Treacherous Domains - Significantly improved loot drops?

[malawiglenn]

What does Significantly improved loot drops mean, in terms of a mathematical value and compared to elsewhere?

What I am after is if an item has 1:x drop chance from a Hero outside this domain, what is the new drop chance inside the domain?

[Demonlord]

I would like to know the answer to this as well as does having multiple Mods on the area give more? If so then how much Each mod gives extra.

Checked the game guide and all it said was an “an increased drop rate particularly Rares” also is it the entire area effected or just the boss or just the chest at the end?

[Aldebaran]

So far, can’t really say that these places showered me with more loot than before.

[PheX]

I guess it means the area is bit more challenging like the crucible waves, just 1 mod won’t make much difference so probs like 5-10% extra loot max. I’ve dropped a few purples on those areas so can confirm they drop gud stuff.

[Glimpse]

This was supposed to up the drop rates in Rogue dungeons and especially for the dungeons boss unique drops. Havent tested myself yet though.

[malawiglenn]

5-10% increased drop rates is not “Significantly improved” :rolleyes:

It means on average that if I expected (most likely outcome in the pseudo-Gaussian distribution) would get 100 legs (or whatever item we are talking about) I would now have a distribution peaked at 105-110 items.

[Avyctes]

I too was wondering about this, I haven’t noticed any difference with before to be honest.

[malawiglenn]

Here are the distributions for 100, 110 and 125 items with width according to the Poisson formula (sqrt(average))

[Avyctes]

It would be more accurate to call it slightly improved then.

[malawiglenn]

It would be more accurate to call it slightly improved then.

Yeah I can accept that.

[Avyctes]

Anyway, a rogue dungeon run before FG dropped I would say between 1 and 10 (being generous here) legendaries. Even if there’s a 10% boost that wouldn’t result in an extra one dropped in a run most of the time. Underwhelming.

[idontwannaknow0]

Quoting the game guide on challenge areas: “Many optional areas have an increased difficulty and Mutators. To compensate for this increase in challenge, these areas also have significantly improved drop rates, particularly for items of Rare quality.”

So I doubt epic and legendary drop rates are boosted all that much from the hero and bosses.

[malawiglenn]

Quoting the game guide on challenge areas: “Many optional areas have an increased difficulty and Mutators. To compensate for this increase in challenge, these areas also have significantly improved drop rates, particularly for items of Rare quality.”

So I doubt epic and legendary drop rates are boosted all that much from the hero and bosses.

Ok.

So let me rephrase the question then. What is the significantly increased drop chance of getting a rare affix and double rare affixes compared to “regular areas”?

[Avyctes]

Double rares are a once in a blue moon drop, unless you double or triple that chance I doubt there’s any actual difference.

[claudius]

To me ‘significant’ means that there is a greater than 95 percent chance (based on statistics) that the observed difference is not due to chance (RNG in video games i guess). Note and that means if a study says there is a significant correlation that still means that there is up to a 5 percent chance that it was just random fluctuations and no correlation.

But in a video game context (as opposed to not correlating science data) ‘signicant’ is arbitrary. One person might think it should be 50% more legendaries while another thinks 20% is ‘significant’.

[CaiusMisus]

Necro, but no clear answer on the internet and this thread comes up in search, so…

Has anybody actually ever looked at the code level what exactly do the Domains do? Would be nice if in addition to the vague description, it clearly listed something like
Rares: +20%
Epics: +10%
Legendaries: +5%

Or similar when hovering over the UI element. I assume that the more mods there are, the better the drops improvement. But hard data instead of speculation and observation would be nice.

[Croc]

Interesting, I never specifically farm the challenge areas for better drop chances, but rather for the increased nemesis spawn rate. Archmage Alexander seems to really enjoy that area with three mutators in the Malmouth Sewers.

[Jason_the_Iguana]

Check out Modal’s impressive compendium of drop chance info instead of this thread:

How to determine the drop chance for an MI w/ specific affixes

In this post, I will explain how to interpret Grim Dawn’s game database files to find out what the drop rate for a specific combination of affixes is. Changelog: On September 21, 2025, I updated this post in two ways. I changed my examples to use current modifiers from patch 1.2.1.6. These numbers were given a big update in 1.2.1. I added a third hypothesis for how the modifiers are applied, proposed by @mi023. I now believe this hypothesis is correct (the numbers for MIs are pretty close to …

It does not discuss legendary/epic drop chance, but it does show (with exact percentages) how the odds of finding magic/rare/double-rare items is affected by challenge layers.

Some exact percentages:

How to determine the drop chance for an MI w/ specific affixes

Post updated with info about challenge layers. For reference, here are the affix combo chances for a typical green MI dropped from a Boss (or BossChest, in SR) on Ultimate difficulty: No challenge layer magic/magic 10.29% magic/rare 44.49% rare/magic 44.49% rare/rare 0.74% Easy dangerous domain magic/magic 9.25% magic/rare 45.00% rare/magic 45.00% rare/rare 0.75% Hard dangerous domain magic/magic 7.54% magic/rare 45.85% rare/magic 45.85% rare/rare 0.76% Roguelike dungeon …

There’s also a link to a spreadsheet where you can check the chances for specific affixes and items.

Bottom line: Tougher challenge layers do make it more likely to find those double-rare items.

Whether the improvement is “significant” is up to you, but in the linked example the odds of a boss dropping a yellow-yellow item (likely useless) drops by 75%, while the chances of dropping a green-green (double-rare) item increases by 25% in the hardest dungeon types. (But a 25% increase on a terrible base chance is still a pretty terrible chance.)

[Bas]

Just wanted to mention crafting materials also drop significantly more frequently in challenge areas. Not sure how much but it’s noticeable.

[CaiusMisus]

Thanks. That’s quite… disappointing. A roughly, a 0.01% increase in double rares per difficulty tier of the domain. Definitely not worth target farming them, especially over running RL dungeons.

Though the Domains can contain monsters that are not in RL dungeons. So if you need some MI from such a monster, might as well I guess.