[Game mechanics] Guide to damage, tenacity, reisistance and debuffs in Neverwinter

theosymphany

Greetings.

There have always been a lot of game mechanic questions and misunderstandings in discussions as we seek to better understand stat/ability effects and optimise our builds. I've compiled much of current knowledge and my understanding into this guide on Neverwinter mechanics with the aim to break down information silos and discuss the concepts in a clearer way than that gleaned from in game tooltips.

I don't have any more access to privilege information than the average player, and I am aware that some of the equations and formulae are at best a good model but in absence of developer information this is as good as we know of how things work.

Kaelac

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Basic Guide to stats and Effects
1.1 Diminishing Returns
1.2 Offensive Stats
1.3 Defensive Stats
1.4 Auxiliary Stats
2. How damage is calculated in Neverwinter
2.1 Base ability damage formula
2.2 Buffing damage
2.3 Combat Advantage (CA) damage
2.4 Crit and deflection mechanics
2.5 Armor Penetration and damage resistance in PvE
3. Debuff mechanics and Interactions
3.1 Booster multipliers
3.2 Defense debuff multipliers in PvE
3.3 How buff and debuff multipliers interact in PvE
3.4 Debuff mechanics for PvP
4. The effects of Tenacity
5. Overall Damage formula

Introduction
A well built character in Neverwinter seeks to maximise outgoing damage and minimise incoming damage in particular scenarios. Different scenarios (eg PvE vs PvP, trash clearing versus boss, AoE vs single target) inevitably calls for different stat distributions, but at the crux they all depend on an understanding of combat damage mechanics.

Since Neverwinter has a large number of stats, players can easily get lost trying to understand, let alone optimising their stats for PvE and PvP. This guide will walk through the mechanics of Neverwinter combat damage calculations, focusing on the following topics:

Relevant stats for offense and defense
How damage is calculated in NW in PvE and PvP
How armor penetration works vs damage resistance
How effects of buff and debuff abilities are factored by the game engine in PvE and PvP
What tenacity does and its effect on resistance.

I am not going to straight up say how much stat you should put here or there, but I want to dissect how damage is calculated and in turn help you realize what stats to focus on. I want to make this guide largely standalone, so apologies to my readers for the slight overlap with my DC guide and Power vs crit guide.

Some of the formulae for this guide have been sourced from the Neverwinter forums and verified for accuracy and relevance. The rest of it comes from hours of personal data gathering, testing, model fitting and analyses together with discussions from fellow players and number crunchers. Thank you to all of you who have contributed to the pool of knowledge we have. If there is anything I have misunderstood or you have any additional data or theories on the concepts presented, your constructive feedback on topics discussed is most appreciated.

I'm happy to keep the relevant discussion here, but as the guide have a large number of images, equations and links, and will be updated as things change the rest of the guide is hosted at
http://laggygamerz.com/forum/index.php?/topic/382-kaelac%E2%80%99s-guide-to-damage-tenacity-reisistance-and-debuffs-in-neverwinter/?p=1649

hudman21

Thank you very much! I will definitely read this.

orodalf

Kaelac, you and all of your guides are amazing.

harrivenger

Hi Kaelac, thanks for all your efforts and your friends efforts. Excellent and superb information, very well written.

classylion

This should be official...

I love it when people actually do real tests and comes back with real numbers, solutions and up to date information. Most of the things are not up to date in neverwinter . But thanks to you I will now be able to better plan my build .

For me personally this is the best guide I have seen in a long time and the best guide of any neverwinter guide. Explains everything to the bone. Thank you!

silence1x

Well done Kaelac! This should at least be stickied. Great info and layman's explanations. For those of us that don't typically study logs, this guide is a wealth of information.

Thanks for all of the hard work that went into this guide.

angrysprite

Great information. May I *strongly* recommend you create a Neverwinter Wiki page with this? Doing so will promote your information from "Fan-Opinion" to "Legitimized Information" because others will be able to contribute and everyone working together to make it eve better and more accurate (where accuracy is surmised because of the lack of official information).

Just a thought.

kolatmaster

This is a thing of beauty, many thanks for all the hours you took to create this! :cool:

cromejohnsen

Does weapon master strike from gwf only buff at will powers?
and is that really about 30%??
thought it would buff encounters as well ...

theosymphany

Yes I doubled checked and the WMS buff is 30% for at wills, stacks additively with others such as Student of the Sword. WMS feated with Staying power will add up to 10% damage to all your encounters. Edited the post to include this info.

gunbahaha

great job thank you friend

fdsakhfduewhfiuf

I'm confused about the crit rating to damage gain graph in figure 6. I cannot reproduce your result.

E.g.increasing the crit stat from 1000 to 1100 will increase the crit chance from 8.09% to 8.78%. Assuming default critical severity of 75% this increases the damage multiplier from 106.07% to 106.58%. That is a relative increase of 0.482%. In your graph the increase is about 0.53%. I don't understand the difference.

To be more precise here's what I'm doing:

1) Crit chance is calculated using 0.288 * crit^1.2 / (10185 + krit^1.2)
2) Damage multiplier is calculated using 1 + severity * chance
3) Relative damage increase is calculated using (afterDamageMultiplier - beforeDamageMultiplier) / beforeDamageMultiplier

theosymphany

Thanks for checking- I used a slightly different method but same principles.

1. Calculate crit chance with similar formula (I have the +0.05 term in there but doesn't make a difference in this case)
2. Calculate crit % difference every 100 points
3. Calculate DPS boost = crit chance difference * crit severity
For example at 1000 crit chance is 8.14 and at 1100 chance is 8.82%. Difference is 8.82-8.14 = 0.68% * 0.75 = 0.51% DPS increase

I did discover that my x axis is shifted by 100 because I started at 100 instead of 0, so the corresponding value should be ~0.51% instead of 0.53 (that's the value at 900 crit) and I'll fix the graphs in the next update.

Results trends are the same between our methods, shown here for 75% severity (yours blue, mine red), but the corresponding cut offs would be of course slightly different. If anything the percentage increase method makes crit even less desirable.



The percentage increase method makes a lot of sense, however I am reluctant to use it as comparison because percent based results will vary depending on base crit chance from feats and ability scores (in our example we are assuming 0% base crit, if you have say 10% base crit those values will decrease a bit). This restricts the general applicability of the result, whereas my method allows the DPS contribution value to be determined from crit strike directly. Let me know if you have further thoughts on that.

chaoscourtesan

Great guide, thank you for your work and for sharing it.

Could you expand on something though? About the blink dog's active bonus..

"In particular the blink dog’s CA damage bonus does not seem to follow the above equations and appears to decrease your overall damage (at green rank, not sure about blue and puple). Again, happy to hear more from others. This is my knowledge gap."

Are you saying that it actually decreases my damage output or do you actually mean that it increases it at a diminished rate?

I mean, should my crit-heavy, CA oriented TR stop running with his blink dog?
I will certainly try with/without and try to see for myself, but I'd love to read what you know or observed about this.

Thanks again.

ryugasirius

Any chance you add a paragraph about how the new damage type (Black Ice) works? Does it simply ignore the "normal" damage resistance and it has its own, or is it more complex?

cromejohnsen

Could you put a table of contents at the beginning of your guides so that i can have a short summary of the topics which are explained in the post. Would look more structured
If you are already working at it or not i would like to know whether you are testing other stats such as control bonus etc. atm .

theosymphany

@chaoscourtesan
From my tests, on HR with aspect of pack with 150 attacks each comparing damage with and without blink dog and with/without CA damage, having the dog (green, have to repeat with blue and purple) in the active slot actually decreased overall damage compared to having no blink dog. I have yet to repeat the test to confirm. However I have spoken to various others who actually tested and mentioned it either had no significant difference, a slight increase, or a dramatic increase. If others have concrete data and parses I'm happy to hear of their experiences.

CA data is hard to get because of the following:
-It's a damage buff, so you can't directly quantify bonuses from brackets or ACT, and requires large amounts of data points for it to be statistically different
-Any bonus from skills/feats/ party members which buffs your damage will immediately invalidate your data. Even if someone runs in and only attack your target dummy for a few rounds can invalidate 5-10 minutes of testing because you don't know which attacks to exclude from logs
-It seems to interact unexpectedly with crit severity which mean you must split crit and not crit damage in calculations
-Any CA bonuses are very slight, especially as they seem to only boost the CA portion of bonus damage, and not your base damage
-CA damage only procs reliably on HRs with Aspect of the Pack, other class only benefit from it occasionally which means you need even more time for testing, likewise with TR stealth.

It's just hard to get any real field tests done I am hesitant to give any definitive advice on whether it's worth it or not without concrete evidence. In my opinion the bonus by itself would be too slight to notice without deliberate parsing.

@ryugasirius: Black Ice damage (Black Ice corruption in logs) bypass current defense resistance however much you have and deal 100% damage to an characters without black ice resistance. If you have black ice resist then
Black ice damage dealt = base damage * (1- black ice resist %)

@cromejohnsen Thanks for the suggestion, I may update it when I have time. Right now I have no plans to check control bonus for PvP because I don't think I can achieve the precision of duration down to tenths of seconds given my high ping. I may look into it for PvE though it may already be fairly well established. Incoming healing is already established. Combat advantage is a mystery due to reasons mentioned above. Action point gain bonus is multiplicative with that from stats/recovery. I will expand and include in the guide

chaoscourtesan

Thank you for the detailed response, Kaelac.

abaddon523

chaoscourtesan wrote: »

Great guide, thank you for your work and for sharing it.

Could you expand on something though? About the blink dog's active bonus..

"In particular the blink dog’s CA damage bonus does not seem to follow the above equations and appears to decrease your overall damage (at green rank, not sure about blue and puple). Again, happy to hear more from others. This is my knowledge gap."

Are you saying that it actually decreases my damage output or do you actually mean that it increases it at a diminished rate?

I mean, should my crit-heavy, CA oriented TR stop running with his blink dog?
I will certainly try with/without and try to see for myself, but I'd love to read what you know or observed about this.

Thanks again.

I ran some tests with the blink dog using a CW. Basically, I would use Nightmare Wizardry as my Combat Advantage trigger. I would throw a spell at a dummy, if Nightmare wizardry triggered then I was guaranteed that my next spell would have Combat Advantage bonus. So, doing lots of tests with and without the blink dog I found that damage increased on non-critical Combat Advantage hits by 1.5%. Damage on critical hits did not change with the blink dog equipped. Statistically, my margin of error would probably be a few percentage points either way (so Theosymphany's results are likely within my margin). But whatever the reality is, I'm highly skeptical that the Blink Dog is worthy of an active companion slot no matter how much Combat Advantage you employ. I dumped mine immediately after testing.

chaoscourtesan

Thank you Abaddon. Considering a 49% crit chance it seems at best that I'm getting minimal benefit. I'm going to find a better pal for that slot. =D

fdsakhfduewhfiuf

theosymphany wrote: »

Thanks for checking- I used a slightly different method but same principles.

Thanks for the explanation. That clears things up. Taking base crit percent into account makes critical strike indeed even less desirable. IMO it needs to be taken into account when trying to find the "optimal" balance between power and crit. For an easy check it is too much of a hassle and in the end may not make that big of a difference. Especially since one cannot arbitrarily shift points between power and crit.

Another thing I noticed is the 80% DR cap you were referring to. You said the DR is capped to 80% before taking resistance ignored into account. I remember a dev's post where a formula was given showing that the 80% cap is applied after RI was subtracted.

Unfortunately I cannot find this post anymore.

theosymphany

Another very good point, I guess I need to add more IF statements to the equation. I'm not sure if I explicitly stated DR is capped to 80% before taking RI to account, rather that all the effects are multiplicative but will try to make it clearer in the guide.

So for calculations of damage, it's already established if attacker RI is > defender DR then RI = DR so it doesn't go negative.

Converse if DR-RI > 80 then DR = 80 due to the cap.

Even then, as DR is a hard cap, whatever the damage calcs pan out post RI, if the total DR ends up being over 80 either from buffs, tenacity etc its still going to be capped at 80% The only thing that can further reduce damage at that point is either dodge/immune/special effects like GF artifact or deflection. Now I'll need to work out how to incorporate that in the formula...hmm

so more like
Effective damage = base damage * buff and debuff effects * (1+ total RI + total DR bonus/debuffs) * (1- TeR)
IF total RI > total DR, total RI = total DR
IF (1+ total RI + total DR bonus/debuffs) * (1- TeR) < 0.2, (1+ total RI + total DR bonus/debuffs) * (1- TeR) = 0.2.
Crits (and TeR crit damage reduction), debuffs and deflect can still apply on top of that multiplier.

ryugasirius

theosymphany wrote: »

@ryugasirius: Black Ice damage (Black Ice corruption in logs) bypass current defense resistance however much you have and deal 100% damage to an characters without black ice resistance. If you have black ice resist then
Black ice damage dealt = base damage * (1- black ice resist %)

So, having any defense in IwD is pointless, unless you are doing PvP, as all mobs do BI damage... is this correct?

fdsakhfduewhfiuf

ryugasirius wrote: »

So, having any defense in IwD is pointless, unless you are doing PvP, as all mobs do BI damage... is this correct?

No. From my experience monsters do black ice damage in addition to "normal" damage. Also it seems not all monsters do black ice damage.

theosymphany

In addition to what's been said, black ice damage only amounts to about 25-30% of overall incoming damage questing in IWD with 0% BI resist. You still need normal DR to mitigate the other incoming damage. Black Ice damage has already been toned down a bit from preview. The more dangerous attacks actually are from ranged/caster mobs such as Deathlock Wights (5k hit every 4s) and Bear riders (similar) which hit for regular damage. (Which is why a pack of 3 Deathlock Wights can be lethal soloing in HEs). The Fey/melee trolls in DV for example don't really deal black ice damage (casters and bosses do).

In the skirmish Kessel's retreat black ice damage can account for over 50-60% of overall incoming damage, and without well timed prones/freezes the party can semi wipe quickly even with black ice resist. That said, in a geared/experienced party you'd have no issues at all swapping back to regular armor (I still use HV on CW and HP on DC) if you're timing controls well/killing fast/ focusing on casters first.

cromejohnsen

so guys
got a ton of new information.
apparently the new greater corrupt black ice enchant which u can slot into your new black ice gear (the blue sockets) can proc at the same time and have approximately a 1 min CD. Same CD goes for the black ice gear set effect.
For the black ice set weapon effect it will show 2500 dmg in blue color when it activates and seemed to proc around every half minute.

For everyone who is interested the last boon in IWD which gives u 500 extra dmg on heal , it only procs when healing yourself.
That means lifesteal does not proc it . Tested it . When it procs theres a lil buff icon showing up on your buff bar . It has an internal cd of around 1 min as well.

kolevra

Excellent work. Very well-written and understandable, very thorough and insanely helpful. Thank you!

I don't have much but I would like to donate some ADs to your hard work and would like to encourage others to do the same. This guide will be invaluable to pros and beginners alike for as long as people are playing the game. Please let me and others know how we can show our appreciation.

theosymphany

Hi guys,

With lots of testing and data collection by @angrymanagement I've managed to recalculate all the combat advantage formulae incorporating the new bonus and updated it in section 2.3. Because some of the bonuses are quite small they fit both an additive and multiplicative model but right now this is the best take with the data I have.

CAbonus refers to the auxiliary bonus % received from boons and artifacts
CHA bonus gives 1 % bonus damage per point over 10, i.e. CHA bonus = (CHA-10)/100.

Equation 2.3. CA damage calculation for non crit hits:
Total damage when CA is granted = base damage * 1.15 * (1+ CHA bonus%) * (1+ CAbonus %) * (1+ blink dog %)

Equation 2.4. CA damage calculation for critical hits:
Total damage with CA and CRIT = base damage * (1+ 0.75 + sum of all crit severity bonuses + 0.15 + CHA bonus + CAbonus) * (1+blink dog %)

For example
Say I have 18 CHA (8% CHA bonus), CA bonus of 400 (converts to 4.9% from section 1.4), a purple blink dog and only base severity of 75%.

CA damage (non crit) = base damage * 1.15 * 1.08 * 1.049 * 1.05
CA damage (non crit) = base damage * 1.368
You do 36.8% extra damage with CA

[edit: left out 0.15 from equation, thanks to pengustrike for pointing it out]
CA damage (crit) = base damage * ( 1+ 0.75 + 0.15 + 0.08 + 0.049) *1.05 = base damage * 2.029 * 1.05
CA damage (crit) = base damage * 2.13
Given that the base crit damage is 1.75x, this is an approx 21.7% increase boost with CA over a standard crit hit.

yeahnubby

Kaelac, you know I'm not a big theorycrafter. Does this mean that blink dog is now a viable companion for HR running AotP or a GWF that gains CA a lot? And maybe even more so if the HR/GWF has a purple Lantern/TR artifact

theosymphany

Yes I would say blink dog is quite competitive damage wise to most of the other pets there. It definitely adds a damage boost at purple, I haven't specifically confirmed for blue and green so can only assume it works.

HR with AotP get 85-99% CA quite easily with their hits when played well, that's theoretically 0.85*5 = 4.25% damage bonus from one pet and surpasses most other ones out there.

For GWFs with a decent party if you estimate 30% CA uptime that's 5*0.3 = 1.5% bonus, which is still better than 300 power (~1.3%) and about on par with dancing blade. Of course with module 4 if Mark mechanics grant CA then CA uptime would be quite a bit higher and raise blink dog's bonus further correspondingly.

aobviouserror

If it's that good then it would be worth stacking it with the new cta pet right?
It seems to have the same active bonus.


PS is there some guide on which companions are the biggest boosts too damage? I've tried the one on the order of the raven forums, but it seems kinda limited :<