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Credit: Prismatic

[WHOOPS! This article is unedited and therefore very hard to read – give us some time to clean it up! 🧹]

Welcome Everyone! It’s time we discussed predetermined skills on Moze. We’ve all read the infamous description of Means of Destruction, and many have cried that it’s rigged. Well they’re partially right. While on the item card the skill states:

>Ammo Chance: +10%
Grenade Chance +6%

This description is false. MoD is what we call predetermined. What does it mean to be predetermined?

* The order the skill procs is always the same, so it doesn’t change between game restarts or save/quitting to main menu, just resets;
* Fast Traveling and re-spawning do not reset the order;

## [color=darkcyan]How can I test this?[/color]

1. Go to Sanctuary. Pick a weapon in which you can easily discern a proc of your skill. Exit to the main menu with that weapon in hand. For Moze’s skills swapping weapons has no effect.
2. Go back in game and fire at the dummy while keeping track of procs in your preferred way.

## [color=darkcyan]Terminology and Acknowledgement[/color]

A massive thanks to @Ratore who got the ball rolling on a lot of this testing. His work saved me a ton of time isolating what affects the proc pools. I’ve also adopted a few of his explanations.

Lastly before we start let us clear up some terminology.

**Proc Pool:** This is the ordered list of numbers which the game checks to see if the effect must activate. We’ll notate the proc pool as a string of 1’s and 0’s. A 1 indicates the effect will activate, a 0 indicates it will not.

**Iterates:** The game moves through the proc pool keeping track of where it is in the chain and if the next action will trigger the effect., iterating on the pool moves to the next number in the proc pool.

## [color=deepskyblue]Means of Destruction[/color]

Means of destruction tracks 2 separate proc pools, one for ammo return and the second for grenade return. On a splash hit both pools are checked and iterated. If you deal splash damage during the 0.3 second internal cooldown of the skill the hit is entirely ignored this hit will not iterate the proc pools.

Something to be aware of is if two instances of splash hit at the same time and are combined, the MoD proc pools will iterate twice to account for both splash instances. So multiple hits bypass the internal 0.3 second timer. The catch however is that you’ll only get at max 1 ammo returned from the multiple splash instances. Short Fuse procs fall within this window, so firing a single pellet splash gun and having Short Fuse proc will iterate the pool twice.

**1/3 MoD Proc Pools – first 75 instances:**

>Ammo Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0001.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.1000.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

>Grenade Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

**2/3 MoD Proc Pools – first 75 instances:**

>Ammo Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0100.0001.0000.0000.0000.0000.0010.0000.0000.1010.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

>Grenade Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0001.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.1000.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

**3/3 MoD Proc Pools – first 75 instances:**

>Ammo Chance: : 0000.0000.0000.0000.0100.1001.1000.0000.0000.0000.0010.0000.0000.1010.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

>Grenade Chance: 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0001.0000.0000.0000.0000.0010.0000.0000.1000.0000.0000.0000.0000.000

~~There’s an interesting pattern hidden in this mess of numbers. The grenade regen appears to be tied to the ammo regen. If you search the chains you’ll see every time a grenade was restored so was ammo. This leads me to believe that there is a dependency between them, it’s likely that the grenade regen pattern has been generated as a function of the successful ammo regen chain.~~
Further Testing and comparisons to Fl4k’s skills leads me to believe the pools merely share the same seed value. See the end of this post for elaboration on this.

## [color=deepskyblue]Short Fuse[/color]

I’ve discussed Short Fuse being predetermined before when I discussed Short Fuse mechanics in [[Guide] Short Fuse – Analysis and Breakdown](https://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/t/guide-short-fuse-analysis-and-breakdown/4409978). To recap though:

Short Fuse is checked on enemy hit, so if you miss a shot you won’t move the iterator forward in the proc pool. As far as Short Fuse is concerned the missed shot never happened.

Short Fuse also has an internal timer of 0.1 seconds between successful procs. The pool can be iterated while the internal cooldown is active however “successful procs” are ignored. Thus you can get a max of 1 Short Fuse explosion every 0.1 seconds. The behavior of this internal cooldown leads to multi pellet weapons being very reliable at proccing SF however they also receive less of a damage buff per shot from it.

**Short Fuse Proc Pool:**
>1100.0000.1000.0010.1110.0000.0000.0000.0001.0000.1001.1000.0100.0100.1011.0000.1001.0100.0000.0100.0000.0001.1110.0100.0011.0001.0000.0001.0000.0001.0000.01

This is the practical usage of the skill covered, see the end of this post for discussion on how this pool relates to other predetermined pools.

## [color=deepskyblue]Pull The Holy Pin[/color]

This was tested and is not predetermined.

## [color=darkcyan]Other Characters[/color]

I’m not going to discuss other characters here, but it’s worth mentioning that testing has taken place on all 4 vault hunters.

### Amara & Zane

Indiscriminate and Playing Dirty were checked, neither is predetermined. Thank you @DocStrangelove for testing Indiscriminate.

### FL4K

Fl4k has a few predetermined skills, see Ratore’s post on [FL4K’s predetermined/fixed skills](https://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/t/fl4ks-predetermined-fixed-skill-proc-pools/4403242) for details.

## [color=orange]Gear[/color]

Gear – barring Bounty Hunter – is seemingly truly random – at least as far as the games pseudo random number generator goes. Boosters from the Big Boom Blaster were tested, As was Moze’s Mind Sweeper and Zane’s Seein’ Dead coms (Thanks Melting_NT for testing Seein’ Dead). These items either have a far more complex predetermined pool or are actually using a chance based system.

## [color=darkcyan]Sharing a Seed, The Ties between all Predetermined Pools.[/color]

I mentioned it briefly at the end of the Means of Destruction discussion. There is a shared seed that generates all the predetermined skills. Its easiest to see if we sort the various pools by their success chance and line their pools up like so:

![image|690×333, 100%](upload://vtp1xsHnfNbZcZWX8UjUZrrfihz.png)

The pools all line up exactly. Notice that any unsuccessful proc of the 6/3 Leave no Trace pool is also unsuccessful for all other pools. Conversely it can be noted that a proc in the 1/3 MoD ammo pool implies that all pools below it will also get a proc at that point in the chain.

This indicates that the function being used for each of these skills uses the same seed, the only parameter in question is how strictly a success is judged.

The eagle eyed may however recall that Short Fuse doesn’t line up here, and in fact is not present on the above table. If we insert Short Fuse into the table and zoom into the relevant section we find:

![image|690×46](upload://4IEuoYXaR1r2D6eTzwrpICb14ml.png)

As can be seen the pools fail to line up, job done then? Short Fuse is special lets move on right? Not quite, in spite of the pools not lining up perfectly they are still very similar. In fact they’re similar enough that with a bit of magic we end up with:

![image|690×46](upload://kdsZYcEXuuWMsQNFqpoUuL59U0s.png)

And like magic the pools suddenly line up. So what do the question marks represent?
Each question mark follows a successful Short Fuse proc, this is due to Short Fuse being able to iterate its own pool. However we never get Short Fuse proccing itself due to the internal timer on successful procs. Hence every Short Fuse proc comes packaged with a throw away iteration of the predetermined proc pool.

This knowledge of the shared proc pools likely lacks any practical application, however I thought it was worth sharing as an addendum to the discussion on Moze’s two predetermined skills.

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