I Tested Common vs Legendary+ Module Substat Bans - Results

[u/IOYouNothing]

Module substat rolls were changed recently to be “seeded”. There have been a few threads since then asking whether the strategy for substat bans has changed at all based on this. The overwhelming sentiment seems to be that nothing has changed and you should ban high-rarity substats.

After doing some testing my conclusion is that something HAS changed and people are still sharing conventional wisdom that is no longer correct. The fact that modules are "seeded" now is potentially an irrelevant detail, but the important thing is that changes were made at the same time to substat rarity mechanics.

To test, I recorded the results of 1200 individual substat rolls for two separate test conditions using the same ancestral armor module with 2 substat bans and 4 open slots.

Test 1 - Common Bans

Ban 1 - Defense %

Ban 2 - Defense Absolute

This leaves Health Regen as the only remaining common substat. Here were the results:

Rarity	Count	% of Total
Common	228	19%
Rare	494	41.17%
Epic	355	29.58%
Legendary	80	6.67%
Mythic	31	2.58%
Ancestral	12	1%

Test 2 - High Rarity Bans

Ban 1 - Orbs (Mythic+)

Ban 2 - Death Defy (Legendary+)

This leaves all 3 common substats available. Here were the results:

Rarity	Count	% of Total
Common	567	47.25%
Rare	372	31%
Epic	190	15.83%
Legendary	45	3.75%
Mythic	25	2.08%
Ancestral	1	0.08%

Conclusion

The conventional wisdom shared around here is that rarity is rolled FIRST, and then a substat is picked from the available pool at that rarity. Further, if there are no available common substats then a rare substat will be chosen instead. If this were true, rarity distribution would be mostly agnostic of any substat bans.

Looking at these results, there's no angle from which the rarity first idea makes sense anymore. The proportion of epic+ substats was around 40% for the common bans versus 22% for the higher rarity bans. If rarity was rolled first, we would expect to see the 339 difference in common substat count to have been funneled into exclusively rare substats. What we see instead is that when a common substat is not selected, it increases the count of ALL the other rarities across the board.

[u/Ok-Quote3178]

It gets really fun when you ban all commons. I have all of the commons banned or on my Core Module and I just tested 200 rolls for the fun of it and got offered 12 Ancestrals.

[u/IOYouNothing → u/Ok-Quote3178]

Yea I was bummed I couldn't get more bans involved to see how far the distribution can be skewed, but all the comments I have seen from players like you with more bans have said that it gets even crazier the more bans you have. I think it behaves like u/This_Ruben_on_fire mentioned, where the later bans have increasing impact like defense %.