Re: LK Screenshots Needed - Normal Chests
1. I don't see a reason to check other objects in LK. The corpses and what not have at best a 1/690K chance of dropping a Ber. But by the time you get down to Vex its only a 2-3 time worse chance. So I think if you are after Ber (Infinity, Enigma or similar) then you will be more efficient sticking to the Special Chests. If you're just rune hunting in general without any real target, hitting a couple objects that fall right in your path won't slow you down too much. Teleporting around hunting for them will though.
2. In Lk, a normal chest is anything that looks like a chest, not spinning or crumpling towers or anything else, just items that look a chest with a lid that opens. The only place that really gets questionable is in Act 5, like so much else there, LoD developers didn't fully understand the original developer's goals and all sorts of odds and ends are chests there.
3. Its not that simple. First, with only 4 items dropping from an unlocked chest, there will be a lot of identical looking drops that come from different seeds making a simple count impossible.
A more interesting point and that I have wondered about for a long time is the question of Locked chests. I always guessed that the seed was selected and then locked state was determined, giving us roughly 17K locked chests and 48K unlocked chests. It turns out the order is reversed.
Locked state is determined and then the 16 bit seed is set. So for normal chests you should have ~65K unlocked drop patterns (even if simple ones are repeated) and another ~65K that are a combination of the unlocked drops and an additional drop cycle. If a rune dropped in the unlocked portion, it should always drop for the seed and have 2^16 odds, if it dropped in the second cycle, it would have 1/4 that or 2^18th or 1/262000 odds. Also note that the locked chests always go through the drop cycles while unlocked chests have a fair (25%) chance of rolling a general nodrop before it gets to the item select cycle. These drops cause a third state where the first cycle happens differently than an unlocked chest but I don't think it changes the basic numbers enough to worry about. (Edit: Actually, considering the 25% chance of a general no drop and wildly guessing that it doesn't change based on player settings, the odds for unlocked drops are (4 * 2^16)/3 or somewhere in the 1/87K range.)
Now, this locked state is determined the same way for Special chests. If you've had enough of the technical details I'll just say that it does not affect the special chests as dramatically and I would venture to guess that all of the known HR patterns do not change as the locked state changes.
Here's why, but we need a little background on the special chests mechanics first. First, the special chests stop drop cycles when cycle passes the magic+ test. To pass the magic + test, the first item dropped in the cycle must be magic or rare (actually set and unique too but those can't happen from special chests). The special chests drop one cycle or two cycles (locked and unlocked), each cycle consisting of 4 drops. If any of those cycles pass the magic+ test, the chest drop is finished. IF they don't, the chests continue to drop, up to 10 more cycles, until a cycle passes the magic+ test.
So what does this mean for the actual number of special chests drops? Very little. The locked chests will always drop a second cycle but they won't alter the magic+ pass if the first drop passes it. So the only thing it can do is add a single second cycle when the first one fail and the second one passes. A very specific set of circumstances and so it would change only a small percentage of drops. The other thing that can happen, is that all 11 of the unlocked cycles fail the magic+ test and so when that same seed is used on a locked chest, it gets 12 cycles. That will also be a rare event and in both cases, its only one additional cycle, not a whole new drop. So the basic odds we've been working with in Lk hold up.
But, that's not all, lets look at one last real world (D2 wise) application of all that.
Lets take the famed
P3 LK Lo drop. (RIP recent find). Now we have never seen an alternate version with more items so using the above information, we can guess that both items did not drop on the same cycle. If they had, then there would be a few Lo drops with additional items. So we can guess that the Lo alone dropped on the first cycle and the Balanced Axe dropped on the second.
Interesting but do we have any supporting evidence. Well, if Lo really is from the first cycle and since special chests use the same drop mechanics as normal chests, there should be a normal chest drop with just a Lo. And of course, there is:
Lo from chest - P3 - (Skinny). We can also guess that there will be a 4x rarer version of this drop from a locked chest that will exactly match the special chest drop, Lo/Balanced Axe.
