Symphonist Drops Bugged?

[MechWarden]

On my new run I've been poking at Symphonists off and on and after 15 or so kills I've gotten 3 Porcelain Tablets, 2 Organs, and not one Porcelain Key. (iirc I've also got Porcelain Shard drops every kill)

Based on the wiki the tablets are a 3% drop while the key is a 15% drop (and the shards are 50%). Either I've been very awkwardly 'luckly' or something with the RNG has been messed with by accident. It feels as though the drop rate stats for keys and tablets got swapped.

Anyone else notice this as well?

[dyra55]

I had about 3 porcelain tablets but also about 3 procelain key drops in my first save file, so probably?

[Kaijudomage]

I got one key really early in solo, been playing since just before the latest hotfix but yeah, every kill since has only dropped shards (every time when the wiki says 50%) and the head for a similar amount of times in both solo and a group map, I've never even seen the tablet and I've also done a fair amount of fishing in the fountain, tho not with the waders.

[Insano-Man]

I have gotten about 3 organs, only 1 key, and I don't even know what the tablet is in the first place. For such a rare, location/event-specific enemy, the drop rates are kind of obscene.

[Large Sweet Tea From McDonalds]

I also had very bad luck getting a porcelain key from symphonists. I got a few organs and then used partial organs from chordfish to make myself a full set of maestro armor. I wore it to flathill and there were two symphonist that spawned and both of them dropped keys back to back first try.

[Nerevar]

i got a key from my very first one i killed on my apoc playtrough^^ so they arent bugged. RNG just gonna be like RNGing hard. but people already whine about it so theyll probaly buff the droprate to like 100%.

[MechWarden]

Originally posted by Nerevar:

i got a key from my very first one i killed on my apoc playtrough^^ so they arent bugged. RNG just gonna be like RNGing hard. but people already whine about it so theyll probaly buff the droprate to like 100%.

Getting a key on your first kill doesn't say anything either way on if it is bugged or not. A 'sample size' of one is way too small to make any meaningful judgement call.
(if anything, your logic us bugged )

I already stated why I think things seem odd; getting 3 even rarer items over getting one less rare key. It is statistically possible to be that unlucky, but it feels highly improbable. And asking if others are having issues helps grows the sample size and give a clearer picture.

Heck, even the (wiki listed) coin flip of getting shards seems to be different. I can't recall any of the Symphonists not dropping them. You even know what the odds are of flipping heads over a dozen times is? Let's just say you have better odds of falling into a Portal Toilet than getting heads 8 times in a row.

On the other hand, it would be nice if a dev just looked at that's in the code and verified one way or another.

[Crochwhisle purple]

it`s simply your luck, or the lack of thereof

[Kaijudomage]

Must be luck yeah, finally got one again, meanwhile I'm swimming in ornate keys and nothing to open with them.
Having more Symphonists to actually fight would be nice, not sure where all the spots are if you induce the fog as even those seem inconsistent.

[Crochwhisle purple]

Originally posted by Kaijudomage:

Must be luck yeah, finally got one again, meanwhile I'm swimming in ornate keys and nothing to open with them. :berserk:
Having more Symphonists to actually fight would be nice, not sure where all the spots are if you induce the fog as even those seem inconsistent.

2 spawn in labs if you use the cart to ride the more straight road to the jungle bot, one near the elevator in datafarm office that takes you close to the flathill portal. somewhere near the crucibles in manufacturing, Also there are: one in the office near the flathill elevator, behind the arcade and inside the police station

[MechWarden]

Originally posted by Kaijudomage:

Must be luck yeah, finally got one again, meanwhile I'm swimming in ornate keys and nothing to open with them. :berserk:
Having more Symphonists to actually fight would be nice, not sure where all the spots are if you induce the fog as even those seem inconsistent.

Not exactly wrong that it is (technically) luck, but it feels like it is more than that. Bad luck shouldn't be this bad. I think I have two dozen Symphonist heads and not one key among them.

Doing some back of the envelope probability math (which very likely could be wrong, since I'm no math geek), at 24 kills I should have better than a 50/50 chance to find a tablet (based on odds stated on the wiki) and I have 2-3 of them. At 24 kills I have a 2% chance of finding no keys (if drop rate is at 15%). Not completely out of the realm of possibility, but that's highly unlikely. On top of that, getting shards to drop every time, 24 times in a row, with the wiki listed 50% odds has a (copy-pastes number from calculator) 0.00000596% chance of happening. Even 12 in a row is a 0.024% chance.

I'm leaning more on the idea that the devs changed the drop rates, either on purpose or by accident (or a bit of both). I'd really like it if someone could look into the code and see what got changed, since I was able to find keys before the update.

[Crochwhisle purple]

Originally posted by MechWarden:

Originally posted by Kaijudomage:

Must be luck yeah, finally got one again, meanwhile I'm swimming in ornate keys and nothing to open with them. :berserk:
Having more Symphonists to actually fight would be nice, not sure where all the spots are if you induce the fog as even those seem inconsistent.

Not exactly wrong that it is (technically) luck, but it feels like it is more than that. Bad luck shouldn't be this bad.

Curse of WombatCombat

[Teacyn]

The drop rates on all of the rare drops in this game are absolutely ludicrously low, with Symphonists being the worst by far (given that they only spawn during an also rare weather event or rarely when portals reset in flathill). I genuinely do not understand why these drops are so absurdly rare to the point many players likely will not even encounter them. One of my friends is doing his second playthrough with us and literally didn't even know the flathill armor exists because he never got a single drop of an Organ or a key.

[crate]

I feel the drop rate could be boosted slightly as they feel (feel being the key word there given my own personal sample size is pretty small) out of line with Order keys where we have so so many simply due to how many dudes you kill and GATE keys which are easily semi-AFK farmable currently.

One fringe benefit is that I worry that having emptied (and stolen) the chests we've opened that any patch that improves the contents or adds new drops in them will be out of reach having already pilfered them, however the GATE and Porcelain chests we have only opened one per player instead of every Order one so maybe we won't be locked out of any future goodies.

[MechWarden]

So an update on this.

After 36 tries, I didn't get a key to drop. It was always a head and always some amount of shards shards, with maybe an organ or a tablet on rare occasions.

I was going to end my test there, leave Flathill, get off the game, and rant here, but I checked the two other spots, and on try 37 and 38 I got a key each.
Thanks!... I guess?!
(still going to rant!)

That's still not good odds. I got more organ drops from the Symphonists than I did keys; though not by much. I think I got 3 organ drops in total, got 2 others from fishing, and two more from the a Cacophonous Crate each.

That put it at (2:38 ratio) a 5.26% chance of a drop for a key, which is about 3 times worse than what's listed on the Wiki. For anyone familiar with statistics, if it was actually a fair 15% drop rate, not getting any drops after 36 tries is a... what, 0.29% chance of it happening if I did my math right?

And if I got 4 Organs from a batch of 40, that's... kind of absurd. I think the drop rates for the Organs matched, getting 3 (maybe 4) during my attempts to get one key. Getting the organs wouldn't have been so bad if keys weren't so apparently rare; with one theoretically easier to get key counting as an organ or two.

I'm eventually going to bug report this, because this was absurd. It wasn't this hard in a previous run, before whatever update that changed the drop rates.

[Kai]

Make it so it gives you a key, and if not, gives you a fragment of a key, requiring you to get 3 fragments to make into a key.