Help with damage mitigation

azrenegade

It seems GWF's can reduce target damage mitigation in several ways. Stacking armor penetration is one. I believe various feats also have a similar effect.

Disciple of war increases armor pen. Staying power allows weapon master strike to reduce the mitigation against the encounter powers. Student of the sword allows crits to lower target defense.

So My question becomes, with high armor penetration and these feats, is it possible, at times, to reduce target damage reduction below zero, or is there a hard line there where the excess damage reduction is wasted?

cheapjing

Arm pen will not reduce mitigation to below zero, however all other powers will reduce the mitigation to below zero. Dungeon boss has 24% damage resistant, which requires about 2200 arm pen to reduce this resistant to zero, however as CON now gives reduce damage resistant in an addictive way, a GWF with 16 CON will hit a hard cap for arm pen at about 1700.

azrenegade

cheapjing wrote: »

Arm pen will not reduce mitigation to below zero, however all other powers will reduce the mitigation to below zero. Dungeon boss has 24% damage resistant, which requires about 2200 arm pen to reduce this resistant to zero, however as CON now gives reduce damage resistant in an addictive way, a GWF with 16 CON will hit a hard cap for arm pen at about 1700.

What I really want to know is, am I wasting my points in feats if I hard cap in armor pen, and those other feats drive my target's damage reduction below zero, and yet I get no further benefit from it?

belladan

Depends. I really should copy the link to all the data parameters.

Everybody loves to state everything wrong. There are something like 3 forms of damage relationships for which certain mitigation affects actually calculate from. For Armor penetration, you are modifying not your damage, but the amount resisted. Throwing out the random damage values, we'll claim that every hit is 10k damage as a max threshold per swing.

You get to a boss, and without armor penetration, that threshold is 2400 less damage that you will do per swing, giving you a max of 7600. Based on the text given for our feat, our encounter bonus will be derived from the 7600 damage in this case, which gives you a max threshold of 8360 damage.

Given a 12% improvement on armor pen, instead of 24%, your threshold is now 8800. Add that 10% encounter, and you are now up to 9680.

Given 24% improvement on armor pen, you are back up to 10,000. Add your encounter bonus, and you are running 11k damage.

So, this means that GWF's can vary from 7600-11000 damage for the same ability. 1 is armor pen, which is 7600-10000, the other is armor pen with encounter bonus, which is 8360-11000. When scaled correctly, Armor pen for GWF's is still really, really important, it however has a lower % of the pie as compared to some other classes. (Ie. Weighting scores.)

And yes, I feel this is reasonably accurate as I have both a destroyer and a sentinel human with only 1% str difference, to base the calculations from. (that, and taking out the crit bonus variance between the two.)

azrenegade

Look I understand how the percentages work.

If My swing does 10k damage and target mitigation has a reduction of 24%, I need 24% armor penetration to get my full damage of 10k from the swing.

And now say I hit the target with weapon master strike and I have 5/5 staying power feat. If I am already negating all his mitigation with armor pen stacking, will my encounter hit for 10% more, or is my damage capped by driving his mitigation to zero through armor pen stacking? Is this feat now worthless because his mitigation is already effectively zero?

The way I see it, either there is a hard cap against driving mitigation below zero or there is not.

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