Item Creation in D1

[Nystul]

seems a pretty good calculation, except i believe the guide states that for a magical item from a monster to be unique is 16% and for a magical item from a chest to be unique is 2%, which would actually lower the chance of finding the example on a monster.
As for the mlvl i considered an average mlvl for a certain dlvl, i dont know if 26 would come out of it, but from the tables in chapter 5, assuming that number of monster is divided evenly among the 185, you can calculate an average from the appearance percentages per dlvl table.
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I think 16% chance that an eligible magic item is unique is for unique (aka boss) monsters only. It's 2% for everything else. It always takes me a bit by surprise when something other than a boss drops a unique item, because it doesn't happen all that often.

My point with mlvl is that "average mlvl" is pretty useless. In this particular example it probably gives a rough approximation of the truth, but in some cases it would be very deceiving. Each monster type has it's own level, and to be accurate you have to consider them individually instead of as an average. The occurance percentages that Jarulf has calculated for us give us a better idea. Those percentages (assuming Jarulf calculated them correctly, anyway ;) ) are perfect to use for determining the chance of running into a certain boss. The problem with using those percentages in the case of the base monsters is that the number of monster types on a level is not always the same. For example, lava maw are more likely to show up than balrogs, but when lava maw do show up, they often are accompanied by 2 other monster types. When balrogs show up, it will just be one other monster type. So I would expect the actual ratio of lava maw to balrogs to be smaller than the ratio of levels with lava maw to levels with balrogs, if that makes any sense.

Someone who paid attention during statistics class can probably come up with a streamlined formula to determine the average distribution of monsters on each level (that is, not the chance of finding snow witches on level 14, but the average number of snow witches you would find per level if you played level 14 an infinite number of times). Otherwise, the brute force method would be easy with a computer program but not fun at all to do by hand.