Diablo 3:

Legendary Drop Rate Analysis

Jack Logan
April 4, 2014
Aliases: Galice, Galiks
BattleTag: Galice#1533
Twitch: twitch.tv\Galiks (retired)
Expansion: Reaper of Souls
Contents
I. Abstract 1
II. The Discovery 2
III. Legendary Drop Rate Formula 3
IV. Choosing the Right Diculty 5
V. Magic Find Implications 6
I. Abstract
The enigma shrouding the drop rate of legendary items in Diablo 3 is a center of debate
and mass confusion for the most ecient methods to obtain them. The choice of whether
its worth it to increase the diculty level for an increase in nding legendary items, and
the resulting quantitative gain associated with an increase in diculty, is still unclear. For
example, is it worth the massive time increase to suer through Torment 6 (t6) monsters
for a higher drop rate? Many would say of course not (and it turns out theyre right).
It seems obvious that higher diculty levels are just not worth it as all Torment diculties
drop the same items, but supposedly at a dierent rate. The aim of this report is to provide a
quantitative analysis of the drop rates for torment diculties, and provide a recommendation
in farming through comparing drop rates in and outside of rifts. Additionally, magic nd
(MF) will be factored into the consideration as an extra factor.
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II. The Discovery
With the recent implementation of legendary drop rates having an 25% increase inside
nephalem rifts, questions have arose. On April 3, 2014, a player asked a question on the
forums:
Hi! Is there a legendary scale from t1 to t6? for example: 5% leg chance at t1 10%
at t2 and so on.. +25% bu today or something else?
javazon, http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/12413271220?page=1#2
Within an hour or so, a blue poster responded with the following:
Great question! (I was actually looking for a good thread in which to drop this
information.)
So, the 25% bonus to Legendary drops in Nephalem Rifts is multiplicative and will
actually stack with the scaling Legendary drop rate bonus in Torment 1-6.
This means if youre playing through a Rift in Normal-Master, youll have a 25%
bonus to Legendary drops. If youre playing through a Rift in Torment 1, youll have
a 43% bonus to Legendary drops (1.15 * 1.25 = 1.43). If youre playing through a
Rift in Torment 2, youll have a 65% bonus to Legendary drops (1.32* 1.25 = 1.65).
And so on.
Hope that helps clear some things up a bit. (Also, I really hope my math checks out.
.)
Note that were going to continue to keep an eye on Rifts and how rewarding they
are (or, more importantly, how rewarding they feel). Weve already seen some great
feedback from players on that topic that were taking a look at now. This bu is just
a small change we could make quickly, and were denitely looking forward to your
feedback over the next few days.
Lylirra, http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/12413271220?page=1#2
At rst glance, the question was indeed answered and all is well. With closer inspection,
however, more information was actually leaked. An excerpt of the previous blue posting
question is highlighted with important numbers bolded:
If youre playing through a Rift in Torment 1, youll have a 43% bonus to Legendary
drops (1.15 * 1.25 = 1.43). If youre playing through a Rift in Torment 2, youll
have a 65% bonus to Legendary drops (1.32* 1.25 = 1.65).
Previously, no insight into legendary drop rates for varying torment diculty was ever
given, and it appears that this information was innocently leaked through answering our
friend javazons curious inquiry. With this information, though, are we able to nd the
actual drop rates for other diculties?
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III. Legendary Drop Rate Formula
Using this new-found information, a trial-and-error approach was utilized to apply known
torment diculty statistics and solve for the drop rate increase due to the diculty increase.
Some people assume it is just a linear increase from that seen between the division of Torment
2 and Torment 1, but that has no grounds or proof behind it. To put it simply, I looked at
the monster increase in health and damage for the varying torment diculty from 1 to 2,
and tried to nd an equation that yielded the legendary drop increase. The derivation will
be omitted, but the end result is the following expression:
T
N+1
LegMod =
3

Health%
N+1
Health%
N
+ T
N
LegMod 1 (1)
where N is the subscript corresponding to torment diculty level and Health% is the
increase in monster health percentage due to the diculty level. Substituting known values
from Table 1, as an example, for Torments 1 and 2:
1.32 =
3

1311
819
+ 1.15 1 = 1.32
which is the exact value released by the blue poster. We can now apply this equation
to the other torment diculties (assuming no more complexities are added to the equation
(and knowing Blizzard, this is a pretty safe assumption)), to yield the rest of the values in
Table 1. Remember the rift modier results are multiplicative so they are simply 1.25 times
the non-rifting drop rate. A graph of these results is shown in Fig. 1.
Varying Torment Diculty Stats
Torment Diculty Health Increase (%) Leg Modier (x) Rift Leg Modier (x)
1 819 1.15 1.44
2 1311 1.32 1.65
3 2097 1.49 1.86
4 3355 1.66 2.07
5 5369 1.83 2.29
6 8590 2.00 2.50
Table 1: Statistics for legendary modier drop rates for varying torment diculty levels.
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1 2 3 4 5 6
1
1.25
1.5
1.75
2
2.25
2.5
Torment Difculty Level
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Legendary Drop Rate Increase versus Torment Difculty Level


Outside Rift
Inside Rift
Figure 1: Legendary drop rate modiers for varying torment diculties in/outside rifts.
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IV. Choosing the Right Diculty
From this data, we can choose the right diculty to optimize our legendary drop rates.
Referring to Fig. 2, we can conclude:
Torment 1 with rifting is slightly less than Torment 3 without rifting
Torment 2 with rifting is equivalent to Torment 4 without rifting
Torment 3 with rifting is slightly better than Torment 5 without rifting
Torment 4 with rifting is better than Torment 6 without rifting
1 2 3 4 5 6
1
1.25
1.5
1.75
2
2.25
2.5
Torment Difculty Level
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Legendary Drop Rates To Rift or Not To Rift?


Outside Rift
Inside Rift
Figure 2: Legendary drop rate modiers for varying torment diculties in/outside rifts.
Comparitive lines are drawn to show equivalence between diculties.
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V. Magic Find Implications
With magic nd, we can conclude several things about certain MF values outside of a rift
(Fig. 3) and inside a rift (Fig. 4). We assume that MF stacks multiplicatively as well, just
like the 25% rift bonus. As we are most likely more concerned with that in rifting, we will
mostly consider the case inside of a rift.
For the case outside of the rift, the MF doesnt have noteworthy eects until MF=150,
where Torment 1 is approximately equal to Torment 2. For maximum MF (300%), which
may or may not be currently obtainable without legacy items (pre-RoS), Torment 1 becomes
approximately equal to Torment 3. The conclusion is that unless Torment 3 is farmed at
the same rate as Torment 1, there will be no noticeable dierences.
1 2 3 4 5 6
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
Torment Difculty Level
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Legendary Drop Rates To Rift or Not To Rift?


Outside Rift
Inside Rift
Outside Rift MF50
Outside Rift MF150
Outside Rift MF300
Figure 3: Legendary drop rate modiers for varying torment diculties and varying MF
outside of a rift.
For the case inside of the rift, we huge returns for the MF as the rift bonus is already in
play. As lower diculty rifts will be of most concern, we conclude that for Torment 1 rifts:
Wearing no MF inside a Torment 1 rift is slightly less than Torment 3 farming outside
of a rift
Wearing 50 MF inside a Torment 1 rift is equivalent to Torment 3 farming outside of
a rift
Wearing 150 MF inside a Torment 1 rift is equivalent to Torment 4 farming outside
of a rift
Wearing 300 MF inside a Torment 1 rift is slightly less than Torment 6 farming outside
of a rift
and for Torment 2 rifts:
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Wearing no MF inside a Torment 2 rift is equivalent to Torment 4 farming outside of
a rift
Wearing 50 MF inside a Torment 2 rift is equivalent to Torment 5 farming outside of
a rift
Wearing 150 MF inside a Torment 2 rift is slightly less than Torment 6 farming outside
of a rift
Wearing 300 MF inside a Torment 2 rift is greater than Torment 6 farming outside of
a rift, and equivalent to Torment 5 farming inside of a rift with no MF
1 2 3 4 5 6
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
Torment Difculty Level
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Legendary Drop Rates To Rift or Not To Rift?


Outside Rift
Inside Rift
Inside Rift MF50
Inside Rift MF150
Inside Rift MF300
Figure 4: Legendary drop rate modiers for varying torment diculties and varying MF
inside of a rift.
More detail can be gone into nding the exact numerical gains between certain combi-
nations, but this document acts to serve as a rule of thumb for choices in rifting versus
non-rifting while using varying MF for varying torment diculty levels.
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