How much should a Random-5 Mage cost?

[Scott Hebert]

Believe me, it's lower than you think.

Short answer: ~160g.

How did I come up with such an answer? Well, I took the modding guidelines from Illwinter's site, and figured out the probability of each type of mage you can get out of a random-5 mage. I then multiplied the cost of such a mage by the probability of it appearing. I then summed them together, and that should be the cost of the mage.

Assumptions made for calculating price:

For initial path above 3, I simply extrapolated the cost of a 4 path by adding 60 (the increment) to the 3 path, and I added 60 again for the cost of a mage with 5 in a path.

For additional paths over 3, I used the same path costs as the third path.

If either of these assumptions are incorrect, better data would be appreciated. The way I have calculated them, it would be easy to switch the costs of the different mage builds to get a different answer.

Other interesting data from this experiment:

Probability of getting a 5-random mage with at least a 3 in any one path: 11.99%.
Probability of not getting a 3 in any one path: 88.0%
Probability of not getting at least a 2 in any one path (all ones): 20.5%

(Note: This also assumes that the mage has 'typical' (i.e., bad) stats.)

The distribution looks like Chi-square, but I don't retain the statistical knowledge to make use of this. I took a rather 'brute force' approach to calculating the probabilities.

I'm now going to go through each mage in the game, and calculate their costs. Any discrepancies (positive or negative) will be reported. Further comments will NOT be made. That is, I am not going to tell the designers of the game that this needs to change, or that needs to change. I am simply going to observe the existence of discrepancies (as the designers have identified mage-cost mechanics).

I hope to have this done sometime before the weekend is over.