Game Mechanics: Feign Death Success Rate

[Raev]

I want to preface this post by saying that I don't know what the true FD success rate should be. The best I could find was these patch notes (implemented here in 2011:

- The Monk's feign death success rate has been improved. It was previously capped at 95% at 100 skill and now it ramps up the success rate for higher skill levels.

Anyway, I feel anecdotally like I have been failing FD quite a bit recently. Today I tried to CR a group from Disco 2, and I failed first directly under gruplinort (somehow I survived) and then again under the commander (had to cap). Now when I first made Raev I made an FD hotkey like so:

/autoattack off
/doability 1
/t raev blah

which produces the message 'Talking to yourself again?' in the log file. I added this because I wanted to see how badly I was failing to get FD off vs casters and never took it out. Since I don't talk to myself normally, pretty much every such message is an FD attempt.

zonko@vanderboom:~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Sony/EverQuest/Logs$ cat eqlog_Raev_project1999.txt | grep "Raev has fallen to the ground" | wc -l
145
zonko@vanderboom:~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Sony/EverQuest/Logs$ cat eqlog_Raev_project1999.txt | grep "Talking to yourself again" | wc -l
1889

145 / 1889 = 7.7% chance to fail. However, sometimes I hit my hotkey multiple times like a scrub when the timer hasn't expired yet. So my real FD failure rate is probably mildly above 8%. Wolfram Alpha is quite sure this is not chance, giving it a probability of less than 1 in a million if the real probability is 5%.

Doing the same thing for my beta logs:

zonko@vanderboom: Logs$ cat eqlog_Raev_P1999Beta.txt | grep "Raev has fallen to the ground" | wc -l
30
zonko@vanderboom: Logs$ cat eqlog_Raev_P1999Beta.txt | grep "Talking to yourself again" | wc -l
348

That gives 30/348 = 8.5% which is even higher, although Wolfram Alpha suggests there is a .2% chance that it could be the result of random chance.

The real question, of course, is what the true chance should be, which is why I didn't title the post 'FD IS BROKEN'. The patch notes seem pretty reasonable to me, but IIRC Cobblestone said people did real tests but he lost the files. Perhaps one of our classic afficionandos