This season brings many new changes to the reward card pool with the introduction of the new Chaos Legion Reward cards to the chest rewards. This highly anticipated cards bring new abilities and potential meta-shifting strategies to the table.
Old Chest Info
After completing my daily quest today, I noticed that some unusual numbers in the chests that surprised me. I received 3 chests that were <5 dec each. I thought that this was a little strange, so I went back and did a little research on my reward history to see if something.
So according to splintercards.com (an awesome resource in case you haven't checked them out, make sure to visit using the link above. there are tons of tools available for game mechanics and card info), the minimum DEC drop from a single chest was 5 (approximately 18.5% of chests will have this value). Each of these chests have some variance associated with it (i.e. the class of 5 dec chest is somewhere between 5-10 DEC). I went back and looked through each daily and season reward chest for the last 3 seasons and verified that I had indeed seen 5 DEC as the lowest reward, and these <10 DEC chests made up around 18% of my drops. cool, seems like this info is about accurate for me.
New Chest Drops?
So where do these new values come from? It appears to me that these DEC drops are actually tied to the burn rate of the cards they drop in place of. That is, these new CL reward cards have 25-50% of the burn rate as the old reward cards. Based on my limited sample (I've opened a total of 37 chests with DEC rewards in them, of which, 8 have been <5 DEC, 21.6%), I believe that the DEC values in the chest are calculated based off the relative burn rate of the cards. So before a common was worth 10 DEC for burn, so the common DEC chest had some variable of 5. The rare DEC chest being 20 correlates with a 40 DEC burn rate for a rare etc. That is, the DEC chests are set at 50% of the burn value of the loot table.
Now that the burn rate of the cards are halved, the DEC drop tables will now look like:
| Reward DEC Chest Type | DEC Value | EV |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 2.5 | 1.2 |
| Rare | 10 | 1,3 |
| Epic | 50 | 1.3 |
| Legendary | 250 | 1.3 |
| GF Common | 62.5 | 1.25 |
| GF Rare | 250 | 1,3 |
| GF Epic | 1250 | 1.3 |
| GF Legendary | 6250 | 1.3 |
Implications
Overall DEC drops from chests 25% of the time. At 50% of their previous value, this means ~12.5% loss in overall reward EV. Based on Splintercards data, the current chest is worth approximately 100 DEC per chest. This means this value should be adjusted down to 87.5 DEC instead, based on current DEC prices for cards.
While this isn't the biggest change, it will certainly reduce the earning potential for players who rely on reward chests (or use quest potions) as the value of the quest potion automatically took a 12.5% value drop with this change. Where this really will see effect is just the high roll potential for those super lucky few who pull those gold foil epic or gold foil legendary loot chest rewards. Previously you could earn up to 75k DEC from a single chest, but that value is neutered down to around 18.75k now (assuming variance is kept same in calculations).
Based on this info, what do you think the effect will be on the overall economy? Have you seen similar results with your chests from the last 2 days? Let's discuss in the comments below!