The last instance in Dragonspyre is a grind that ends with Malistaire’s defeat at your victorious, albeit blood-soaked, hands. He hands out a robe. One out every seven times, it will be the robe for your school of magic.
That same instance contains the bosses who drop the class-specific ring and athame, too — 1/7 of the time.
So how many times will you be battling Malistaire and his friends to get everything you want?
Your very first time in the instance, you only have a 0.29% chance of getting all three drops, so you’ll almost certainly be there more than once. But since this instance requires a group of at least three wizards to complete — you want to know how often you and your friends will need to make time to get together.
I ran a statistical analysis!
First, a definition of terms for those whose math days are behind them.
The median of a set of values is the element in the middle of a sorted set. The mean of a set of values is the mathematical average. These are different here because there’s an upper limit to lucky — you could, potentially, get everything first time through — but no limit on unlucky — there is no guarantee you will ever get a drop you can use. The standard deviation is how tightly values are clustered around the mean. 95% of the values in a set with a known expected value (in this case, the mean) is within two standard deviations of it.
median got robe: 5
mean: 7.074400 stddev: 6.506202
95% chance to get robe: 20
median got all: 11
mean: 12.377000 stddev: 7.590960
95% chance to get everything: 28
Chance you got everything if you stopped when you got your robe: 36%
Median number of additional runs to get everything once robe obtained: 3
Longest time to get robe: 64
Longest time to get everything: 69
Half of the wizards who fight Malistaire will have gotten their robe by their fifth time through. If they want to continue on until they get their ring and athame too, half of the wizards had either gotten the ring and athame already or took no more than three additional runs to complete the set. So 25% of all wizards will get every piece of their class gear from the last instance within eight runs.
75% of all wizards just won’t be that lucky, though (although half of all wizards will get everything by their eleventh time through). There’s hope. 95% of all wizards will have gotten their robe by the twentieth time through (and 5%… won’t). 95% of all wizards will have gotten everything by their 33rd time through.
So far, it looks like the bosses all drop one of their set every time. Otherwise the values would be really out there.
How many times will you, personally, run the last instance? Count on at least seven.
These numbers are based on a simulation running 10,000 wizards through the final instance and counting how many runs it took each one to get their robe and how many additional runs to get everything. It assumes that each boss has an equal chance to drop any class-specific item.
9 thoughts on “Wizard 101: How many times must Malistaire die?”
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As my father use to say to me, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” *pinches new death robes* /hug
hah. there is no luck. there are only odds, young padawan.
back to leveling my pyromancer now.
You say pyromancer, I hear Pie Romancer. Mmmm. Pie.
I promise I will call sometime soon! Just horrible, horrible real life turmoil.
Well Tipa, if pyromancer reminds you of pie, then you must really really love pie. Because i know the word pie is in pyromancer and i got used to that 🙂
Is there any greater food than pie? You can bake pretty much anything into it. About the only kind of pie I won’t eat is Moose Turd Pie.
I stoped reading this because it started getting confusing and I hate math.
Math has only good things to say about you.
Seriously, though, math is so incredibly useful — and I’m talking as someone who failed 8th grade Algebra. I had to take it again the next year, aced it, went on to get a perfect score in the AP Calculus test and skip Calc in college. That’s because when I started all over again in Algebra, I finally “got” it. I had an epiphany — I realized I’d just EXPECTED math to be hard, and so it was — but actually, it’s how stuff works. That’s what drove me into computers when I thought I’d be doing something else with my life; I wanted to be a translator or a journalist, not a programmer. But when I realized I could figure out how things really worked — with math — I couldn’t turn back.
My greatest disappointment in my children was that they both decided math was too hard and brushed it off. Now my daughter washes dogs for a living and my son can’t do simple arithmetic.
Math isn’t hard. It’s just a way of looking at life.
It was actually pretty easy to understand 😀 Thanks for posting..