After some realizations, I decided to publish my current theory of the Treasure Hunter and drop rate system. Unfortunately even if I post the general summary of it, it will still look like a wall of text but I think it could pan out to be an important contribution to the FFXI community.
For starters the entire outline of my theory can be found on my blog at:
http://ami.calcobrena.com/2008/09/de...-and-drop.html
Here's a brief summary of that wall of text with this wall of text.
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I'd like to summarize by recapping the varying possibilities of this model. I believe that any single item that can drop off a monster has a root value defining its rarity in a base 2 system. These values are 1/256(.390625%), 1/128 (.78135%), 1/64, (1.5625%), 1/32 (3.125%), 1/16 (6.25%), 1/8 (12.5%), 1/4 (25%), 1/2 (50%) and 1/1 (100%). I believe that the Treasure Hunter job trait simply drops the rarity by a single tier effectively doubling the rate at which an item can drop. However, I believe that Treasure Hunter II may be more complex as it may simply add a bonus along with the first Treasure Hunter and create a ratio that simply can't be factored such as 3/256 (1.171875%) which would make more sense as rare items still seem to be rare even after several applications of Treasure Hunter. However, there's also the possibility that the bonus is applied after the initial Treasure Hunter and that the rate drop rate is effectively doubled again. This could also make sense because when applied to the rarest possible drop rate of 256, that would give it a drop rate of 1/64 (1.5625%) as opposed to 3/256 (1.171875%). The rarest possible items still remain pretty damn uncommon under the influence of either version of this formula. Treasure Hunter bonuses applied by the Thief's Knife and Assassin's Kote seem to point to the idea that original ratio itself is simply altered and result that can be factored is just a coincidence of the mechanics rather than a law governing the formula itself. That would mean that with "Treasure Hunter +3" your drop rate would be 4/256 which could be factored down to 1/64 and results in a percentage of 1.5625% when applied to the rarest possible drop rates. "Treasure Hunter +4" would likely reduce the rarity to 5/256 or 1.953125% making rare items still very rare even with with the highest possible rate of Treasure Hunter. Considering how some drop rates still seem to hover around 1% or 2% even with "Treasure Hunter 4" it is likely that this is the correct formula. However, even under the most optimistic circumstances that Treasure Hunter II reduced the rarity of a 1/256 all the way down to 1/64 and the bonuses from Thief's Knife and Assassin's Kote are applied afterwards, that still only gives us a maximum bonus to the rarest items of (3/64) or drop rate of 4.6875% compared to the 5/256 ratio that grants us a 1.953125% drop rate. Such small differences would be difficult to test but if we applied either formula to a base rarity of 1/32 we'd have a difference of 3/8 (37.5%) or 5/32 (15.625%). Finally, we would have to figure if multiple items are in the drop pool, if there's a cap on how many identical items can drop, and we have to find out if there are limitations that prevent fractions such as a drop rate of 1/4 being boosted to 5/4 or if that there are no limitations if this allows for an automatic drop rate or if the drop rate is rolled over into a new possible drop rate of an identical item. Of course, with an item of 100% drop rate that doesn't mean we'll get five them as I'm sure if this were the case there would be a cap imposed. Otherwise, items that drop 100% would have a drop ratio of 256/256 (1/1) and could be boosted to 260/256 or 5/1, depending on which formula for bonuses defines the model, and with no cap imposed we would be getting 5 of them under the latter formula and that just doesn't happen.
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Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks.