There are multiple layers that stand between you and death, many players just account for Def and Res, and give only Resist all credit and glory, but there are quiet a few other things that can be used to prevent kissing the ground.
This guide is meant to help you know how all these armors and enemy debuffs stack together.
Keep in mind that each type of protection is like a big wall between the enemy and you, something will not get to be affected by the third wall if it was stoped flat by the second one.
I want to take a moment to clarify this guide is meant to quantify mitigation. By mitigation i mean the reduction of the damage you would normally receive. If you fight a minion that always misses half the time, mitigation only takes those 50% of the hits as the only true damage to be reduced.
Lets go through them in the order they affect you, shall we?
Recharge
-Recharge slows down the recharge speed of enemies attacks effectively reducing the amount of hits you can suffer in any period of time. Recharge suffers of three disadvantages:
<ul type="square">[*]The first wave of hits (the so famous Alpha Strike) is unaffected by it, as all attacks there are already charged up the moment you jump the enemy.[*]The effect is of lower impact against higher level enemies, since it is a debuff.[*]Although it increases the recharge time of an attack, it does not increase the activation time. Meaning that an attack that takes 2 seconds to hit, and 4 seconds to recharge will only have the 4 seconds increased, not the full 6 seconds, making the benefit a bit more random[/list]
The formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:
RechargeBenefit = 1-1/(1+(Debuff/100))
-Acc and Defense
Defense increases your chance to entirely deflect an attack.
-Accuracy lowers the chance of the enemy hitting you.
-Acc and Defense both act together but they dont stack. Against unbuffed enemies this does not trully makes a diference and its as if they did stack. Since I7 they will be affecting all enemies equally and basically 10 Defense really means 20%, since it will give the enemy 20% less chance to hit than normal, I wont get on the reason for this here, all you have to know is 1 = 2 once it comes to defense.
Defense is not really reliable, not because it does not work, because it does, but because you never know at what point your luck will run out. Its one of the few things in this game that is truthfully random. The main differences between Acc debuffs and Defense are:
<ul type="square">[*]-Accuracy is a debuff, and therefore is less effective against higher level enemies[*]-Accuracy affects all of the affected enemies' attacks while Def usualy only help against specific types of damage or method of attack.
As noted on the introduction, this type of protection only works on the attacks that did go through the slow effects of Recharge.[/list]
Formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:
DefenseBenefit = (AccDebuff + Def)/50 * 100 * (1- RechargeBenefit /100)
-Damage
Damage debuffs are rather simple: They reduce the damage an enemy can do by a percentage. If an enemy can do 100 and you debuffed his damage by 10% he will now hit for 90. Again, as all debuffs, this protection suffers a penalty the higher level the enemy is compared to you.
Formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:
DmgDebuffBenefit = DmgDebuff * (1- (DefenseBenefit +RechargeBenefit) /100)
Resistance
Very similar to Damage, Resistance lowers the damage an enemy inflicts upon you. The difference is, it is lowering the already lower damage. So, using the above example, if the character has 10% resistance and is already doing 90 damage (since it went down on the example above,) he will now do 81 damage. As you can see, despite them doing the same thing, we cant just sum the two numbers. A disadvantage of Resistance is that it tends to only cover up certain damage types, while Dmg Debuff lowers all incoming attacks.
Formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:
ResistBenefit = Resist * (1- (DmgDebuffBenefit + DefenseBenefit +RechargeBenefit) /100)
HP and HP buffs
All damage that was going to be mitigated has been mitigated at this point. Now on you get the reminder of the damage. But there is another thing to keep into account and its your HP. You see, not all ATs have the same HP, and some power sets have means to boost their base hp. To understand the true benefit of HP you have to entirely forget about it as a fixed number and start to think about it in terms of percentages. All that truly matters is that the little progress bar that indicates health doesnt go from 100% to 0%.
So, to truly measure the impact HP has on your damage mitigation you first need to know what is the HP of your AT relative to others. Here is a table that shows just that:
RHP stands for Relative HP. As you can see, Corruptors, Controllers and Kheldians are the baseline. Anything above that is considered to have a bonus, while anything below it is considered to have a penalty.
Lets say that an attack does 20% damage to a corruptor after all mitigations and you are a scrapper. You want to know how that 20% translates to you. But wait, before we do that, there is another issue. You may have an HP buff on similar to Dull Pain that may enhance your HP further off the base and it must also be accounted for.
The formula for this is:
HPBenefit = (1-1/(((RHP/100)*(1+(HPBuff/100))))) * 100 * (1- (DmgDebuffBenefit + DefenseBenefit +RechargeBenefit + ResistBenefit) /100)
Lets run a tanker example of this one here. (You can just jump to the bold number at the end if you are not interested in the math) In this example we will assume that HP is the only thing protecting you from death, in other words, zero in all the previous mitigations. We will use no dull pain either.
So, we have that the naked tanker can theoretically resist the same damage as a Corruptor with 42.85% resistance to all damage types.
Running the same with Dull Pain will yield a 59.18%.
Now there is one tricky thing about HP buffs and High Base HP, as you have seen, the HPBuff yields a resist like benefit, however there is a gotcha: This resist like benefit also applies to all outside heals. Yes, this means that the same way this makes damage harm less of your overall HP, it also makes outside heals heal less of your overall HP. HB buffs are wore, as those make your own self heals be resisted. I'll cover the implications of this toughly on the next section.
Regeneration and Heals
This was the part I ran into issues last time, my biggest issue was I was not accounting for the time factor, if anyone sees any incongruence this time around please let me know.
Unlike all other protections this one actually becomes more useful the more mitigation you had on the other areas. Basically, for an enemy or group of enemies to kill you in a limited amount of time, he must do your entire HP worth of damage plus the entire HP that you can regenerate within the amount of time.
Example, if a hero has 100 points of hp, and he regenerates at the standard regeneration rate of 25% of his hp in a minute, and the enemy must be able to kill the hero in exactly one minute, he must do 125 points of damage during that time, or in other words, about 2.084 points of damage per second. Add a percentage of mitigation trough any means to that (def, resist, anything) and you are lowering the damage per second the enemy does, so now he must increase his damage by an amount that compensates so he can kill you within that amount of time.
There is the reason why a long fight favors a build that is based on healing, because you have more HP that must be removed to successfully kill you. And that is the same reason too that alpha strikes almost ignore regeneration and self heals, the damage per second of such a wave of attacks is so high that you never get the chance to heal up. This is the reason why you got to keep time into the formula, because I bet in house, the devs actually balance all enemies around how long they should take to kill X or Y build.
That being covered, there are two ways to increase your recovery rate:
+Regeneration
+Regen is simple, its a multiplication of your base regeneration factor. We regenerate at 5% every 12 seconds. We calculate our regeneration per second like this:
Regeneration = (0.05*(1+Regen/100/12)*100
Self Heals
Self heals are a different issue. First off, they work off our base hp, not our buffed HP, we must keep this into account because by this point we already equaled all hp values on the HP buff stage. First off all self heals must be calculated to aquire how much healing per second they can provide, then we sum all those self heals together (in the case of more than one) and we then use the value we get (HPS) trough this simple formula:
FinalHPS = (HPS/100*BaseHP) *100
So, our final maximum recovery per second is:
HPRecovery = Regeneration + FinalHPS
And now finally we get to the end line. At this point we analize balance. The formula to account how much damage per second must be done to kill you is this:
Seconds is the amount of seconds you want to balance around. I think between 45 and 60 seconds is the average duration of fights in this game but you can toy with any number, you may find a better balance between sets that are more heavily tweaked towards healing on the 45-60 second range though. Going for longer fights tends to give benefit to the build with higher recovery based survivability while shorter fights tend to go against those same sets.
Now we have a final number we can compare with, but we still have to go around guessing what to compare it against, not to mention the number can be huge sometimes. What I did for ease of comparison is I predefined a small formula that just calculates the amount of DPS needed to kill the baseline, and I divide the result of the previous formula by this one.
I am calling the number that comes out of the whole formula the CCK score. This stands for Controller/Corruptor/Kheledian since those are the ATs that are considered to have 100% HP, and it basically means how many times that must be used to kill you.
If the game is truly balanced around 1 hero = 3 minions, the CCK*3 should be the number of even minions you should be able to handle with some challenge.
Closing
These are a LOT of formulas, I know I would never go around doing all this by hand, so I made a small excel sheet that allows you to fill in the blanks so you can analyze your builds against the different damage types.
You can find the calculator here. If the link for some reason breaks please do send me a PM telling me about it.
Additionally I did a Min/Maxed version where all builds have every single possible power on their sets PLUS tough/weave/health all 3 slotted, and combat jump or hover single slotted for def.
[/ QUOTE ]
PLEASE do try to find errors on this but also dont do it just because of gut feelings, do it because you actually think something should be added or multiplied or whatever in a specific way and not the way I did.
There are multiple layers that stand between you and death, many players just account for Def and Res, and give only Resist all credit and glory, but there are quiet a few other things that can be used to prevent kissing the ground.
This guide is meant to help you know how all these armors and enemy debuffs stack together.
Keep in mind that each type of protection is like a big wall between the enemy and you, something will not get to be affected by the third wall if it was stoped flat by the second one.
I want to take a moment to clarify this guide is meant to quantify mitigation. By mitigation i mean the reduction of the damage you would normally receive. If you fight a minion that always misses half the time, mitigation only takes those 50% of the hits as the only true damage to be reduced.
Lets go through them in the order they affect you, shall we?
Recharge
-Recharge slows down the recharge speed of enemies attacks effectively reducing the amount of hits you can suffer in any period of time. Recharge suffers of three disadvantages:
<ul type="square">[*]The first wave of hits (the so famous Alpha Strike) is unaffected by it, as all attacks there are already charged up the moment you jump the enemy.[*]The effect is of lower impact against higher level enemies, since it is a debuff.[*]Although it increases the recharge time of an attack, it does not increase the activation time. Meaning that an attack that takes 2 seconds to hit, and 4 seconds to recharge will only have the 4 seconds increased, not the full 6 seconds, making the benefit a bit more random[/list]
The formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:
RechargeBenefit = 1-1/(1+(Debuff/100))
-Acc and Defense
Defense increases your chance to entirely deflect an attack.
-Accuracy lowers the chance of the enemy hitting you.
-Acc and Defense both act together but they dont stack. Against unbuffed enemies this does not trully makes a diference and its as if they did stack. Since I7 they will be affecting all enemies equally and basically 10 Defense really means 20%, since it will give the enemy 20% less chance to hit than normal, I wont get on the reason for this here, all you have to know is 1 = 2 once it comes to defense.
Defense is not really reliable, not because it does not work, because it does, but because you never know at what point your luck will run out. Its one of the few things in this game that is truthfully random. The main differences between Acc debuffs and Defense are:
<ul type="square">[*]-Accuracy is a debuff, and therefore is less effective against higher level enemies[*]-Accuracy affects all of the affected enemies' attacks while Def usualy only help against specific types of damage or method of attack.
As noted on the introduction, this type of protection only works on the attacks that did go through the slow effects of Recharge.[/list]
Formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:
DefenseBenefit = (AccDebuff + Def)/50 * 100 * (1- RechargeBenefit /100)
-Damage
Damage debuffs are rather simple: They reduce the damage an enemy can do by a percentage. If an enemy can do 100 and you debuffed his damage by 10% he will now hit for 90. Again, as all debuffs, this protection suffers a penalty the higher level the enemy is compared to you.
Formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:
DmgDebuffBenefit = DmgDebuff * (1- (DefenseBenefit +RechargeBenefit) /100)
Resistance
Very similar to Damage, Resistance lowers the damage an enemy inflicts upon you. The difference is, it is lowering the already lower damage. So, using the above example, if the character has 10% resistance and is already doing 90 damage (since it went down on the example above,) he will now do 81 damage. As you can see, despite them doing the same thing, we cant just sum the two numbers. A disadvantage of Resistance is that it tends to only cover up certain damage types, while Dmg Debuff lowers all incoming attacks.
Formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:
ResistBenefit = Resist * (1- (DmgDebuffBenefit + DefenseBenefit +RechargeBenefit) /100)
HP and HP buffs
All damage that was going to be mitigated has been mitigated at this point. Now on you get the reminder of the damage. But there is another thing to keep into account and its your HP. You see, not all ATs have the same HP, and some power sets have means to boost their base hp. To understand the true benefit of HP you have to entirely forget about it as a fixed number and start to think about it in terms of percentages. All that truly matters is that the little progress bar that indicates health doesnt go from 100% to 0%.
So, to truly measure the impact HP has on your damage mitigation you first need to know what is the HP of your AT relative to others. Here is a table that shows just that:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>AT RHP%
Tanker 175.0%
Brute 140.0%
Scrapper 125.0%
Blaster 112.5%
Kheldian 100.0%
Corruptor 100.0%
Controller 100.0%
Defender 95.0%
Stalker 95.0%
Dominator 95.0%
Mastermind 75.0%</pre><hr />
RHP stands for Relative HP. As you can see, Corruptors, Controllers and Kheldians are the baseline. Anything above that is considered to have a bonus, while anything below it is considered to have a penalty.
Lets say that an attack does 20% damage to a corruptor after all mitigations and you are a scrapper. You want to know how that 20% translates to you. But wait, before we do that, there is another issue. You may have an HP buff on similar to Dull Pain that may enhance your HP further off the base and it must also be accounted for.
The formula for this is:
HPBenefit = (1-1/(((RHP/100)*(1+(HPBuff/100))))) * 100 * (1- (DmgDebuffBenefit + DefenseBenefit +RechargeBenefit + ResistBenefit) /100)
Lets run a tanker example of this one here. (You can just jump to the bold number at the end if you are not interested in the math) In this example we will assume that HP is the only thing protecting you from death, in other words, zero in all the previous mitigations. We will use no dull pain either.
= (1-1/((175/100)*(1+(0/100)))) * 100 * (1- (0 + 0 + 0 + 0) /100)
= (1-1/(1.75*(1+0))) * 100 * (1- 0/100)
= (1-1/(1.75*(1+0))) * 100 * (1- 0)
= (1-1/(1.75*1)) * 100 * 1
= (1-1/1.75) * 100
= (1-0.5714) * 100
= 0.4285 * 100
= 42.85
So, we have that the naked tanker can theoretically resist the same damage as a Corruptor with 42.85% resistance to all damage types.
Running the same with Dull Pain will yield a 59.18%.
Now there is one tricky thing about HP buffs and High Base HP, as you have seen, the HPBuff yields a resist like benefit, however there is a gotcha: This resist like benefit also applies to all outside heals. Yes, this means that the same way this makes damage harm less of your overall HP, it also makes outside heals heal less of your overall HP. HB buffs are wore, as those make your own self heals be resisted. I'll cover the implications of this toughly on the next section.
Regeneration and Heals
This was the part I ran into issues last time, my biggest issue was I was not accounting for the time factor, if anyone sees any incongruence this time around please let me know.
Unlike all other protections this one actually becomes more useful the more mitigation you had on the other areas. Basically, for an enemy or group of enemies to kill you in a limited amount of time, he must do your entire HP worth of damage plus the entire HP that you can regenerate within the amount of time.
Example, if a hero has 100 points of hp, and he regenerates at the standard regeneration rate of 25% of his hp in a minute, and the enemy must be able to kill the hero in exactly one minute, he must do 125 points of damage during that time, or in other words, about 2.084 points of damage per second. Add a percentage of mitigation trough any means to that (def, resist, anything) and you are lowering the damage per second the enemy does, so now he must increase his damage by an amount that compensates so he can kill you within that amount of time.
There is the reason why a long fight favors a build that is based on healing, because you have more HP that must be removed to successfully kill you. And that is the same reason too that alpha strikes almost ignore regeneration and self heals, the damage per second of such a wave of attacks is so high that you never get the chance to heal up. This is the reason why you got to keep time into the formula, because I bet in house, the devs actually balance all enemies around how long they should take to kill X or Y build.
That being covered, there are two ways to increase your recovery rate:
+Regeneration
+Regen is simple, its a multiplication of your base regeneration factor. We regenerate at 5% every 12 seconds. We calculate our regeneration per second like this:
Regeneration = (0.05*(1+Regen/100/12)*100
Self Heals
Self heals are a different issue. First off, they work off our base hp, not our buffed HP, we must keep this into account because by this point we already equaled all hp values on the HP buff stage. First off all self heals must be calculated to aquire how much healing per second they can provide, then we sum all those self heals together (in the case of more than one) and we then use the value we get (HPS) trough this simple formula:
FinalHPS = (HPS/100*BaseHP) *100
So, our final maximum recovery per second is:
HPRecovery = Regeneration + FinalHPS
And now finally we get to the end line. At this point we analize balance. The formula to account how much damage per second must be done to kill you is this:
((1+(HPRecovery/100*Seconds)) / Seconds / (1-Mitigated/100))
Seconds is the amount of seconds you want to balance around. I think between 45 and 60 seconds is the average duration of fights in this game but you can toy with any number, you may find a better balance between sets that are more heavily tweaked towards healing on the 45-60 second range though. Going for longer fights tends to give benefit to the build with higher recovery based survivability while shorter fights tend to go against those same sets.
Now we have a final number we can compare with, but we still have to go around guessing what to compare it against, not to mention the number can be huge sometimes. What I did for ease of comparison is I predefined a small formula that just calculates the amount of DPS needed to kill the baseline, and I divide the result of the previous formula by this one.
((1+0.05/12*Seconds) / Seconds)
The complete formula is:
((1+(HPRecovery/100*Seconds)) / Seconds / (1-Mitigated/100)) / ((1+0.05/12*Seconds) / Seconds)
I am calling the number that comes out of the whole formula the CCK score. This stands for Controller/Corruptor/Kheledian since those are the ATs that are considered to have 100% HP, and it basically means how many times that must be used to kill you.
If the game is truly balanced around 1 hero = 3 minions, the CCK*3 should be the number of even minions you should be able to handle with some challenge.
Closing
These are a LOT of formulas, I know I would never go around doing all this by hand, so I made a small excel sheet that allows you to fill in the blanks so you can analyze your builds against the different damage types.
You can find the calculator here. If the link for some reason breaks please do send me a PM telling me about it.
You can find that here
Additionally I did a Min/Maxed version where all builds have every single possible power on their sets PLUS tough/weave/health all 3 slotted, and combat jump or hover single slotted for def.
You can find the minmaxed comparison here
[/ QUOTE ]
PLEASE do try to find errors on this but also dont do it just because of gut feelings, do it because you actually think something should be added or multiplied or whatever in a specific way and not the way I did.