Comparison of "Lighting Storm" and other Legendary Stores

GrimSkald

For both 2 star Nightcrawler and Electro they've given us a weird kind of Legendary Store with the featured 2 star (at actually an extremely low percentage, weirdly enough,) 3s, and the full assortment of 4s and 5s. Some of these are at increased odds, but that's not important for the sake of this comparison. The cost of the store is cheap - 15 CP, but that's only 5 CP less than Classics so I wondered to myself "What is in fact the best deal, all things being equal? Sure, this store has 3s in it, but it's cheaper than the others, does that balance it out?"

I decided to crunch the numbers. These numbers are based on the odds they gave us - I derived percentages based on the "i" button, then multiplied that by the number of pulls one would get for 100 CP. I put the full table below.

So two things are pretty clear - your actual chance of pulling Electro from one of these is very low, less than literally anything else. OTOH spending 15 CP on a 2 star is kind of lame, so that's fine. The other interesting thing is that you actually get more 5s out of the limited time store than the legendary store, but less (significantly less, actually) than from Classics. Bear in mind that the "Pulls/CP" is a raw number - on average you will pull that many of that tier for each 100 CP, so even though the percentage is slightly lower, you get more 4 star pulls for Classic than for Legendary tokens.

But wait, what about shards?!? That was a bit tricky, but I averaged it all out -- basically took all the shards of that tier multiplied by their % chance, added the set shards, and divided by the number of shards per cover. I used the percentages they gave us a long time ago when they changed them. The stated percentages, incidentally, were 3% for 5x50, 2% for 100x4, 1.5% for 200x4 and 125x5, and 1% for 400x4 and 500x5. Since that number also gets multiplied by pulls/100, it did change things a little bit, here's the tables including those numbers:

It does make the Lightning Storm store more attractive, but Classics are still by far the best deal for random 5s - averaging just under to 1/100 cp spent.

TL/DR - if you're looking for 5s and don't care which ones you get, Classics are a great deal. The Lightning store isn't an awful one, but you're going to get just over half as many 4*s from it as with Classics, so if that's your priority, skip it. Shards help, but they really don't make up the gap since Classics are also cheaper than Latest.

meadowsweet

9 decimal places makes it harder to read (and the calculation isn't that precise to begin with.) And I would use 300 CP - the lowest common denominator of 15, 20, and 25 - instead of 100 CP, so you end up with whole numbers of pulls:

For 300 CP	Latest	Classic	Lightning
CP per Pull	25	20	15
Total Pulls	12	15	20
5★ Covers	1.7	2.5	2.0
4★ Covers	10.3	12.5	6.7
3★ Covers			10.0
2★ Covers			1.3

GrimSkald

@meadowsweet said:
9 decimal places makes it harder to read (and the calculation isn't that precise to begin with.) And I would use 300 CP - the lowest common denominator of 15, 20, and 25 - instead of 100 CP, so you end up with whole numbers of pulls:

For 300 CP	Latest	Classic	Lightning
CP per Pull	25	20	15
Total Pulls	12	15	20
5★ Covers	1.7	2.5	2.0
4★ Covers	10.3	12.5	6.7
3★ Covers			10.0
2★ Covers			1.3

Good point on the decimal places. I didn't do anything with that, it just put them out to the size of the cell. While 300 CP is better for an "integer" distribution, I don't really think that matters -- so what if the Lightning Store gives 6 2/3 pulls per 100? Math takes the decimal as easily as it takes 4 and 5 and the numbers are just "ballpark figures" anyway.

Regardless, the "Lightning Storm" store isn't as bad a deal as I expected for 5 stars, but it still doesn't hold a candle to Classic pulls and is only vaguely better than Latest for 5 stars and noticeably worse for 4.

Here's the table neatened up a bit, thanks for posting actual text:

KGB

I actually pulled 20 lightning tokens (needed to pull 4 for my daily quest a couple of times and I just pulled 12 more for fun once I got 'hot').

I ended up with 4 5-stars, 6 4-stars, 8 3-stars and a pair of 2s. Plus I hit the 500 bonus shards for a 5 star once too and another 50 shards for a total of 550 5 star shards. I really beat the odds according to your table.

I'll get a bunch more draws in the coming days once these PvP/PvE events finish and we get the placement tokens. Hopefully my luck stays hot.

Now that I look closer something seems a bit off on your math. If you spent 6000 cp on Classics you'd get 300 draws (300x20=6000) which should net you 45 covers (15% chance). If you spent 6000 cp on the lightning store you'd get 400 draws (400x15=6000) which should net you 40 covers (10% chance). 40/45 = 88.9% as many covers which is much higher than your stated ratio of 2 to 2.5 (2/2.5 = .80). That's excluding bonus shards which the lightning store should get you +500 more (1/100 chance of 500 and you made 100 more draws) plus all the other chances for lower shard amounts too. So I think it's better than 90% as many 5 star covers rather than the 80% your quoting.

KGB

JoeHandle

Mine own brief number crunching led to deciding the new tokens would only be worth it at 10CP.

But ofc that's "too cheap" ... would make pulling two of these essentially a classic pull + a free 3*, so why then have classics.

The ultimate killer tho is the boosted rates on 4s and 5s in classics. Can't pass up pushing those characters when the selections are hot. Like .... right now.

entrailbucket

Oh... oh no. Do people think classics are good now? Does the math say that they're worthwhile???

This is a total disaster for me. What am I supposed to do now? I'm going to have to start spending all my CP on those 500CP single-cover offers from the store or something.

JoeHandle

@entrailbucket said:
Oh... oh no. Do people think classics are good now? Does the math say that they're worthwhile???

This is a total disaster for me. What am I supposed to do now? I'm going to have to start spending all my CP on those 500CP single-cover offers from the store or something.

Just you and me, buddy. Classi-holics for years. Building it wide builds'em all.

DAZ0273

@entrailbucket said:
Oh... oh no. Do people think classics are good now? Does the math say that they're worthwhile???

This is a total disaster for me. What am I supposed to do now? I'm going to have to start spending all my CP on those 500CP single-cover offers from the store or something.

Shush! Don't say that word, you know, the "m" one. The spread sheeters are listening, their calculators are humming and they hunger...the forums will be awash with data, run, run before it is too late!

GrimSkald

@DAZ0273 said:

@entrailbucket said:
Oh... oh no. Do people think classics are good now? Does the math say that they're worthwhile???

This is a total disaster for me. What am I supposed to do now? I'm going to have to start spending all my CP on those 500CP single-cover offers from the store or something.

Shush! Don't say that word, you know, the "m" one. The spread sheeters are listening, their calculators are humming and they hunger...the forums will be awash with data, run, run before it is too late!

It was the increased bonus shard chances that really did it for me. It allowed me to fill out those characters for whom the RNG had not be kind (e.g. Colossus,) and bring up all my 4 stars to boot.

The fact that they gave away massive numbers of LTs in those HP vaults also didn't hurt. I spent like 4-5 thousand on Classic Pulls last season...

JoeHandle

@GrimSkald said:

@DAZ0273 said:

@entrailbucket said:
Oh... oh no. Do people think classics are good now? Does the math say that they're worthwhile???

This is a total disaster for me. What am I supposed to do now? I'm going to have to start spending all my CP on those 500CP single-cover offers from the store or something.

Shush! Don't say that word, you know, the "m" one. The spread sheeters are listening, their calculators are humming and they hunger...the forums will be awash with data, run, run before it is too late!

It was the increased bonus shard chances that really did it for me. It allowed me to fill out those characters for whom the RNG had not be kind (e.g. Colossus,) and bring up all my 4 stars to boot.

The fact that they gave away massive numbers of LTs in those HP vaults also didn't hurt. I spent like 4-5 thousand on Classic Pulls last season...

Oh, c'mon now, they didn't give them away. Sure loaded them up for a relatively decent price tho!