Query on Armour and Resistances!

[machinus]

Both Wikis about the game are horribly outdated. Don't trust anything about them, topics like this is where the good info is at!

Will you be doing MPQ mining on release?

[galzohar]

So...this means physical damage is treated like any other "type" and given a resistance statistic?

Explain to me the difference between "resist all" and %DR from armor?

Yes.

And no real difference, except that you will surely have quite a bit more than 0 armor even with all white items, while your resistances will be very minimal without +int gear or at least being a wizard/wd, so at least for the "all white gear" guy int will provide a better defensive value than strength. Though resistance and armor stats will probably provide a much better benefit so you won't bother with either if they aren't your primary (aka damage increasing) stat.

[jokewood]

And of course, avoid double-effects whenever possible, such as the int/resist/armor/str fiasco that we have right now.

I do wonder why they kept armor and resistances as two different stats instead of rolling them into one catch-all mitigation stat, now that they do ostensibly the same thing. It feels very ungainly to me, and I'd have to think that it will make even less sense to the majority of players (i.e. the type that aren't remotely interested in theorycraft).

[arcanedreams]

Ok so I was going to try to get resit skills on my barb, but it seems from this thread armor resists magic too, so i should just focus on armor.

BUT.

Are the two resists calculated separately?

Going by that graph if you have 8k armor, you kinda stop gaining resistance at a decent rate.
So after 8k armor should you go for resists?

My example question: If you have 50% resist to fire and your armor gives 50% damage reduction, lets say you get hit for a 1k fireball.

50% fire resist, so 500 damage. THEN does your armor mitigate more, so 50% of that..250 damage in the end?

[machinus]

Based on the way the two effects are described in the descriptions, I would say that armor and resist have to be multiplicative.

That is, defense is calculated in this way (this is my guess):

dodge/avoid/evade check (now known as just Dodge)
block check, damage reduction applied
absorbs applied (not sure how absorb works yet)
resistance reduction applied
armor reduction applied

So if you have no dodge, blocking, or absorb, what will happen is you will reduce incoming damage of each type by each resist% and then apply your armor reduction % to every damage type. So if your "physical resistance" (ugh what a terrible concept) ends up being 20% and your damage reduction is 50%, you will take (1-.2)(1-.5)=.4 or 40% damage from physical attacks.

This makes the most sense to me considering the D2 damage system and the descriptions given for these systems.

[jokewood]

Ok so I was going to try to get resit skills on my barb, but it seems from this thread armor resists magic too, so i should just focus on armor.

BUT.

Are the two resists calculated separately?

Going by that graph if you have 8k armor, you kinda stop gaining resistance at a decent rate.
So after 8k armor should you go for resists?

My example question: If you have 50% resist to fire and your armor gives 50% damage reduction, lets say you get hit for a 1k fireball.

50% fire resist, so 500 damage. THEN does your armor mitigate more, so 50% of that..250 damage in the end?

See superstate's post:

I might have something for this weekend!


For now though I'll say this:

It is important to realize that Strength and Intelligence scales linearly with EHP in respect to themselves. I should say that they scale linearly with eachother as well, but the difference is that "the k of the two linear functions aren't necessarily equal". They will work very much like the synergy between increasing crit and strike size, where increasing one stat will improve the value of the other stats relatively. For example, if you're at 1000 intellect and 100 strength, increasing strength by 1 point will likely yield a larger sum of EHP gain than increasing intellect.


What you'll end up with is a number for a ratio, a theoretical equivalence where adding 1 Strength = 1 Intelligence in terms of EHP gain. This might be at a 1:1 ratio, ie you would aim for having as equal amounts of Intelligence and Strength possible. I haven't looked it up where the ratio will be at, but I figure it might "wobble" a bit between levels, since the functions for calculating the DR is using discrete sums of level (you can't be level 59,7886 for example, or you can be but the game won't make that distinction).


So on a finishing note, it isn't a certainty by any means that you can shuffle around between Strength and Intelligence however you wish and retain the same level of survivability. There will be tiny, tiny differencies. And when I say tiny I very much mean around a hundreth of a percent different.

[arcanedreams]

Jokewood I understand in terms of that, what I'm after is my passives, and the scaling and calculations between the two armor and resistance.

For example if I have high armor already, the curve of damage reduction goes down. So I could take the passive that increases armor by 40% to raise it lots more, or grab 50% resistances. Depending on how it calculates, if it rolls against both resists, one will be better than the other.

His post is more about choosing strength gear over int and so on, not large percentage increase to armor or resists.
I get he is saying it is good to have armor and resists about equal, but I wonder at what breaking points.
A 50% increase to resists might not yield as much as 40% increase to armor depending on your base armor and resists.

[galzohar]

Yes, if your armor gives more damage reduction than your resists, it's better to increase armor by X% than to increase resists by the same X%. If the % is different, of course, you should probably just re-calculate on a case-by-case basis. Even if the resistance % increase is much higher (think war cry runes), it still does no good if you don't have any resistances. Whether you will or will not have any resistances depends on the affixes and their availability. You'll definitely have some extra armor from having strength on all your items, but whether you'll have much resistance via int, or more likely via resistance affixes, is not known yet, and might even be up to your item selection.

[zakaluka]

 Dex Range      Dodge% / Dex

   0 -  100         0.1
 100 -  500         0.025
 500 - 1000         0.02
1000 - 8000         0.01

8000 Dexterity = 100% chance to dodge

I am very interested in this. The only reason I can see for making a piecewise function like this is if the implementation to make EHP actually linear vs dex involved a logarithm. Even fast logarithm algs involve populating an array with exponents, so a piecewise-linear implementation makes the hit/dodge calculation a tiny fraction of what it would be otherwise. Basically if they did it in a more elegant way all combat would require many times more computation. Bad for the bottom line when all events get computed server-side.

Gonna think this one through.

Remember what we've learned from other games: if there's a %dodge mechanic, and it's linear until certain breakpoints, our EHP will have an exponential upward slope as we stack dodge. Until those breakpoints, where it'll flatten out significantly. Basically the last 50 points of dex from 450-500 are the most valuable per budget in terms of EHP; if you can't get near that breakpoint you probably want to itemize around the next lower one.

[galzohar]

No logarithms here. Simple +,*,/ operations is all you need to convert between damage reduction % to EHP bonus.

The areas where dodge % is linear to dex are small enough that the EHP will be almost linear too, as you'll see if you make a graph (or look for the one I posted in another thread) of EHP as a function of dex.