Chromatic Orbs Guide

Chromatic Orbs look very simple, but there's a hidden and very important bias to how they roll.

Nothing about the in game description reveals the truth - these orbs are rigged.

Chromatic Orbs are biased based upon the attribute requirements of an item, and this bias gets more severe the later in the game you are.

Player research estimates that the odds of rolling a green socket are proportional to 17 plus the item's Dexterity requirement. Red sockets, 17 plus Strength requirement. Blue, 17 plus Intelligence requirement.

A low level example with weak bias:

Consider the unique item Thousand Ribbons

This has an Intelligence requirement of 17.

If your Thousand Ribbons has 6 sockets on it, the first socket had 17 chances to be red (17 + 0 for the STR req of 0), 17 to be green, and 34 to be blue. This is a 25%/25%/50% split.

On average, you'd expect the bias to leave you with 1.5 red sockets, 1.5 green and 3 blue.

An example with a strong bias:

Repentance is a unique item with a severe drawback, its final STR and INT requirements are 306 (each). DEX requirement is 0.

This means each socket has 323 (306 + 17) chances to be blue, 323 to be red, and only 17 to be green. That's 1 in 39, or 2.56%.

In short - you won't get Repentance to roll quadruple green or even triple green under normal circumstances!

Sometimes this bias works for you. Other times... There's ways around it.

There are ways to bypass this rigged RNG but they all have limits.

For three socket items, you can deterministically create any combination of colors with the crafting bench.

For four socket items, you can do that to get the three hardest colors, then if your fourth color is wrong, reduce the item from 4 sockets to 3 sockets with the crafting bench, then add a 4th socket again. Keep doing this until colors are perfect, then relink the item.

For six socket items, you can use that logic, but it is more expensive.

However, you might also want to compromise on the item base you are using. Perhaps you've decided that a Twilight Regalia is the perfect base for your character, but a Sacred Chainmail wouldn't be much worse. If you want to roll 4 red 1 blue 1 green - the Sacred Chainmail will be much easier to hit that on.

If the item is corrupt (or you are willing to corrupt it), you can use Tainted Chromatic Orbs. Or you can use a very expensive Harvest craft to 'bleach' the color of one random socket to white and hope that this solves your problems.