Successful self-enchant chance

Schatten · Post by **Schatten** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 9:39 am

Successful self-enchant chance is
ENC + 0.25*IN + 0.125*LK - 2.5*EP (on use / on strike)
ENC + 0.25*IN + 0.125*LK - 5*EP (constant)
(source: Morrowind:Enchant - UESPWiki)

According to this, with Enchant at 26, Intelligence at 175 (fortified) and Luck at 140 (fortified) I have 12.25% chance to successfully create an item with 30 Enchantment Points, but I keep failing again and again despite having tried more than 50 times already.
If I don't fortify Intelligence and Luck, I can easily create 15 EP items, although the chance of success is exactly the same - 12.25%. What is wrong?

(MW+TB+BM 1.6.1820)

Stworca · Post by **Stworca** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 10:02 am

Let me respond with an example of my own.

In Battle for Wesnoth game my Grand Mage has 4 attacks/round, each with 70% chance to hit (attacks are magical so there are no modifiers for weather, terrain and enemy defense). Yet today he missed 47 attacks in a row.

Chance for something like that to occur is.. 8,862938119652501095929e-25 (in short : rather f'n small.)

In Morrowind however there is an easy way to increase the chance greatly. You see, +stat potions stack with each other. Drinking 20 +40 int potions will raise your stat by 800. +Ench would be better naturally, four times better in fact, but there are no such potions that i know of. Drink a few dozen potions and try again. If you have alchemy then drink int potions before crafting, to make more potent int potions.

Ahoy

Schatten · Post by **Schatten** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 10:16 am

Meaning?.. It just happens?

Stworca · Post by **Stworca** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 10:20 am

Yeah. But do raise enchant significantly (trainers) and make sure that your item has the required capacity for the enchant!

30 EP requires item that can HOLD 30 EP

Schatten · Post by **Schatten** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:00 am

I know of capacity and fortify skill potions or spells, I just can't understand why of two equally probable events one is easy to happen and another one is nearly impossible.
Anyway, thanks for your help.

Lemmus · Post by **Lemmus** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:40 am

Shattan, an easier example than Stworca's would be flipping a coin. The chance of flipping a coin once and getting heads is 50%, and of doing so five times and getting 5 heads in a row is 3.125%. But if you have flipped a coin four times in a row and gotten heads each time, then the chance of the next flip being heads is 50%. The universe does not keep track of your previous flips.

An easier way to envision this might be to image a mayonnaise jar filled with jelly beans, and one eighth of them (12.5%, close enough) being your favourite colour, let's say blue. If you reach in blindfolded and don't pull out a blue, you put it back and try again. Over time, chances are you will eventually pull a blue one, but it's never going to get any easier, statistically.

This is made more complicated by the fact that we don't really have any details about Morrowind's random number generator. Is it time based, action based, or load based? If time based, then every attempt should be truly random due to small variations in how long it takes you to do things, but if it only generates a new number when certain in-game events happen then standing in one place re-loading on fail might cause you to repeatedly have the same random number. I expect that the program is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, but am not sure.

Oh, and for reference, the chance of success after 50 attempts at 12.25% odds is 99.85% which is a failure chance of 15 in 10,000. While certainly very unlucky, it's not as horrible as you might think.

Stworca · Post by **Stworca** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 12:05 pm

Lemmus wrote:
Oh, and for reference, the chance of success after 50 attempts at 12.25% odds is 99.85% which is a failure chance of 15 in 10,000. While certainly very unlucky, it's not as horrible as you might think.

In short, you're still very, very lucky when compared to my damn Grand Mage

I'd say he should play Lotto, but instead of picking 6 numbers from 49, he should pick 43 numbers that he thinks will be hits, and instead choose the six that he didn't select.

Schatten · Post by **Schatten** » Fri Jan 28, 2011 3:08 pm

"... standing in one place re-loading on fail might cause you to repeatedly have the same random number"
That occured to me as well and I tried saving and then repeatedly reloading in different places, but it didn't help at all.

(Slightly off the topic) An acquaintance of mine once told me about his experience playing fortune wheel: he kept betting on black knowing that red can't really turn out more than 10 times in a row since there's equal probability of both red and black, but he ran out of patience (or money) after 22nd unsuccessful bet