question about how gold items drop

up until now i thought that if a certain type of enemy can drop a white item of a certain type, that enemy can also drop a gold version of it
lets say the cave spiders from fow drop white chaos axes, and occasionally you get one thats gold
well, ive been killing vaettir in jaga moraine and ive noticed that even though they drop white spears and scythes quite often i never had them drop a gold version of those weapon classes yet, no matter how many runs i did

so i was wondering...
am i missing some rule that applies to how gold items drop?

bad luck

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so i killed them so many times it got me roughly 9mln xp and 800+ wisdom points from their drops, yet due to bad luck alone i got 0 gold scythes/spears? bit of a stretch dont you think?

scythes+spears are extremely rare drops

Not really for Spears. I get LOADS of Nightmare Spears in DoA.

thats DoA, the elite area for the campaign spear users come from.....

Scythes and Spears drop idc less then others but you do it Nm / hm? and with 8 ppl party? more change if you solo in Hard mode.

solo hm
12 chars

to answer your question. Yes if they drop a white item of a certain kind they can drop it as a gold. You could have had 100's drop already but not know it due to LS. Its just piss poor luck is all.

How do you figure that? Your speculation stated as truth?

I can't see an easy way to prove this short of exhaustively testing all mobs. Such an approach would also require you to know every white they drop to start with. Also note that it is a statement that is impossible to disprove (short of reading the guild wars source code), so you could farm a mob for the next million years waiting for it to drop a gold that it never does, but you could never be sure it doesn't actually drop it.

There's really no way to tell, but I think what manitoba said is highly likely. If my guess was on, I'd say that every mob has a specific loot table (i.e. drops these certain items including collectible, money, dye, possibly materials, and specific weapons/off-hands), then if a weapon/off-hand drops, there is a chance for it to be white/blue/purple/gold. Just a guess, though.

(BTW, rares are exempt from loot scaling)

Roughly speaking,

The type of a drop depends on the type of the monster.
The rarity of a drop depends on the level of the monster.

An item is created by a routine of the type create_item(item_type, item_rarity) instead of first throwing together some stuff then calling a function that defines the rarity of the result. Some items are always created with a certain rarity although there aren't any fundamental restriction to what rarity objects can have, so the game engine would be perfectly happy with purple dyes (i.e., not a Vial of Purple Dye but an uncommon Vial of Green Dye) or white minigwens except for the fact that these are not created by any current process.

It is possible that there are separate rarity probabilities for different items. It would kind of make sense if mesmers (like Vaettirs) would drop caster stuff with the nominal rarity distribution but non-caster stuff with a heavily modified distribution. It would be good to have hard numbers (what dropped, how much) to estimate the probability of different scenarios.

nah ur right, everything that can drop in white, can also come in blue/purp/gold.

I'm not sure where you're coming up with this. I've gotten purple and gold items off level 2-3 monsters before. What's your reasoning behind this?

RARITY

higher level mobs drop them more often

Sorry for being inexact. The rarity depends on the level of the monster but there isn't a linear dependency. Rather, it's something like this

p_gold = 0.05 * exp(L/30)
p_grape = 0.15 * exp(L/30)
p_white = 1 - p_gold - p_grape

p are the probabilities of each rarity level getting dropped and L is the level of the monster. The equations are meant as an example and do not pretend to be the actual ones used by the game (although they show generally similar characteristics).

And yes, I'm a former alpha tester. Dropped after NF because of lack of time.

So, in other words the probability to get rarer items increases as the level increases? That makes a lot more sense.

I honestly don't think it is that way, still. I think you may see it that way because you spend much more time fighting higher level mobs, and thus getting more drops from higher level mobs, and of course most of your golds. As a contrast, the past ~40 hours I played in EotN on my Necro (lvl 20), I didn't get a single gold drop; however, I started a new Dervish, and managed to get 2 golds on Istan before lvl 10/5 hours played.

EDIT: And yes, I understand how probabilities work and that by sheer chance it worked out that way. Regardless, no one can say with any certainty without knowing the code.

The probably of getting a rare probably does increase slightly with the level of the mob, however that is not what defines an item as rare.

Think of each mob having 3 tables of data linked to it.

table 1 contains the types of items that the mob can drop, sword, wand, iron ingots, etc.

table 2 contains the stats that those items can contain should the mob drop the item, sundering mod, 15^50 inscription, etc

table 3 contains a percentage that mob a can drop an item from table 1, with a mod from table 2. It's this percentage that determines rarity. The mob your killing may typically drop axes that are white or have a crappy mod on them, and these combinations make up the majority of table 3 for that mob. However there are a few table 1 + table 2 combinations that are a bit better than normal for the mob, these would drop with a purple color. Even rarer in number in the table are the really nice combinations which have stats that qualify the item as a gold/yellow drop.

These tables are variable according to the mob, and the level of the mob. What might be a gold item for a level 15 mob is only a purple for a Level 20, etc.

I'm not saying this is exactly how it works as I don't know, but I recall reading someplace that this is the basic jist of the matter.