So, I did the incursion today, as did others in my guild. The Warrior that is our other raid tank, got a 370 spec appropriate weapon. One of our healers, a monk, got a 375 spec appropriate weapon. I did the incursion, same toon, guardian druid, and I got my 5th 370 INT item…14 days 21 hours played at level 120 on this toon, and I’ve gotten a 5 to 0 ratio of weapons for specs I barely or don’t at all play at ilvl 370, and thinking back, I’m pretty sure the 340 agi staff, and 355 I have now are the only agi weapons I’ve ever gotten on this toon, whereas I’ve gotten a boat ton of INT weapons at lower ilvls. Meanwhile…other toons, monk, hunter, DH, have in some cases gotten more than one spec appropriate 370 weapon.
I know it is the way it is designed but then why have the option to choose loot spec at all . Hunters getting Pole arms yet never playing melee or ret pallys getting healing weapon despite never playing healing in 12 years of game
Indeed, that’s the purpose of having loot specs. It allows you to work for an off spec item while playing your main spec.
Regardless, my post is not about the details of how they’ve implemented things, it’s about “odd frequency”. Just to add another data point, I got a 325 blue weapon, for transmog only, from an island the other day, and…strange enough, the item was INT stats for Resto and Balance…
Even weapons not intended to use at all seem to drop only as INT for me.
I realize I’m a small sample size, and maybe in some grand across game aggregate this all works out, but that’s the problem, I can’t tell this, so it seems like a bug to get a succession of 6 or 7 of the “wrong item type” on what should be a 50/50 shot at either or.
If I played a pen and paper game, while it’s possible I might roll a 6, 6 times in a row, I’d definitely question whether I had weighted/poorly manufactured dice if I did (air bubbles from molding etc. are flaws that skew the “random”). This is why Casinos spend so much money on dice, tight manufacturing.
But if 10 million people did it, it would actually be more surprising if nobody got 6 6s in a row. Random does not mean an equal distribution at the individual level. It means an equal distribution of all possibilities. Plus, as you said yourself, it is more like rolling a 4, 5 or 6, 6 times in a row because so many Druid weapons are for Int specs. And that is only 1/64 which is going to happen all the time.
That said I don’t disagree this is a bad design. Like a number of their choices, it creates a “reverse lottery” situation where the really far end of the probability range gets shafted rather than rewarded. But, unfortunately it isn’t in the scope of the Bugs forum. It is working as they intend.
Probability is a model, not a mechanism, you can’t say it’s not a bug, because a bug could produce the same results as I’ve received through “randomness”. Since I can never experience 10 million samples, there is no way for me to tell or you to tell. There could be simple transcription errors in the database that could produce these same results…so…unless Blizzard wants to pipe in and say “we checked the random number generator against the loot tables for Druids and whatever other algorithms we use (bad luck protection, catch up, etc.) and you’re just getting unlucky”, there is no way to know.
That’s good, because I did the incursion tonight, which was an “Equipment Cache” and, no surprise to me, I got ANOTHER INT item…a caster off hand item, 8th time getting an INT item now? I’m losing count… This of course doesn’t include all the duplicate armor items I’ve gotten. Just NEVER an AGI item in ALL the various caches I’ve done for emissary, WQ, and WF…even specific ones for weapons.
Edit: I just did the incursion, again, just now, and I got…surprise, surprise, another INT item Honorbound War Staff…from the same type of Equipment Cache as last night. For reference, we have a BUNCH of druids in the guild, and as far as I’m aware, all of the regular players have a 370 or higher weapon, but of course, they all play Balance or Resto…
Because randomization is fundamental to the design of the game now, in itemization, and in many things, and this post is NOT about my personal need for gear but rather asking the developers to look at specific ways the game is CODED and ensure there are no bugs cropping up as “randomness”. Changing the way the loot works is not a fix if this IS a bug in the way the randomization works and/or communication with their data structures.