Welcome to Project: Gorgon!


Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) that features an immersive experience that allows the player to forge their own path through exploration and discovery. We won't be guiding you through a world on rails, and as a result there are many hidden secrets awaiting discovery. Project: Gorgon also features an ambitious skill based leveling system that bucks the current trend of pre-determined classes, thus allowing the player to combine skills in order to create a truly unique playing experience.

The Project: Gorgon development team is led by industry veteran Eric Heimburg. Eric has over a decade of experience working as a Senior and Lead Engineer, Developer, Designer and Producer on successful games such as Asheron’s Call 1 and 2, Star Trek Online and other successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games.



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  1. #1
    Senior Member Yaffy's Avatar
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    Estimating the Value of Mitigation

    When I talk about tanking and damage reduction, some players get confused when I mention the "Value" of different mitigation types. What does it mean when someone says one source of mitigation is more "Valuable" than another? I wanted to make this thread to try and answer these questions, as well as to give some insight on how building around damage reduction works.

    As any player knows, damage and attacks are separated into different types and categories, such as melee, ranged, physical, elemental, etc. Just like how attacks have different types, players have to build defense towards specific damage types because the vast majority of defensive bonuses only work towards certain damage. For example, using equipment with fire resistance on it will help you against enemies that do fire damage, but it will be worthless against enemies that do cold damage.
    However, damage types are unevenly distributed. For example, physical damage types are significantly more common than other damage types across the game. This means that overall, 1 physical mitigation is more valuable than 1 mitigation in other types since it will reduce more damage.

    The difficult part is trying to calculate the exact value of different mitigation. 1 slashing mitigation might be more valuable than 1 lightning mitigation, but by how much? Is 1 slashing worth 5 lightning mitigation? How about 10? What makes this more difficult is that this value could change depending on where you are. There are lots of places where lightning damage enemies don't exist, and therefore slashing mitigation is infinitely more useful in those cases. Furthermore, their value changes depending on your current mitigation. Physical mitigation might be more valuable normally, but the more you build into it, the more damage other damage types will do in comparison, therefore making them more valuable. After all, it doesn't help much if you're immune to physical damage if the occasional lightning mob is the one killing you.

    Weighing Damage Types
    In order to figure out the value of mitigation, we can give damage types a "Weight", which is to say what percentage of damage we expect to take. For example, if we expect 60% of the damage we take to be slashing, and 40% of the damage to be fire, then we can say that the value of the two damage types is 3:2. To put this into practical terms, an "Optimal" build in this case would build 2 fire resistance for every 3 slashing resistance.

    As an example, I have created spreadsheet to estimate the weight of different damage types in Gazluk Keep, the current end game dungeon in Gorgon. To do this, I listed each elite enemy in the dungeon and which forms of attacks they do. Essentially, it's counting damage types to moves.


    So with this, I have created an estimate of the value of each damage type. Now obviously this chart is not completely accurate for many reasons. First off, players have some control over what attacks hit them, while this chart assumes you'll get hit by everything. Secondly, the chart assumes you'll be fighting everything and in equal numbers, which is almost certainly not going to happen. Lastly, I am assuming each enemy does the same DPS, which isn't true. I wanted to get exact DPS numbers, but unfortunately it's very difficult to get that through the json files. Lastly, this chart doesn't account for non-elite mobs, which you may or may not want to pay attention to. However, even with these issues, the chart still gives a helpful estimate, and the discrepancy between certain damage values reveals a lot.

    Observations for Gazluk Keep
    So based off of the above chart, we can draw a lot of conclusions (For GK specifically). You can make your own conclusions based on your specific build, but here are some general observations.
    1. A majority of damage in Gazluk comes from melee attacks. This means melee evasion is the most useful form of reducing damage overall.
    2. Slashing is the most common form of damage, followed by Fire. This means tank players should make sure to build these
    3. Ice, Trauma, Psychic, Nature and Electric damage are not particularly important.

    Some more specific observations we can make are how helpful certain sources of mitigation are. For example, Unarmed has a mod that reduces physical damage by 18% passively. If we estimate that 56% of the damage in Gazluk is physical, then we can say that the mod reduces damage in Gazluk by 10.08%. We can use that number to compare it to other sources of mitigation.
    For example, Shield's Elemental Ward gives 100% elemental resistance, but only for 10 seconds. Because it has a 30 second cooldown, we can say that this buff has a 33% upkeep time and therefore reduces Elemental damage by 33%(Actually slightly less, but let's keep things simple). If a player was using this ability all the time, they would reduce GK's damage by 6.33%. Therefore, with no other forms of mitigation, the unarmed passive will reduce more damage overall.

    Here's the kicker though, physical mitigation is significantly easier to get than elemental mitigation. It's not difficult for an unarmed user to get 50% physical resistance or more through their other abilities. Let's make the same decision again, but assume the player already has 50% physical resistance. In this case, physical damage would now have a weight of 28%, and elemental would have a weight of about 31%. In this case, the unarmed passive would have a value of only 5.04%, and Elemental Ward would have a value of 10.33%. This is an excellent example of how the value of certain defenses change as you build, and why it's important to have a good mix of different mitigations.

    With that said, here are some notable forms of mitigation:
    Blocking Stance: 18.6%
    Telka's Teeth "Canine" : 13.6%(Very notable for being evasion based, and therefore stacks with damage type mitigation very well. ALSO RAKSHASA ONLY)
    Headbutt: 15.12% (Average when fully modded)
    Combat Echolation: 7% (Not a lot, but scales perfectly with everything)

    Conclusion
    Anyways, I hope that this gives a bit of insight on how to "Weigh" different forms of mitigation against one another, and hopefully it will help with building/designing damage mitigation builds! This is something I wanted to do for a bit, so hopefully it's helpful for someone out there. Also this should explain why I get so excited at something as silly as a 15% fire resistance hat being added to the game. (Also thanks Beta for your help with the json files. They were very useful even if I couldn't get exact damage numbers).

    P.S. Yes, the simple act of being a Rakshasa and drinking an easy to get potion will make you a better tank than the vast majority of skills and stacks with the best ones incredibly well, basically acting as a third tanking skill. It also gives melee tanks a lot of extra damage! Telka's teeth might be a bit unfair.
    Last edited by Yaffy; 06-21-2019 at 04:47 PM.



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