Quote:
Originally Posted by Goregasmic
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In the end, outside of curiosity, there's no use to knowing if charm has a 95% or 98% chance to break on tick because on the field it will break when it will break and you'll have to deal with it. And it isn't like you have alternative options to compare efficiency against. The only time where breaking probability would be useful is if you could come up with something like "an ilis shaman has a 80% chance to break in the first 10 ticks" which lets you figure out if that's too unruly for you or not but you'd know that with a cursory glance at the dataset.
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It's certainly true that we see a massive amount of variability in practice. A pet can start out causing a lot of trouble with constant breaks and then suddenly settle down and produce several runs where the charm lasts for many minutes. The overall charm duration will only show its underlying distribution when you collect many hundreds of individual charm attempts (the graph in my first post was from data collected over more than 2 weeks).
On the other hand, the exponential nature of the cumulative duration probability does mean that relatively small differences in the underlying per-tick probability would end up leading to quite dramatic changes in duration:
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Though as I noted, you're only going to really see this when looking at very large numbers of different charm attempts.
There is, possibly, an additional factor in play when it comes to maximum charm duration. I've attached a zip file containing the parsed data from the L2 orc pawn (CHA 115) and an apparition in CoM (still buffing my CHA back then, so CHA was 189 if I remember correctly). The apparition charm data is from when I was L48 and doing the moat area. Unfortunately at this point I was routinely casting Cajoling Whispers, so I'm not sure if it was above or below L37, but it hit for a max of 88, if that means anything.
If you just eyeball then orc pawn data first, you'll see a surprising number of charms lasting 142 or 143 ticks (as I mention in the code, the log's precision is limited to 1second, which means that some error is introduced by the need to account for casting time of the charm spell). Out of the 31 charms, 6 last 142 or 143 ticks, which doesn't fit an exponential distribution and suggests that there's a hard limit being imposed which rolls up the long tail and caps it at 143 ticks. I didn't see the same effect on the data from the greater spurbone, and at first wondered if this was evidence of a level effect. But then I went through my old logs and found the data on the CoM apparition, in which you can see a very similar effect, only now the hard cap seems to apply at 155 ticks (5 of the 25 charms recorded have this length). Comparing these data is hard, as there's a difference both in mob level and my own CHA. I've also seen evidence that the cap can go even longer, with at least one charm from CoM when I was L49 (also with 189 CHA) lasting 161 ticks.
So, it's possible that there is indeed a hard cap on charm duration, and I can't rule out the possibility that the length of this cap is at least partially determined by CHA. I really haven't tested this, though, and looking at the sort of design that a proper test would need - studying the maximum length of 15+minute charms - something like that is going to be very gruelling.