Disclaimer: not my thread. Just another repost from the old forums. Credit goes to @Scottes
I am re-uploading this because I still get asked decently often about if +2FRI affects lance chests. Also I am tagging @MeltintheSun as well because of his helpful testing thread involving craw if I remember correctly.
I just got done running a fairly large test, looting over 1,200 Lance chests and counting the loot with a +2 Find rare Items COM, as well as 4-player mode.
I have determined - to my satisfaction at least - that the +2 Find Rare Items COM doesn’t do anything to improve loot in chests, and neither does playing with 4 players. Nothing.
Some Background
First, some explanation behind Rarity Levels for those who don’t know about this.
As most/all know, weapons are made up of different parts - body, grip, magazine, etc. Most of these parts have a Rarity - for example the part Barrel.barrel4_Hyperion_Butcher has a Legendary Rarity, which is what makes it a Legendary/Orange weapon.
Well, sort of. In actuality, parts have 6 levels of rarity (see table 1 below) and each level has a value. The rarity values for all the parts are totaled, which gives the weapon’s Rarity Level, and this determines the weapons color (see table 2 below).
Table 1 - Rarity of Parts
0 - Common
1 - Uncommon
3 - Uncommoner
5 - Rare
8 - VeryRare
50 - Legendary
Table 2 - Colors by Rarity Level
0-4 - White
5-10 - Green
11-15 - Blue
16-49 - Purple
50-60 - Light Orange
61-65 - Orange
66-100 - Dark Orange
101+ - Pearlescent
My Reasoning For These Tests
Previous tests of this sort counted how weapons were found, and the colors of each. I do not find this accurate enough, since the above table shows that a slight increase in rarity does not always lead to a change in weapon color. I simply do not feel that previous tests were accurate enough.
Find RARE Items always made me think of the Rarity Level. This hidden stat determines the color (white, green, etc). Previous tests did check the color, but that isn’t granular enough, since two weapons with a Rarity Level difference of 2 would most likely still be the same color.
So I wrote some programs to parse Borderland’s lookup tables and calculate the Rarity Levels of the weapons. I “reverse-engineered” the values by checking weapons in Debug Mode. I tested 70 or 80 weapons to check my numbers, and all came out perfectly [after some fiddling].
The Tests
s620ex1 was kind enough to send me his map with 120 Lance Chests.
I used WillowTree to copy my Mordecai, increased his backpack to 500, and emptied his inventory (backpack and equipped).
I then copied that save file 10 times, and gave one of them a COM with +2 Find Rare Items.
I ran through s620ex1’s map 10 times, collecting every single piece of gear. I ran through 8 times with the empty Mordecai - No FRI. Then once with the +2 FRI, and one last time set to 4-player mode using NoPER’s utility.
I then wrote a program to analyze the weapons collected, counting the Rarity Level of every part on every weapon collected. I ignored the shields and COMs because I can’t verify their Rarity Levels. And I felt that the weapons alone produced enough data.
The Results
Without the FRI, I made 8 runs and collected a total 2696 weapons. The average Rarity Level was 18.94. Of those 8 runs, the lowest average Rarity Level was 17.89, and the highest was 20.51.
Of those 8 base runs, I collected an average of 337 weapons, between 328 and 355 weapons on each run.
With the FRI, I collected 330 weapons with an average Rarity Level of 19.26. Both of these numbers are well within the bounds of the 8 test runs.
In 4-player mode, using NoPER’s BorderPlayers utility, I collected 337 guns, with an average rarity of 19.04. The number of guns in this test matches the base run average, and the average rarity level is off by about 0.5%.
Edit: I just noticed that Willow Shrubbery will provide a total value of the items in the inventory, so I uploaded the save files used for this test. I only have 4 of the No-FRI save files, since the other 4 have been deleted. For these 4, the total value of gear ran from $729m to $788m, with an average of $756m. The one save file with the +2 FRI total value was only $729m - the lowest of all! The 4-player test file total value was $754m - right on the average.
BTW, I didn’t find a single Pearl weapon in all of these runs. 3363 weapons and 0 Pearls.
My Conclusion
Because of these tests, it is my opinion that neither +2 Find Rare Items nor 4-players has any effects on the overall contents of chests.
