Quote Originally Posted by SpankWustler View Post
I really should have included "effectively" because yeah, that is technically how defense works. In retrospect, saying "Much like my wiener is an effective device for extinguishing flames. Let me at that forest fire in rural Nevada, Chief!" would have been cleverer anyway.

I've been trying to find a decent explanation or model of monster pDIF/player defense effects/etc. so I can complain harder about this. I keep finding stuff about avatars and various pets instead. You actually have a concrete number for a concrete thing, so I'm hopeful you could point me towards some of this stuff or just provide a relatively thorough explanation if you can be bothered?
To be perfectly honest, I'm having the same problems finding the data that I originally read. The 1.0 cRatio bound for monsters was something that was brought up years ago at this point, I just have a fairly wonky memory. A lot of the current pDif discussion is focused on players rather than monsters, and it doesn't seem like BGWiki has been updated with the old monster pDif data (or if it has, I'm being dumb and can't find the page). A lower bound on cRatio makes sense, however, because you can see that monsters of any level never, ever have less than 0.38 cRatio as this would allow them to hit for 0 regardless of their base damage.

An exact lower bound on cRatio is fairly easy to test if someone needs to recreate the original data, it would just be immensely time consuming. As far as I know, the model it follows is the same as it is for players, aside from the lower bound and the general lack of level correction for monsters (aside from Signet). Byrth probably has a better idea of where to find data this old, if you want to pursue it further.

What this means in practice, however, is that the minimum pDif roll that any monster can hit with 1.0 cRatio is 0.699 on a non-crit - which is to say, even with "Capped" defense a monster will still be able to hit you for 70% of his total weapon damage (base + fStr). Considering the kind of base damages that the monsters you'd want to cap defense on have, and the stagnant curve for player HP growth, this isn't exactly stellar.