Monday, September 29, 2008

Lets talk about resists...

Another nerd post... woot. This one may be short tho, because I'm sitting in the queue for the server. 

Ok, so it looks like Resist get applied *after* the damage calculation has been made. 

So, lets go back to our ability formula:

Special = (((Str/10)*2 + WDps)*1.5+Add)*(1-Armor)  where Armor is the percentage value of melee mitigation, converted to a decimal... so 61.4% mitigation would be .614 yadda yadda yadda.

So it appears that resists (or in melee's case, toughness) get applied post-formula. This isn't a massive deal or anything; just figuring out how things work. 

Magic attacks, that are based of strength (chosen, w00t) appear to have a tactical advantage, as they ignore all armor, and melee mitigation (at least on medium and up targets) appears to be significantly less that magic resistances. 

For a Chosen's Ravage.. the forumla would look like this:
Special = (((Str/10)*2 + WDps)*1.5+Add)*(1-Resistance)

Where, on a tank or medium melee DPS, you'll see armor values as high as 75%.. resistances typically run somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30%, with 50% achievable being buffed. However, when dealing with Chosen you've got to take into account resist debuff aura's and Blast Wave.... but then there's also Armor Debuffs too. 

Basically... this post just kind of correlates how the forumlas change in relation to the Chosen. Which is cool with me... cause that's what I play ;P 

Friday, September 26, 2008

Holy Crap-sick!

Man, it's been a rough couple of days... so no updates on ye'ole blog. 

Monday, went home sick.. which, if you know me it takes A LOT to make me leave work; because, lets face it, I'm a dedicated work-a-holic. 

Tuesday - Cold sweats, fever, temp would go from like 96 to 103; it was a crazy night and day. I thought I started feeling better on Wednesday, but then about 3:45-4:30 I started feeling like crap again.. then went to the doctor that night (now you know I didn't feel good; I hate Doctors).  They did X-Rays, made me pee in a cup, shoved a q-tip up my nose and tickled my brain... all this crazy stuff.

In short; this week has kinda not been fun... but it's been awesome too; cause I got to spend a lot of time with Jill, and got to play some WAR weds and thursday. 

EDIT:   Here's jack coming back from the groomers this weekend, before I got sick =)



Monday, September 22, 2008

To Nerd... or not to Nerd?

Credit To Disquette for doing most of the Calc's... its an informative post none the less... for like, 450,000 people out of what, 6 billion?


This post cover's how it looks like Combat mechanics in terms of stats and abilities work in WAR. This is taking out quite a bit, and is kind of simplied.. but hey; the games been out what, four days?

Lets cover Stats
     Strength - this increases your auto-attack melee dps by 0.1 dps per strength
    Toughness  reduces the dps done to you by 0.1 dps / toughness.
    Weapon DPS - Damage per second 
    Weapon Speed - how many seconds it takes for each auto-attack swing of your weapon


Ok, so for a basic weapon swing... this looks like it's the auto-attack formula.

Dmg = ((Str/10) + Wdps)*(Wspeed)*(1-Armor)

Where Str is the DPS increase from your base stats, and armor is the Mitigation due to your targets Armor rating. 

Now, keep in mind this is just for auto attack... or 'white-damage' for you WoW folks.  Now, this hits, what... once every 4 seconds? depends on the weapon speed... so most of what you're going to be doing are Special Attacks. These are attacks that can be injected into the auto-attack sequence, and are special 'abilities' that toss in additional damage and effects; We're just concerned about damage here right now tho. 

So; here's the forumla: 
Special = (((Str/10)*2 + Wdps)*1.5 + Add)*(1-armor)

So keeping the same variables as above, we just introduce 2 more:
Special damage - This is the total damage the hit is going to cause, after the ability is factored in. 
Add - Additional Damage listed on the Abilities tooltip (straight damage without variability)

The interesting thing to note... is that there is no variability here, aside from Crits (still working on bonus damage figures and coefficients). Whenever a tooltip says "Ravage: yadda yadda yadda... 63 Damage"  that's the bottom line... that additional damage is going to be 63 every single time. The only variability that really comes into play is your stats vs. the monsters toughness and armor.  Which, if you know those values, then you can actually calculate what your damage will be on every single yet (again, the exception being Crits) for every single ability. 


If you're looking for a RAW DPS increase... you're going to need to stack Strength, as, aside from the mosters attacks and your weapons, it's the only stat that has a direct influence on damage caused. Other ways to increase DPS would be via Toughness debuffs or Armor debuffs; as those stats come into play with each attack (special and auto). 

Weapon skill comes into play somewhere... WS being the ability to penetrate a certain percentage of mitigation from Armor; however it looks like it comes into play AFTER the initial damage calculation and reduction; thus making it a less than Ideal stat to stack. However, gaining a lot of Weapon Skill you would see an increase in damage, however it doesn't look like it comes into play as much as Strength. Also, you've got to factor in low-armor and armor-debuffed opponents.  Armor penetration is a less than ideal stat whenever a target is already debuffed to sub-5% mitigation anyways.. Talisman's and gear could yeild a stronger ROI on Strength, or furthering your own Mitigation (resists and toughness). 




Woot, first post?

So I've been keeping a Sea Doo Blog before... but since I sold the 'doo (RIP), I haven't really kept up with it. So, I decided since Katie keeps a blog (which is coool) and everyone is always so busy.. but constantly on their PC's, I'd start one!

Blogs are an awesome place to type out thoughts, ideas and to vent... which is just cool. 

Picked the title.. because, well, that'l be what I write about most I guess =D that and Nerd stuff / number crunching. I'm not shooting for daily updates or anything like that; though I may end up updating it a lot more than I think.... just not setting any massive expectations!

There's gonna be a lot of Nerd talk, numbers and forumlas, schanuzer adoration, church-sp33k and Fiancee/Wive love up in ch'eere... so buckle up!

EDIT: and for you grammar types; there's going to be some aweful sentance fragments, some miss-spellings, over use of hyphens and probably some wrong verb-tensing;. If I'm feeling frisky; I might even make up a couple of words here and there too. So if this bugs you, avert your eyes!