UberGuy

It's unlikely that you're doing anything wrong. They are, as described, very rare.

On average, they appear to drop at something like once per five thousand mobs defeated. Note that this is not entirely accurate, as different ranks of mobs have different chances to drop recipes, and the metric above was across at least a mix of both minions and LTs. However, it's a decent rule of thumb.

And of course its important to bear in mind that a 1:5000 probability doesn't mean anything like you're guaranteed one purple every 5000 mobs.

Finally, if you team a lot, each mob drop only goes to one person. Teams certainly defeat a lot of mobs, but not enough to make up, for example, for a team of 8 meaning that 1/8th of the drops goes to each player (on average). Sadly, the best way to ensure good drop density (in general, not purples specifically) is to defeat stuff solo.

I play solo a lot, and do what I'd call "light weight" farming relatively often, and I have gotten maybe 20 or so purples across all my eligible characters. Given how many things I'm doing "right" to optimize my odds of getting them, I think that shows how rare they are.

Well, it's been a while since I hit this benchmark. Since I achieved it, I purpled out my Dark/Dark Corr, which was pretty darn expensive when I did it - it cost me about 1B inf. However, I made some profit along the way and ended up with about 1.5B on her.

Of course, I had two other characters listed who were tantalizingly close to 2B, and I just couldn't resist getting them to the mark too. So here's my first simultaneous Inf Capping. My Stone/Fire Brute and Nightwidow. As you can see, my Widow's not technically capped yet - but the results of claiming that LotG sale will require a tad of inf juggling if I don't want to drop a few million off. The Brute's last sale was far more modest - a 5M crafted Doctored Wounds that was only about 1M over the cap. (Yes, I saved it.)

The Widow is actually mostly purpled, shy just one set I still want. The Brute is going to get a pretty complete overhaul. I plan to wait a while on both, until I16 gets a chance to settle in, on the gamble that purple prices may actually fall some.

By the way, it turns out I mean "simultaneous" a bit more literally than might be usual. The two characters are on separate accounts.
(If your looking for the inf counters, they're hyperlinked above. The picture below is just a smaller image to show the two characters online together.)

Old Faultline is an old version of the map that's no longer accessible. However, all badges from the old version were brought forward to the new version, just in slightly different locations to account for the updated map layout and geometry. So all those badges are still available.

To find them, just use the locations for the new/current Faultline badges with the same names.

What reaching the softcap does, effectively, is reduce the foe's statistical average damage against you to 10% of what it would be normally. This result comes about because of the interactions between accuracy and defense (and toHit). Here's the fairly fully detailed version of the math for things' chance to hit a target.

HitChance = AttackAccuracy*(BaseChance-TargetDefense-DefenseDebuffsOnTarget+SelftoHitBuffs-SelftoHitDebuffs)

HitChance can't be smaller than 5% or bigger than 95%. Of interest, however, neither can the part in parenthesis.

For players attacking even-mobs, BaseChance is 75%. For even-level to +5 level mobs attacking players, BaseChance is 50%.

For a player, AttackAccuacy is PowerAccuracy*(1+SlottedAccuracy+AccSetBonuses). For a mob, AttackAccuracy is PowerAccuracy*(1+LevelBonus)*(1+RankBonus)

Mobs get accuracy bonuses for being higher level than their target and for being ranks above minion.

Let's simplify some of those terms out. We'll say this is a +2 minion mob attacking a player. We'll assume no toHit buffs or debuffs in play. Let's give the mob one attack that has a 1.0 base accuracy. A +2 critter has a +20% accuracy bonus. That simplifies the math for when this critter attacks us down to this.

HitChance = 1.2*(50%-TargetDefense)

Now, initially, if we have no defense effects that work against the mobs attacks, TargetDefense will be zero. That means that the mob has a 1.2*50% = 60% chance to hit with each attack. Let's assume this attack does 100 damage every time it hits. It's going to hit you 60% of the time, so over many, many attacks, the average damage the foe delivers to you is 60 damage/attack.

Now lets turn on some defense toggles. Let's start with 10% defense that works against the mob's one attack. Now the mob's hit chance looks like this.

HitChance = 1.2*(50%-10%) = 1.2*40% = 48%

So the attack hits 48% of the time. It still deals 100 damage per hit, but it misses more, and the average damage per attack drops down to 48.
Let's look at what happened in terms of ratios. The new average is 48 and the old one was 60. 48/60 = 0.8 = 80%. Increasing your defense by 0.10 absolute reduced your foe's new over old average damage output by 100%-80% = 20%.

If we play with different defense values, we'll find that this ratio holds constant. No matter how much accuracy is involved, increasing your defense by 0.01 (usually called 1%) reduces the ratio of average damage foes deliver to you by 2%. If this holds true, then reaching the defense cap (+.45 defense) should reduce our foe's average damage by 2*45% = 90%.*

Let's get back to the softcap question. Lets say you turn on additional powers and bonuses and your poor +2 mob finds himself looking at 65% defense against his one attack. (Impressive toggles, eh?)

HitChance = 1.2*(50%-65%)

Now, it looks like the quantity in parenthesis is going to go negative, but it can't. I mentioned before that the smallest it can be is 5%. So...

HitChance = 1.2*(5%) = 6%

Old average damage was 60, new average damage is 6. 6/60 = 0.1 = 10%. So when you're at the defense softcap, your foes' ratio of average damage is reduced by 90% when compared to you having no defense at all.

The 5% "floor" on the parenthetical value is where the 45% softcap comes from. Since mobs below +6 levels to you don't get to toHit bonuses, more than 45% defense in the parenthesis is overkill versus most foes, because 45% is what you need to drive that parenthetical quantity to 5%. Of course, if you go back up to the more complicated version of the HitChance formula I showed near the top of this post, toHitBuffs on your opponents or DefenseDebuffs on you can change how much defense you need to drive the foes to 5%.

I know that was long. Hopefully it was at least a little clear.



*This also works in reverse. If something reduces your defense by 0.01 (1%), it increases the ratio of average damage you sustain by 2%. Since the parenthetical value caps at 95%, this means foes can increase their average damage against you by as much as 2*45% or 90%. Letting enough Cimeroran traitors hit you in a short time can mean they start dealing 1.9x as much average damage against you, which can get pretty ugly.

I set about figuring out the confidence interval math for these trials, and the LT values definitely do look suspicious.

Edit: I switched from normal approximations to the math from the calculation page noted earlier.

Using the same data set I last pasted above, I now get this.

Continued testing on same settings: Bosses, -1 foes, 6-person effective team size. Edit: AVs are off (none on the map)

Since there's been a patch since I started this, and I switched to bosses enabled, I started a new data set.

My goal is to get to around 2000 minions, with however many LTs that works out to. I'm running -1 Nemesis set to a team size of 6.

My data so far. (There were bosses on the map, but I skipped them, just defeating their buddies.) I'll just keep updating this data set with additional runs.

Defeats:
Rank: Minion, Defeats: 530
Rank: LT, Defeats: 176
Recipes:
Rank: Minion, Drops: 11, Rate: 2.075% (77.830% of expected)
Rank: LT, Drops: 7, Rate: 3.977% (74.574% of expected)
Salvage:
Rank: Minion, Drops: 43, Rate: 8.113% (101.415% of expected)
Rank: LT, Drops: 15, Rate: 8.523% (80.101% of expected)

As an aside, a new change with I16 is that Nemesis spawn snipers on outdoor maps. I always wondered why they didn't before. What's interesting about it is that they seem to replace minions, not other LTs. Because of this, I've gotten spawns with as many as 5 LT+snipers. That's a lot of Vengeance. Even if you defeat them in a smart order, the last couple of guys hit hard. And these are -1s.

I have had bosses off, but I could easily turn them back on, since I've been skipping their spawns anyway.

Hm, OK, I definitely need to add some data to my collection. With what I have I'm coming up short of Wiki percentages on both ranks. I need about four times as many kills as I have currently to feel good about the numbers I'm getting though.

Others have covered this, but those powers aren't a reason to make a Regen. Think about what you can already do on a Regen and then consider what % increase over that base these powers offer you.

This sort of thing goes best on powersets like SR, Shield, or even Invuln or Electric. Why? Because (except for I16 /Elec) they already have good damage avoidance/reduction powers but no inherent +regeneration and no self heals. Bumping up their regeneration even slightly can represent a big increase in the raw DPS they can sustain, because their defense/DR can cut down that raw DPS to much smaller levels.