Crawmerax

Methods

Playing on PC and using a few simple mods, I decided to kill Craw countless times, collect everything he drops, and use the exporting abilities of WillowTree along with some basic Excel calculations to tally up every single part of every single weapon, shield, and COM.

Here are the modifications used:

• Modded backpack size to 9999, in order to fit everything for many many runs at once enabled the console, and used the “notarget” command to freeze Craw so I could kill him with minimal fuss
• Made myself a cheater shotgun w/ 200k+ damage…every little bit of speed helps 4-player slider, set to 4 players to make him drop more stuff each kill. I did a smaller set of tests to establish that only the quantity, not quality, of the drops changes with the slider enabled.
• I tried using the only user-created Craw farming map I could find, but it was useless for these purposes (altered drop tables). So, all my testing was done on the official Craw.

I ran one set of ~20,000 drops on each character, and another two with Mordecai and Lilith with their Find Rare Items COMs equipped. So, six sets overall, with each one representing 160-170 kills (4-player mode).

Each kill yields about 120 drops (4 players). A single-player kill is about 65 drops, for reference.

Results

Each table below contains the summed and percentage totals for each weapon part/type. The far right column represents the chance of getting that particular part. These can be multiplied together to get a % chance for a theoretical weapon.
e.g. I want a perfect Torgue Cobra, as do we all. Looking at the percentages:

• body5 = 82.8%
• barrel4 = 4.3%
• stock5 = 13.6%
• mag5 = 34.1%
• mat3 = 48.4%

For the sake of sanity, let’s say I don’t care about the sight.

0.828 * 0.043 * 0.136 * 0.341 * 0.484 = 0.08% chance of getting all those parts.

Weapons

Repeater Pistols


Revolver Pistols


Machine Pistols


SMGs


Rocket Launchers


Bolt-Action Snipers


Semi-Auto Snipers


Combat Shotguns


Assault Shotguns


Combat Rifles


Support Machine Guns


Eridian Weapons


Items

Class Mods


Shields


Grenade Mods


Legendaries & Pearls

The lists below show how many of each oranges and pearlescents each character found.


Not surprising to anybody, but the Equalizer is far and away the most common legendary. It accounts for 20% of all the orange beams. I will discuss this further below; before getting too deeply into the relative abundances, remember that these bulk totals are slightly skewed by having 2 sets each of Lilly and Mordy.

Overall, the total Legendaries = 5,707. Total weapons drops are 62,859.
5707/62859 = 9.079%. So, almost 1/10 weapons he drops is orange. Not bad; too bad 1/5 of these are Equalizers!


Pearls are freaking rare! Notice that in >1,000 Craw kills, I did not get a single Bessie or Nemesis. They are so rare that the stats above are of limited value.

Overall, total pearl weapons = 12, shields = 11. Total item drops are 56,908.
12/62859 = 0.0191%. Approximately 1/5250 weapons is a pearl.
11/56908 = 0.0193%. About the same. 1/5175 items is a pearl shield.

Call it 1/5000 – that is the takeaway here…at ~65 drops per 1-player kill and 120 per 4-player kill, that is approximately 1 pearl every 77 single player kills (42 4-player kills). The old hearsay was 66:1 legendary:pearl, but unfortunately it’s more like 250:1.

Better get to work.

Editor’s Note:

The original poster has assumed that every weapon dropped from craw could’ve been a pearlecent weapon which is incorrect, on every craw kill you have 9 chances for a pearl weapon and 9 chances for a pearl shield. The enhanced edition of the game adds an extra loot pool which runs 3 times, giving either a pearl, gearbox legendary, or normal weapon

In the original edition you have a 0.121% chance to get a pearl weapon from craw and a 0.078% chance for a pearl shield. In the enhanced your chances for a pearl weapon get boosted slightly to a 0.142% chance.

If you’re curious as to how I came by these numbers I ran through craw’s pool using the editor to find out exactly what is in it and the chances, then did all the maths.

-ZetaDæmon

Overall Stats

Weapon Types

The table below gives the distribution of weapon and item types across each character.


A few things to note right away:

• • The weapons-to-items ratio hovers just above 1.1, with the exception of FRI Mordy. We’ll talk about this later.
  • Average weapon and item rarity is virtually identical for all sets
  • Only Lilith gets Eridians. Hooray?

Calibration!

What I would like to do is use the above data to quantify the widely accepted view that the different characters have meaningfully different drop rates for the various weapon types. “Roland finds more machine guns” and “Mordy finds more pistols” are universally accepted, and some digging around in the editor by Scottes seemed to confirm this.

In order to do that, I need to standardize this data set to create a theoretical “base rate”. This base rate would be independent of the weighting applied by which character you choose.

To calibrate the data, I tossed out the FRI Lilith and FRI Mordy data, and used their non-FRI counterparts. Lilith has the smallest number of weapons found (10,208), so I need to truncate the other 3 characters’ data sets in order to compare apples to apples. Doing that gives me this:


So, what is this showing us? The “% of bulk” column for each character is the important one here. It shows the amount of each weapon type that each character found, relative to this base rate. Numbers greater than 100% mean that character found more of that weapon type, relative to other characters.

It’s kind of difficult to explain. Let’s look at Brick, and his 144% in Rocket Launchers. He found almost 1.5x the amount of rocket launchers than he would have, if this drop rate was not weighted. Same with Lilith and her 120% in SMGs. This way of presenting the data is not perfect, and I welcome any suggestions on how to improve it. Case in point – Roland and his 98% in RLs. This would lead us to believe he doesn’t find all that many launchers, but in fact he found quite a few more than did Lilith or Mordecai, just not as many as Brick.

This data is nowhere near as conclusive as I had hoped. I certainly believe that the larger deviations from 100% are real. The smaller ones I am not so sure about. For all 3 pistol types, I am unconvinced that there is any difference. MPs have the largest variation in %, but the smallest sample size.

What it does clearly tell us is that you can find any weapon type with any character. You may have a slightly better chance of finding a good Bastard with Roland, or a Bitch with Lilith, but playing with the “right” character is certainly not a requirement. The story is different with Class Mods…

Class Mods

The Class Mods table in the first post looks like a huge mess of numbers at first glance, but there are some striking differences between characters there. The COMs that Craw drops are HEAVILY weighted for the character that you are playing. Between 60-65% of the COMs dropped are for you. The remaining 35-40% are split about evenly between the other three characters.

So, if you want a Professional, play as Lilith. If you want a Patriot or Bad Ass or Gunfighter, you are damn near wasting your time playing as Lilith. If you really want an Atlas Champion for Roland but can only kill Craw with Lilith, better start practicing – using Roland has 5x the likelihood of getting you one!

The rest of the COM parts seem to be exactly evenly weighted, which I find odd. None of the other weapons or items behave this way.

Materials

The distribution of material grades is as follows: Mat1:Mat2:Mat3

• • Weapons: 29,406 : 3,910 : 29,524 or approximately 7:1:7. You have about a 1 in 15 chance of getting that precious Mat2.
  • COMs: 19,118 : 4,224 : 2452 or approximately 24:5:3. Lots of 4-liners out there.
  • Shields: 7,535 : 6,670 : 2,603 or approximately 15:13:5.

Other Notable Stuff

First and most important – in the first post above we have all the part abundances for each weapon type. But the question we have is, are the part distributions the same for legendaries and pearls? Can I estimate the chance of getting specific parts on an Anaconda or Crux?

To answer this, I looked at the part stats for just Equalizers. We have most of these, so if they mimic the overall revolver stats pretty well, we should be happy. Do they? Sloppy table says:


Yeah, pretty much. The left bold column is overall revolver %s, then the Equalizer subset. There’s some erratic behavior going on with the accessories, but other than that it is spot on. I’m happy with that. I think the answer is yes – we can use the part stats in post 1 to estimate our (lousy) chances of getting perfect legendaries.

Find Rare Items & Scavenge Extra Items

Man, these have been debated half to death on the dusty old forums. Conventional wisdom was that FRI doesn’t work, except maybe to increase the number of Eridians. Lots of people still believed in it. SEI was believed to work, but nobody seemed to care all that much. So, I tested both of these – Lilith’s Catalyst and Mordecai’s Scavenger COMs have FRI, and the Scavenger also has SEI.

Find Rare Items

In order to test this, I ran full 20k item sets with Lilith and Mordy, both FRI and non-FRI. I would call the results damning – feel free to check the tables in post 1.

Here’s what it does not appear to do:

• • Increase weapon rarity (average rarity is ~identical)
  • Influence the relative abundance of the individual parts of weapons.
  • Change the relative abundance of weapon types
  • Change the relative abundance of manufacturers
  • Increase the shield rarity, or influence shield part probabilities
  • Increase COM rarity, or influence COM part probabilities
  • Make certain COM types more or less common than “normal”
  • Increase grenade rarity, or change the abundance of elementals or types
  • Do anything at all

If anyone can think of any other possibility that I have not accounted for here, please say so! I would love to see this work, but I think if it had any effect we would be able to see it in a data set this large.

Scavenge Extra Items

This one does work and on Craw himself! Here’s what it does:

• • Causes Craw to drop money and ammo in addition to weapons and items. This is a pain because it gets in the way of picking up other stuff.
  • Increases the number of ITEMS ONLY by about 10%. In the same number of kills, I got 10,232 items with SEI active and 9,343 items without it.
  • Again, ITEMS ONLY! This means elemental artifacts, shields, COMs, and grenade mods.

It does not do anything at all to weapons and does not change the quality of items, only the quantities. So, if you can spare the time, it’s worth swapping to a Scavenger COM just before killing Craw. I speculate that this increases your chances of finding pearlescent shields, but I can’t prove it.