I’ve seen a few topics about farming bosses for legendaries (and lots of disbelief they actually drop at all), so I did a bit of digging and put together another visual guide to aid you Legendary Hunters plus a bit more information about how boss drops seem to work.
Important Note: As I’ve said before, the information I have data mined may not take into account changes applied through updates since I can’t seem to look at some of the new data files in the PC version of the game. But this info should still clear up a few misconceptions about how boss drops work.
First up, if you have done a raid in Destiny, you will know there are seperate loot pools for both Normal and Hard mode. The same thing applies to Battleborn bosses and mini bosses. Bosses will have 2 possible drops for Normal and 2 for Advanced, while mini bosses will only have 1 possible drop for each difficulty setting. However if playing on Advanced, you will have a chance of getting any legendary from both modes.
Hardcore mode plays no part in deciding which loot pool to use when rolling for a boss drop. To the best of my understanding, Hardcore mode only affects the rate in which in-game collectibles (health, credits, shards, extra lives) drop at, because you know, you are playing hardcore
There could be a scale multiplier that adjusts the drop rate in there, but I couldn’t see it, so take that as you will.
Unlike Destiny raids though, it doesn’t look like you get a separate chance for both Normal and Advanced drops if you kill a boss while in Advanced mode. Again, this is an assumption purely based on the lack of information I could find regarding drop formulas in the data. Loot Packs were a lot easier to determine this kind of thing. If someone can confirm getting 2 legendary drops at once from a single boss in Advanced let me know! It has been confirmed on multiple occasions that bosses can drop more than one Legendary at a time, however it often seems to be in the form of 2 of the same item and possibility limited to specific bosses such as Geoff from The Algorithm.
As for drop rates, all I could find were the base values. Regardless of mode, the base drop rate is the same for Normal and Advanced legendaries, however I believe you will have an increased chance of getting a legendary in Advanced because there is a bigger loot pool.
I’m not 100% certain these drop rate assumptions still stack up in the current sandbox. Several players have demonstrated that there clearly could be some bias towards specific legendaries, but the fact still remains you would have a higher chance of getting any Legendary on Advanced because you benefit from the bigger loot pool.
Example - Killing a major boss
Normal: Legendary #1 or Legendary #2 or Extra Credits or No Drop
Advanced: Legendary #1 or Legendary #2 or Legendary #3 (Advanced Drop) or Legendary #4 (Advanced Drop) or Extra Credits or No Drop
Finally here’s the infographic for all boss drops ordered by mission and the order that you encounter them within the mission. Question, do mini bosses you face during Rendain’s fight drop their respective legendaries? If so I’ll add them to the list. I had to manually link up boss loot pools to enemy AI classes in the data (and track down kill screen icons for them, some of which I am still missing) so I’m not sure if the re-match bosses can drop their respective loot The mini bosses you fight in the Heliophage will not drop anything from their respective loot pools.
Legendary Boss Drops now has its own Rewards Page.
Here’s a list of gear cards with their calculated max stats. However as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, some of these stats are being calculated wrong and I haven’t got round to fixing them! So please don’t treat this as a definitive reference until I can correctly output all stat values.
That image was kinda getting out of date, so rather than having to keep on updating it, everyone should just use the filtered list that is now available through my Gear Search app. I’ve also added a bunch of things to help make it smoother for those of you farming Legendaries
Below is the original “Legendary Boss Drops” infographic.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9554132/battleborn_boss_drops.jpg