unable to make any adjustments to item drop rates for Hell and Inferno difficulty in 1.0.3a, but we do have some changes planned for 1.0.3b (which isn’t far out).
Great, another week of this crap.
Lylirra: For clarity, we’re currently looking to patch to 1.0.3b some time this week. That may change depending on testing needs, but it’s definitely our goal to get the patch out sooner rather than later.
…And locking this thread up. =/
To reiterate the major points:
We know this is an important change for many players and will provide more updates when they’re available. In the meantime, please be sure to keep your posts and replies as civil as possible — otherwise, threads may be locked.
As no survey of blue posts is complete without mega-whining from someone (intentionally?) misunderstanding one of Bashiok’s posts, here’s a final entry.
“With all the said “development and testing” that goes into these patches, how did the development team not identify the current loot table/drop rate issues? Doesn’t make sense.
The drop rates in 1.0.3 are exactly as they’re listed in the 1.0.3 design preview blog, so there were no issues as far as validity/accuracy of the changes. Obviously a reduction in drop rates later on in favor or increased drop rates earlier on (and overall more high end items circulating in the economy) wasn’t very popular. We agree it was a bad change, so we’ll be correcting it, but it wasn’t a quick enough change to get into 1.0.3a.
–Bashiok”
Once again Bashiok, and whoever he currently represents, decides to speak to the community in riddles and sarcastic condescension.
For the last WEEK people have been asking to see the old drop rates, or some kind of reference to what actually changed.
So the day before a patch hits, you describe the 1.0.3 patch drop rate adjustment as a bad change? Huh, how long did it take you to figure out nerfing the drops late game and increasing the drops early game was a bad design choice?
Then you decide to go on and state that “More High end items circulating in the economy” which leads ALL of us to believe you are yet AGAIN going to nerf the drops rates. But let me remind you of how people are quitting, selling the top tier gear from their mains and leaving. You say there are more high end items circulating, which could be from many different sources, not the 1.0.3 item drop rate.
If you actually took time to read the constructive complaints about the drop rates, people are complaining that NOTHING is dropping. High end items according to ilvl may be dropping more, but the rolls those items actually have are atrocious. In my own experience I have gone from being able to utilize my 350% mf and play for 5-6 hours before finding something sellable / useable. I have not found anything since the 1.0.3 patch, literally all of it has been trash. Whimsey clears, A1 clears, A3 clears, nothing.
Your post has actually cleared up something for the community, for once. Now we all know why nothing was said about pre-patch drop rates. Now we know why it takes so LONG for your team to actually balance, because you are paying attention to the ECONOMY, and not the PLAYER BASE.
GG Bashiok.
And no, I am not thankful.
Bashiok: Which part was sarcastic or condescending?
I assume I’m getting trolled, but no, we’re not nerfing drops.
So, can you guys provide any feedback or evaluation of drop changes in v1.0.3, and say what adjustments need to be made going forward, without sounding quite as whiny/trolly as most of the B.net forum posters do? Are you seeing more level 61+ stuff earlier? Does it seem more possible to gear up for Acts 2-4 Inferno by playing late Hell and Act 1 Inferno, as the changes attempted?
I haven’t tried later Hell, but you can gear up for the Inferno D in Inferno Act1 currently, with some very persistent farming. I think this is fine.
The problem right now, there is little point in running A2/A3/A4 Inferno, because while you do get more ilvl 63s, you still get TONS of complete trash (e.g. under lvl 60, even lvl 51s!) This should be tweaked. I’d say the lowest you can get in a1 is 51, a2 = 55 (or perhaps 58), a3/4 = 60. The actual 61,62 and 63 rates are fine.
So right now, you have 52% chance to get ilvl 51-60 in A3/4 Inferno. After the change I’m proposing you’d have 52% chance to get lvl 60, and nothing lower. This is acceptable, because 60s can still spawn great mods and sell for millions of gold (though of course not as often as ilvl 61/62/63)
Can you really get as low as 51 in Acts 3-4?
Not commonly, but yes. Like I said, you have 48% to get 61/62/63 and 52% chance to get 51-60s
^cool dude
Um, do I have this right? There was a period of better drops which apparently is now being reversed? This game balancing is becoming more of a joke everyday. If I am to believe all this, every one is rocking A+ gear with massive primary stat/VIT/res all and I am still rubbing 2 sticks together trying not to die in inferno for the billionth time which now has depleted any gold I had to near zero. And this nerf is being done because there is too much good stuff out there?! Now before the cool kids go tell me to go play in hell for awhile because I suck, I will tell you that I did just that. Continued repair costs, gold drop nerfing, and crappy drops overall have simply made this game a lose-lose endeavor for anyone who doesnt play 24/7. I say this at the same time that I say I love the game. I think blizz NEEDS to ignore the top 5% of players and the bottom 5%. Creating balance to cater to the few is not good.
No one but Blizzard knows exactly, since while Bliz shared the odds for ilvl drops in v1.0.3, they have not shared them for previously. So we know that now the odds of item level 61/62/63 drops in act3/4 Inferno are 24%/16%/8%. But apparently, judging from anecdotal player reports those are LOWER odds that pre-v1.03. So Bliz enabled ilvl 61+ to drop earlier, but apparently lowered the chances of those items later.
So v1.03 item finding is great for people in hell or early Inferno, but sucks for people who were already into act 3/4 Inferno. And the plan is to keep it improved for hell and early Inferno, while buffing it (back to pre v1.03 levels?) for act3/4 Inferno.
Definitely agree, right now it makes more sense for most people to run act1 quickly than to run act2-4 slower even with higher chances at lvl63 items. The reason is if you don’t have amazing gear, act2 is somewhat difficult and act3/act4 are definitely difficult (or time consuming if you play extra carefully). Act1 doesn’t require crazy gear and with speed you can get more gold, while having a 2% chance at the best items in the game. Hopefully they keep the drop rates for act1 and bump up the rates for the other acts. Even with these 1.0.3 numbers in act1, we aren’t exactly swimming in great gear, so it still protects their precious auction house profits.
“This is acceptable, because 60s can still spawn great mods and sell for millions of gold (though of course not as often as ilvl 61/62/63)”
In fact no because if you increase offers, you won’t increase the buying capacity of buyers.
Said in an other way, what ever you can farm in Inferno, I still have 700k to spend no more.
So it could be a good thing as everybody will have better items but don’t count on this to get -as a seller- more gold. You won’t.
Since 1.0.3, killing named mini-bosses, all I get is piles of gold. Where are the items? I like gold, but not seeing items drop, even 2 or 3 crappy blues, is disappointing, especially when you have to deal with BS mods, like Izual and his ridiculously fast spamming of ice shards. Being frozen 60% to 70% of the fight is not fun, nor challenging, it is annoying to outright stupid, depending on whether or not you got beat to death while being permanently frozen and unable to do anything.
This was supposedly fixed in 1.0.3a?
“Fixed a bug that was causing Unique monsters to not drop the appropriate amount of loot when slain”
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6514995
I don’t think it’s fixed. Played last night after the patch, acts 2, 3, 4 in nightmare to get my demon hunter to Hell. Enough named mini-bosses dropped gold-only to prompt me to post. And the most annoying, as I said above, was Izual.
They addressed that yesterday, I think. It was fixed as part of the recent hotfix patch.
Been running Act 1 for 4 hours yesterday, mf with NV around 280%. Got a crazy number of rares, but not one was good, not even for AH, had to vendor them off. One more night like that and I doubt there’s going to be a third night.
Considering the number of possible affix, did someone compute the chance to get a good rare with (core stat / vit / res all / bonus affix) ?
Many just heard drops were buffed and took that at face value. There are too many factors.
Drop -quantity- was reduced. Mostly through the breakables nerf, but there were other influences. This can make it seem like loot quality is worse than it is because a smaller haul overall means a smaller chance at those great items.
Drop -quality- was increased (for some Acts?) by altering the probability that a drop will be of a higher iLvl. Increased rares from packs, decreased rares from bosses, and mf nerf also affected this.
An aspect that is not as transparent deals with how items are ranked into levels. If iLvl ranking was loosened to include less desirable modifier values on the high end, that would also increase the perception that loot was nerfed because there would be a larger proportion of “trash” in each haul. Does anyone have any information on how iLvl is determined?
I look forward to this change since it is not worth running act3 or 4 now. Most of us are just powerfarming act2 with MF which yields results but is boring as hell and really not how I would prefer to play the game.
Part of me thinks that one of the largest issues with items in Diablo 3 is the fact that if I buy a really good sword, I can later upgrade my sword and sell my old one to somebody else. This creates an issue where old items rarely leave the economy through disenchanting or vendoring, and just trickle down to players who are behind most people progression-wise. In my very strong opinion, Blizzard should increase the drop rates across the board and add a system where an item can only change hands 2 or 3 times before it becomes “soulbound” and has to leave the economy instead of being thrown on the AH again. Currently, it’s just way too easy to obtain sub-maximum power gear for way too cheap because there’s just way too many of them circulating within the economy, and makes it less and less worthwhile to farm for items by hand due to perpetually decreasing AH selling prices.
I completely agree that there should be some kind of account bind-on-equip mechanism because there is nothing to take items out of perpetual circulation. I was thinking perhaps allow an item to be equipped by every character on the account it drops for (so you could farm for alts), but once traded off the account, it binds to the new owner’s account.
Thinking on this, items purchased from the auction house should be bound to your account on purchase. Items need to be removed from the game while allowing people to freely equip and try out everything with all their characters. Plus, people need to think twice about spending several million gold on a single item. If people want to do that fine, but at the same time, if they find an upgrade they should not be able to put the item they purchased back on the AH and instantly recoup their gold to subsidize their next millions-of-gold equipment upgrade. Acquiring good gear should be more time consuming. In addition, this will keep gold farmers from paying ridiculous amounts of gold for good items in an attempt to corner the market and put the items back on the AH for even higher prices.
Yes I know people that play the AH won’t like this, but too bad. The AH is not the game. The AH was meant to ease trading and get rid of spam in chat channels and playing WUW/WUG in trading games.
I disagree. I would rather see crafting used to eliminate items from the AH. I would prefer to:
1) Balance mods to increase diversity. Buff unused mods (in much the same way that certain skills/runes need a rework).
2) Fix the ranking algorithm for high tier items (iLvl 61-63) to mostly include mods and combinations thereof that are actually sought after.
3) Have different materials from iLvl 61,62,63.
4) Introduce new blacksmith recipes for iLvl 61,62,63, with useful static modifiers in addition to some random slots.
5) Bring back the Enchanter, require mats from #3. Perhaps, in addition to regular enchanting recipes, introduce a gamble like feature to re-roll a mod, also requiring mats from #3.
6) Make blacksmith crafted items and items modified by the Enchanter account bound if the DE processes isn’t taking out enough good items from the AH.
Crafting to me is a whole other animal with its own issues. Every recipe/plan should require a white or gray(socketed) base item, otherwise the game simply needs to quit littering the ground with these items.
I think most players would disagree with that and Blizzard certainly would (cuts into their profits) so it’s more like too bad for you. I wouldn’t mind soulbound items if drop rates were increased 10 or 20 fold across the board but that is about as likely to happen as your fantasy of soulbound items.
Since the patch I’m seeing a decent number of iLvl 62-63 in act 1 Inferno, and have actually managed to find a few nice upgrades even with my limited play time. However, due to the RNG nature of the drops, most iLvl 62-63 I found are not even worth keeping for an alt, so I would like to see either an increase in the drop rates or they might tidy up the affix pool a bit so more high iLvl items are actually usable.
cant believe that actualy 8% of all items in act3 are ilvl 63
after 1.03 i noticed that i got only low lvl items and nearly no ilvl 62/63, so i wrote down all rare loot, after 1 week i got 866 rare items in act3 with only 46 ilvl 63 items. sure one can have bad luck, but 5,3% after nearly 1000 items is so far away from 8%,
And how many of the 5.3% were actually good/useable/sellable? 0%?
most items were ****, but i dont think they changed the stats on the items
you should have counted all the white/blue stuff too, because those are part of the 8% as well.
“Obviously a reduction in drop rates later on in favor or increased drop rates earlier on (and overall more high end items circulating in the economy) wasn’t very popular. We agree it was a bad change, so we’ll be correcting it, but it wasn’t a quick enough change to get into 1.0.3a.”
What does this mean?
Maybe I’m cynical after all the bad moves Blizz have made with D3 but
I interpret it as they want to withdraw the iLvl63 from act1 inferno again.
That would kill the game.
Did I get it wrong?
yes you probably did.
The change is only unpopular because of ‘a reduction in drop rates later on’. Although not explicitly written, it is pretty safe to assume they will be correcting this part of the change.
However, to compensate for introducing more high end items into the economy, twice, They may reduce lvl63′s in act 1 and/or act 2. Though this would be unpopular.
Does the modification in drop rates for a given iLevel also affect the rates that a Legendary/Set piece will drop as well? I am in Hell A4 and am still looking for my first piece!