I opened 100 orbs on PBE to test the bonus drop rates (gems/hextech skins) for the upcoming VS event
http://i.imgur.com/Iit9Stf.jpg?noredirect
Hello lovely people! When Riot announced the VS event on PBE (http://www.surrenderat20.net/2017/06/61-pbe-update.html) I noticed they did not give us any indication of what our chances of getting tokens, gem, or the hextech skins respectively during bonus drops are. I used my PBE account to buy and open 100 orbs to give myself and you guys an idea before any real money is spent. (tldr at the end)
Disclaimer: this data is from the PBE build so things could possibly change when the event goes live.
Results I used chaos orbs, but I assume order orbs should have the same drop rates. Out of 100 orbs I received:
- 46 token drops (36 of which amounted to 20 tokens, but ranged from 20 to 140 by a factor of 20)
- 2 gem pairs
- 0 hextech skins (chaos has a chance to drop Vayne's skin, order Annie's)
Obviously I do not know Riot's actual function for drop rates, but a sample size of 100 orbs should give us a decent understanding of what they are.
Other things to note
- Orbs will only drop legacy skin shards (skins that are not permanently in the store) which means they will probably be of a lower quality than those of a normal chest, but are guaranteed to be skin shards as opposed to champion shards.
- The order and chaos passes are the same price as a ward skin and they contain ward skins, so if you would buy the ward skin, go ahead and buy the pass. The crafting material is not all that great (1 chest+key, 1 orb, 100 tokens which is not even enough to build a orb (140 tokens)). However, they double the amount of tokens you get during missions (so buy the pass early if you are going to get it) and also unlock the ability to receive at least one gem through a mission.
- The summoner icons that also unlock the borders for the Yasuo and River skins do not need to be equipped for the borders to appear. So no need to worry if you like the borders but not the icons.
Personal thoughts I really like how Riot has not been much of a money grubbing company (no pay-to-win) and how you can just buy what you want (unlike in Overwatch for example), but I'm not really liking the trends I have seen from the Ecommerce team as of late. Dangling gems and hextech skins in front of people and offering a paid rng method to get them, not offering the actual bonus drop chance percentages, timed limited rewards, and even using large values for tokens (100s instead of 10s) to make it seem like you are getting a bang for your buck. These all seem like pretty questionable methods of squeezing money out of people. I know they have to make a profit, but I hate it when psychological trickery is used to do that.
Still, the skins look great and it's really cool how Yasuo and River reference each other in the voice overs.
tldr Experimental orb bonus drop chances: Tokens 46% / Gem Pairs 2% / Hextech Skins <1% Passes are a good deal if you like the ward skins and/or if you want a gem. Get it early if you do. I do not like it when psychological tricks are used to get people to spend money, but the new skins are really cool.
Screenshot of the 100 orbs for proof
