Luck

General Luck is separate from gathering-related luck, and has separate values on a character, but functions similarly. More information is below.

"Luck of the general type (as opposed to the types of Gathering Luck that you see on something like a sickle or a food buff) affects your chances to roll “higher” on our lists of items that come from enemies and containers like stockpiles. In the case of furniture schematics and found furniture items, the higher-end storage items are among the most rare. Increasing your Luck will definitely make this more likely to occur, but as with all luck - there’s no guarantee you’ll get it."

"There are two ways we interpret luck:
 * 1) An overall scale that you can think of as a ratio of when things occur or a percentage chance to occur.
 * 2) A relative scale that has a movable odds range based on other values we add into it.

Things like enemies and searchable containers use Method #1 above, where anything in their drop list can occur, and your luck stat increases the likelihood of you getting the less common items in the list. In New World’s loot model, drop tables are divided up into overall rarities, with rarer groupings of items living “higher” on the roll table than more common items. There are entire sets of items that drop less frequently than other sets, and equipment is a great example of how we do this.

There are collections of equipment that live at different general probabilities: a “Common” set, “Family” sets, and “Elite” sets. Rarer still are the more context-specific Expedition sets and Named Items. Common items have the broadest possible perk roll variety, Family sets have slightly more narrow perk roll variety and a higher chance to roll perks, and Elite sets only come from Gold-Bar (elite) enemies and have narrower perk rolls and an even higher chance to roll perks. Expeditions items almost always roll some perks, and Named items come with a pre-set selection of perks that don’t roll.

Luck doesn’t increase your chance to get higher gear score rolls or roll more perks, but it does increase your chances of seeing item drops that have higher chances of rolling bonuses.

Gatherables (but not Fishing) use method #2 above. As your Luck stat increases, it gradually enables new items to drop from the tables. This means that if your luck values are totally unmodified, there are some items in those tables that it are impossible for you to obtain without a bonus. This is particularly useful for “AND” tables, or tables that give you more things as they roll higher. If we were to use this with “OR” tables, it would actually decrease or even eliminate your chances of getting items in the lower roll ranges of the table (so we don’t do that). We set up these tables to “open up” more as your base luck grows to avoid inundating lower-skill-level players with less-common items that they would have no use for until progressing much further in other, relevant skills. We also use it to plant little surprises and new things to find as you level your gathering skills!

Additionally, we don’t use percentages in our data notation, we use integer-based roll ranges to apply probability weights to the chances of a specific thing dropping.

For instance, let’s the roll range on regular tree is 100,000 (because it is!), but somewhere above that range, say 105,000, is a chance to get a fish (trees don’t drop fish, this is just an example). When you chop down that tree with unmodified luck, you have a 0% chance to get a fish. But if your luck was modified by say, 10,000, your roll range increases from 0-100,000 to 10,000-110,000, which gives you a (roughly) 5% chance to get that fish when you chop down the tree. If you only increased your luck by 5000, you would have a 0.00001% chance at that fish…but that’s why our luck increases from things like food and equipment are pretty chunky so we avoid cases where your luck value is “stuck” in an unfortunate “ultra low odds of a thing” state.

With gatherables in particular, increasing your gathering skill adds base luck to your roll, with Level 200 granting a total bonus of 2000 to your base rolls. There aren’t any cases in the game where not having a luck bonus will prevent you from getting an item as long as the associated Trade Skill is at 200. You can use food and equipment to further increase your drop chances, or even enable some items to drop for you “earlier” in your progression!"