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Cosmic Damage Resistance and Resistance Debuffs SOLVED!
monsterdaddy
Posts: 795 Arc User
Hi Folks, I've been doing a lot of testing on PTS with my Hellion, my dodge tank on Teleiosaurus. Lots of mysteries have been unraveled and I wanted to share this with our community. Damage Resistance and Resistance Debuffs are NOT we had commonly believed.
Penetration (PEN)
First, Cosmic damage resistance is generally 52% (51.76% to be exact). I'm going to simplify and just call this ARMOR. 52% ARMOR follows the same old CO formula of 1/(1+Armor%)-1 = amount of your damage that is debuffed. At 52% that is -34.1% so you would see this message like this:
Your Thundering Kicks deals 659 (1000) Crushing Damage to Teleiosaurus.
So 659/1000 - 1 = -34.1%, this is how you can easily check how much armor your target has, and how much damage you are losing.
How do you reduce ARMOR? I'm going to call this penetration ("PEN"). Right now I have found only three sources of PEN:
Detect Vulnerability (INT spec tree, variable %)
Depleted Uranium Core (15%)
Penetrating Strikes (Brawler spec tree, 10%)
Of these three, only Penetrating Strikes can be shared in a raid, the other two are personal. It's so personal that DoT's and multi hit powers like Bullet Ballet DO NOT GET THIS PEN (besides the first tick). For Cosmics, this is a huge loss of damage.
P.S. Any PEN exceeding the target's ARMOR has no effect. Cosmics do vary in ARMOR from 20% to some huge 700%?!
Bonus Damage Units (BDU)
Second, I realized resistance debuffs are NOT DEBUFFS and don't affect resistance AT ALL. I believe it used to but then CO found it was doing too much damage and changed it to the current system. Back then I don't think we knew what they did but after testing I know the answer.
All resistance debuffs like Demolish, Shredded, etc. do not affect resistance but instead are simply bonus damage on a damage layer on top of additive and multiplicative damage buff and above offense damage buffs too. I'm going to call them Bonus Damage Units or BDU's because this CO system is very strange and I will explain why later. To determine your bonus damage it's simply adding up all your BDU's and then CO does their magical Cryptic math to apply diminishing returns to it like they do to all damage layers. To make this even stranger, Cosmics have a much high diminishing return curve than normal targets.
So let's talk BDU's first:
15% BDU's - No Quarter, Armor Piercing, Burn Through (personal only)
18% BDU's - Demolish, Frail Armor, Hard Frost, Shredded
21.6% BDU's - Hexed, Superconductor, Devoid, Disintegrate, Sonic???
2% BDU's - Pestilence, Stagger (per stack), Debilitating Challenge, Rend (per spec point)
2.4% BDU's - Expose Weakness (per stack) (personal only)
5% BDU's - Wither (per spec point)
8% BDU's - Engulfing Flames (per stack)
9.6% BDU's - Stressed (per stack)
20% BDU's - Overpower
Pretty weird right? Anyways, it is what it is and to see how much bonus damage you get you simply tally up all the BDU's and apply a formula that I determined matches my testing as follows:
Under 33 BDU's: BDU%/(1.26+2.7xBDU%)-1
Over 32 BDU's: BDU%/(1.17+2.96xBDU%)-1
Should give you +/- 0.2% of actual value.
PEN and BDU's Together
So how do you put this information together. Let's say you are not INT primary but you do have a DUC and in a Cosmic Raid it is likely someone is applying Penetrating Strikes to the Cosmic. So total PEN is 25%. That mean the Cosmic has net 27% ARMOR to your attacks so per the formula: 1/(1.27)-1 = -21.1%, each of your attacks will lose 21.1% of your damage. If you have zero personal or shared BDU's you could get a message like this:
Your Thundering Kicks deals 789 (1000) Crushing Damage to Teleiosaurus.
Let's say you applied Demolish to the Cosmic and you have 5 stacks of Expose Weakness. And other players have applied 2 stacks of Stagger, Debilitating Challenge (2/2), Rend (2/2), and Wither (2/2) plus No Quarter, Armor Piercing, and Burn Through. First, No Quarter, Armor Piercing, and Burn Through won't help you as they are personal to the player that applied it. But the rest add up to 52 BDU's. Per my formula, that would give you bonus damage of 19.2% (actual test was 19.1%, close enough). So now your combat message would be:
Your Thundering Kicks deals 940 (1000) Crushing Damage to Teleiosaurus.
So a big takeaway here is to realize more PEN = more DPS. Getting to 52% PEN would be ideal.
P.S. Cosmic bonus damage was 19.2% in the above example, 52 BDU on a regular target is 33.5%, so quite a huge difference.
Raid Strategies
Just like we love AoPM and other Auras during raids, just one or two players consistently applying Penetrating Strikes increases the damage for the ENTIRE raid group. Same for BDU's, it helps if just one player consistently applies the rarer BDU's like Debilitating Challenge, Rend, and Wither but due to diminishing returns it's a lesser effect though it could be helpful for Teleiosaurus DPS checks.
Build Strategies
Obviously if PEN is the biggest determinant of higher DPS, then INT primary is good choice despite the recent nerfing of Detect Vulnerability. In fact, Preparation makes INT a decent choice for high DPS tanks.
There are two strategies you could take for a DPS build:
1) Stack INT to get 42% Detect Vulnerability and with Penetrating Strikes you get to 52% and zero out the Cosmic ARMOR. This build favors Forms like for Melee: Particle Accelerator, for Ranged: Technology, Spellcaster, Concentration, Aspect of the Infernal. Energy unlocks like Molecular Self Assembly and Conjuring would be favored too.
2) Bring INT to ~220 and use a DUC and with Penetrating Strikes and AoPM (+100 stats) you can get 27% from Detect Vulnerability and again you zero out the Cosmic ARMOR. The magic number from testing is INT of 319, that is the value where you zero out Cosmic ARMOR in testing. Not an easy route since it requires a DUC but it allows you to do a tank build and use Forms that are not based on INT like Form of the Tempest. Plus with INT spec Expertise, you can get a significant buff to critical % and HP for tanks. This is quite a challenging and situational build but with a lot of benefits.
If you choose another Primary Superstat there are interesting nuances to consider. For one DEX is actually UNFAVORED now because one of it's best DPS benefits; Expose Weakness, despite adding 12 BDU's total, loses a lot of it's benefits due to Cosmic BDU diminishing returns. With a lot of BDU's in a raid, Expose Weakness might add just 1-2% extra damage. So the extra Severity from STR or EGO Primary would outdamage a DEX Primary build in Cosmic raids.
Test Methodology
Thanks to my character Hellion for being beaten up by Teleiosaurus for days to provide test data. Lots of retconning, fighting the Dino and then checking the data and making calculations and theories. I actually had a whole table of values for 0%, 5% , 10% and 20% PH dummy data before I realized ARMOR and damage bonus were separate calculations.
And you can easily test my numbers too from pulling your combat logs. In DRA raids (from Anniversary) I seemed to get a consistent 21% damage buff on my 100% PEN toons which seems to match the upper end of the bonus damage curves.
Thanks everyone, please feel free to give feedback and your testing results and I will update if we get new information.
Penetration (PEN)
First, Cosmic damage resistance is generally 52% (51.76% to be exact). I'm going to simplify and just call this ARMOR. 52% ARMOR follows the same old CO formula of 1/(1+Armor%)-1 = amount of your damage that is debuffed. At 52% that is -34.1% so you would see this message like this:
Your Thundering Kicks deals 659 (1000) Crushing Damage to Teleiosaurus.
So 659/1000 - 1 = -34.1%, this is how you can easily check how much armor your target has, and how much damage you are losing.
How do you reduce ARMOR? I'm going to call this penetration ("PEN"). Right now I have found only three sources of PEN:
Detect Vulnerability (INT spec tree, variable %)
Depleted Uranium Core (15%)
Penetrating Strikes (Brawler spec tree, 10%)
Of these three, only Penetrating Strikes can be shared in a raid, the other two are personal. It's so personal that DoT's and multi hit powers like Bullet Ballet DO NOT GET THIS PEN (besides the first tick). For Cosmics, this is a huge loss of damage.
P.S. Any PEN exceeding the target's ARMOR has no effect. Cosmics do vary in ARMOR from 20% to some huge 700%?!
Bonus Damage Units (BDU)
Second, I realized resistance debuffs are NOT DEBUFFS and don't affect resistance AT ALL. I believe it used to but then CO found it was doing too much damage and changed it to the current system. Back then I don't think we knew what they did but after testing I know the answer.
All resistance debuffs like Demolish, Shredded, etc. do not affect resistance but instead are simply bonus damage on a damage layer on top of additive and multiplicative damage buff and above offense damage buffs too. I'm going to call them Bonus Damage Units or BDU's because this CO system is very strange and I will explain why later. To determine your bonus damage it's simply adding up all your BDU's and then CO does their magical Cryptic math to apply diminishing returns to it like they do to all damage layers. To make this even stranger, Cosmics have a much high diminishing return curve than normal targets.
So let's talk BDU's first:
15% BDU's - No Quarter, Armor Piercing, Burn Through (personal only)
18% BDU's - Demolish, Frail Armor, Hard Frost, Shredded
21.6% BDU's - Hexed, Superconductor, Devoid, Disintegrate, Sonic???
2% BDU's - Pestilence, Stagger (per stack), Debilitating Challenge, Rend (per spec point)
2.4% BDU's - Expose Weakness (per stack) (personal only)
5% BDU's - Wither (per spec point)
8% BDU's - Engulfing Flames (per stack)
9.6% BDU's - Stressed (per stack)
20% BDU's - Overpower
Pretty weird right? Anyways, it is what it is and to see how much bonus damage you get you simply tally up all the BDU's and apply a formula that I determined matches my testing as follows:
Under 33 BDU's: BDU%/(1.26+2.7xBDU%)-1
Over 32 BDU's: BDU%/(1.17+2.96xBDU%)-1
Should give you +/- 0.2% of actual value.
PEN and BDU's Together
So how do you put this information together. Let's say you are not INT primary but you do have a DUC and in a Cosmic Raid it is likely someone is applying Penetrating Strikes to the Cosmic. So total PEN is 25%. That mean the Cosmic has net 27% ARMOR to your attacks so per the formula: 1/(1.27)-1 = -21.1%, each of your attacks will lose 21.1% of your damage. If you have zero personal or shared BDU's you could get a message like this:
Your Thundering Kicks deals 789 (1000) Crushing Damage to Teleiosaurus.
Let's say you applied Demolish to the Cosmic and you have 5 stacks of Expose Weakness. And other players have applied 2 stacks of Stagger, Debilitating Challenge (2/2), Rend (2/2), and Wither (2/2) plus No Quarter, Armor Piercing, and Burn Through. First, No Quarter, Armor Piercing, and Burn Through won't help you as they are personal to the player that applied it. But the rest add up to 52 BDU's. Per my formula, that would give you bonus damage of 19.2% (actual test was 19.1%, close enough). So now your combat message would be:
Your Thundering Kicks deals 940 (1000) Crushing Damage to Teleiosaurus.
So a big takeaway here is to realize more PEN = more DPS. Getting to 52% PEN would be ideal.
P.S. Cosmic bonus damage was 19.2% in the above example, 52 BDU on a regular target is 33.5%, so quite a huge difference.
Raid Strategies
Just like we love AoPM and other Auras during raids, just one or two players consistently applying Penetrating Strikes increases the damage for the ENTIRE raid group. Same for BDU's, it helps if just one player consistently applies the rarer BDU's like Debilitating Challenge, Rend, and Wither but due to diminishing returns it's a lesser effect though it could be helpful for Teleiosaurus DPS checks.
Build Strategies
Obviously if PEN is the biggest determinant of higher DPS, then INT primary is good choice despite the recent nerfing of Detect Vulnerability. In fact, Preparation makes INT a decent choice for high DPS tanks.
There are two strategies you could take for a DPS build:
1) Stack INT to get 42% Detect Vulnerability and with Penetrating Strikes you get to 52% and zero out the Cosmic ARMOR. This build favors Forms like for Melee: Particle Accelerator, for Ranged: Technology, Spellcaster, Concentration, Aspect of the Infernal. Energy unlocks like Molecular Self Assembly and Conjuring would be favored too.
2) Bring INT to ~220 and use a DUC and with Penetrating Strikes and AoPM (+100 stats) you can get 27% from Detect Vulnerability and again you zero out the Cosmic ARMOR. The magic number from testing is INT of 319, that is the value where you zero out Cosmic ARMOR in testing. Not an easy route since it requires a DUC but it allows you to do a tank build and use Forms that are not based on INT like Form of the Tempest. Plus with INT spec Expertise, you can get a significant buff to critical % and HP for tanks. This is quite a challenging and situational build but with a lot of benefits.
If you choose another Primary Superstat there are interesting nuances to consider. For one DEX is actually UNFAVORED now because one of it's best DPS benefits; Expose Weakness, despite adding 12 BDU's total, loses a lot of it's benefits due to Cosmic BDU diminishing returns. With a lot of BDU's in a raid, Expose Weakness might add just 1-2% extra damage. So the extra Severity from STR or EGO Primary would outdamage a DEX Primary build in Cosmic raids.
Test Methodology
Thanks to my character Hellion for being beaten up by Teleiosaurus for days to provide test data. Lots of retconning, fighting the Dino and then checking the data and making calculations and theories. I actually had a whole table of values for 0%, 5% , 10% and 20% PH dummy data before I realized ARMOR and damage bonus were separate calculations.
And you can easily test my numbers too from pulling your combat logs. In DRA raids (from Anniversary) I seemed to get a consistent 21% damage buff on my 100% PEN toons which seems to match the upper end of the bonus damage curves.
Thanks everyone, please feel free to give feedback and your testing results and I will update if we get new information.
Post edited by monsterdaddy on
0
Comments
Anyways, thanks for doing all the tests. I'm unsure if everything is accurate (esp when trying to work around Cryptic math), but there's some nice info here.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!