Guild Wars 2

Somebody stop me! I’m about to start doing math! =[

While screwing around idly in the mists, I was playing around with staff abilities and started to notice something…

The RNG of the staff skills may not be equal. (RNG is short for “random number generator” meaning the chance for an effect to happen, such as getting rare loot or Chaos Storm proccing Retaliation)

It seems to me like some effects are more likely to proc than others depending on the skill used, here was my estimate based on spamming about 10-20 times straight. (None of this is concrete data, which is why I’m hoping a tester from OMFG can help clear things up)

Out of spamming Chaos Storm (6 hits)15-20 times…

• A daze procced every single time except once, that one time poison procced 4 of the 6 hits.
• Weakness seemed to proc the least.

Out of spamming Winds of Chaos 10-20 times…

• Bleed procced most often, followed by Vulnerability. Burn was the most rare.

I didn’t test Chaos Armor, though I should’ve. x.x I don’t know if theres a mathematical equation for something like this, since it could’ve just been my luck. That’s why I’m hoping others can also run some tests and see if they produce similar results.

When dealing with RNG, you basically need to have a high enough sample size to get statistically relevant data. This sample size depends on the number of possible outcomes and the % chance of each outcome.

And…that’s about where my in-depth knowledge of statistics ends. I can say that if you do 100 samples for winds of chaos, that will almost definitely be enough times to have a statistically relevant sample. Chaos storm might need a bit more, since it has 4 possible negative effects, although only 3 positive ones.

I would actually like to test the effect of chaos storm on multiple opponents. I’m assuming that the effect is random for each one of them each tick, but I’d love to be sure. And I’d like to know the probabilities as well, because I feel like I never see chill proc (but no doubt it’s just skewed anecdotal observation)

In case anyone needs an assistant/target for testing/calculating, I can offer my help with that. Simply message me. It’s just that I couldn’t be bothered to do it alone.