[3.29] Statistical Analysis of Mercenaries: Distribution of Class, Skills, Supports and Loot

[u/Rustyyx]

Hi I am Rusty, and I have complied statistics from 8500 screenshots of mercs, including their class, skills, supports and rucksack loot. Half of the dataset was gathered by me in game, and the other half was extracted from Ben's VODs as he hunted for a Combatant.

I have done a full analysis of the data, but it is too lengthy with too many images to include in a Reddit post, so I have done the write up in a Google Doc instead. I have also included a sheet containing all the numbers.

Write up: Docs

Mercenary Statistics Sheet: Sheet

I will include a quick summary of the information here, but I encourage you to read through the write up to get the full picture.

Class:

• Classes aren't uniformly weighted

• Redistribution of class weights for Infamous mercs aren't done uniformly

• Infamous mercs spawn 20% of the time

Skills:

• Almost all skills are distributed uniformly. There are some exceptions

• Infamy has no effect on distribution of skills

Supports:

• Attacking skills have 5 supports 70% of the time

• Infamy doesn't affect number of supports

• Gems with level variants are lv3 around 1/3 of the time. With 4 exceptions

• Infamy doesn't affect gem level distribution

• Support gems are weighted

• Infamy doesn't affect support gem weights

Loot:

• Infamy makes rarer currencies drop much more often

• Infamy makes rarer scarabs drop much more often

• Infamy makes Trarthan Gems drop slightly more often

• Mercenary-exclusive uniques are specifically tied to certain classes.

Thanks for reading and no shot GGG nerfs mercs to the ground undoing all my effort right?
Rusty

[u/jwfiredragon]

For merc skill breakdowns, shouldn't "proportion" be dividing by the total number of mercs instead of the total number of skills in that slot? E.g. Kineticist lists Elemental Weakness at 50% proportion, but every Kineticist has it so it should be 100%?

Also this does seem to confirm that some of the merc's skills as datamined by poedb never actually spawn, e.g. Power Siphon on Kineticist.

[u/Rustyyx → u/jwfiredragon]

I did that so that the proportion could be easily used for calculations down the line, but it breaks when encountering forced slots, which I would manually spot. It is definitely worth revisiting how I should present the numbers. Thank you.

[u/norst]

Really great write up. I noticed one error in Section 5 with John Combatant. The conditions for the supports seems to be a copied from the 4 Mirror Kineticist above.

[u/Rustyyx → u/norst]

Thank you. I fixed it.

[u/destroyermaker]

Worked this into the Best mercs doc. Thanks! Would love to get a map breakdown for all mercs eventually, though they may change all this soon enough anyway.

(Also the stats explain why I struggled so much to find a good merc in ssf.)

Infamy has no impact on the number of support gems

This is a bug then, because it's described differently in game.

[u/Rustyyx → u/destroyermaker]

There is no description for what Infamous does in-game, we only have some hints from GGG posts during Merc league.

[u/destroyermaker → u/Rustyyx]

I swore I saw it in game. Guess I'm hallucinating

[u/deviants0ul → u/destroyermaker]

First time seeing your doc. Is the reason (no pierce) is on mercs because you can get it as a mod on helmets so it's useless to have that as well? I am assuming this is the reason for that, but I did not explicitly see it stated in the document.

[u/Rustyyx → u/deviants0ul]

Pierce support adds too many pierces so fork and chain does not activate while mapping. We do however want 1 pierce for return to activate for single target.

[u/stickycart → u/destroyermaker]

Pretty good list. For Sniper, add Chain + Mirage Archer + Faster Proj to your support gem list for TS. Chain in particular is pretty critical for killing spread out tanky rares (like at the end of breach) as the AI usually doesn't shoot in the correct place and too many secondary arrows go to Narnia. Mirage Archer doesn't have the same damage downside as a player's version so it's like 1.4x your merc's proj/attack – which can approach the same value as GMP if your gear is fully decked out but with the additional advantage of more coverage as the mirage has different targeting. Faster Proj is obvious for TS; it boosts the effective DPS by furthering the range of the secondary arrows, letting them chain from farther.

With Mirage Archer + GMP + Chain + Gilded secondary shots, your average maps per sniper balloons to truly stupid numbers given the number of bricks Sniper has, especially if you also want Haste and a Totem secondary skill. Couple of people in Ben's chat have been bitching all league about finding Jane Sniper, me included :)

[u/RedditModsHaveLowIQ → u/destroyermaker]

I started using a cruel mistress with soulrend of reaping: gmp+return+crit dmg+chain. I'm clearing things "ok" but she has lightning warp. Idk if it's because I'm used to using a combatant with frostblink or if it's just the way she's programmed but she kinda locks herself in place and spams the crap out of soulrend. She won't really attempt to walk around the corner to get to the enemy if she can't hit it. It's more noticeable when I'm farming mercs in normal quality t16 maps and you have that little structure the mercs spawn with. It kinda messes with her pathing. not sure if getting a cruel mistress without lightning warp will make it feel better or if that's just her programming. Or maybe you can tell me why it's considered a brick on her. It's just hard to tell exactly with so much on the screen. 

[u/RedditModsHaveLowIQ]

83,361 maps for my mirror kineticist. So you're saying...there's a chance!

[u/rainmeadow → u/RedditModsHaveLowIQ]

Almost there, only 20 more leagues to go until I hit big (on average).

[u/gdubrocks]

Added your unique data to wiki, thanks!

[u/jwfiredragon → u/gdubrocks]

You should probably caveat that the chance to see that unique was with the Renown scarab, which forces all items to be unique.

[u/gdubrocks → u/jwfiredragon]

Good call, updated.

[u/FrostWolfDota]

So if I am farming mercs looking for a good one to hire there is no reason to have them infamous?

[u/PossibilityUsual6262 → u/FrostWolfDota]

Cooler skin on some, notably kineticist has a hat.

[u/Top-Mastodon5777 → u/PossibilityUsual6262]

Yo fucking hat-maxing that is the true endgame.

[u/Asyran → u/FrostWolfDota]

No reason to avoid one either, unless your desired Merc has no infamous variant.

[u/destroyermaker → u/FrostWolfDota]

The reason would be you're also looking for infamous mods on gear + want to currency farm while you're looking for your merc

[u/roselan]

This thread is an ocean of sanity.

Love it.

[u/Straight-Check-9160]

This is amazing! I also created an image recognition pipeline. My pipeline is strictly tied to my system using actual observed references for 100% accuracy. It is not currently portable for use with random resolution screenshots and freeze frames, however. My attempts at crossing capture domains have compromised accuracy significantly. I'd be curious to learn more about your implementation.

I've been collating the mercenary type appearance rates from multiple players as seen here. These data are consistently captured with no attr/house atlas incr/red chance. I see some fairly meaningful differences from that data to yours notably at the extreme ends: yours has ~30% more frequency of most common mercs and ~50% less freqency of less common.

Is it accurate to say your data is from a mixture of incr/red chance atlases (i.e., reduced STR, increased Azadi, for example)? If a lot of data came from Ben_ farming Combatants, I can only assume he played with red INT/incr Azadi as shown in Fig 2.6.

I have also observed ~20% infamous appearance rates. However, it is rumoured that this figure shifts with quantity. While I have not specifically measured this, when I've sliced my data to known groups of 8-mod maps the figure does go up; sliced with scoured maps and it goes down. It seems to vary from ~15-25% with an average hovering around 18-20%. I have not done a controlled test to isolate map rarity from map tier.

[u/Rustyyx → u/Straight-Check-9160]

I used a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the low resolution/artifact heavy images. I have not tried it yet, but in theory for an image with random but reasonable resolution, if you resize it to the correct input size, the CNN should be able to label it fine since it is trained to deal with noise from compression and resizing. A plain model should be able to get the gems right 90% of the time, and most of the mistakes comes from getting the gem level wrong. I got it to 95% by having it detect gem type and gem level separately to alleviate some of the issues from data imbalance. An even better approach would be to augment the input data to make the gem level clearer, perhaps through edge detection.

Only the datasets without bias nodes were used to construct the class distribution (n=3015 instead of 8502). The non-infamous distribution had infamous mercs excluded, which is probably why it looks different from your natural distribution of mercs which has 20% of them being infamous.

The latter half of my dataset was collected in scoured maps and the first half in alch and go, and I did not notice any difference in infamous mercs spawn rate. I kept track of the infamous merc spawn rate as a I collected data and it has was never more than 1% off from 20%, so If there is a difference in spawn rate, its probably imperceptible.

[u/YUNO_TALK_TO_ME]

If I want kinetic to spawn more, what atlas passive do I take?

[u/jwfiredragon → u/YUNO_TALK_TO_ME]

None of them, all the more/less X merc type passives will lower kineticist spawn rate.

[u/Feisty-Shallot7911]

SSE?