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Lucky Looter VS Better Barter?


toores

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Is Lucky Looter any good?

I did a test with bookstore crates and LL level 5 gave me consistently less and worse loot than LL level 0.

It was a lvl 45 character artificially leveled up.

 

I'm just wondering "lucky looter" VS "better barter". One needs PER, other needs INT, my character has neither. Going both is too freaking expensive.

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I believe Loot is also tied to your Gamestage. So even though you leveled to 45, you have no zombie kills and such. I never use Lucky Looter though so can't say (it's a stupid perk imo) but always put at least one point in Daring Adventurer and Better Barter during a play through.

 

But ya the higher the gamestage the better the loot.

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I did a test with bookstore crates and LL level 5 gave me consistently less and worse loot than LL level 0.

It was a lvl 45 character artificially leveled up.

LL does not give more loot, it just gives better loot... in from of better quality items. Afaik it does not increase your chance of finding a speciel book, especially that one you are searching for. But with LL you have a better chance to get lvl6 sniper instead of just a lvl5 one.

 

Better Barter is imho self explaining. If you trade a lot, the skill is worth it. If not, then not.

 

So if you go looting a lot and just trade occasionally, skill lucky looter.

If you go less looting and hope for getting good items primarily by buying them of a trader, skill better barter.

 

If you do both nearly equal, both skills are usefull, however better barter will give better "visible" results then lucky looter, because you never will know what items a chest would have given to you if you would have lucky looter not skilled.

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LL does not give more loot, it just gives better loot...

 

I don't know how to explain this then:

LL lvl 0

I looted 10 book crates a few times. Got plenty of books and other stuff as well.

LL lvl 5

Did the same, 10 crates. Got half as many items and half as many books.

 

Repeated both again and got similar results.

LL lvl 5 resulted in fewer items in inventory and always fewer books...

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You are playing with RNG and expect to see reliable results. That doesn't work. Lucky Looter does not switch RNG off, it just changes the possibilities.

 

Doing the same just twice does not leed to any usable results. Do it 100 times or so and look again.

And as i mentioned: LL doesn't affect the amount of loot, nor makes drop more books or whatever you see as "good" loot.

 

I guess to make the effect of lucky looter better visible, open weapon bags (or the big shotgun messiah crates, ...) multiple times and then look at the QUALITY of the dropped items, not at the amount of items!

 

If BB also affects the quality of the trader items or even BB at a certain level is needed for certain items at the trader, BB becomes more important, sure.

 

I guess in the end you finally answered your own question by yourself, didn't you?

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If there's a trader nearby, then both perks are worth it and they have synergy. Lucky Looter gets you more dukes from selling higher quality loot, especially in the early game - Q1 items sell for much less than Q2 and Q3. Better Barter gets you more value for your dukes, but more importantly it improves the tier and quality of items to buy (especially the Secret Stash).

 

Maxing out both might not be worth the investment, but going for 5 PER / 5 INT and 4 LL / 3 BB definitely has value.

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In games I've played with friends, we've gotten tons of miles out of having whoever specs into int picking up BB. It plus cigar and awesome sauce helped up buy 2 trucks for barely more than the price of 1 in one of our recent playthroughs.

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I'm pretty sure leveling lucky looter unlocks exotic loot in the crates and it's a forced perk in A18. Forced as in you have to max it up to get all the magazines and recipes easier.

I have both lucky looter and better barter maxed and I think the lucky looter is a necessity early and late game. Early because you require exotic loot, late because you loot too much and would otherwise waste a lot of time searching.

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Dang, I had no interest in PER or INT whatsoever. I can even live with getting there slowly (tier 6 items) but I hate that without BB lvl5 I'll never get some items. And I really dislike that they are tied to builds. (...as PER and INT are tierd to weapons)

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I find some points in LL essential because it makes looting itself faster. But the bonus to gamestage is just that, a bonus to gamestage. You get there automatically with or without LL. Leaving LL low doesn't make stuff vanish from normal loot lists, that would be a really braindead feature

 

In my current single player game I have LL level 2 (because of the loot-timer-reduction) and I find a lot of quality 6 items.

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But the bonus to gamestage is just that, a bonus to gamestage.

 

This bears repeating. All LL does is give you +50 or whatever to your gamestage when you open a lootable. Get that +50 gamestage the old fashioned way, and you'll eventually get the same loot.

 

Option 1: Take the perk Lucky Looter, and get loot results like you're a higher-level character!

Option 2: Be a higher-level character!

 

Loot results will be the same (in the long run; RNG can be an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥).

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I believe lucky looter simply increases the quality of items found. Higher quality items can be sold for a much higher price. Regardless if you invest in lucky looter or not, as you level up and increase in gamestage you will find better items when looting.

 

As far as the barter skill, I have no clue as I have never invested a single point in it.

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This bears repeating. All LL does is give you +50 or whatever to your gamestage when you open a lootable. Get that +50 gamestage the old fashioned way, and you'll eventually get the same loot.

 

Option 1: Take the perk Lucky Looter, and get loot results like you're a higher-level character!

Option 2: Be a higher-level character!

 

Loot results will be the same (in the long run; RNG can be an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥).

 

Now hold on a second there friend. Lucky looter only increases game stage in loot you say? So I should stop suiciding my character and in about 25 days I'll have the same loot effect as the maxed perk?

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My very first perk is always into lucky looter because early game its nice to be able to find more and more items in regular trash. It may not seem like much but if you loot A LOT the end numbers show. The biggest difference it's made with me is with treasure maps and end loots in POIs. At 1 perk, you'll get 5k dukes and some pretty normal loots. at 4 and 5 perks I was walking away with 20k+ dukes.

The increase in quality is also pretty nice. I almost always have looter googles on for extra bonus and ease of finding map treasures.

 

In better barter, the biggest noticable difference in trading is with high cost items like the fergettin' elixir. At 1 perk it was costing around 36k. at 4-5 BB perks it was down to 20k. They have decent synergy. In my group games we have a couple of looter shooters and we let them open all the trunks/chests/safes and then the INT person whos to sells to the trader.

 

At some point in your game, you'll be raking in more dukes than you'll ever need. We spend the leftovers on things like the AP and HP ammo and schematics and books because its the most quality of life in the cheapest spots.

 

I recommend it. The differences are drastic if you know how they work. In regular trash it aint much n the end game, but on the big loot tables the difference is quite noticeable.

 

Depending on where you are at in your gamestage your focus will swap from trash in the early stages and then big loots and maps in the end stages. It's basically free money.

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I don't know how to explain this then:

LL lvl 0

I looted 10 book crates a few times. Got plenty of books and other stuff as well.

LL lvl 5

Did the same, 10 crates. Got half as many items and half as many books.

 

Repeated both again and got similar results.

LL lvl 5 resulted in fewer items in inventory and always fewer books...

 

10 .. 20 crates is not statistically significant enough to draw any conclusions. The lowest number where you can attempt to draw any conclusions is about 30 tries but that low it has HUGE error margin. The uncertainty of your estimate is very roughly proportional to 1 / sqrt(n) where n is the number of your tries.

 

At that number of tries the variance of your results is probably much smaller than the effect of lucky looter. You would need a high enough sample size to detect a difference between, roughly 1 % and 2 % sucess rate as a ballpark figure.

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This bears repeating. All LL does is give you +50 or whatever to your gamestage when you open a lootable. Get that +50 gamestage the old fashioned way, and you'll eventually get the same loot.

 

Option 1: Take the perk Lucky Looter, and get loot results like you're a higher-level character!

Option 2: Be a higher-level character!

 

Loot results will be the same (in the long run; RNG can be an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥).

 

Wait.. so loot quality caps? I thought they would at least stack with each other.

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Wait.. so loot quality caps? I thought they would at least stack with each other.

 

Hmm. Wonder if the looting algorithm is using the individual gamestage or the calculated gamestage in groups. If the latter it would be pretty trivial to have couple of friends with you for extra +200 or so gamestage for ~L 35 characters.

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Now hold on a second there friend. Lucky looter only increases game stage in loot you say? So I should stop suiciding my character and in about 25 days I'll have the same loot effect as the maxed perk?

 

Oops sorry, I did not mean to ignore your response for a week.

 

Wait.. so loot quality caps? I thought they would at least stack with each other.

 

Or yours for two days.

 

What I said was:

 

All LL does is give you +50 or whatever to your gamestage when you open a lootable.

 

I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with suiciding your character or loot quality caps. The mechanism of Lucky Looter, as I understand it, is as follows.

 

1) Assume you have a character with Gamestage 100, no Lucky Looter

2) Assume that said character buys max Lucky Looter

3) When that character opens a lootable item, the game will "roll" RNG on the contents of that lootable as though the player had Gamestage 150.

 

Note that I'm not certain if max Lucky Looter is +50 or +100 or what the exact number is. But whatever the actual number is (and of course each lower level of LL adds a smaller amount) as I understand it the game just adds that to your Gamestage to give you an "effective Gamestage" when opening a lootable.

 

Continuing the example:

 

4) Assume the character gains 50 GS through a horde night, for a total now of 150

5) When that character (still having max LL) opens an item, the effective GS will now be 200 - 150 "real" plus 50 from LL

 

I hope that clarifies my understanding of how it works.

 

Edit to add: from loot.xml, here is an example of how LL would affect what is going on. (Note that in the actual XML it says "level" where I have put "gamestage" - I did this for clarity; the XML comments indicate that level=gamestage.)

 

<qualitytemplate gamestage="0,9" default_quality="1">
<loot quality="1" prob="0.764"/>
<loot quality="2" prob="0.765"/>
<loot quality="3" prob="1"/>
</qualitytemplate>

<qualitytemplate gamestage="10,19" default_quality="1">
<loot quality="1" prob="0.742"/>
<loot quality="2" prob="0.7"/>
<loot quality="3" prob="1"/>
</qualitytemplate>

 

If you were at GS 7, let's say, but you have one level of Lucky Looter which (let's assume) gives you +5 GS for looting, then when you open a lootable you would move from the first <qualitytemplate>, which is for GS 0-9, and instead use the 2nd <qualitytemplate> which is for GS 10-19. Because your effective GS for looting would be 7 (base) +5 (bonus from LL) = 12.

 

Moving to that 2nd <qualitytemplate> gives you a very slightly higher probability of a better quality item. If you look in items.xml this sort of thing is all over the place - probabilities dependent on effective gamestage, which is what Lucky Looter will increase.

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Hmm. Wonder if the looting algorithm is using the individual gamestage or the calculated gamestage in groups. If the latter it would be pretty trivial to have couple of friends with you for extra +200 or so gamestage for ~L 35 characters.

 

It uses the party's effective gamestage. I assume that the game takes into account the players' Lucky Looter-modified GS when calculating the party's effective GS for looting. From loot.xml:

 

<!-- This generates items with Quality Levels based on the player party's gamestage.
The  LootGamestage  effect is added to that. -->

...bunch of quality level/probability groups follow...

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The loot bonus is not relevant for me. I always get a few levels in LL because the loot speed. You can spend more time opening crap in this game than any other activity if you loot a lot. Faster looting saves time to gain more levels. You will eventually make up for those points spent anyway.

 

BB is darn near a necessity though. You can get anything from the trader.

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