Effective Hp Cursed and Armor

[Nevuk]

I typed this post out the other night but accidentally closed the tab. Which is just as well as a few more things occurred to me. Basically I'm going to discuss the concept of Effective HP - the amount of damage that needs to be dealt to kill a character. It occurred to me upon reading the discussions of the cursed class after trying one that this was specifically what made them broken end-game. It's an idea I first saw used in the dota / hon communities.

A brief discussion of three kinds of armor systems :

A flat reduction value - I believe this is what is used in TOME. A set amount of armor reduces a set amount of damage dealt in physical damage. So 4 armor will reduce damage by 28, etc (I don't know the real values).

Resistance /% - Damage is reduced by a set %. 50% resistance reduces damage by 50% - (500 deals 250).

Scaling % - Used in dota and most mmos in some form, Each point of armor reduces damage by a scaling %. Dota uses 6%, so 2 points of armor reduces 11%, 3 points 15%, etc.)
(There are items which reduce a flat reduction but this is below the thresholds of stronger neutral enemies and all enemy heroes). The important thing to note about this is that with the concept of effective hp it scales linearly.


Effective hp:
This is easiest to explain with flat resistances. A 500 hp halfling beserker with 70% resistance to fire will require an extremely high amount of fire damage to die. (500 / .3 = 1667.67 fire damage for lethality). Now the important thing to know about balancing is that this affects just how effective healing is for that character. A single point of hp healed for a player will be worth over 3 hp of damage from their opponents in that damage type. The reason that the scaling % scales linearly is that each point actually add 6% to their effective hp, although it makes 100% reduction impossible to reach.

Cursed : What is particularly imbalanced about the cursed class is if their armor is high enough to ignore damage from enemies while letting them still drain hp off of them, in addition to having a talent which naturally gives them a 20 or so % increase in EHP at 10+ hate (cursed body). There's nothing technically wrong with this concept, in effect it just means that they are counter-summoners, something of which tome has too little. So the amount of health you can get from lifelink can mean a substantial increase compared to the amount that healing and regen would be worth to a different class. (I suspect this is why darkgod could load up a end-game cursed and not take damage at all in the end fight). The danger comes in when armor allows them to totally ignore even strong enemies and drain more hp from them than they will ever deal.

I've also seen a few people on the forums mention that stacking armor seems pretty imbalanced in ToME currently, and many classes can do it without too much effort (get about 22 strength, spend two generic points on armor, max stone skin and skeleton armor on a skeleton archmage, etc). One solution to the problem would be to merely switch armor systems without actually changing Cursed, as Cursed do currently feel like one of the most complete classes. It's just one option, though. Switching Cursed's skill to merely do double the amount of damage it currently deals rather than draining HP may be bit more thematic and make the game go slightly faster for them in compensation. I do think that balancing a system like this is considerably easier than the current system, especially with some of the random very late game pieces of armor you can find early on (Stralite or Voratun pieces can make certain things live a very long time).

It can also help to differentiate between defense and armor more - Currently, high enough armor has the same effect as defense in resulting in 0 damage(just says 0 rather than miss). It can even be better to be hit from the damage on hit auras, resulting in the strange need to have low defense but very high armor.

Also, resistances were lowered to be capped at 70% for a similar reason. There are more systems of armor than the ones I know of , these are just the simplest ones to use that I know of. Could switch it to 5% to make the math a bit simpler even.


(A source to back up the 6% increase in ehp per point of armor thing :

Proof:
Consider a hero with 1000 hp and 0 armor. To kill it one needs to deal at least 1000 damage to it.

If we give the hero 10 armor, which is 37.5% damage reduction, every attack would only deal 62.5% of the original value (100% - 37.5% = 62.5%). To kill it now, one needs to deal 1600 damage (1600 * 0.625 = 1000). You could say that the hero now have 600 more effective hp (EHP).

If we instead give the hero 20 armor, which is 54.5% damage reduction. The damage multiplier is now 45.5%. The damage needed to kill would increase to 2200 (2200 * 0.455 = 1000). The increase in EHP is 1200, twice the amount as given by only 10 armor.

http://www.playdota.com/mechanics/damagearmor

[darkgod]

That's one of the best post in favor of non flat armour I saw, grats

Makes me ponder ..

[Grey]

One particular problem with cursed is that heavy armour has no negative effect for them. Maybe it should reduce attack?

But yeah, current armour system can be easily abused, especially with some of the very high armour egos (plush cloaks for instance). One potential solution is having higher APR monsters, though that might just make armour irrelevant. Maybe more enemies should get Sunder Armour?

[Canderel]

Ok... How does armor currently function?

And how does armor work regarding magic?

[Grey]

Armour currently subtracts from damage. An enemy that would hit you for x would instead hit you for (x - y), where y is the armour value. Except... it takes effect before a lot of damage multipliers, so it really negates the damage of a lot of attacks. High enough armour and you're immune to melee and missiles, and this isn't all that hard to achieve against many enemies. Magic is unaffected.

Perhaps criticals should ignore armour? At the moment I believe the critical calculation comes in after the armour reduction, meaning critical attacks can still do incredibly low damage to armoured creatures. Making criticals ignore, or mostly ignore armour would benefit the player in certain circumstances (especially rogues), whilst hindering those that mindlessly melee in heavy armour without watching their HP.

By the same token critical spells could have a certain amount of resistance penetration, so that elemental attacks are still dangerous to those that max out their resistances, and bosses with high resistance can still be overcome.

[marvalis]

The easy solution would be make armor apply before resistance.
Let us assume an endgame character with 70% resist.

Armor after resist:
80 armor: at least 267 damage is needed to at least start doing damage.

Resist after armor:
at least 80-something damage is needed to start doing damage.


This can be quite significant. Armor after resist is just to much.

In terms of armor scaling:
* you could add physical resist to armor (more resist at higher difficulty levels so you can still find 'better' armor)
* Scale armor with strength: add a multiplier * value + a flat value, for example armor = 26 + str/60*26
* Scale armor with level.

Overall I like str the best, given the reasoning that 'the stronger you are, the better you can use your armor'.
Alternatively, you could make higher strength reduce the penalties of wearing heavier armor. That would mean that mage with low str would get a lot more fatigue than a warrior with high str. This would encourage cloth using for casters vs heavy armored warriors.
Str scaling + str based penalty reduction seem like a good way to go to me. It would even fit rogues that should rely more on dex/evasion.

All of this means that armor in the early game will still be overpowered, while significantly weaker in the endgame. This also means that player at the start of the game will need a decent damage output, or even a flat damage bonus so they at least do 15+ dmg against early armored targets (I think they should do at least 25+ but I am being cautious here).

[Dervis]

I found this problem while working on my Insane Cursed (got killed in the end fight twice :S).

Anyway here's the issue:
A level 110 wolf will do 0 (zero) against 10 points of armor. A level 140 orc elite berserker isn't even a real threat anymore once you hit around 40 pts of armor.
This happens because the stat bonus isn't affecting the base attack power as much as it should.

At the moment it is working something like this:
(Damage(power,stat,talent)+APR-Armor)*range*crit*multipliers

Code: Select all

[ATTACK] attacking with innate combat
[COMBAT DAMAGE] power(1.227619) totstat(32.000000) talent_mod(1.000000)
[ATTACK] to 	Dervis	 :: 	19.641897700691	3	17.68	::	1
checkHit	32	12
=> chance to hit	95
[ATTACK] raw dam	19.641897700691	versus	17.68	with APR	3
[ATTACK] after range	5
[PHYS CRIT %]	0
[ATTACK] after crit	5
[ATTACK] after mult	5

What i suggest is applying range before armor and increasing the stat weight a bit, going for something like this:
(Damage(power,stat,talent)*Range+APR-Armor)*crit*multipliers

Also it seems that all mobs have Range 1 unless they're using a weapon, so I'd suggest defaulting this to 1.30 or so or adding range to innate attack.

[Nevuk]

Another non-flat scaling could help with is fighters using shield wall attacking high armor mobs. They would merely deal greatly reduced damage instead of 0, which has always struck me as a little unfair. You don't want to make the talent entirely useless for parts of the early game, or it would be further down the tree.

I suspect APR would also be much more noticeable outside of extreme areas of its effect, as it scales linearly additionally, especially if negative armor values are allowed (But only to an extent, multipliers past 30-40% or so become kind of unfair. It would add a neat flavor to rogues at least if they gained a talent to reduce armor below 0 regardless of changes). Really, the idea behind it is just to make armor more of a normal, intuitive factor in the game as to how the value will effect damage. I honestly have no clue how armor works at the moment beyond knowing that above 20/30 or so very little in the west does damage to you besides casters.

It also means that armor is effective no matter the amount of damage incoming - currently bosses that hit extremely hard can make any level of armor practically meaningless. It would mean that there is not as huge of a difference between a boss mob and a normal mob, but I kind of think of this as a good thing. And bosses' damage could be buffed regardless to higher levels if the feel of them being so powerful was retained. When every enemy in the game besides a few become meaningless the game requires less thought.

[Marcotte]

Just a note: darkgod has changed how armor and APR works in the SVN version.

Now, for every point of armor, damage is reduced by 1%. But this reduction is multiplicative, so if you have X points of armor, and get with 100 damage, you would only have gotten hit by 99 if you had X+1 points of armor. Second, APR works by reducing making some of the damage goes through the armor without reduction, starting from the damage that would have been blocked. So if APR > armor, armor is totally ineffective. And if your armor is huge, every point of APR will make a big difference.

[Final Master]

I have no clue how armor and apr now function with that explanation - any able to give a more direct description?

[edge2054]

It's 0.99 ^ Armor rating

So basically it's a diminishing 1% damage reduction.

In a non-multiplicative system 10 armor would give you 10% reduction.

In this system it gives you 0.99 ^ 10 or 9% and change.

In other words 100% reduction never happens and each point of armor you add past the first gives less reduction then the point ahead of it.

[benli]

I hate to suggest this, but would it make sense to merge armor and physical resistance. It seems they serve almost the same purpose and they only add confusion. Trying to figure out how armor, APR, physical resistance, all resistance, etc. combine in a single attack is hard.

A single system of damage reduction would make things clearer. I think armor/APR could be moved into the existing system of resistance/resistance peircing. That system could then be changed to treat resistances as values instead of percentages and use the .99 ^ X calculation for all types of damage. You could then remove the caps on resistances. 100 physical resist (armor) and 100 fire resist would cause you to take 36% damage. "All" resistance could just add to that the values of the other resistances so 20 "all" resist would give you 100+20=120 physical and 100+20=120 fire resist.

I realize this is a bit of work (especially rebalancing some of the physical attacks), so I'm just putting it out there as an idea for simplifying things.

[Dervis]

I hate to suggest this, but would it make sense to merge armor and physical resistance. It seems they serve almost the same purpose and they only add confusion. Trying to figure out how armor, APR, physical resistance, all resistance, etc. combine in a single attack is hard.

A single system of damage reduction would make things clearer. I think armor/APR could be moved into the existing system of resistance/resistance peircing. That system could then be changed to treat resistances as values instead of percentages and use the .99 ^ X calculation for all types of damage. You could then remove the caps on resistances. 100 physical resist (armor) and 100 fire resist would cause you to take 36% damage. "All" resistance could just add to that the values of the other resistances so 20 "all" resist would give you 100+20=120 physical and 100+20=120 fire resist.

I realize this is a bit of work (especially rebalancing some of the physical attacks), so I'm just putting it out there as an idea for simplifying things.

Perfectly sensible.

On the other hand, tweaking and combining percentual and absolute damage reduction is pretty fun (Antimagic Shield for example) so that should stay in the game somehow. For example:
- All armor items would become % physical resist instead - Iron plate = 3 def, 7% physical resist
- All egos would still be armor (hardened iron plate - 3 def, 7% resist, 8 armor)
- Swap out most talents giving physical resist to armor. Juggernaut, Chant of Fortress, etc.