So survival trial are fun for another reason -- an opportunity for a lot of testing!
It looks like they've just imported the regular battle architecture but limited you to 3 cards, which creates a great "experiment" and is very instructive. Let's see what we can glean:
- Center cards (i.e. the middle one in expert) still get doubled chances at activation
- Because you have a limit of 3 procs per battle, in expert mode, you do not have an chance for "stealing" a proc -- i.e. a process whereby a 4th (or 5th) card does not get a chance to proc because the limit of three has already been reached. [Suppressed might be a better term for this, but that's also the term used here for using a card that can't proc because of alignment issues, see: http://marvel-war-of-heroes.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Harryc1209 ]
- The implication of the above is that you can track the observed activations of wing (non-center) abilities in these battles and they should match the actual PROC rate (and the center activation be exactly double those) -- which I have!
So, in other words, if you have a card that has a 50% PROC rate, it'll go off 100% in center and in survival 50% in wings, while in regular 5 card battle (where you have twice as many wings) because of stealing/suppressing PROCs the APPARENT or observed rate of activation will only be 41% (actually 40.625% but, hey, close enough).
NOW, for the point of this post. Does that mean you want to run a deck of only three cards in regular battle (to improve the proc-ing of the wings)???
HECK NO!
Remember, last blog post. The proc rates aren't changing, only their opportunity to express after a 3-proc (i.e. those times of a possible 4th or 5th proc being suppressed).
Let me put it another way:
Back to our hypothetical 50% proc rate deck, regular battle:
- with 3 cards:
- Center: 100%
- Wings: 50%
- 3 Proc Chance: 25%
- with 5 cards:
- Center: 100%
- Wings: 41%
- 3 Proc Chance: 69%
(If that hurts your brain think of it this way -- after the center, the first deck, with two cards left, has two 50% chances at a proc and has to get them BOTH to get three procs, the second deck has 4 cards left, or 4 41% chances at a proc and only has to get TWO of the FOUR to proc for the three procs :)
Now the order of checking the two or four wings is random (also confirmed in survival trials where I had wings proc both ways) so adding in a non-proc potential card (e.g. a RA Hawkeye against a Bruiser deck) is (proc-wise) the same as having one less card--suppression but not stealing...