Loot Table Wiki Explanations
 

Can someone explain the multiplier & percentages and how they came about?

Trakanon Example:

http://i.imgur.com/DOzHIOW.jpg

Some mobs have multiple loot tables each of which has a % chance to be a certain item.

In the instance you posted above.

Table [1] will have 2x items drop from it 100% of the time, any individual item having a 6% chance to be that particular item in that drop slot.
Table [3] will have 2-4 teeth with 100% chance of teeth of being on the corpse.
Undead Dragongut Strings is probably Table [2] with a 20-25% chance of being on the corpse.

Just a note that while all the drop table details (in light gray) may occasionally be right, they are from the eqemu db and so likely have changed on p99, and are more of a hint.

Only recently Estu has added some actual p99 data to a small number of mobs, e.g. Burynai Excavator, based on log statistics. I'd like to extend this and get more people involved, so we can get more accurate drops on the wiki, but I'm not sure how to go about it. Something like the Magelo "Sync" program would be awesome, but I don't have the inclination to make something like that from scratch, besides it may be frowned upon by the admins.

FYI for anyone interested, here is what I've been doing. I'm solo leveling an iksar monk right now and logging everything he does (you can set the game to automatically generate logs for all your characters; I set this up about a year ago). Whenever I kill something I loot its corpse. When the loot window comes up I press the ' button to start a /say command and I click the "link loot" button in the loot window, even if it's empty. Then I use a simple perl script I wrote to read through my entire log and count up the loot, looking for lines like this (they don't have to appear one right after the other; there may be other lines in between):

You have slain an XXXXX!
You have looted X platinum, X gold, X silver, and X copper from the corpse. (note that not necessary all of these are here, or that indeed the line shows up at all, since the monster may drop no coin)
You say, 'XXXXXXXX'.

The first line tells the parser that it's time to start looking for a certain monster's loot data. The second line is analyzed to sum up the total amount of money the monster dropped and add it to a total for that kind of monster. The third line is analyzed to count up the items looted and add them to totals for that kind of monster. Once the script is done looking through the entire log, it generates percentages for each piece of loot dropped by each monster, as well as average coin dropped. I then throw these into the wiki.

Two important notes about this process:

(1) It's somewhat important that you actually link the original loot table in /say or wherever: looting every item yourself (and then destroying things you don't need afterwards) would usually work for the logs (if you wrote a script accordingly), but if you found lore items that you already had in the bank, you'd be shit out of luck.

(2) You need a LOT of kills to get statistically useful data about the monsters. I like to put the percentage drop rates to the nearest tenth of a percent. This means I really ought to be looking at something like 1,000 kills for each monster, but this is obviously a lot to ask for. My guideline for myself is that I aim to get 100 kills for each monster, but if I get 50 at the bare minimum and don't see myself killing it again for a while, I'll put up the data. Whenever I put up data I collected like this, I write down in the notes about the wiki edit the number of kills I used.

My plan is that once this monk is a reasonably high level, I'm going to run around and collect data on every low-level monster that I can (relatively) quickly and easily kill 100 of, since this will be a lot faster than dealing with monsters that still give me EXP.

If anyone is interested, the script is here: http://pastebin.com/3zcLR4T6 (Ravhin - this is an updated version of the one I sent you earlier.)

If anyone wants to join me in collecting data and updating the wiki with it, that would be cool. If you're going to update something that I've already posted data for on the wiki, contact me and we can consolidate our data.