Boredom Post 2: Luck

This is a post I made on the forums in response to someone asking how Luck works:


From what I hear and read, most people think luck works like magic find in Diablo 2. I believe that Luck works similarly to how it did in Hellgate: London, considering Mythos was originally meant to test that game's engine. If someone can prove this assumption wrong, then this info won't be accurate:

- When loot drops, the first thing that is rolled is the number of drops. Then it rolls the quality for each drop, followed by the stats and affixes for the individual items. Each mob/boss/chest has a loot table of base items and affixes it can pick from.

- The ONLY roll that luck affects is the quality of the drops. It won't give more drops, or better stats/affixes. It will not affect whether the item is an armor piece or a health potion. It also has no affect on the quality of gems.

- The game associates every item rarity with a luck number (example below). Luck simply reduces the chance for an item to be Common (white), thereby increasing the chance of a higher rarity.


I have no clue what numbers are actually used in the game (those are definitely much higher than I'm using), so this is just an example:

Each rarity level has a luck "value", which is totaled up:
70 Common (white)
35 Magic (green)
25 Rare (blue)
10 Mutant (purple)
7 Legendary (orange)
3 Unique (yellow)
150 total

Based off the above numbers, a drop has a 47% chance of being Common (white), 23% chance for green, 17% for blue, 7% for purple, 5% for orange, 2% for yellow.

Let's say your toon has a total Luck score of 30. Since luck only affects chance to be Common, the list now looks like this:
40 Common (white)
35 Magic (green)
25 Rare (blue)
10 Mutant (purple)
7 Legendary (orange)
3 Unique (yellow)
120 total

By lowering the chance to be white, you've effectively raised the chance of a drop to be green from 23% to 29%. Blue goes from 17% to 21%, purple from 7% to 9%, orange from 5% to 6%, and yellow from 2% to 3%, rounded up.

Keep in mind that this is how the Hellgate: London luck system works, and I'm only assuming it's the same because Mythos was designed to test that game's engine.


I did test runs earlier in the Beta, and I can conclusively say that Luck has a greater effect than people give it credit. I won't post my gear or full test results, but on average I saw close to 50% less whites drop whilst wearing Luck gear, over 200 runs in the same dungeon.