kris, I'm not sure how you are seeing that Baal has a good chance of dropping TC87.
He drops items through Act 5 (H) Equip B (note the B) whereas Pindle and the other Act 5 SUs, and all monsters in level 85 areas like the Pit and WSK, drop from Act 5 (H) Equip C.
Back in 1.09, this used to mean that Baal couldn't drop from TC90, whereas Pindle etc all could. After they removed TC90 for 1.10 though, they still wanted Equip C to be better than Equip B, so it kept a much better chance of dropping TC87. ATMA lists this correctly as far as I can see. Baal's chance of dropping weap87 is about 1/200, whereas Pindle is about 1/50. And that's even considering it per kill, so Baal is getting a lot more individual drops than Pindle.
As a result, while Baal is still the best source of almost all items in the TC78-84 range (Meph for lower ones), Pindle or the Pit kick his butt on TC87 uniques.
The consequence of this is that I am actually not artificially enhancing the rarity of Stormlash and Schaefers in my list, I am effectively reducing the rarity of the TC87s, because they are more common from other monsters. But Stormlash and Schaefers don't get reduced as much, because Baal is indeed the best source for those, so they appear to move up the list (when really the top of the list is moving down around them).
Those are rare purely because of the 1/5 or 1/6 rarity, which is a much more significant factor than the relative rarities of the TCs. Blizzard went to some trouble to "flatten out" the TC distribution, as a quick perusal of ATMA's listings can illustrate. From Pindle or a Pit boss, the distribution of the rarest TCs goes roughly like this:
TC3 (1/138 kills)
TC78 (1/39)
TC6 (1/33)
TC87 (1/31)
TC81 (1/26.3)
TC84 (1/25.7)
TC51 (1/24)
TC69 (1/22)
etc
As you can see, it is not nearly the simple descending table from 87 down that you might expect. In particular, you'll note TC78 is way high. I suspect they did that on purpose. It makes the numerous highly sought TC78 uniques, including Stormlash, a lot harder to find. As an aside, note also how high TC51 is - the TC with Skullders, War Travs, Oculus, HoZ, Vamp Gaze and many others all packed into it. They don't want us to have those, I swear
You can see though how the 1/5 of Schaefer's or the 1/6 of Stormlash is going to make a much bigger difference than the relative rarity of the TC. It makes Azurewrath a lot rarer too, but since AW is only TC75, Meph can drop it easily, and anything Meph can drop easily is always a lot more common because Meph is still everyone's MF biatch. I know Meph can drop TC78 too, but his odds of doing so are tiny compared to lower TCs (for much the same reason Baal is bad for TC87s).
From Baal, just for reference, the rarest TCs are
TC87 (1/133 kills)
TC3 (1/65)
TC78 (1/18)
TC84 (1/17)
TC6 (1/15)
TC81 (1/13)
TC51 (1/11)
TC69 (1/10)
etc.
Suo, TC3s are indeed rare, mostly because people on the realms don't spend much time doing normal diff, it's all "rush plz" and they're straight away up into monsters that don't drop them. From Bliz's perspective, they should be more common because people "should" be going around killing normal Corpsefire/Coldcrow/Blood Raven/Rakanishu more often than any other bosses (they're the first ones you meet after all) - and they all have much better chances of dropping TC3s.
But we tend not to play the way Blizzard thinks we should :lol:
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