Was deciding on what my goals were going to be last season and decided to answer some questions I had about Visions. These are the questions I had that I wanted to look at:
- What is the floor distribution (is it flat or skewed towards 1 end of the spectrum)
- Are certain floor types more prevalent than others
- what mob is the mob type distribution
- legendary drops per Vision
- legendary drops per number of floors
- best bounty act for Visions
and for you conspiracy theorists, there was some fun ones that have come up in the forums over the years I wanted to test:
- hot game/cold game theory
- do lower level games have a better spawn chance
- and are there diminishing returns on Vision spawn rate playing the same difficulty
All the testing I did was set with these parameters:
- I ran full bounty acts with a UE DH
- full cleared the floors until I reached the bounty
- did all red chests as I found them (good density)
- used nems on the follower
- did the 2 rainbow goblin portals I found
Here’s my results:
- For floor distribution, I wanted to see if it is more likely to get Visions that were short, long, or equal chance across getting a 1 floor Vision to a 15 floor Vision. (Just used my T16 runs).
Floor occur avg
-
01 39 6.76%
02 49 8.49%
03 33 5.72%
04 49 8.49%
05 33 5.72%
06 38 6.59%
07 38 6.59%
08 46 7.97%
09 36 6.24%
10 33 5.72%
11 36 6.24%
12 40 6.93%
13 33 5.72%
14 40 6.93%
15 34 5.89%
Surprisingly, at the beginning,I thought I was going to get a skewed distribution leaning towards shorter Visions, but looking at the data there is a fairly close range of 5.72%-8.49% and no general pattern, so it seems you are just as likely to get a 1 floor Vision as a 15 floor Vision. In the end, I had 697 total Visions with 5522 floors for an average of 7.92 floors per Vision.
- Next I looked at different floor types. When I wrote them down, I found there are actually 15 floor types, which makes sense since there is a max of 15 floors on a Vision. I also found doing this that one floor type won’t repeat on a single Vision.
-
floor type… … … . occur avg
A1 town… … … … . 361 6.54%
cemetery… … … … 371 6.72%
old trist… … … … .. 354 6.51%
halls of agony… … 377 6.83%
Maghda… … … … .. 369 6.68%
desolate sands… .. 369 6.68%
shrouded moors… 366 6.63%
temple firstborn.. . 371 6.72%
ruins of sescheron 386 6.99%
stonefort… … … … . 375 6.79%
arreat crater… … … 380 6.88%
spire… … … … … … . 358 6.48%
westmarch… … … .. 366 6.63%
burning man… … … 342 6.19%
battering ram… … .. 377 6.83%
Looking at the data, it is just as likely to get any floor at any time Everything was fairly distributed.
- Next was interested in mob type. There are 4 types of mobs you can get, one yellow unique (ye), blues (bl), 3 bosses (bo), and goblins (go). Obviously, goblins are rare but wanted to see how rare each type came up.
mob type occur avg
-
ye 3846 69.65%
bo 0620 11.23%
bl 0957 17.33%
go 0099 01.79%
- Now I wanted to look at how many legendary drops per Vision. Since I did runs at 5 different difficulties for the conspiracy theories, I charted each one.
-
diff legs floor avg
T16 20145 577 34.91
T13… .. 572 34 16.82
T6… … . 246 31 7.94
T1… … . 118 29 4.07
N… … … . 60 26 2.31
Basically on average, you will get a full bag of legendary drops per Vision when you run T16. Not bad for a couple minute portal.
- After running a few thousand Visions, it becomes pretty obvious the number of legendary drops increases the more floors you go down, so here is my T16 data
floor occur leg… avg.. range
-
01 39 0045 1.15 0-4
02 49 0158 3.22 0-12
03 33 0207 6.27 2-17
04 49 0440 8.98 4-22
05 33 0491 14.88 5-30
06 38 0676 17.79 4-32
07 38 0905 23.82 12-43
08 46 1427 31.02 16-68
09 36 1305 36.25 21-61
10 33 1406 42.61 33-55
11 36 1924 53.44 24-87
12 40 2452 61.30 39-85
13 33 2308 69.94 51-97
14 40 3306 82.65 60-113
15 34 3095 91.03 73-116
- Since I do a lot of bounties and a lot of Visions, I was curious which bounties were best for Visions. Anyone who has done a ton of bounties know that A5 is loonnnngggg, followed close behind by A3, A4 is the fastest, followed close by A1 and A2 is in the middle. I was curious if the longer ones would spawn more Visions or were just long for the sake of being long. For this set, I just looked at my T16 data
-
act runs Vis avg.
A1 63 164 2.60
A2 63 137 2.17
A3 62 137 2.21
A4 62 129 2.08
A5 62 130 2.10
Kinda analyzing the data, it would look like A1 is the clear winner (fast bounty/highest rate) followed by A4 (fastest bounty/about same rate as the other 4), then A2, A3, A5 (based on Vision spawns and length to do the bounty). So if you are someone who does not mind unbalanced bounty mats and are tired of running cow sticks/Temple of the Firstborn, running A1 and A4 bounties is your best option if you want to use bounties to spawn Visions.
- Now the fun part. I love a good conspiracy theory and I have seen many as it pertains to Visions. First I am going to look at the hot/cold game conspiracy. This is basically a theory that Blizz has super control in giving you games that are extra-ordinarily good or punish you with very bad games. For this, I am using data for the 44 full 5-act bounty runs I did on T16. From the data for the next conspiracy theory, my average for those 44 full runs was 11.45
V = Visions, o = # occurrences, f = floors, Legs = legendaries
-
V o. oavg.. f… .favg Legs… Legsavg
06 1 02.2% 045 7.50 0247 41.2
07 5 11.4% 278 7.94 1280 36.6
08 3 06.8% 183 7.63 0862 35.9
09 5 11.4% 364 8.09 1584 35.2
10 9 20.5% 762 8.47 3622 40.2
11 1 02.3% 094 8.55 0465 42.3
12 5 11.4% 400 6.67 1649 27.5
13 4 09.1% 406 7.81 1754 33.7
14 4 09.1% 433 7.73 1910 34.1
15 2 04.6% 248 8.27 1088 36.3
16 4 09.1% 449 7.02 1908 29.8
19 1 02.3% 146 7.68 0594 31.3
Just looking at the data (I know, small sample sizes) most the number of occurrences are around the average of 11.5. No heavy skew towards cold games (way under 11) or hot games (way over 12).
Looking at the far extremes, the “hottest” game with 19 Visions in it had slightly lower than my grand total floor average of 7.9. It also was well below the legendary average of 34.9 per Vision. As far as number of portals, it was a “hot game” but was a “cold game” in the other categories.
The “coldest” game with 6 Visions was also below the floor average with 7.5 below the overall 7.9. As far as legendary drops it was well better than average with 36.6.
Even with small sample size, this data gives me no trust that there is some magical all “hot” or “cold’ games. It is more of an RNG = RNG thing.
- The second conspiracy theory I wanted to look at was that doing a lower difficulty will give you Visions. I have seen this a lot where people feel Blizz makes it easier to get Visions at lower levels to get you to play more. I did 3 full bounty runs each at T13, T6, T1, and N after running most my time at T16. Here is my results:
-
Diff Vavg favg
N… .. 8.67 7.54
T1… . 9.67 8.07
T6… 10.33 9.19
T13 11.33 8.50
T16 11.45 7.78
Now again, I know, small sample size. Looking at the 12 sub T16 runs, all 4 of them provided less Visions than the T16 ones did. The floor average for the sub T16 runs was a bit higher, but varied wildly from difficulty to difficulty. It is most likely small sample error and has nothing to do with secret Blizz code to make new players feel better. Even if the Vision spawns were significantly better with lower difficulties, the far lower drop rate still makes them not worth dropping difficulty.
- Last conspiracy I have seen come up a lot is that the more you play the less/worse the Visions get. I have even seen a thread where someone was claiming that if you play a difficulty for a long time, then switch to a lower difficulty, the Vision spawn rate will actually go higher for the new difficulty played. Here is what I did. I took all my T16 full runs and broke them down to a first half/second half. 44 runs, so 22 in the first and 22 in the second half of the season. Here is what I got:
-
… …Vavg favg Lavg
1st. 12.1 7.76 35.94
2nd 10.3 7.71 34.04
Looking at what I got, the first half did have almost 2 more visions per full bounty run, but the floors stayed about the same, and the legendary average was almost 2 higher in the first half. It does look like this conspiracy could be plausible, again, small sample sizes. If anyone wants to do 1000 full bounty runs in a season and post their splits, be my guess, but as for me, I will just give it a inconclusive maybe. As for the theory that playing a bunch of T16, then dropping the difficulty will give more Visions, that is pretty much debunked from my previous conspiracy data as I did the N-T13 runs after I did most the T16 runs.
Summary
A lot of useless information here I hope someone finds some use for. I love numbers and I love fun conspiracy theories. This actually kept me interested in playing the whole season last season. Figured I would share my results in case anyone every wondered about this stuff.
TL;DR:
Did 697 Visions. Averaged 7.92 floors per Vision. Averaged 34.91 legendaries per Vision on T16. Odds of getting a 15 floor Vision is the same as getting any other number of floors. Higher difficulty and more floors = more legendaries. Gob floors are 1:50. RNG = RNG.
