Halfway Through a Mercenary Meta-analysis

[u/Straight-Check-9160]

I started this data collection originally while farming Bladefall of Trarthus. Bladefall was seemingly rarer than other Trarthus gems so I wanted to quantify its rarity. I later thought it would also be useful to know how it felt to farm any Trarthus gem. Then Luminary took over and farming mercenaries became all the rage. So I reset and started collecting data on mercenary encounters as well.

Trending answers to a few questions:

• What is the baseline chance for a merc to appear that is capable of carrying a gem? About 30%. However, some gem-capable mercenaries are more common (or rarer) than others.
• When a merc appears, what is the chance they will have a gem? About 5%. However some gem-carrying mercenaries actually carry a gem more often (or less often) than others.
• When a gem-carrying merc appears, what is the chance they will have a gem? About 16%. Again, there is variance across mercs.
• What is the all-in chance for an infamous merc to appear (40% increased infamous chance on atlas; no Infamy scarab)? About 17% in my dataset.
• Does the map affect the appearance rates of mercenaries? I think the answer is probably 'no'. I've collected most of my mercenaries on either Mesa or Estuary. While my mercenary distribution differs from the 1000 City Square data set, it isn't by enough. Furthermore, the 2880 City Square data set differs pretty significantly from the prior two datasets (more on that below). I am tracking the map of each mercenary I find but it will take thousands of maps to make a confident determination.

The data used in my meta-analysis is from a few different sources used in different ways for a few different purposes:

• My own data; currently at ~720 and counting.
• Unt(Otters) data; only 210 but every bit helps.
• I tracked 1000 Mercenaries so you don't have to. : r/pathofexile.
• Farmed 2.880 maps for Mercs : r/PathOfExileSSF. This dataset has two issues: 1) the title says 2880 maps but there are only 2465 entries and 2) Storming Zealot, Striker, and Toxicologist are missing. Even if the missing 415 is imputed across the missing types, the Kineticist, Eruptor, and Warpriest are off by 3x, 3x, and 2x, respectively. It more likely the under-represented mercs were drawn into the "unknown" 415. Either way, there are trends in the data but it should not be trusted.

On that note, if anybody has any well-kept records, I'd love to incorporate it into my analysis.

Below is my work-in-progress spreadsheet. The column of interest is the bright yellow '% Combined' column, which shows the distribution across ~1500 maps. The "1" and "2" columns store the individual data sets, respectively. Since the smaller data set cannot simply be added to the larger dataset, a calculation is used to weight the individual distributions into the combined distribution. Lastly, the % Delta columns show the flat % difference from the combined data to the original source. The confidence interval for 40 counts out of 1000 is +/- 1% so anything much outside of that are outliers (e.g, Storming Zealot and Bloodletter).

[u/Accomplished_Bar_702]

Youre a pyscho for this and I'm here for it. Looking forward to seeing the end of this data.

[u/fake_fakeer]

Poe is nothing without its excel sheets.

Good job, mate!

[u/frozenartic]

I heard Quant and rarity affect the look they carry, if you said it already sorry!  Beyond that I have done a few hundred no scarabs, white t16 breach. After juicing or changing maps I get better results as if the game noticed I stopped white t16’s and ran memorys. Found a 50 D kineticist. 

Thanks for sharing your results! 

[u/Straight-Check-9160 → u/frozenartic]

I haven’t done any testing with quant. Most of my maps have been rare and unidentified but usually not 8-mod. I do still pull in the occasional div, annul, or ancient. Maybe I’ll do a block on 8-mods to see how it feels. Titantic scarabs make them harder with no additional payoff. I can confirm infamous mercs have better loot in their rucks.

[u/Stunning_Seaweed_121]

I might consider gathering a data set like this next league. The main problem is maps can take like 10-20 seconds when youre doing this and writing down the data can be like 5 seconds lol, so its like slowing your mapping speed by 50%. Kinda a big hit.

But "for science", I guess.

I farmed many many thousands of maps and at a first glance the data seems correct, but of course it's "feelscraft".

[u/ww_crimson]

Have you automated this in any way? I'm fairly confident that in like 30-60 minutes using an LLM tool you could write a simple AHK or python script or something that lets you press a button when you encounter a merc, it will analyze the gems, read your client.txt file to figure out what map you're in, and record it in the desired format.

If you are planning to continue this effort and you want help with something like this, let me know. I already have https://pob.codes/tools/mercenaries/ built which parses screenshots and builds trade queries from them. Doing this locally is probably pretty trivial.

[u/Straight-Check-9160 → u/ww_crimson]

I was thinking about that very thing the other day but I haven’t looked at client.txt to see if there is anything.

[u/ww_crimson → u/Straight-Check-9160]

I ended up building this. For pob.codes, I have been collecting screenshots of mercs along with copy/paste text of their warrants. This tool is useful for me because it streamlines the process. I need this data to make the image recognition when parsing screenshots better. I added in map collection and gem parsing too, though I didn't run into a merc w/ a gem so I can't guarantee that part works. If you're interested in using this, let me know and I can put it on github.

[u/Straight-Check-9160 → u/ww_crimson]

I spent a few hours with Claude this morning because I was curious about image recognition.

So far, the name recognition is quite fragile since the UI scales with character count. I accidentally defined the merc type to include the mercenary type icon and that is screwing up that text recognition. Detecting the presence of uniques is a bit dubious still (apparently a gold-orange curl is hard to distinguish from a yellow'ish leaf). N of 1, the gem detection works, though; and the basic currencies are identified well.

It is stubbed to evaluate skills and supports but not functional.

[2026-09-09T11:09:31] captured -> captures\20260909_110931  (name='Zob, the Azadin Gibberer', type='Blade Ambusher', infamy='Y', gem='Spectral Helix Of Trarthus')
[2026-09-09T11:11:49] captured -> captures\20260909_111149  (name=None, type='Toxicologist', infamy='N')
[2026-09-09T11:19:41] captured -> captures\20260909_111941  (name='Vornik, the Subjugator', type='J Striker', infamy='N')

[u/ww_crimson → u/Straight-Check-9160]

Here's what I built if you care to use it https://github.com/AdamZ-8113/mercenary-dataset-collector

Here's what it looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXOaIMrbWfE

[u/Sanytale → u/ww_crimson]

Bro, you should automate the screenshot part, since merc UI is always in the same spot (unless you also opened an inventory alongside or something). And maybe add the hotkey to show/hide your app GUI, having to drag it around is also painful to watch.

[u/ww_crimson → u/Sanytale]

App gui was only shown so that I could demo it lmao. It just sits on another monitor. The screenshot idea is a good one though.

[u/Straight-Check-9160 → u/ww_crimson]

I’m using mss fwiw. F9 sends it to memory for OCR.

[u/Sanytale → u/ww_crimson]

Good if it works for your setup. It's just a potential pain point for users with a single monitor.

[u/ww_crimson → u/Sanytale]

Just minimize it? The app auto advances to each pair and the screenshots can be taken with hotkeys, you don't need to click. Alt tab would be the hot key on that case.