Failing trivial combines

[mewkus]

It was my understanding that for every 40 points above the trivial level your raw (unmodified) skill is that there's a reduction of 1% to the minimum failure rate, such that if the combine is more than 200 points below your raw skill it becomes a no-fail combine.

My baking skill (unmodified) is 304 and I was making Cracked Reruga Meat, which has a trivial of 102. Despite my skill being 202 points over the trivial, I managed to fail one of my attempts.

Is my understanding of the trivial combine rule not correct? Have they changed since increasing the skill caps to 350? Is this a bug?

[Aanuvane]

I don't think I've ever heard that it's completely trivial and you'd never fail. But I just might not be aware. I recollect failing on things that are more than 200 points under my current unmodified skill, but I don't recall the specific item (it was something JC).

[Xerius]

I tried to do a quick search of the forums for what would be a very old post by this point with nothing to show for it, but by what I recall from a number of people doing large (several thousand) combine runs, it was concluded that without Mastery AA's, every tradeskill tested had a five percent minimum failure rate. Mastery would cut that down to roughly three percent, but there would still be a few failures in larger runs. I can work from some personal data this week as well, as I have been working on Archery on one of my alts, so with his 287 Fletching skill, I get between one and seven failures on each set of two hundred combines at 56 trivial, with eleven sets of two hundred combines done in the last week.

[mewkus]

I found the post where it was reported. From http://mboards.eqtraders.com/eq/foru...tanker-handout it says (emphasis added),

Next, your maximum chance to succeed is calculated. This acts as the upper cap for the SuccessWithMastery. The cap is 95% plus 1% for every 40 points that your skill is above the trivial. If you are 39 points over the trivial, you get no benefits. If you are 40 points over, the cap becomes 96%. 80 points is 97%, and so on, up to 200 points or more giving a 100% maximum chance to succeed. This only looks at your raw skill, not your skill as modified by a geerlok or other item. This is your Max Cap. Some recipes can override this cap with a minimum chance to fail. It is not known whether any recipes currently use this.

Kyros was the person who programmed the success/skillup calculators on this site and if you plug sample numbers in (e.g. 200 points over trivial with no mastery), you'll see that it matches what Tanker (SOE dev at the time) had told him.