Recently I have been putting alot of time into farming the treasure monsters in act II inferno in hope of finding something to sell on the auction house. In this process it came to my interest that the four different kind of "treasure goblins" - so to speak - seem to have slightly differentiated loot tables. I therefore decided to note the loot that I found from farming in hope of finding some expectactions of "what to most likely get" when you kill this li'l son of a **** with a bag of gold!
I have searched a little around here and there for some elaborate research into this and generally could not find something definitive, so I decided to post my results here. IF there should be some people who have the actual loot distribution tables or have performed far more research than I have collected in the following thread, please bring this to my knowledge.
Anyway, now that the formal stuff is over, let's get down to business.
The goal of my data is to find:
1) If there is some sort of differentiated loot tables for the different treasure monsters, aka if bandits generally drop more blues compared to the goblins.
2) if there is an even or uneven chance of getting each kind of monster; hence expanding the scope slightly.
SO... What I have collected after a day of farming is a collection of data from 200 treasure monsters killed (these treasure monsters are either Treasure Goblin, Treasure Bandit, Treasure Seeker or Treasure Pygmy). The data is actually from a total of 208 monsters, but 8 of those pesky bastards either managed to run into a group of monsters or some random creature killed me and allowed the treasure monster to portal away...
I have farmed in a gear set having 165% MF and 0% GF. The % MF may inflict some of these results in the shown percentage of a given quality gear, however, the overall picture should be the same. The reason why I ran with +MF gear was simple: I wanted to farm items, and these data are merely something I came up with along the way.
Results
Raw data can be found here (.xlsx format).
It should be mentioned that the data set is quite small, so the errors are more likely to have an influence in the charts. I tried to collect as much data as possible without losing too much sanity and I found that 100 treasure monsters killed should do the trick.
Generally of the 208 creatures I found, 59 were treasure goblins (28%), 62 were treasure bandits (30%), 43 were treasure seekers (21%) and 44 were treasure pygmys (21%). It is possible that the actual distribution is 25% of each; this should be clear if a larger data set becomes available.
The following chart illustrates the average amount of gold found for each monster type.
It does seem that there is a difference in these distributions, however, if one could look at the data sheet, the amount of gold picked up ranged widely between 500gold and 4000 gold. It should be fair to say that each treasure monster on average drops approximately 1500 gold with zero gold find gear (at least in inferno act II).
The following chart describes the average loot collected for each treasure monster type.
Here something becomes quite clear:
- The Treasure Bandit dropped vastly more Tomes of Secret than the other three types.
- The Treasure Seeker dropped vastly more gems than the other tree types (in fact, 2-4 gems per kill).
- The Treasure Seeker seems to be slightly behind on the amount of gear dropping compared to the rest of the types; but this could be due to the small sample size.
- Overall, the Treasure Pygmy seemed to be the type dropping the most gear with the highest quality (again, low sample size, but also by looking at the ilvls of the gear from the pygmys - they just seemed better than the rest).
- The Treasure Goblin may drop more items overall, but not necessarily the best quality. They do, however, drop nice amounts of gold.
So to summarize:
- Treasure Goblins are generally all-around great to kill, dropping mostly gold and magic items.
- Treasure Bandits have the by far best drop chance for Tome of Secret (I had one bandit dropping 5).
- Treasure Seekers drop gems primarily, usually 2-4.
- Treasure Pygmys may be ahead in gear quality, but this is not concluded - the sample size needs to be improved for this
There is nothing in this research that can by any certainty assure you that e.g. the average amount of dropped rare items from a treasure pygmy is approximately 1.25 when you have 165% MF - it only shows that the different kind of treasure monsters does not seem to share the same "loot table" (I simply can not find a better word for it). It is not rocket science nor is it something that will have a huge impact on your gameplay, but it might be relevant info for some people.
Some may say "I don't care about this, I just kill all of the goblins I may find" and honestly, I understand that completely. But after these statistics were made I personally skipped a lot of treasure seekers solely due to the fact that I know they drop primarily gems and therefore I could not be arsed bothering with them.
I may increase the sample pool if there should be more interest into this subject.
- Happy Hunting!
