Solomon's Ring: working as intended?

[Eremoto]

So I've been blazing through Ritual of the Night and I've been grinding Miriam so she becomes even more overpowered and I'm at a point where defense clearly comes second to maxing DPS, crits and damage output in general and I also noticed that maxed (9 and 9 in both category and rank) passive shards (the yellow ones) become permanent passives despite not being selected and of course I had to farm these, specially after getting Solomon's Ring, a ring that's supposed to increase your chances of recieving shards from slain demons.

 

I went farming with the ring on for about 30 minutes but most of the time I got nothing. It got to a point where I thought that maybe there was a mistake in translation or programming that made it so the ring would, in fact, give no shards or give lesser shards (like Focus Energy in Pokémon Gen 1 where it would substract crit chance instead of giving you crit chance), so I did a quick test with and without the ring. In order to make it thorough enough, I killed 200 demons: 100 without the ring and 100 with the ring equipped. 

 

Maybe luck wasn't on my side as without the ring I got 52 shards and with it I could only get 39. Of course this isn't definitive as I have no way of checking the game's inner workings and I'll keep doing tests as I want to farm and play more of the game, but I was curious, has anyone else had the same experience with Solomon's Ring?

 

Also I think it'd be fun if there was an item in Bloodstained that wasn't programmed correctly so it had odd properties that made it behave in unplanned ways. 

[LordBilbanes]

I haven't acquired the ring, so I couldn't comment.  I do know, though that as my luck stat increased, the frequency of item drops went up considerably.  Have you checked your luck stat in relation to what you were doing?  Also, how does the Solomon Ring affect your luck stat?  If it doesn't raise your luck and you equipped it in favor of an accessory that did, removing the latter may have paradoxically negatively affected your ability to collect shards reliably.

[Optinooby]

Yea, as LordbilBanes sais, you want to make sure you have high luck first, and make sure you havent got bonuses cancelling each other out if possible......

 

 

You need to be careful with probability as well because the law of averages is weird. You say you got more without while doing 100 kills, well it could be like that all the same up to 500 kills, but then 500-800 could then give you one on every single kill with the ring, which would then put it above!! 

[Eremoto]

Yeah, I thought the same. Luck DOES in fact affect item and shard drops and as far as I can recall, Solomon's Ring reduces DEF and CON but highly enhances Atk and Luck and perhaps even Intelligence if memory serves right, in my case probably it had to do with my subpar Luck stat, but now I've maxed my Increase Luck shard and shards drop far more frequently with the ring equiped. Without it now I get 1-2 shards out of 5 kills while having it equipped makes it average to 2-4 shards per 5 kills.

 

So yeah, I just had a bad Luck stat but leveling up and increasing luck alongside Solomon's Ring does really increase shard drops, I just assumed it didn't work due to original results with it being disappointing. Glad to see they worked in a way to easily farm shards.