I was doing some casual content today, and got a piece of gear that would usually be ilvl 360 from that source. Instead, it titanforged all the way up to 420, higher than mythic raiding gear. This seems moderately ridiculous.
The chances of warforging by 5 ilvl can’t be higher than 30%, based on having seen scores of warforges out of hundreds or maybe a few thousand drops this expansion. If the chances of each 5 ilvl of forging are the same, a 60 ilvl forge - 12 steps - should happen once in a million drops. Once in maybe a thousand drops seems way too high.
I see a couple possibilities for what’s going on. Either the chances of an additional 5 ilvl of forging goes up with the increasing levels of forging, which seems a really bad idea. Or, there’s a bug in the algorithm.
I hope it’s a bug. The most likely bug is that Blizzard is using a linear congruential (LC) random number generator, and making repeated calls for each level of forging. LC random number generators generate runs of results in the same range that are either too long, or too short (depending on the parameters used, but it’s a one or the other thing; you can’t select parameters that fix this). Blizzard is probably using one that generates too many runs. As a result, 60 ilvl forges, which should be one in a million, end up being maybe one in a thousand or something like that.
There is a simple fix to this. Instead of calling the random number generator repeatedly to determine whether there are multiple forges, call it only once, and use that single random number to look up the level of forging based on the precalculated chances of each level of forging. For example, if the chance of each level of forging is 30%, don’t call the random number generator once per level, checking if the result is less than 0.30 each time; instead, call it once, and if the result is less than 0.30, it forges, if it’s less than 0.30 squared, which is 0.09, it double forges, if it’s less than 0.027, it triple forges, etc.
If the forging algorithm works the way I think it does, that should make highly forged items much rarer, reducing complaints about forging. If instead high levels of forging are actually a design feature of the game, I strongly suggest that this be reconsidered; frequent high levels of forging can make normal sources of high ilvl equipment seem pointless.
Bottom line: high levels of forging are too common; please fix.