I would like to begin by stating that I do not use community patch or any other mods and that this farm is the result of pure vanilla read only farming.
A little bit of a preface, I was about to do some op8 sandhawk farming to try to get some flying elemental ones and was in the chat of a twitch stream where I mentioned that it seems sandhawks without an element and prefix are more likely than those with. Someone in the chat told me that no element was a 75% chance and that slag, corrosive, fire and shock split the other 25% equally. This person also claimed that all attachments, including not having any attachment, were all equally likely. So I decided to make a record of all of my sandhawk drops and calculate some stats based on the results. This is some of the more interesting stats at my current stopping point of 500 runs.
Number and percentage of each element:
No element: 344 68.8%
Slag: 34 6.8%
Fire: 42 8.4%
Corrosive: 39 7.8%
Shock: 38 7.6%
Of course, after only 500 runs there is some margin of error but I update the percentages every 10 runs and the no element hasnāt peaked above 71% since very early on. One interesting thing is that slag was actually my most common elemental drop up until somewhere in the 350-380 runs range when it was passed by fire. I also had a stretch of around 80 runs without a single shock and other times I will get 2 back to back. It is hard to say if after enough runs the percentages will line up with 75%, 6.25%, 6.25%, 6.25%, 6.25% but I do believe the actual chance of no element is around 70%.
Next up is the prefix. I would like to start off by explaining a few things about the prefixes. There are 7 options when the game picks a prefix. 6 of which correspond to an attachment and the other is for having no attachment. If the sandhawk has one of the 6 possible attachments its prefix will be either: Bladed, Stoic, Skirmish, Deft, Stopping, or Flying. If the sandhawk has an element and no attachment, its prefix will be as follows: Slag = Amp, Fire = Incendiary, Corrosive = Corrosive, Shock = Sapping. If the sandhawk has no element and no attachment, its prefix will depend on the manufacturer of the grip as follows: Dahl = Smooth, Hyperion = Light, Maliwan = Captain Scarrletās, Tediore = React, Bandit = Reserve.
The result: 396 or 79.2% had no attachment. Just the default prefixes on nearly 80% of the 500 sandhawks.
So as I mentioned above there are 5 grips. There are also 5 stocks. If we multiply 5 stocks * 5 grips * 5 element options * 7 attachment options. We get a total of 875 different sandhawks (note this isnāt counting sights). During my 500 runs I found 187 different combinations.
Lastly, I sorted the sandhawks into 3 categories: Common- contains any sandhawk that has no element and no attachment as this is the most probable option. Uncommon- these sandhawks had either an element or an attachment but not both. Rare- both an element and a prefix.
I didnāt keep track for each of these the number out of 500 that dropped but instead how uniques in each category were found. All 25 common sandhawks were found. 128 of the 250 different uncommon sandhawks spawned. And only 34 of the 600 possible rare sandhawks were found in my 187 unique drops. I did keep track of how many common sandhawks spawned total since it was easy enough to sum up 25 of them: 275 of my 500 sandhawks were no element no prefix, thatās 55%! Finally: based on my thoughts that you have a 30% chance of an element and a 20% chance of a prefix: You have a 6% chance of getting an element and a prefix. Then if you want say a perfect shock sandhawk with dahl grip and dahl stock you have to take that .06* the 1 in 4 chance of shock * the 1 in 5 chance of dahl stock * the 1 in 5 chance of dahl grip* the 1 in 6 chance of flying and you get .0001. That is a 1 in 10,000 chance for a perfect sandhawk.
Thoughts and or comments?
I never saw the BL2 auto-save flash on the screen so I suspect the XB1 cloud save may have gotten me, if it does auto-saves.
