Sharding armor

Blackula__ - Archosaur

I am sorry to ask an old question but I could not find the post where it was covered and tested. I know everyone says HP but I remember some debate of defense shards too.

HP works for magic or physical damage - 1 argument
PD only works physical attack
MD would only on magical


What I was trying to look up was something about diminished effect of defense shards? I read it once but only understood some of it since I was new to the game. Is 40hp better then 40 defense? Also has anyone tried pushing their magic defense up with belts, shards and necklaces?

Fleuri - Sanctuary

Blackula__ - Archosaur wrote: »

What I was trying to look up was something about diminished effect of defense shards? I read it once but only understood some of it since I was new to the game. Is 40hp better then 40 defense? Also has anyone tried pushing their magic defense up with belts, shards and necklaces?

I would say that defense shards give diminishing numbers but do not give diminishing effects. And, in my opinion, "which is better" depends on how much of each you already have.

If you are just trying to make a quick decision: if you do not have your level * 40 health, you should always shard with hp shards first.

Or, if you do not like that approach: your effective health against an attack is described by this equation:

health * defense / (defense + 40 * attacker)

Here, health is your hp, defense is whichever defense you need for that attack, and attacker is the level of whatever is attacking you. To get precision you should pick an attacker you are concerned about and use numbers based on your alternatives and see how much effective health you would have for each of your gearing choices.

Meanwhile, when people talk about diminishing returns from defenses, they are usually talking about something that they do not understand:

The "diminishing" thing that people talk about comes from how the game expresses your defenses. If you have 10% damage reduction, then getting to 11% damage reduction is easy. However, if you have 90% damage reduction then getting to 91% damage reduction is hard. But going from 90% to 91% damage reduction gives you a 10% reduction in damage taken so it is worth a lot where going from 10% to 11% damage reduction gives you a relatively minor effect. Meanwhile, even when your damage reduction does not visibly change, you can test and see that increased armor still reduces the damage you are taking.

Blackula__ - Archosaur

That last bit makes alot of sense......what you are saying is they call it deminished because simply sharding your armor can make you go from 10 to say 13% but the same shards do nothing to that % higher up.....

The error in that thinking is that it still is reducing the amount of damage taken even if it doesn't show up in a whole % increase in reduction.

Hopefully I understood that correctly I am pure dex so I am in that HP sharding range. I was just wondering if I would benefit from some pdef or mdef shards instead of all HP

Thank you for posting