HM vs NM Lockpicking

I have seen a few things relating to this topic, but none of them have really answered my questions of which is more cost effective and how many chests can be opened with a stack of lockpicks based on your retain rate. So I decided to just work it out on my own. However I was somewhat surprised with the results at first then they started to make more sense. I would like to throw this out and have some other eyes look it over. Does anyone see any problems with my assumptions or logic?



All of my assumptions are shown on the sheet. If your HM vs NM retain rates are not in increments of 5 you should be able to just interpolate between columns for a rough estimate.

PS, if this post should be in another area, mods feel free to redirect me to the proper place.

I vote to sticky this, also, I see no errors in your logic.

wow thats very detailed, very nice job. i dont see any errors that i can spot.

just a thought, it would be nive to know how many chests we are missing in the "it makes it too lengthy part" just a thought

Nice work!! Definetly sticky material!

Quote: Originally Posted by here to troll

just a thought, it would be nive to know how many chests we are missing in the "it makes it too lengthy part" just a thought I took the numbers out to make the chart shorter, but the number you see is the "correct" sum. So the result is correct, I just added the note so that if anyone summed up my numbers they wouldn't wonder why they were getting a lower number.

Presumably there's also a cost for the lucky/unlucky titles for each option. (as well as for the chest title, and gold ID).

Perhaps that's all boardwalk'd, but I find I 'd prefer opening NM chests to get lucky up... However, I end up opening mostly HM chests, as the loot drops are better there (and I don't just run 1.x minutes per chest without doing anything else - how mundane). Thus my high unlucky and low lucky title...

As to your valuations for golds/grapes, they make assumptions based on the fact that you'll be camping in kamadan, hope-spamming to sell (and hoarding items/mods/inscriptions). These days I pretty much just vendor 15%/x inscriptions on the golds they're on - the wasted time and inventory hassle isn't worth the supposed 500g/1k value that you *may eventually* get... If it's worth less than ~5k, it ain't worth trying to sell (IMHO). Now, on the other hand, if it's 250-stackable...

(unid gold ~700g, not 800g (you used 800, not 750) - and it takes a lot of time to sell them even at that price. Your purple values are more in line with vendor trash tho. I'm not sure I believe NM golds drop 25% - seems more like 13-16% to me, but I've not collected stats on 1000 NM chests =D. And HM gold drops seem more like 80-85% to me - again no stats, just feel...).

First of all, you count the total number of chest opened in a most cumbersome and inaccurate way. The correct equation is N = P / (1 - R) where N is the total number of chests opened, P the number of picks and R the retain rate. E.g., with 250 picks and 90% retain rate the expected value would be 2500 and not 2487 as you suggest.

Second, there is a very detailed and in-depth (if somewhat old) analysis of the economy of chest running at the community works section.

Also: the mean value and gold to grape ratio of loot from normal mode chests depends on chest type. You are not going to get a 25% gold ratio from any chest with a 90% retain rate, even at maximal bonus.

Quote: Originally Posted by tmakinen