Adria's elixiers

[Sr.Juez]

Greetings, Lurkers:

Recently I started a new warrior, and I have arrived at the clvl required to buy elixiers from Adria, but... well, she insists in selling me a Dex elixier about 95% of the times I speak with her, sometimes one or two elixiers of Magic and VERY RARELY one or two elixiers of Strenght.

Well, I've always wanted to know if there was an explanation for this. Is this really "random", and I'm just being unlucky, or is there any bug or something about this Adria's behaviour I should know?.

If this is not random, what elixiers does she "prefers" selling to you, Sorcerors and Rogues?. Or does this only happens to warriors?

TIA.

[Draconis]

It happens all the time.

Pretty shocking, it takes ages to get enough STR elixirs:) Its worth it though, because warriors rock!

I've seen no information that it is a chosen thing or a flaw or anything more than random though. Perhaps DEX just has more chance to be created.

[Selby]

It's the same thing that happened to my Rogue. Always magic and strength, no dexterity. I doubt it's any more or less random than anything else in the game. It's just a matter of what we are looking for never comes up as often as we want it to.

Selby

[--Pete]

Hi,

Years ago when the topic of how to max a character's stats as fast as possible was being debated on the DSF, I took a few characters to level 33ish keeping track of elixirs offered. I no longer have those records, and it was only for four or five characters, so the sample was too small to be more than an indicator. But as best as I remember, the number and type did run in short streaks but were pretty much random overall.

I think that you've just noticed another application of Murphy's Law as embedded in the Diablo code :)

--Pete

[NiteFox]

Hrmm... I'm currently trying to max-out my clvl 35 sorc, and he only needs about 20 or so bottles of Jack Daniels to have full magic. And bad breath.

This has been something that I've been trying to do for a fair while of sporadic play. From what little I've noticed there does seem to be "streaks" where Adria sells up to two Elixers of Magic for a time, even if you go scumming back and forth between Cats and her shack. I've currently hit on a dry period where she sells no Elixers of any sort. Which is a shame 'cause I was thinking of installing Diablo on my sister's laptop for easy item transfer, and Kitsune's looking a little short in the dexterity department.

[Jarulf]

Streaks are actually in complete accordnace with laws of probability. If you never got them (or very seldom), THEN one should start to wonder about the randomness.

I recall reading a story about a professor in statistics who would give his students a home assignment. They should all go home and toss a coin 200 times and write down the result. Obviously, some students would simply skip actually tossing the coin and instead write down what they thought would be a random sequence of coin tosses. It was almost always possible to catch those students. Why? Because they lacked long streaks of the same result. Now, I don't recall the exact probabilities (nor do I want to calculate it now), but tossing a coin 200 times, means that there is an EXTREME high chance that you will get like 5 or 6 results of the same type in a row. You will also get several of 4 in a row and so on. However, most humans trying to write a "random" sequence of coin flips, will avoid even such things as 4 in a row thinking it is too unlikely and not random enough.

A nice story about how bad humans are in predicting and judging probabilities and what is probable and not and what is common occurance in random effects.