dev1069 Phantom Roll Effect Adjustments feedback

[Ophannus]

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

[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.

[Ophannus]

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

[Mirabelle]

Calling people out over knowledge of defense stat is a bit childish. I think even those of us who have no programming or math skills at all have still seen the relative inefficiency of the stat over years of play, even if we don't know the particulars.

As Chamann said, a Protect/cocoon type roll would be so bad if it cost nothing to use. But it costs an attack roll which in the scheme of things is significantly more valuable both in enmity generation and in killing efficiency over a modest reduction in damage.

At least a phalanx roll sometimes has a bit of usefulness (ex. pulling EP/DC mobs for a Fell Cleave party). A protectra roll would be a waste of a buff roll.

[Motenten]

Just wanted to note that this is probably a reasonable estimate of an actual lvl 114 mob. Tossing in a base 415 defense (roughly what my nin would have with Protect V on; nin used because that's what I'm gear as at the moment), average damage taken when using berserk would be about 313, which is about in line with what I see from high level mobs. Accounting for level correction means mobs don't need d200+ weapons (as I often heard claimed years ago) to be hitting for 300 damage a swipe.

And yes, switching from Berserk to Defender does reduce average damage taken a fair bit; with Defender, average damage would be about 228, which increases the time it would take the mob to kill me by an extra hit or two. On the other hand, switching from Defender to Berserk triples my average damage done, going from 20 to 60 in this simplistic model (note: lots of things not accounted for, or fudged to keep the math simple; don't take this as absolutely accurate).


And a random thought that just crossed my mind as a suggestion for what to do with Gallant's Roll: Make it a boost to all defense skill proc rates -- Parry, Shield and Guard (but not evasion, since that's already covered by Nin's roll). With things like Shield Mastery and Tactical Parry, it could give a slight boost to offense while still performing the role of a defensive buff. Further, it would be a periodic full or very high reduction in damage, rather than a constant low-level reduction in damage, and there are times when that's the more useful form.

Caveat: I have not given any serious though to the full implications of such a roll, though I'll note that yes, it will be significantly more valuable for a pld (who would get both parry and shield) than it would be for anyone else, and I think that's probably a good thing.

[Byrth]

I don't see how single directional level correction would make it impossible to calculate. It would just always be the same as your EM case.

[Motenten]

I don't see how single directional level correction would make it impossible to calculate. It would just always be the same as your EM case.

Simple exercise: Figure out the attack and weapon damage of the mob used in Mocchi's example without using any level correction. Let me know what you come up with.

[Byrth]

Simple exercise: Figure out the attack and weapon damage of the mob used in Mocchi's example without using any level correction. Let me know what you come up with.

So you're assuming that the numbers he provided are some kind of absolute average?

Unknown Attack enemy -> unknown ratio, assumed to be absolute averages of many hits. Increasing his defense by 44% decreased his damage taken by 20%, where we normally would have predicted 30% without level correction. If they were single hits, being off by 20 damage (10%) is nothing. Keep in mind this is the SE guy that went and "tested" TH10>TH9 by killing things.

[Motenten]

We can infer that they are supposed to be generally consistent representations of expected damage (I expect them to represent cRatio rather than actual average pDif, as that's the simplest way of conveying the value), otherwise the point he was trying to illustrate would be meaningless. If the numbers picked were some random sampling out of the full pDif range, there's literally no meaning in saying that defense reduces damage taken, since the numbers could be -anything-.

This is further backed up by Bayohne's post; if the intent is to provide a simple illustration of how defense works to those who may not be as math-savvy, and they choose non-representative samples of the damage done, they are effectively lying to their audience. I doubt they would want the fallout of being caught directly lying about basic game mechanics (as opposed to merely bad testing methodology, as in the TH post, where they didn't assert any actual numbers).

Regardless, it wouldn't be too hard to test for mob level correction with a little level syncing, to verify one way or the other.

[SpankWustler]

You're going off the assumption that the person conducting the test understood the subject matter and college freshman statistics; thus knowing there could be samples miles and miles away from the average, and knowing the importance of getting hit a bunch of times rather than just once for each defense value.

I really super-duper hope you're right, because otherwise I am probably going to snap this cheap 12$ keyboard over my own head in a demi-human feat of rage. Given some of the stuff that's gone on lately, however, I can not share your level of confidence.

Edit: Not that any of this has any impact on level correction's presence. I just enjoy complaining. It's good for the bodily humors or something.