Destiny: The Best Way to Get Loot

Destiny has been out for a while now and we've seen lots of articles all claiming to have "The best way to get loot", however now that Bungie has "Nerfed" the "Holy Loot Cave" what is the new best way to get loot. One of the most frequent ways I see in comments is Crucible. I've seen polarizing views on Crucible. Some say it gives tons of loot, some claim it doesn't give anything. I wanted to put this to the test and find out exactly how much loot Crucible gives.

To do this I played 100 matches of Crucible Control and recorded the results in a spreadsheet, which can be found here: http://goo.gl/rjJL1U if anyone wants to see my data. Since I was not involved in the development of this game I had to make some assumptions, commonly refereed to as All Variables Equal.
Assumption 1: One Multiplayer mode does not give better rewards than another.
Assumption 2: Playing with Friends does not result in a higher chance of rewards.
Assumption 3: Kill/Death Ratio, Score, Rank, Leaderboard status, or how well you did in any one match does not affect reward drops.

Since I cannot actually tell if these are true I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this data. The only way to actually test this would be to do this same test with all the different multiplayer modes, with and without friends, wins and losses.

Furthermore there are two schools of thought when it comes to how rewards are handed out.

The first school of thought believes that every player is given two chances (rolls) to get a reward as evident by the two reward spots. This school believes that if you don't get the first loot reward you still have a chance to get the second reward. This theory is untestable due to the reward always appearing in the first reward slot.

The second school of thought is that you must first get one reward before you can roll for a second one.

Understandably these two schools will have varying results. For this reason I have recorded both sets of results but statistical analysis requires going with a more conservative approach. For this reason the results I post here are of the second school of thought, however the statistic for the first school of thought can be found in my data.

The Results

Overall Crucible had a 59% chance of giving you a reward and a 6% chance of giving you a legendary. While during this 100 games I never got an Exotic weapon I was in a game where someone did meaning that Crucible has less than a 1% chance to receive an Exotic weapon (an exact number would require further testing to the nearest hundred after receiving an Exotic).

A further breakdown of the drop tables is here:
Overall Chance: 59%
Legendary: 6%
Auto Rifle: 1%
Scout Rifle: 3%
Hand Cannon: 4%
Pulse Rifle: <1%
Primary Weapon Engram: 5%
Sniper Rifle: 2%
Fusion Rifle: 4%
Shotgun: 5%
Secondary Weapon Engram: 4%
Heavy Machine Gun: <1%
Rocket Launcher: <1%
Heavy Weapon Engram: 3%
Helmet: 3%
Helmet Engram: 5%
Chest: 6%
Chest Engram: 4%
Gauntlet: 5%
Gauntlet Engram: 3%
Boots: <1%
Boot Engram: 4%
Class Item: 3%
Everything Else: 14%

In these results everything else includes rewards like Strange Coins, Motes of Light, Armor Shaders, and anything that does not fall into one of the above listed categories. Engrams were recorded as engrams instead of the corresponding item they decrypt into because Engrams have their own loot tables and can become something that it wasn't originally. I.E. A boot engram can become a Mote of Light. Weapon Engrams were recorded as Weapon engrams because recording it as a specific weapon type would skew the data set. I.E. if I recorded every engram as an autorifle (imagining they all were) the chance to get an autorifle would go from 1% to 6% which may be inaccurate since you might not get an autorifle from an engram.

Disclaimer: These are my results and my results only. Unless these results are actually confirmed by Bungie to be accurate we must assume there is some level of risk with this data. I would like to assume that my level of risk is under 5% which would make the results statistically significant. However due to the amount of assumptions made when starting this I cannot guarantee the results, nevertheless I feel confident in my assumptions and the subsequent results.

If you made it this far I thank you for reading all of this. What do you think is the best way to get gear? Do you go to Crucible for gear or do you like to grind the "Holy Loot Cave"? If so what are you going to do now? Was this useful to you?

[CuHound]

Awesome story, well thought out and interesting to read.