Lockpick

Lock picks were released with the addition of hard mode. In hard mode all chests are Locked Chests and require lock picks instead of keys. Lock picks have a base 10% chance of surviving the opening of a Chest. This percentage increases based on the character's ranks in the Lucky and Treasure Hunter titles.

Using a lock pick to open a high-end chest adds 1 point toward the Treasure Hunter title. If you successfully retain a lock pick after use, you gain 250 points towards the Lucky title. If it breaks, you gain 25 points towards the Unlucky title.

Lock picks also work on all normal mode chests. If you try to open a normal mode chest with both the proper key and a lockpick in your inventory, the game will ask you which item is to be used.

Availability
Lock picks are available from merchants for 1,500g (1,200 from a Discount Merchant)

(As Hard Mode is impossible in Pre-Searing, Lockpicks are not sold by Pre-Searing Merchants)

They are also a random drop in hard mode areas.

Lockpick survival chance at level 20



 * The percent chance of a lock pick not breaking after use in hard mode is:
 * (Character level / 2) + (3 * Treasure Hunter ranks) + (2 * Lucky ranks)


 * For a player that has reached level 20, lockpicks survive 10%...43% of openings.

Economic value of using a lockpick on Normal Mode chests
The second column indicates the chance of retaining a lockpick that is needed in order to be indifferent to using a regular key or a lockpick. The third column is the inherent bonus in low end chests. The fourth column is the important one. Having a higher chance of retaining the lockpick than indicated in the fourth column means you should use a lockpick. Having a lower chance than indicated in the fourth column means you should use a regular key. 1 This is the bonus given to your chance of retaining the lock pick when using on a particular tier of normal mode chests. 2 There is an approximately 10% decrease in this retention break even point if one is going for Lucky/Unlucky titles. See lockpick lucky contribution note below.
 * the percent of bonus needed from titles can be found by:
 * 1 - (Price of Key / Price of Lockpick) - Inherent Survival Chance Bonus


 * Level 20 characters have a base chance of 10% even before titles are factored in, and thus using a lockpick is always a better deal than using a 1250 key.
 * If you purchase your lockpicks from a Discount Merchant, the base price of lockpicks goes down to 1200g per key, resulting in a substantial lowering of survival chance needed to break even. Discounted lockpicks will have a better value than discounted keys only if the regular priced lockpick had a better value than the regular priced key.
 * See also Luck titles guide for a detailed cost/benefit analysis.


 * Note that using lockpicks also contributes to Lucky and Unlucky title, so there is an added incentive to using them over keys which give slightly better value per use. The monetary value of this Lucky/Unlucky title contribution has not been factored into the above table. The value of a lockpick with lucky+unlucky points obtained from it added in is approximately 305.6gold's worth of playing 9 Rings.
 * If one is going for both lucky and unlucky titles in addition to wanting to know the least expensive way of opening treasure chests (and gaining Treasure Hunter points), the use of a lockpick would be advisable (take into account the above table, find the appropriate break even point and take into account an additional 300gold). For example, with a 26% retention rate it would be beneficial to use lockpicks for 600gold and 450gold key chests as well. Thinking of it another way, the lucky+unlucky feature of lockpicks reduces the retention % breakeven point by 8-11% (10% for most of the chest key categories), so you would need a 15% (25-10%) native retention rate or higher in order for a lockpick to be more beneficial than a key for a 750gold key.

Similar Items

 * Keys