HA/Arcane Question.

its a waste, you can manage a better rounding of your defenses with garnet shards and physical defense accesories. they add up quite nicely, to the point when you are buffed, you have more defense than light armor even.

you're saving yourself thetrouble of buying 2 armor sets, and gimping all your stats for the sake of a bunch of pdef; it really isnt worth it to go HA.

that would be too much pain. restat would do best. restating at your level is not bad at all thus it would cost you less than doing at 9x but you must be aware gathering all the right gear is hard.

kenlee wrote: »

it is worth to go HA but only at 95-100
till that lvl you will spend alot of time and money finding gear and maybe restat

In point of fact, it's possible alot earlier, the main problem which makes it not worth the effort early on is that your new armour sets are spread across six levels. This makes it more work to collect the bonuses and distribute stats to make the set work.

The earliest it's feasible is Lv.70, due to the appearance of TT armour. As all pieces come at once level, it's now much more straight forward to plan and collect gear.

I personally restatted at 74. I could have been ready for 70 exactly but chose to go with a few cheaper ornaments/armour rather than going overboard simply to switch 4 levels earlier.

AndyNagato - Lost City wrote: »

an arcane can use fox form as well and manage 8-10k+ def in sage fox should they have buffs, defense fails when stacked ridiciulously high. the more you have, the less effective it gets.

That is a common misconception. The damage reduction gained from defense becomes smaller the higher your defense is. But you don't die because of damage reduction, you die because of damage taken. If you compare damage taken vs. defense, going from 1k to 2k defense gives you as much extra survivability as going from 20k to 21k defense. (In the same sense as going from 1k to 2k hp gives you as much extra survivability as going from 20k to 21k hp.)

http://pwi-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?p=1536391#post1536391

to me, its an entirely worthless build, why gimp all your stats just so you can have some more pdef? i find it funny how HA builds try to give themselves more self worth by saying 'oh our build is so hard, arcane is just easy mode,' its easily done with a level 3 tome, and TT/legendary gears @ 90 >.>;.

I do it because it expands my performance envelope. I give up about 10% on my damage and 15% on my pet heals, for about a 300-400% increase in survivability against physical damage. If my projections on my melee damage are correct, by 99 I'm going to end up doing about as much melee DPS as an arcane's spell DPS, so the only downside to the build will be a weaker pet heal.

Percent on survivability isn't a simple number you can just easily come up with. As our defense / HP goes up, so does typically the atk of the mobs/ bosses we're being hit by.

Making a sweeping generalization here, but Heavy and HA/AA builds aren't typically adopted for PVE. They're adopted for PVP purposes.

Not that the PVE side really matters though. At the end of the day, so long as a Venomancer meets three conditions for PVE:

- Pet Heal recovers faster than pet loses HP
- Pet cannot be oneshot
- Venomancer is not dying

Then their equipment is more or less irrelevant. Whereas other classes have issues of life-and-death if their gear is poor, the only threat facing a poorly equipped Venomancer is inefficiency (assuming the above three conditions are met): They can still grind, kill, and move along, just at a less 'optimal' speed.

That said, back to HA/AA: Since we have our pets, even if you were to restat MAG to 5, a large portion of our damage out (ie. our pet's) is unaffected. This is one reason Heavy Veno builds are doable, unlike Clerics, Wizards, etc.

Note of course that I've made a simplification above by assuming all our damage is magical... Which is of course a fallacy, as Solandri's melee DPS calculations have shown.

tweakz wrote: »

Percent on survivability isn't a simple number you can just easily come up with. As our defense / HP goes up, so does typically the atk of the mobs/ bosses we're being hit by.

The 300-400% I gave was comparing heavy vs. arcane taking physical damage. Not heavy vs. some mob.

kenlee wrote: »

ok lets do some math.

lvl 100 with those devense and someone is hitting for 10k damage. there is DR counted and after that is 75% pvp reduction

1k pdef -> DR = 20% -> 2000 dmg -> 20% of initial 10k damage -> damage got reduced by 80%
2k pdef -> DR = 33% -> 1675 dmg -> 16.75% of initial 10k damage -> damage got reduced by 83.25%

---

9k pdef -> DR = 69% -> 775 dmg -> 7.75% of initial 10k damage -> damage got reduced by 92.25%

---

20k pdef -> DR = 83% -> 435 dmg -> 4.35% of initial 10k damage -> damage got reduced by 95.65%
21k pdef -> DR = 84% -> 400 dmg -> 4% of initial damage -> damage got reduced by 96%

going from 1k def to 2k def is about 3.25% less damage taken from initial 10k damage while going from 20k to 21k pdef is about 0.35% less damage taken
so from my calculation this is not linear
going from 1k to 2k is about 325 damage while going from 20k to 21k is 35 damage
having 6k HP is like going from 3 to 3.58 hits and the others values 13.79 to 15 hits... still not linear
going from 9k pdef to 20k pdef is about 3.4% which makes it the same as 1k->2k

Please click the link I gave. I broke down survivability in both hits (which is what people think of when they think of hp) and percent (which is what you're doing). It's linear in hits. Here are corrected numbers since yours are a bit off due to roundoff error:

1k pdef -> 20.00% DR -> 80.00% DT -> 8000 damage -> 2000 PvP -> 3 hits til dead
2k pdef -> 33.33% DR -> 66.67% DT -> 6667 damage -> 1667 PvP -> 3.6 hits til dead
Improvement in survivability is 0.6 hits

20k pdef -> 83.33% DR -> 16.67% DT -> 1667 damage -> 417 PvP -> 14.4 hits til dead
21k pdef -> 84.00% DR -> 16.00% DT -> 1600 damage -> 400 PvP -> 15 hits til dead
Improvement in survivability is 0.6 hits. Same as for 1k -> 2k.

The misconception is that people say to use citrines instead of garnets because hp has no diminishing returns while pdef does. That is wrong. hp operates the exact same way as pdef. If you're taking hits for 500 damage:

1000 hp -> 2 hits til dead
2000 hp -> 4 hits til dead
Improvement in survivability is 2 hits.

20,000 hp -> 40 hits til dead
21,000 hp -> 42 hits til dead
Improvement in survivability is 2 hits.

So click on the link I gave; I broke it down both in terms of hits and in terms of %. In hits, increase in survivability for both pdef and hp are linear. In %, increase in survivability is not linear for pdef, but neither is it linear for hp.

kenlee wrote: »

thats not an error, the game itself likes to round down numbers.

It rounds the damage reduction in the character sheet to within 1%. For actual damage calculations, it uses the unrounded figures (as near as I can tell). i.e. If your improve your pdef so your DR goes from 83.2% to 83.4%, the character sheet will display both as 83%. But you will still note a decrease in damage taken.

ok, the number of hits you take is linear but its not the same with survivability imo. lets say pdef itself is fixed but yout hp pool isnt fixed. for example you have like 20k hp and those defences from above and you take that damage every second. getting 2k damage every second will tick the charm till it comes back to full over and over again... not even counting pots.

That's why I listed it both ways - in terms of hits til dead and in terms of %. You're trying to argue against something I never claimed.

Whichever way you want to think of it is just a matter of semantics. The bottom line is that mathematically, hp and pdef work the same for survivability. If the way you think of it, hp has no diminishing returns for survivability, then pdef also has no diminishing returns. If you think of it so pdef has diminishing returns for survivability, then hp also has diminishing returns.

http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/3686/damagetaken.jpg

Your graph is linear. You've just taken a straight line and inverted it 1/x. The x and y values are still related to the first order (i.e. x^1, as opposed to x^2 or sin(x)), which is the definition of linear.

http://pw.solandri.com/pics/damage_pdef.png

Look, I completely agree with the things you are saying. It's why I've always countered conventional wisdom here and advocated defense as slightly more important than hp. But that doesn't change the fact that defense and survivability have a linear relationship. Just like hp and survivability have a linear relationship.