Cost of my herc

Solandri - Heavens Tear

Edit: For those of you coming from the stickied legendary pet guide, each battle pet pack on average gives you 26.8 source of force or feathers. This works out to an average of 373 packs, or 186.5 gold to get a legendary pet. You should plan for a bit more than this, as some people get unlucky (and being stuck at 9980 SoF without enough money to buy another pack really sucks). And the NPC who exchanges SoF for feathers will only do so in lots of 100. So you may actually need to get as many as 10,090 SoF/feathers to get your pet.

If you're trying to decide between buying SoF/feathers from cat shops vs. converting coin to gold and buying battle pet packs directly, refer to the chart in this post. It will tell you the equivalent cost of a single SoF/feather at a certain price for gold. That way you can easily tell which is cheaper - that cat shop or buying the packs yourself.

371 battle pet packs, 185.5 gold.

Source of force
49 packs of 10
51 packs of 20
45 packs of 30
39 packs of 40
12 packs of 50
total 5020 (196 packs)

Feathers
33 packs of 10
46 packs of 20
36 packs of 30
35 packs of 40
25 packs of 50
total 4980 (175 packs)

Total
82 packs of 10
97 packs of 20
81 packs of 30
74 packs of 40
37 packs of 50
total 10,000 (371 packs)

Average 26.954 per pack. Calculated average from pwdatabase = 26.8 per pack.

Here's a plot of the accumulated average as I was opening the packs.

Plotting a moving average (window of 20 packs), it makes me want to feel superstitious about some stuff I did. But I don't think the evidence is strong enough to warrant mentioning exactly what I did, for fear of starting a superstitious belief. I'll just state that half of the dips correspond very closely with things I did differently while opening the packs. It really makes me wonder...

Sakurajd - Sanctuary

kinda like... if you lure using a low level unit in FBs, they're likely to drop more items.

OMGLAZERZ - Heavens Tear

Looks about right.

Solandri - Heavens Tear

Finally got around to buying a phoenix. Had the coin for a while but was too lazy to convert it into gold and kept buying other stuff with it.

374 battle pet packs, 187 gold.

Source of force
48 packs of 10
44 packs of 20
42 packs of 30
27 packs of 40
22 packs of 50
total 4800 (183 packs)

Feathers
48 packs of 10
45 packs of 20
35 packs of 30
37 packs of 40
26 packs of 50
total 5210 (191 packs)

Total
96 packs of 10
89 packs of 20
66 packs of 30
64 packs of 40
48 packs of 50
total 10,010 (374 packs)

Average 26.765 per pack. Calculated average from pwdatabase = 26.8 per pack.

Here's a plot of the accumulated average as I was opening the packs.

Plot of the moving average (window of 20 packs). The first 30 packs were from a friend who bought some stuff from me for gold (paid with pet packs). They had a crummy 22.3 average - I told her she sold me cursed packs. b:chuckle The rest I bought myself and had a 27.1 average. I know it's just a coincidence, but it's still pretty funny. At about the 50th pack, I entered a TT 1-1 and opened the rest of the packs while we were playing.

A tip for opening these. When you've opened the battle pet packs and have a bunch of force packs and phoenix plume packs to open, don't click them one at a time. Each size pack counts as a separate mission. If you click the same pack twice (before you've gotten the force or feathers), it'll give a "mission already taken" error. But you can click different ones. So click a 10 pack, a 20 pack, 30 pack, 40 pack, and 50 pack. By then the 10 pack should have given you your force or feathers and you can start clicking them all again. Makes it go much faster. (Don't do more than 5 at a time, I got a server sync error and had to restart when I did.)

Solandri - Heavens Tear

I've put the Excel spreadsheets I used to generate those nifty charts on my web site. Both files are the same (you only need to grab one). They just have different data for my two purchases. If anything, it will help you add up all those packs so you know when you've hit 10k overall.

pw.solandri.com/files/herc%20purchase%20public.xls
pw.solandri.com/files/phoenix%20purchase%20public.xls

I made them for personal use so they aren't very pretty. I highlighted the fields where you enter your data in yellow, and protected the rest of the cells. Basically you:

1. Clear all the yellow cells of any data.

2. As you open each pet pack, you write down how many SoF or feathers you got from each pack in a new cell in column A, starting from A1 (above the line). Don't worry about whether they're SoF or feathers, you'll figure that out in (3).

2a. The top row will tells you your totals. E1 = total, G1 = average per pack. When E1 hits 10,000 you are done (although you may have to trade SoF for feathers or vice versa). Columns B and C tell you the same thing at any point in time while you were opening the packs.

3. The SoF and feather packs will automatically form stacks in your inventory. Every now and then put the number of packs in these stacks into the yellow region in the upper right. For ease of entry, I suggest putting them in your inventory like they are in the spreadsheet. One row for source packs, the row underneath for feather packs. Going 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 from left to right.

3a. The numbers surrounding that yellow block adds up SoF and feathers, and packs. F5 and L2 should be the same as E1. If they're not, you made a mistake somewhere. M5 and L6 should equal the number of packs you've opened (rows you've filled in column A). (L5 is a checksum and should always be 0. If it's not, the spreadsheet is broken.)

4. The charts should update automatically, up to the number of packs I had to open. I dunno what happens if you open more, you may have to edit the charts. They are just for show, and don't affect the calculation of the totals and averages.

5. If you end up opening more packs than I did, you'll have to copy the formulae from columns B, C, and D down to the new rows. It should work up to 499 or 500 packs. I don't remember what I used as the limit.

5a.Column D is a running average of 20 packs (10 before, 10 after) so it should stop 10 packs before your last one. Likewise, D1 to D10 are also empty for this reason.

6. When you're done, give Peritia a copy of your pack totals (the numbers in the yellow block on the upper right), so we can statistically verify how many packs it should take on average to reach 9999.

Bunny_blues - Heavens Tear

Solandri - Heavens Tear wrote: »

371 battle pet packs, 185.5 gold.

Source of force
49 packs of 10
51 packs of 20
45 packs of 30
39 packs of 40
12 packs of 50
total 5020 (196 packs)

Feathers
33 packs of 10
46 packs of 20
36 packs of 30
35 packs of 40
25 packs of 50
total 4980 (175 packs)

Total
82 packs of 10
97 packs of 20
81 packs of 30
74 packs of 40
37 packs of 50
total 10,000 (371 packs)

Average 26.954 per pack. Calculated average from pwdatabase = 26.8 per pack.

Here's a plot of the accumulated average as I was opening the packs.

Plotting a moving average (window of 20 packs), it makes me want to feel superstitious about some stuff I did. But I don't think the evidence is strong enough to warrant mentioning exactly what I did, for fear of starting a superstitious belief. I'll just state that half of the dips correspond very closely with things I did differently while opening the packs. It really makes me wonder...

dont get it

axt57

Why does this thread have 5 replies and nearly 35k views? What.

Also, nice necro.

Solandri - Heavens Tear

axt57 wrote: »

Why does this thread have 5 replies and nearly 35k views? What.

It's linked to in the stickied legendary pet guide. When the author of that guide asked me for permission to link to my post, I thought he meant a post where I broke down the pwdatabase probabilities to come up with an average 26.8 per pack and hence $186.50 for a legendary pet. So I told him sure, go ahead. Instead, he linked to this post.

Arcrueid - Raging Tide

More data, collected on Feb 20, 2010:

200 Gold

400 Battle Pet Packs

56 Phoenix Plume Pack (10)
54 Phoenix Plume Pack (20)
35 Phoenix Plume Pack (30)
34 Phoenix Plume Pack (40)
16 Phoenix Plume Pack (50)
47 Force Pack (10)
53 Force Pack (20)
48 Force Pack (30)
32 Force Pack (40)
25 Force Pack (50)

4850 Phoenix Feathers
5500 Sources of Force

10350 Phoenix Feathers

25.875 per pack

When I collected data for my nixes on a different server, my average was slightly over 26. It seems the reasonable lowest average would be 25 per pack, leading to exactly $200 worth of packs. The minimum cost would be roughly $185 at 27 per pack. Pretty much best to spam $180 worth of packs, then start opening things one by one.

~Arcrueid

xxqueenofshebaxx

Can you convert the feathers to Source of Force? And if so, How? Thanks for your help!!!

SerenityMare - Dreamweaver

Another necro. O.o

Also, your question has been answered in this thread right in the first post if you have read the thread.

You can convert only in chuncks of 100. So you need 100 feathers to convert to Sourcesof Force. And vise versa.

Mayfly - Dreamweaver

You can convert feathers to SoF and vice versa 100 at a time at the pet manager.

XMomokox - Dreamweaver

xxqueenofshebaxx wrote: »

Can you convert the feathers to Source of Force? And if so, How? Thanks for your help!!!

In PW-MY i rememeber i was looking at the the homesteed guy in vanished (u can by a horse from him) and i saw excange feathers for SoF and SoF for feathers
not sure if its in pwi b:surrender

Lythianaa - Dreamweaver

XMomokox - Dreamweaver wrote: »

In PW-MY i rememeber i was looking at the the homesteed guy in vanished (u can by a horse from him) and i saw excange feathers for SoF and SoF for feathers
not sure if its in pwi b:surrender

Yea you can exchange at the Pet Manager between SoF and feathers.

Another necro btw.