dev1069 Phantom Roll Effect Adjustments feedback

[Byrth]

Maybe I'm uninformed, but I haven't seen any strong evidence that the relationship between defense and damage taken is much other than piecewise linear, and mostly just linear over the normal defense range. The 1.0 "floor" you speak of is likely not actually a floor but a plateau in the equation, similar to the one that exists in the player pDIF formula. As evidence, I offer low level monsters outside of cities. They hit for 0-1, which means they have base damage greater than 0 and pDIF at or below 1. If I was a betting man, I would say that monsters likely use the same pDIF equations as melees except with a 4.0 Ratio cap and no level correction. You can't get below 1.0 on things that matter because they have such high attack.

Point is, no one is ever going to stack defense because +30% defense does not lower damage taken by 30%. If Ratio is directly proportional to damage taken, then changes in ratio are proportional to changes in damage taken. Adding 25% defense would reduce average physical damage taken by 20%.

* Cool, Defender does do something! But using Defender decreases your attack by 25%, so now how do you hold hate?
* Most dangerous monster attacks aren't physical damage, so why would you sacrifice your ability to hold hate to take 20% less damage from them?
* If you increase your defense too much, you run into this lower plateau or "floor." At that point, increasing your defense by 25% decreases physical damage taken by less than 20%.

[doctorugh]

The only job left with a remotely effective means of non-damage hate generation post-RDM nerf is BLU, with Fantod generating 320 CE and 320 VE on a ~5 second timer with gear/buffs. Even in my best enmity gear, that's not going to maintain hate over any DD just because of how the game works. Also, it's not like we even use disengaged tanks at this point in the game anyway.

Hmmm, maybe make fantod lvl 49 or less, then paladin cap "cap" defense without reducing attack (hate) and get a nice hate tool to boot.

[Ophannus]

In before Devs respond of : "Lowering your damage taken decreases your enmity loss".

[SpankWustler]

Since people more eloquent than myself have focused on the problems with defense itself, I'll be brief.

Naked/with Defender active/with Defender active + food effects (black curry bun)

Because dealing damage is the most effective way to increase enmity in today's FFXI, this person has a far more effective method of damage mitigation than defense available. This person will never be targeted by a monster on which any effective damage-dealer is engaged.

[Motenten]

Naked (Defense 460): 245 damage

To add a technical quibble: I'm not sure how you're getting 460 defense while naked. As a Taru pld/war (lvl 99), I have 238 defense while naked. I assume you actually mean "fully armored".

• Naked (Defense 460): 245 damage
• Defender (Defense 575): 216 damage
• Defender + food (Defense 663): 197 damage

Ok, assuming a basic ratio function with level correction (and assuming it mirrors player attack level correction), we can solve that with a system of linear equations.

Level correction (+15 levels): +0.75
Base weapon damage: 133
Mob attack: 500


Now let's take a look at the effects of Defender and Berserk as the mob's level increases. For the attack side, I'll assume the mob has 500 defense and that the player has 500 attack as well (no food, and somewhat defensively geared).


First Defender:

Mob lvl   Player Dmg      Mob Dmg
100             -26%         -19%
101             -28%         -18%
102             -29%         -18%
103             -31%         -17%
104             -33%         -16%
105             -36%         -16%
106             -38%         -15%
107             -42%         -15%
108             -45%         -14%
109             -50%         -14%
110             -56%         -13%
111             -63%         -13%
112             -71%         -13%
113             -83%         -12%
114            -100%         -12%

The percentages are the change in damage done compared to not having Defender active. You'll see that by having Defender active against a level 100 mob, the attack that the player does drops by 26%, while the damage taken from being hit by the mob decreases by 19%.

As the mob's level increases, you'll see that the negative effects of the lowered attack scale up rapidly, such that by the time you're fighting a mob 15 levels higher than you, you're essentially doing no damage at all.

On the other hand, the value of the defense you're adding is also dropping. You're only reducing the damage the mob does to you by 12% by the time you're fighting a mob 15 levels above you.

Overall, the higher the level of the mob, the more detrimental the attack loss is, and the less valuable the defense gain is.


Now Berserk:

Mob lvl   Player Dmg      Mob Dmg
100              26%	      32% 
101              28%	      31% 
102              29%	      29% 
103              31%	      28% 
104              33%	      27% 
105              36%	      26% 
106              38%	      25% 
107              42%	      24% 
108              45%	      24% 
109              50%	      23% 
110              56%	      22% 
111              63%	      21% 
112              71%	      21% 
113              83%	      20% 
114             100%	      20%

And now we see essentially the same effects mirrored. The higher the level of the mob, the more valuable the attack boost of Berserk becomes, and the less detrimental the additional damage taken is. By the time you're fighting a mob 15 levels above you, you could use Berserk and put on 27% PDT (barely half the cap on PDT) and you'd be doing twice as much damage as without Berserk while taking as much damage as if you had Defender active.


As mobs reach even match, the relative defensive gain of Defender reaches its peak, where going from Berserk to Defender reduces damage taken by about 40%. It can arguably be considered useful against mobs that are within a few levels of the player, but its raison d'etre, reduction of damage taken from extremely high level mobs (the entire purpose around which pld is built), is shown to be largely an illusion.

If you look seriously at the above numbers, it becomes plainly obvious why players are largely indifferent to the idea of a defense boost. When it takes a 25% boost in attack to reduce damage by as much as a couple augmented Dark Rings, what's the point? You're losing a massive amount of damage output (Defender's attack penalty, defense food vs attack food, Gallant's Roll vs Chaos Roll, etc) for very little gain, that is *least* valuable against the very difficult mobs you're touting this as being useful for.



One could perhaps argue that the comparison should be made in terms of absolute gains and losses. After all, a 12% reduction on a 1500-damage attack can keep you alive, while a 12% reduction on a 50-damage hit is barely worth noting. And yes, if you consider it from that perspective, the reductions or increases in damage from Defender and Berserk can be considered static. That is, you get the same absolute increase or decrease in damage regardless of the mob's level.

In that respect, it could be considered the equivalent of Phalanx. A 25% increase in defense vs the sample mob is equivalent to a 29 point phalanx effect. Interestingly, considered as a phalanx-equivalent, it becomes -more- valuable the less defense you have. A DD with 300 defense would have damage reduced by 44 points per hit; a pld with 600 defense (ignoring the quirks of stacking percentage buffs) would have damage reduced by 22 points per hit.

It's also directly proportional to the base damage of the weapon the mob uses, so you could say that you get different phalanx values against mobs of different damage ratings, which maintains its relative value in all cases, whereas Phalanx itself is static and thus becomes exponentially more valuable the lower the base damage of the mob's weapon.



Given that consideration, treating it as a variant on a phalanx effect that scales up with mob damage, it's a decent option. In terms of the trade-offs involved, though (giving up an attack buff in order to gain a defense buff), the player usually loses far more than they gain.

[Chamaan]

Like other people have been saying, when you start dealing with higher level monsters, the small amount of damage reduction from increasing defense is impotent in the face of boosting offensive power. This wouldn't be an issue if we could put up as many buffs as we want, like how Whms throw up Protect just because hey, it doesn't hurt anything, but Cors only get two slots for their buffs. It's not resource efficient.

Here's the point where I make a suggestion. If you really don't want to give us Phalanx that badly. Change Gallant's Roll to reduce the damage from AoE abilities and spells from mobs. Something like Scherzo or Earthern Armor that only works on AoE. That's something you wanted to focus on in Voidwatch and Legion right? If it's a decent boost I'd sure use that in a tank party.

[Byrth]

Ok, assuming a basic ratio function with level correction (and assuming it mirrors player attack level correction), we can solve that with a system of linear equations.

Level correction (+15 levels): +0.75
Base weapon damage: 133
Mob attack: 500

So Level correction applies as a bonus for attacking monsters as well? I didn't know!

[Ophannus]

Never seen Nidhogg hit low level players for like 800 non crit before?

[MarkovChain]

Those of us here who understand how Defense works

Kay, I'll make it simple neither you nor anyone else knows jack shit about how defense work. The pdif formula that have been used for years are notoriously wrong. Secondly a lower cap on pdif isn't excatly informative on how defense work since what matter is only the distribution between low and max damage received. Even when pdif has a lower cap the average damage taken is still partwise linear as a function of cratio and therefore as function of 1/DEF. It means that while static defense gear is technically losing power, stuff like defender is exactly as useful regardless of def.




You also said that high level monster have so much attack that stacking def may not be useful due to having a lower cap. This is definitely not true. What's not true is "the high attack part" being responsible for it. For instance you can do this simple test on monk against chigoes. With countestance and no gear you basically defense free :

your defense = 40 => 117,... damage taken on average
your defense = 54 => 107,... damage taken on average
your defense= 95 => 60,.... damage taken on average



Stacking def is actually beneficial but in your case (HNMs) the problem is not their attack but the level difference term.

[Yinnyth]

neither you nor anyone else knows jack shit

Kettle. Pot. Black.