Just how scarce is loot in Shadowlands?

Community General Discussion
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Hello, WoW community! With all the hubbub around raid drop rates changing and the new Valor points coming, I thought I’d do a fun math exercise to answer a few questions about the current state of loot in Shadowlands.

Note that I’m not pitching any opinions here; I’m just presenting how the match behind the game’s design actually affects player experiences and outcomes. I’ll leave it up to you all to form your own opinions about what this means, because… well, you were going to do that anyways.

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Castle Nathria Drop Rates

Up to now, Castle Nathria has been dropping 3 pieces of loot for a 20 person raid. That means on any given boss, you have a 15% chance of getting something.But with 10 bosses, there are lots of possible outcomes. So what’s the actual chance of getting different quantities of loot from Castle Nathria?

When there are 10 bosses, and 3 drops per 20 people per boss, here are the probabilities:

  • 19.69% chance of getting no loot.
  • 34.74% chance of getting one piece of loot.
  • 27.59% chance of getting two pieces.
  • 12.98% chance of three pieces.
  • 4.01% chance of four pieces.
  • 0.85% chance of five pieces.
  • 0.12% chance of six pieces.
  • 0.01% (1 in 10,000) chance of seven pieces.

With the above drop rates, your average number of pieces of loot earned from clearing an entire Nathria raid is 1.5 items. Of course, this is an average, so your own personal experience won’t necessarily reflect it. It’s entirely possible to fully clear the raid multiple times and get no loot, becuse randomness is random.

With the upcoming change to 4 pieces per 20 people per boss, what happens to the probabilities? This!

  • 10.74% chance of getting no loot.
  • 26.84% chance of getting one piece of loot.
  • 30.20% chance of getting two pieces.
  • 20.13% chance of three pieces.
  • 8.81% chance of four pieces.
  • 2.64% chance of five pieces.
  • 0.55% chance of six pieces.
  • 0.08% chance of seven pieces.
  • 0.01% (1 in 10,000) chance of eight pieces.

This bumps up the expected number of pieces of loot per person per raid from 1.5 to 2, and strongly reduces your chance of getting nothing at all (from about 20% to about 10%).

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Mythic+ Dungeon Drop Rates

The prevailing opinion in the WoW community about Mythic+ loot is that it’s too scarce, which makes Mythic+ dungeons less rewarding than they used to be. Valor points are coming in patch 9.0.5 to help players address that problem, but so far, you will still need to find the piece of loot you want before you can upgrade it.

This means that even with valor points, the scarcity of loot will continue to be a hurdle that players must jump over before they can get their upgrades.

So… just how scarce is loot in Mythic+? What is the probability of running a given number of Mythic+ dungeons in a row and getting nothing at all? First, let’s look at the probability of getting no loot for multiple dungeons in a row if you aren’t timing keys – so you’re seeing 1 loot item drop per dungeon.

  • Run 1: 80% chance of getting nothing.
  • Run 2: 64% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 3: 51.2% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 4: 40.96% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 5: 32.77% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 6: 26.21% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 7: 20.97% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 8: 16.78% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 9: 13.42% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 10: 10.74% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 11: 8.59% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 12: 6.87% chance of still getting nothing.

At 1 drop per dungeon, if you run 3 dungeons in a row, your most statistically probable scenario is that you get nothing. You need to run four dungeons before you’ve tilted the probabilities in your favor. And by the time you clear your 7th dungeon, you have a 20% chance that you haven’t seen any loot still.

But what if you start timing keys and get 2 drops per dungeon?

  • Run 1: 60% chance of getting nothing.
  • Run 2: 36% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 3: 21.60% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 4: 12.96% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 5: 7.78% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 6: 4.67% chance of still getting nothing.
  • Run 7: 2.80% chance of still getting nothing.

This is a dramatically different result. At one drop per dungeon, you had to run four dungeons in a row before you would probably get something. At two drops per dungeon, you will probably get something by your second run. And the numbers compound pretty dramatically as you chain more runs together – for example, you are 10x more likely to have no loot by your seventh run at 1 drop per dungeon as you are at 2 drops per dungeon.

What does all this mean? I don’t know! But I thought it’d be cool to inject some hard numbers into the conversation about the current state of loot in Shadowlands. So I hope this was helpful!

3 Likes
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I just ended up scrolling down, way too long to read.

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TLDR: Time your keys and you get loot.

Good advice OP.

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Can we go back to BFA loot drops ? 3 loots in mythic plus if you timed it . BFA was a much more successful expac . 6 months from now only a handful of people will be left . The loot situation is awful !! I do 4 m + a week on two toons and rarely get loot , the vault is my loot for the week , besides the junk from mission table and quests . Soon there will be no one playing this game . What’s the point when you can’t make your toon more powerful and progress . Or it take 3 months to go 15 item levels .

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BFA was rock bottom for this game.

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9.0.5 M+ is shaping up to be 100x better than BFA M+.

Would much rather get a Getiku from whatever difficulty and upgrade it to 220 than farming 100+ 15+ KR’s for the chance of Titanforging one to usefulness.

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I’m not a math type, but I don’t think you can calculate odds of getting loot like that.

If you flip a coin, you have a 50% chance of getting heads. If you flip that coin and get 999,999 tails in a row, even on the 1,000,000th flip, its still just a 50% chance of getting heads.

In a raid with 20 people and 3 loot drops, each person has a 15% chance of getting loot on each boss. Unless there is some form of bad luck protection in place, I wouldn’t expect that number wouldn’t to change just because you kill more bosses.

The loot in SL just sucks, its completely unrewarding. Weekly my friends list is getting emptier and emptier. I’ll probably give SL another month or so and then go as well. This expansion is a dumpster fire.

  • W
2 Likes
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You can calculate it in binary outcomes like “getting loot or not getting loot though”.

In your analogy, you’ve got a 50% chance of flipping heads each time, but the overall chance of not flipping a tail diminishes with each flip.

But if we look at it of “how many heads can you flip in a row” we know that:

1 Heads: 50%
2 Heads: 25%
3 Heads: 12.5%

And so on.

This means that to hit the only other possible outcome (i.e. landing one tails) is calculable by the inverse of this %, because again, there’s only two possible outcomes, Flipping Heads X times in a row or landing tails at least once.

So your while your chance of flipping a heads remains 50% each flip, the odds you’ve hit a tail by the third flip is 87.5%

It’s too late for me to check his actual math, the methodology is solid since we’re only looking for the binary outcome of “getting gear vs not getting gear”.

1 Like
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This is correct…

Also to throw things off more. Not every single drop is useful.

The issue is not only the drop, as said before… players want loot to be meaningful.

I’m not saying that only useful loot should drop for everyone every time. But if you factor in that only rest 1-2 pieces are beneficial for anyone in a single dungeon run. The odds sound better when you include a bunch of things that’s completely useless to each player.

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If someone believes my math is wrong, please correct it! But here’s how it works:

There is 1 scenario where you get no loot, with a 19.69% of that scenario occurring.

There are 10 scenarios where you get 1 piece, and each scenario has a 3.47% chance of occurring, making up 34.74% of the possible outcomes.

There are 45 scenarios where you get 2 pieces of loot, and each scenario has a 0.61% chance of occurring, making up a total of 27.59% of the possible outcomes.

Etc…

1 Like