Please test: Is the drop RNG genuinely low... or is Isobel Velois bugged?

DewiMorgan

I've heard a few themes with the style pages.

1. It takes people ages to get. They're grinding for days.
2. They got it within 15 minutes.
3. They were grinding for days, then changed alts, and then got a drop within 15 minutes.

To my mind as a tester and developer, that seems really sus. It suggests there's something different between alts that causes stuff to fail to drop for some: a bug.

What per-character features are likely to affect drops? I can think of only two.

1. CP (Treasure Hunter particularly: less likely Fortune's Favor, Homemaker)
2. Companions (Isobel particularly, also Mirri, Bastian, Azandar).

Why Isobel, especially?

She's the only one that affects WBs. But, as a counterpoint: Isobel doesn't explain dolmens and geysers: that'd be more likely to be the other companions.

In theory, the Knights' packs are "additional" to the existing loot drops, rather than replacing one of the items.

But what if the style pages are also "additional", and there can only be one "additional" item in each loot drop? Or if it's somehow otherwise taking up the slot that the replica page would take?

How can we test this?

[I am not a dev: just asking for other players to test if they can. I super hope it works for some of you!]

So far, since I thought of this, my wife and I have put away our companions. She got the Replica Staff of Worms within 15 minutes. Out of only two people tested, that's not enough data, but it's super suggestive. Still no drop for me, but I've max-levelled every companion other than Isobel, so it could be one of the others. Or just bad RNG for me.

So:

• How long did you grind for each of your drops?
• Which companions do you have at max level (so you get their perks "free")? Specifically, do you have Isobel maxed?
• Which companion, if any, did you usually have out when you ground?
• Which companion, if any, did you usually have out for each of your style page drops?

And maybe most importantly:

• If you have a companion out, try putting them away, and see if you get any drops in the next few hours before the event goes away.

Maybe also try another alt, and even better, one with different CP. Change all the variables you can, and see if stuff drops.

PC-EU players will get to test this longer than PC-NA.

evymyu233

thats bad,i already have her perk free.i dont have many time to play,so i farmed about 6 hours in total then give up.obviously no style page.

Deserrick

I got the Sunna'Rah page within a few world bosses without Isobel, then summoned her to help with some less populated world bosses, and left her summoned. Weeks later, no Barbas helmet. Isobel is not level 20 yet, so her passive is not automatic. I will unsummon her and update.

Also, this was on a character with Treasure Hunter.

UPDATE: still no helm style page after 30 world bosses

Nerouyn

Just rng.

On two different accounts, both on which companions were new, one account got the dolmen necro staff in under twenty minutes. The other took nearly a full day. Well over eight hours.

Both with companions out cos also levelling those.

I didn't care about the staff on either. I was dolmen levelling new characters.

The same character who got the necro staff almost instantly, utterly failed to get anything else.

Many hours spent fishing for Necrom fishing achievements and nada.

Spent a couple of hours over the course of the event in Summerset and Vvardenfell trying for their shinies and also no luck.

fizl101

Pure RNG - I have Isobels perk unlocked without her presence. I got the Barbas helm on my 3rd Boss. 4 days of boss farming later I got the staff motif

Grizzbeorn

Just RNG.
Izzy didn't make any difference, either way (regardless of whether she was with me, or not).

SydneyGrey

I farmed with different characters, and didn't always use Isobel. Sometimes I used Azander or Sharp. I got the Summerset geyser drop but nothing else, after farming Vvardenfell bosses quite a bit over multiple days.

Farming Vvardenfell would have been a big waste of time except that it gave me the weekly endeavor for farming dangerous baddies, so that was cool. I didn't get either of the Vvardenfell drops, though.

DewiMorgan

Deserrick wrote: »

I got the Sunna'Rah page within a few world bosses [...] Weeks later, no Barbas helmet.

fizl101 wrote: »

Pure RNG - I have Isobels perk unlocked without her presence. I got the Barbas helm on my 3rd Boss. 4 days of boss farming later I got the staff motif

Nerouyn wrote: »

Just rng. On two different accounts, both on which companions were new, one account got the dolmen necro staff in under twenty minutes. The other took nearly a full day. Well over eight hours. [...] The same character who got the necro staff almost instantly, utterly failed to get anything else.

Almost everyone I have seen reports the same nonlinear pattern: either they get a drop in a minutes, or days of grind. I was the same. First dropped in minutes, nothing else in weeks.

This could just be a reporting bias, but when everyone who gives timelines in this thread, even the people saying "it's just RNG!", are reporting the same two-tier no-middle-ground distribution without noticing that they're disproving their own point... I don't think that's reporting bias.

While this pattern of successes should be possible for outliers, for it to be the common pattern that everyone experienced is simply not how linear, single-tier RNG works.

If it was linear, then we would not have both "days" AND "minutes" be common. If "days" is common, then "within 15 minutes" needs to be only very slightly more common than "between six hours, and six and a quarter", rather than *everyone* reporting getting at leas tone drop in the first few minutes. If "minutes" is common, then "days" should be a tiny outlier, rather than *almost everyone* reporting days of grind.

Now, it could be a deliberate two-tier RNG, where characters got a significant boost in their odds for the first half-hour or so of grind each day, or until the first drop, or something. Or it could be a bug.

The number of people reporting switching characters and getting the drop in minutes, after days of grind on other characters, suggests that whether deliberate or a bug, the nonlinearity was character-related.

The nonlinearity might not have been due to companions; that was just a hypothesis to test. Might have been a deliberate per-character reduction in odds after their first drop. Might have been something else. But you know what it absolutely was not?

It was not honest, linear RNG.

Sky-Piercer

I do have Isobel maxed and had her out for some days of the event I believe but mostly used Sharp.
My drops seemed to follow an exponential increase in farming time. My first 2 took barely a few mins, while my next 2 took entire days.
And the 5th never dropped, despite farming Vvardenfell WBs for several days. Got the staff but not the helm.

tom6143346

I have the Isabell perk as well and get all style pages within 4 days of bloody grind. So the perk affects not the drop rate in any form

XxCaLxX

First day of event I got the two style pages from WB’s in vvardenfell in 4 bosses total and got the fishing one the first try in between waiting on boss spawn. Still first day and did about 15 dolmens and got that page. Spent the other 18 days doing geysers when I could and never got that page. I have all the companion perks but don’t believe they have any effect on such drops as these.

Necrotech_Master

isobels bonus adds has a chance to add an additional drop to the boss loot, not related to the other loot, its most certainly not in the same drop pool as the style pages were (i think when i did get my style pages, i also got isobel treasure bags too)

its also a heavily common misconception that embers wallets do not prevent picking someones pocket 3 times, the wallet was a "free" pick

the only case im aware of where something might be up is with sharps fishing passive and the crab-slaughter-crane in wrothgar, but ive never seriously tried to get this lol

ArchangelIsraphel

Actually, what your saying does make a lot of sense in accordance to my experience.

Two friends of mind were grinding for the staff of worms, putting in 8-12 hours for over 7 days before they finally got it- both had Isobel unlocked and at max. They were always with either Isobel or Ember. They also had Sharps and Mirri unlocked.

On the account I was using, I did not have Isobel at all, and I got the staff within....30 minutes. I had Mirri and Bastian unlocked on that account, but was not playing with them summoned.

Neither of them saw hide nor hair of the staff that dropped from the geysers during the whole event. It never dropped for them.

I got mine within 4 hours.

I'm not saying that the companions have something to do with it, but it really is weird.

In contrast, the Vvardenfell drops took me an entire week of merciless grinding to get.