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Armor penetration. Can someone confirm these assumptions?
sean99999
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
Hey folks,
9/3/2014
Even more new discoveries :
Assumptions:
#1) There are two categories of skills. Let us call it: Category A & Category B for simplicity. Skills which fall into Category A adds to one another. Skills which fall into Category B multiplies its base with category A.
CATEGORY A
CATEGORY B
CONTROL WIZARD
Ray of Enfeeblement (15%, 30%)
Elemental Empowerment (10%)
Conduit of Ice(15%)
High Vizier Bonus (10%, 30%)
DEVOTED CLERIC
DivineGlow(15%)
High Prophet Bonus (10%, 30%)
GUARDIAN FIGHTER
Mark (7.8%)
Tide of Iron (20%)
GREATER WEAPON FIGHTER
Student of the Sword (5%, 15%)
WEAPONBUFFS
PlagueFire (2%, 6%). GPF (3%, 9%)
This conclusion is drawn from the following logs:
Dmg Base Percentage Skills Comment
218 173 -26.0115606936 Ray&Elemental Empowerment 1.15 * 1.10 = 1.265
955 783 -21.9667943806 Plague + CoI 1.15 * 1.06 = 1.219
5964 4085 -45.9975520196 Plague + HV + Arcane 1 + 0.6 + 0.3 + 0.1 = 1.46(These are all category B skills)
903 409 -120.782396088 HV & HP & CoI & Elemental Empowerment & Divine glow (1+0.15 + 0.15) * (1 + 0.3 + 0.3 + 0.1) = 2.21
#2) There are two types of Armor reduction skills when a target has positive defense stat: One that reduces a target's defense based on a current unknown calculation, another subtracts it directly.
This conclusion is drawn from the following log:
Skills which subtracts directly
0% ARP versus a Troll (16%? resistance). Casting COI
940 (1119) 15.9964253798
633 (639) 0.9389671362
Skills which reduces a target's defense based on calculation in #3)
Elemental Empowerment (10%) versus a troll (16% resistance) with 5.9% ARP.
565 628 10.0318471338 Normal troll 16% - no debuff
1065 1169 8.8964927288 Normal troll 16% - Elemental Empowerment debuff
Corrections:
Student of the sword is a flat 5% damage buff per stack. The tooltip is faulty.
Credit:
Credit goes to Pac for helping and figuring out the Category A & B numbers with me.
9/3/2014
Even more new discoveries :
Assumptions:
#1) There are two categories of skills. Let us call it: Category A & Category B for simplicity. Skills which fall into Category A adds to one another. Skills which fall into Category B multiplies its base with category A.
CATEGORY A
CATEGORY B
CONTROL WIZARD
Ray of Enfeeblement (15%, 30%)
Elemental Empowerment (10%)
Conduit of Ice(15%)
High Vizier Bonus (10%, 30%)
DEVOTED CLERIC
DivineGlow(15%)
High Prophet Bonus (10%, 30%)
GUARDIAN FIGHTER
Mark (7.8%)
Tide of Iron (20%)
GREATER WEAPON FIGHTER
Student of the Sword (5%, 15%)
WEAPONBUFFS
PlagueFire (2%, 6%). GPF (3%, 9%)
This conclusion is drawn from the following logs:
Dmg Base Percentage Skills Comment
218 173 -26.0115606936 Ray&Elemental Empowerment 1.15 * 1.10 = 1.265
955 783 -21.9667943806 Plague + CoI 1.15 * 1.06 = 1.219
5964 4085 -45.9975520196 Plague + HV + Arcane 1 + 0.6 + 0.3 + 0.1 = 1.46(These are all category B skills)
903 409 -120.782396088 HV & HP & CoI & Elemental Empowerment & Divine glow (1+0.15 + 0.15) * (1 + 0.3 + 0.3 + 0.1) = 2.21
#2) There are two types of Armor reduction skills when a target has positive defense stat: One that reduces a target's defense based on a current unknown calculation, another subtracts it directly.
This conclusion is drawn from the following log:
Skills which subtracts directly
0% ARP versus a Troll (16%? resistance). Casting COI
940 (1119) 15.9964253798
633 (639) 0.9389671362
Skills which reduces a target's defense based on calculation in #3)
Elemental Empowerment (10%) versus a troll (16% resistance) with 5.9% ARP.
565 628 10.0318471338 Normal troll 16% - no debuff
1065 1169 8.8964927288 Normal troll 16% - Elemental Empowerment debuff
Corrections:
Student of the sword is a flat 5% damage buff per stack. The tooltip is faulty.
Credit:
Credit goes to Pac for helping and figuring out the Category A & B numbers with me.
Post edited by sean99999 on
0
Comments
Damage resistance varies from 0% - 24%. The only thing that reduces this is armor pen.
All debuffs are damage buffs. Ignore all tooltips, they are wrong. Student of the sword is 5% damage buff per stack up to 3. hv is 10% per stack. Gpf is 3% per stack. Etc etc etc. They will always increase dmg by this amount. Mobs do not have defense scores.
The most likely explanation for this is that mobs do not have the same stats as characters. Effects that list "character stats" as the target seem to have been somewhat arbitrarily and mysteriously assigned PvE effects.
Maybe what you are seeing is the first stack of a debuff is calculated as if the dmg resistance was based on defense and each additional stack just duplicates that effect.
Ah yes, it all makes perfect sense if Student of the sword is a 5% damage buff per stack, assuming a faulty tooltip. Let me correct my original post.
Assailing Force (-15% resistance on CoI) is a +15% damage buff. It stacks multiplicatively with Elemental Empowerment (+10% dmg on arcane encounters for like what, 3 seconds or something) which should result in a +16.5% dmg buff when both debuffs are on the target.
Hey inthefade, thing is, i get a straight +10% damage buff with elemental empowerment when i try it on a dummy (0 defense).
I assume you mean +26.5%?
Are the devs aware of all this?
Have they commented on it?
Is it working as intended?
It's always worked like that so I would hope they are aware of it. most debuffs stack additively and most buffs stack additively but they combine together multiplicatively. because these are feats it's possible they messed up the math
The wording in tooltips don't help for sure, in understanding how things work.
I mean, "Increased armor penetration", "lowers defense", "lowers damage mitigation", "reduced damage resistance" and other such things... they look like they do very different things, but as I've been reading on the forums, they actually don't...
inthefade462, How much of these information have you personally parsed yourself?
I parsed arcane empowerment + HV set. It is a total of 40%, not 26.5%.
Steal time deals 5678 (4056)
arcane empowerment is 10%, HV is 10%x3, so you would get 40%.
[20:15] [Combat (Self)] Critical Hit! Your Repel deals 5870 (4193) Arcane to Target Dummy.
40%.
I was talking about assailing force (15%) and elemental empowerment (10%) which stack multiplicatively instead of additively for 26.5%.
I was testing again just now and something odd is happening.
Here is assailing force and elemental empowerment (took off helm, no HV):
using CoI and repel (for arcane) you can see on the repel line that they stack multiplicatively, ie 15% x 10% = 26.5% instead of 15% + 10% = 25%.
Here is the same test but starting with OF for 3x HV stacks:
You can see 30% dmg from HV on the OF hit
On the CoI hit, instead of 30%+15% = 45%, we see 30% x 15% = 49.5%
and on the repel hit which has HV + Assailing Force + Elemental Empowerment, we get 61%. If they were purely multiplicative we would expect 64.45%. If they were additive, in any combination, you'd expect 26.5% + 30% = 56.5%. or 49.5% + 10% = 59.5%. or even 30%+10%+15% =55%. but we get 61%.
edit: ok so what the game is doing is taking additive stacks and totaling them, then multiplying them by the multiplicative stacks.
we saw before that HV (30%) and elemental empowerment (10%) stack additively for 40% damage buff. so its 40%x 15% = 61%
I'm somewhat new to the game(stopped playing for close to a year), so can you please explain how you get 61%?
Please don't tell me: 15% of 40 = 6, then 40+15 . Then add 55+6 = 61. That would be absolutely absurd, even for PW.
these are just debuffs btw, which impact the X of HAMSTER (YYYY). don't forget that actual buffs that GF's and mainly DCs bring to the table impact raw damage (YYY) before the debuffs apply, and buffs are much stronger than debuffs as they don't have to worry about target cap limits on applying debuffs.
How about terror enchantment? Tooltip says it reduces defense by 20%, does that mean its stronger than gpf? Is the tooltip wrong as well, or I overlooked some game mechanic that makes gpf better?
Perfect terror is 4% dmg buff and doesn't stack.
Another way to explain it (and likely what is happening internally) is that the damage from one buff is applied and then the second buff is applied to that total instead of the base damage. For example let's say you do 100 damage (for easy math). The first buff is applied 100 * 1.40 = 140 then the second buff is applied to that total instead of the base damage. So 140 * 1.15 = 161.
I suspect that in the code they are adding up the total damage with something like totalDamage = totalDamage + (baseDamage * buffPercent) and for some buffs they accidently put totalDamage = totalDamage + (totalDamage * buffPercent)
A monster with 20% resistance,i have 5.6% ARP, full HV set:
897(1048) -before steal time : +14.4% resisstance
563(597) - after steal time : +5.7% resistance
(Don't really understand why the next monster has 21% resistance)
Or with CoI, 5.9% ARP, full HV set:
949(1130) - before CoI +16% resistance.
633(639) - AFter CoI +0.94% resistance
I don't believe the term stacks multiplicatively should be used here. Stacking multiplicatively implies: 40 resistance * 15% = 46%resistance; used in other buffing calculation which usually implies it is nearly worthless.
In this case, this method is stacking is extremely valuable.
This formula requires a new term: it adds & multiplies; or it multiplies the base. lol
I genuinely believe the formula used here is completely wrong and buggy.
And yes, GPF is sadly 3% a stack. Sigh.
Yeah there's something going on that's going to require a lot of parsing. I noticed this before when someone was saying they weren't getting 3% per stack on GPF, for 9% total, they were only getting 7%. I tested it and I was getting between 7.2% and 9% depending on what kind of mob I was attacking, with a GF without 24% arp.
I took off some darks, ARP is at 21.2%, and went and fought some iron golems, some interesting numbers:
[15:55] [Combat (Self)] Your Magic Missile deals 488 (608) Arcane to Iron Golem.
[15:55] [Combat (Self)] Your Magic Missile deals 514 (641) Arcane to Iron Golem.
~80.2% dmg dealt. just starting up with MM no debuffs. But again I have 21.2% arp? Even my shadowtouch, first proc only hit for 80% of normal.
[15:55] [Combat (Self)] Your Shadowtouched deals 200 (250) Necrotic to Iron Golem.
Then I cast Steal Time which applies both Elemental empowerment and 3xHV stacks, or 40% dmg boost:
[15:55] [Combat (Self)] Your Shadowtouched deals 345 (250) Necrotic to Iron Golem.
[15:56] [Combat (Self)] Critical Hit! Your Steal Time deals 8986 (6511) Arcane to Iron Golem.
I'm dealing ~138% of dmg of normal.
I'm missing roughly 2% of damage from arp, which matches would I would expect with only 21% fighting an iron golem.
But my base attacks, when i'm only missing 2% of dmg ignored, is actually dealing only 80%, not 98%.
There is obviously a different formula going on that is more convoluted than I'm prepared to reverse engineer. There used to a bunch of theorycraft threads back in the day that worked out why arp was the most important stat and capping arp to 24% first was the best source of dmg increase, then worrying about everything else. My findings suggest those findings to be true.
edit: it's been reported that the last 2 hits of MM do not benefit from arp, which would explain the above, except that none of my MMs were benefitting from arp, not just the last 2 hits. I tested with Ray of Frost and 21.2% had no dmg reduction at all from iron golems on at will, but still 2% bonus dmg was missing after HV+ee debuffs. odd.
Until of course, that defense reaches 0 via ARP. Then the numbers follow a different formula, which is the one mentioned above.
Do you have a different perspective on this mystery?
Ray of enfeeblement & CoI is adding and multiplying.
HV & Arcane empowerment is only adding.
With all four bonuses, the entire team does 103% more damage. That is amazing. Shame on those wizards who only focus on individual damage. :P
against 1 enemy that has ROE on it. It's not that wizards focus on individual damage, it's that cw's (and everyone else really) focus on spreading debuffs against the most targets as possible. Which is done by Shard, Steal time and COI. that leaves 1 encounter open for spreading chill stacks/control (Icy Terrain, Chill Strike) or aoe dps (sudden storm).
with 2 CWs the 2nd only bringing another assailing force COI you get the same 103% dmg bonus against 5 enemies, which is still not that great.
the real benefit is getting atleast HV on every single mob, combined with a multitude of various other debuffs on every mob possible, especially DC buff/debuffs.
So no, the real shame is on wizards who run ROE on anything other than single target fights, of which there are exactly 2 in game, Fulminorax, and Valindra.
No, i am talking specifically about wizards who focus on individual damage and bring little to no debuffs on all monsters, including bosses.
Not those who are intelligent enough to know when to push/repel, debuff and DPS.
You shouldn't repel/push anything in PvE. That style is done for, and only suitable in few places such as SP (I think), and only for undergeared pugs that have little DPS.