Developers or experts please help: Cow, Unarmed, and mitigation questions

Community and Devs:

I am looking for some help from someone (or devs) who has played and tested Unarmed and certain mitigation mods at length as well as the Cow mods which seem far more straightforward and I believe they stack in an additive form. However, I have no conclusive results or findings on the cow ones which are apparently additive. The shield proc ones from Unarmed are very confusing to me and I have not tested them much yet. So, from reading the forums I have gathered that they are all separate proc chances (not stacking) that can proc on each hit and give the % chance provided and the % shield noted in the treasure mod. However, I'm a bit confused by the possibilities of me being wrong and its harder for me to test this one. Also, this feedback would help in understanding mitigation in general and how they are added, applied, in what order, and even armor and other mitigation forms: how does all of this work together. In old Dungeons and Dragons there were rules about when certain "rolls" happened, who got the "initiative" or first strike, etc. This is similar and I'd love to know, particularly because the posts I have read on it didn't provide much info and were older.

You don't have to read all the mods I list if you get what I am saying because a bit of them are redundant and I wanted to catch as many as I could in case some are applied differently.

The following mods in question are mods such as these:

Mitigation proc % based:

Unarmed attacks have a 21% chance to conjure a magical field that mitigates 10% of all physical damage you take for 1 minute (or until 100 damage is mitigated).

Unarmed attacks have a 21% chance to conjure a magical field that mitigates 10% of all physical damage you take for 1 minute (or until 100 damage is mitigated).

Unarmed attacks have a 14% chance to conjure a magical field that mitigates 10% of all physical damage you take for 1 minute (or until 100 damage is mitigated). Damage mitigated in this way is automatically added to the damage you do with your next Kick attack.

Unarmed attacks have a 14% chance to conjure a magical field that mitigates 10% of all physical damage you take for 1 minute (or until 100 damage is mitigated). Damage mitigated in this way is automatically added to the damage you do with your next Kick attack

Headbutt deals +20% damage and conjures a magical field that mitigates 20% of all physical damage you take for 10 seconds (or until 200 damage is mitigated)

While using Unarmed skill, 18% of all Slashing, Piercing, and Crushing damage you take is mitigated and added to the damage done by your next Punch or Jab

While using Unarmed skill, 18% of all Slashing, Piercing, and Crushing damage you take is mitigated and added to the damage done by your next Punch or Jab

Etc.

Treasure effects/mods from Cow that are simply +x:

Chew Cud increases your mitigation versus Crushing attacks +19 for 10 seconds
Chew Cud increases your mitigation versus Crushing attacks +19 for 10 seconds

Chew Cud increases your mitigation versus Slashing attacks +19 for 10 seconds
Chew Cud increases your mitigation versus Slashing attacks +19 for 10 seconds

Chew Cud increases your mitigation versus Piercing attacks +19 for 10 seconds
Chew Cud increases your mitigation versus Piercing attacks +19 for 10 seconds

For 30 seconds after you use Moo of Determination, any physical (Slashing/Piercing/Crushing) attacks that hit you are reduced by 22. This absorbed damage is added to your next Front Kick.

There may be others and there are also ones for acid and other non physical damage (in both cow and unarmed) that I didn't list but I assume would work the same as the physical ones as their text is listed in an identical manner except the form of damage being mitigated.



Questions:

How do the % based ones stack?
How do the % based shields (procs) stack for unarmed?
How do the +slashing, piercing, crushing straight numbers from cow apply (additive, multiplicative, etc)?

Any help on these and any that I missed that function differently would be greatly appreciated. It is expensive building a full set of equipment and I will have these questions even when we get new levels of them and new equipment at level 100 or 150. Thanks so much for bothering to read this wall of text and for answering or providing comments if you do.


((TLDR: How do the % based ones stack?
How do the % based shields (procs) stack for unarmed?
How do the +slashing, piercing, crushing straight numbers from cow apply (additive, multiplicative, etc)?))

Generally speaking:

If a treasure mod says there's a percentage chance of something happening, those percentage chances are always rolled separately. If you have two "10% chance to blah" mods, that's two dice rolls for a 10% chance, not one 20% chance.

Additive bonuses for damage, mitigation, and everything else I can think of stack. (There are probably exceptions, but not for typical combat stats.)

Multiplicative bonuses for damage and mitigation also stack. They are added together before multiplication. Two "+10% base damage" mods give you +20% base damage.

When calculating damage, the order of calculation is:
- additive damage for that ability (e.g. +5 to Slashing Strike)
- additive damage for that damage type (e.g. +5 to Slashing Damage)
- multiplicative damage for that ability (e.g. +10% Slashing Strike damage)
- multiplicative damage for that damage type (e.g. +5% Slashing damage)

(That's off the top of my head, and there's lots of weird cases because there's hundreds of weird stats, but that's the gist for basic damage.)

Bubble mods ("magical field that protects") are a special case of the usual stacking. They are real procs ("procedures") in the old-school sense, meaning that each bubble adds a little bit of code to your character briefly, and that code intercepts the damage calculation to mitigate damage by X%. If you have two of those, they both apply, but since they are separate code snippets, they don't combine; they are each applied one by one.

Example: if you have two 10% mitigation bubbles and take 100 damage, then the first 10% mitigation would remove 10 damage, and the second one would see the damage as being 90, so would mitigate 9, for a total of 19 mitigation. (If they were additive like other percentage mods, two of them would mitigate 20, not 19.)

Bubbles, reflections, drains, and anything else that falls outside of the basic combat flow are implemented as callbacks (or procs if you prefer) that intercept the combat flow and change the results. Those are applied individually, one after the other, in the order they were buffed onto your character.

(At the risk of making this more complicated than necessary, I wanted to add that percentage-chance-to-do-X mods are also implemented as callbacks, which is why they are each rolled separately. And since the MUD term "proc" means both the callback ("procedure") and the act of the procedure going off (or "procing"), you could say that the mod "21% chance to conjure a magical field that mitigates 10% of all physical damage" is a proc that can proc a proc. And that explains why I don't usually use the term "proc" for anything!)

Great explanation of mechanics. Thanks for taking the time Citan!

Since you mention you are in the process of building a set of armor, what I've gone for first are straight mitigation mods (18% of slashing is mitigated etc), then things i can trigger such as headbutt giving a 20% mitigation, and then the various % chance of magical fields. Fights can be very quick and you don't often have time to build up those bubbles. But in a spot where you are constantly fighting, like GK, they can build up nicely and give you some real protection.

Sorry it took me so long to reply and thank you Citan. I really appreciate your time. I feel like you may have explained parts of this in other posts I had read but I couldn't recall where and I hadn't seen the full explanation. I'm bookmarking this for future reference as it is really useful. Please let us know, if possible, if there are any major changes to damage calculations before launch? Thanks!!!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Citan

Generally speaking:
Additive bonuses for damage, mitigation, and everything else I can think of stack. (There are probably exceptions, but not for typical combat stats.)

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How do they stack? is flat mitigation calculated first? is % mitigation calculated first? You didn't answer that part of his question at all, unless knowledge of this is some well kept secret?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by overtyped

How do they stack? is flat mitigation calculated first? is % mitigation calculated first? You didn't answer that part of his question at all, unless knowledge of this is some well kept secret?

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Going off memory of what Yaffy said in Discord, flat mitigation is first, but there are a couple of weird exceptions (one Ice Magic ability iirc and maybe another ability) that actually affect i can't quite remember but some distinction between increasing resistances and lowering damage and basically it more or less in those couple of oddball cases works in the opposite order.

The attacker's damage is calculated using the steps I listed above, then that amount is applied to the target(s). The target subtracts their mitigation, then multiplies the remainder by the appropriate damage-type vulnerability.

There are definitely exceptions and lots of special cases -- a few are intentional one-offs, but others are bugs, or works-in-progress. An example of the latter -- we recently added new vulnerabilities based on attack form: Melee Vulnerability, Burst Vulnerability, etc. You would think those would be applied at the same time as the damage-type vulnerabilities, but right now they're applied earlier, before mitigation is applied. That's a bug -- but one I decided wasn't important right now, since we barely use those vulns yet. It'll become a higher-priority issue when we use them for more stuff.

If there's something in particular that doesn't seem to work right, it's not a bad idea to report it -- even if it's a known issue, seeing someone report it means that somebody cares about it, which raises its priority at least a little bit!