[Guide] Moze's Predetermined Skills

Prismatic · March 22, 2020, 9:03pm

Welcome Everyone! It’s time we discussed predetermined skills on Moze. We’ve all read the infamous description of Means of Destruction, and many have cried that it’s rigged. Well they’re partially right. While on the item card the skill states:

Ammo Chance: +10%
Grenade Chance +6%

This description is false. MoD is what we call predetermined. What does it mean to be predetermined?

The order the skill procs is always the same, so it doesn’t change between game restarts or save/quitting to main menu, just resets;
Fast Traveling and re-spawning do not reset the order;

How can I test this?

Go to Sanctuary. Pick a weapon in which you can easily discern a proc of your skill. Exit to the main menu with that weapon in hand. For Moze’s skills swapping weapons has no effect.
Go back in game and fire at the dummy while keeping track of procs in your preferred way.

Terminology and Acknowledgement

A massive thanks to @Ratore who got the ball rolling on a lot of this testing. His work saved me a ton of time isolating what affects the proc pools. I’ve also adopted a few of his explanations.

Lastly before we start let us clear up some terminology.

Proc Pool: This is the ordered list of numbers which the game checks to see if the effect must activate. We’ll notate the proc pool as a string of 1’s and 0’s. A 1 indicates the effect will activate, a 0 indicates it will not.

Iterates: The game moves through the proc pool keeping track of where it is in the chain and if the next action will trigger the effect., iterating on the pool moves to the next number in the proc pool.

Means of Destruction

Means of destruction tracks 2 separate proc pools, one for ammo return and the second for grenade return. On a splash hit both pools are checked and iterated. If you deal splash damage during the 0.3 second internal cooldown of the skill the hit is entirely ignored this hit will not iterate the proc pools.

Something to be aware of is if two instances of splash hit at the same time and are combined, the MoD proc pools will iterate twice to account for both splash instances. So multiple hits bypass the internal 0.3 second timer. The catch however is that you’ll only get at max 1 ammo returned from the multiple splash instances. Short Fuse procs fall within this window, so firing a single pellet splash gun and having Short Fuse proc will iterate the pool twice.

1/3 MoD Proc Pools - first 75 instances:

Ammo Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0001.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.1000.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

Grenade Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

2/3 MoD Proc Pools - first 75 instances:

Ammo Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0100.0001.0000.0000.0000.0000.0010.0000.0000.1010.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

Grenade Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0001.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.1000.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

3/3 MoD Proc Pools - first 75 instances:

Ammo Chance: : 0000.0000.0000.0000.0100.1001.1000.0000.0000.0000.0010.0000.0000.1010.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

Grenade Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0001.0000.0000.0000.0000.0010.0000.0000.1000.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

There’s an interesting pattern hidden in this mess of numbers. The grenade regen appears to be tied to the ammo regen. If you search the chains you’ll see every time a grenade was restored so was ammo. This leads me to believe that there is a dependency between them, it’s likely that the grenade regen pattern has been generated as a function of the successful ammo regen chain.
Further Testing and comparisons to Fl4k’s skills leads me to believe the pools merely share the same seed value. See the end of this post for elaboration on this.

Short Fuse

I’ve discussed Short Fuse being predetermined before when I discussed Short Fuse mechanics in [Guide] Short Fuse - Analysis and Breakdown. To recap though:

Short Fuse is checked on enemy hit, so if you miss a shot you won’t move the iterator forward in the proc pool. As far as Short Fuse is concerned the missed shot never happened.

Short Fuse also has an internal timer of 0.1 seconds between successful procs. The pool can be iterated while the internal cooldown is active however “successful procs” are ignored. Thus you can get a max of 1 Short Fuse explosion every 0.1 seconds. The behavior of this internal cooldown leads to multi pellet weapons being very reliable at proccing SF however they also receive less of a damage buff per shot from it.

Short Fuse Proc Pool:

1100.0000.1000.0010.1110.0000.0000.0000.0001.0000.1001.1000.0100.0100.1011.0000.1001.0100.0000.0100.0000.0001.1110.0100.0011.0001.0000.0001.0000.0001.0000.01

This is the practical usage of the skill covered, see the end of this post for discussion on how this pool relates to other predetermined pools.

Pull The Holy Pin

This was tested and is not predetermined.

Other Characters

I’m not going to discuss other characters here, but it’s worth mentioning that testing has taken place on all 4 vault hunters.

Amara & Zane

Indiscriminate and Playing Dirty were checked, neither is predetermined. Thank you @DocStrangelove for testing Indiscriminate.

FL4K

Fl4k has a few predetermined skills, see Ratore’s post on FL4K’s predetermined/fixed skills for details.

Gear

Gear - barring Bounty Hunter - is seemingly truly random - at least as far as the games pseudo random number generator goes. Boosters from the Big Boom Blaster were tested, As was Moze’s Mind Sweeper and Zane’s Seein’ Dead coms (Thanks Melting_NT for testing Seein’ Dead). These items either have a far more complex predetermined pool or are actually using a chance based system.

Sharing a Seed, The Ties between all Predetermined Pools.

I mentioned it briefly at the end of the Means of Destruction discussion. There is a shared seed that generates all the predetermined skills. Its easiest to see if we sort the various pools by their success chance and line their pools up like so:

The pools all line up exactly. Notice that any unsuccessful proc of the 6/3 Leave no Trace pool is also unsuccessful for all other pools. Conversely it can be noted that a proc in the 1/3 MoD ammo pool implies that all pools below it will also get a proc at that point in the chain.

This indicates that the function being used for each of these skills uses the same seed, the only parameter in question is how strictly a success is judged.

The eagle eyed may however recall that Short Fuse doesn’t line up here, and in fact is not present on the above table. If we insert Short Fuse into the table and zoom into the relevant section we find:

As can be seen the pools fail to line up, job done then? Short Fuse is special lets move on right? Not quite, in spite of the pools not lining up perfectly they are still very similar. In fact they’re similar enough that with a bit of magic we end up with:

And like magic the pools suddenly line up. So what do the question marks represent?
Each question mark follows a successful Short Fuse proc, this is due to Short Fuse being able to iterate its own pool. However we never get Short Fuse proccing itself due to the internal timer on successful procs. Hence every Short Fuse proc comes packaged with a throw away iteration of the predetermined proc pool.

This knowledge of the shared proc pools likely lacks any practical application, however I thought it was worth sharing as an addendum to the discussion on Moze’s two predetermined skills.

boombumr · March 22, 2020, 9:36pm

I don’t know why I find all of these skills using pre-determined pools to be hilarious, but they are for some reason. I can’t imagine how much time you need to spend on Sanctuary just shooting the target dummy!

Thanks for your hard work.

cat_thulhu · March 22, 2020, 9:48pm

Seriously?? Wow. That does have potentially interesting implications for MoD not working on PS, and makes me wonder about intermittent MoD function on PC.

So there is no way to reset the count, as far as you are aware?

Thanks for all of the hard work! Fascinating stuff…

Prismatic · March 22, 2020, 9:53pm

Not that I’ve seen. Save quit to menu was how I reset it for the testing.

cailte · March 22, 2020, 11:55pm

How would one go about that?

And why would the Epicenter work where the others do not?

Mahtyo · March 23, 2020, 12:25am

Epicenter does not behave as a typical grenade, my guess would be that the orbs it spawns count as regular splash while the impact count as grenade damage.

Another example would be fire storm grenade. It does not behave as a normal grenade either, and waddayaknow? The meteors proc MoD!

I’m with the belief that ghast call also proc MoD. Window maker do aswell, which does seem odd to me. The homing behaves more like a tediore than a atlas tracker so if tediore homing works with MoD that might explain it.

Prismatic · March 23, 2020, 12:35am

You now know exactly when MoD should be proccing. So things like the Loaded Dice conspiracy can be checked. I’d probably throw a nade or two at the dummy then shoot at it as normal and watch to see if the two proc pools stay synced or if the nade pool falls a few procs behind.

Hugostiglyts · March 23, 2020, 10:36pm

Thanks for doing this.

Now I know the Flakker can hit at least 24 times per shot, probably more.

Also I tried to test this myself (I’m on ps4) and most of the times MoD follows the exact same proc pool from your post but 1/10 it procs for the first time at the 31st shot.

And I didnt know this but grenades CAN’T proc MoD on ps4!. I asked hurdygurdy before posting some stupid question like “do grenades deal splash damage?” And he already knew about it (what a novelty).

Prismatic · March 23, 2020, 10:42pm

The 31st shot is probably just due to you shooting during the internal cooldown. My initial testing on it ran into this issue a lot. I think I did 6 runs of 3/3 MoD to be sure I had the correct sequence.

MoD on ps4 remains a mystery to me. I only know about it because I’ve demonstrated concepts to ps4 players and been told it’s not possible on ps4 due to grenades not doing MoD.

cailte · March 23, 2020, 11:01pm

I’ll have a go at testing sync tonight AEST if I get a chance. Works all up in the air with this pandemic, so I might not get time to play.

xrz.luisgabriel · March 25, 2020, 12:49am

Dont know if it makes sense, but Im a PS4 player and seems like 2/3 MoD is working a lot better than 3/3. Does it makes sense? My Nebula is regenerating ammo and grenade, my Tracker is regenerating it too and I think even a Q-System with Short Fuse is procing MoD a lot more.

kabflash · March 25, 2020, 1:33am

It’s quite possible the 3/3 pool is where the bug lies. How bout if you have say 4/3 from a class mod has anyone tried that?

sonicgundam · March 25, 2020, 2:08am

is there a way to check if Mindsweeper follows a predetermined patter as well, or is it a true procgen?

Hugostiglyts · March 25, 2020, 2:29am

I just tried with 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 MoD and I didn’t regenerate ammo or grenades.

I tried this yesterday, quit/saving and then shooting at Jack’s dummy 10 shots with Unforgiven and its was totally random, sometimes the grenades spawned 3 times in a row, never, only the first shot, 5th and 9th and so on.

sonicgundam · March 25, 2020, 3:05am

ok awesome, thanks!

Prismatic · March 25, 2020, 7:16am

Maybe this needs to be bigger.

Mind Sweeper if predetermined would have had some crazy repercussions.

sonicgundam · March 25, 2020, 7:25am

yeah that’s my bad. i read it the first time going through the post, but it really didn’t sink in.

Mahtyo · March 28, 2020, 8:44am

After re-reading what i originally wrote in my previous post i realised it were explained kinda backwards.

What i meant to say were this:, when they changed hex, stormfront, quasar into AoE damage instead of grenade damage this somehow affected all grenades on PS4. Epicenter, firestorm, widowmaker does not proc MoD on impact, but their spawned effects does. Which seems to me that the orbs from epicenter, meteors from firestorm and homing grenades from widowmaker are properly listed as grenade damage. They all share similarites by spawning something entirely new so these special effects are still listed as grenade damage while the initial hit does not.

MoD likely only track grenade damage and splash damage and not AoE damage, but since most grenades are now listed as AoE instead of grenade only a handful still works.

Mind sweeper nades proc MoD, tediore proc MoD. They’re still properly listed as grenades/splash.

I probably made even less sense this time around but there you go.

cailte · March 28, 2020, 10:39pm

Nah that made sense mate.

sammantixbb · March 29, 2020, 4:19am

Well. I think you’re looking too hard. I don’t think MoD tracks “grenade damage”, but just splash.

So the effects of those grenades you mentioned are splash. What’s missing is grenade hits being counted as splash.

Currently. We’ve found a couple of guns that deal “splash damage” but have no effect on MoD. I’m curious to whether this might be a key to what happened on PS4.