Estimating the Value of Mitigation

[Yaffy]

Yaffy, I'm sorry again for putting this here. This thread was just supposed to be a handy explanation of weights of defensive stats ( and you did a good job of that, btw)

Yeah, in retrospect I should have left this alone as I suspect it's going to derail Yaffy's excellent thread.

No worries, I don't mind at all, as long as it leads to some productive discussion. I was mostly just doing a big info dump and didn't really know if I'd get many replies on it anyways, since I don't know what kind of comments people would make.

That said, I expect physical mitigation will always be a bit more useful than the others, just because so many monsters have claws and pincers and so on.
Since I'm still using GK as the prototype for group combat, I've already made some changes to it for next update -- and I may make a few more based on this thread, just to make it a bit more varied. GK is a really big place, after all...

That's ok, because physical mitigation is very common and easy to get. By default, physical mitigation is the most important for any character, but as people build more of it, it's more important for them to build other types of mitigation. In fact, it would actually be very unfair if all the damage types were spread out evenly, as some forms of resistance are very difficult to acquire.

I commonly state that fire is actually the most valuable resistance, despite my chart stating that there's only half as much fire as there is slashing. That's because it's very easy to get to a point where you can reduce slashing damage by more than half (Unmodded Staff already reduces it by 53%), but fire damage mitigation is very limited and therefore it will usually end up being the problem for any "Tank" build. If you made it so every damage type was even, then players would have difficulty building defenses against some of them just because there aren't enough good tools for it in the game.

For example, electric is mostly unmitigatable because there's even fewer good sources of defense against it than fire. If a lot more electric mobs were added to Gazluk, that would mean the difference between a dedicated tank build and a character with no mitigation would shrink, because both would take very similar damage. Currently, tanking can be quite noticeable mostly because a majority of the damage is physical, and therefore players can build against it and take significantly less damage overall compared to other characters.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that although it might sound bad to have uneven damage types, it's totally fine since the availability of mitigation to players is also uneven. If a big majority of mitigation leans towards physical damage, that's ok if physical damage makes up a majority of the damage players are taking. It's not the best scenario, but it's not bad either. In a perfect world, we would have a diverse set of damage types, but we would also have a lot of options to build around them as well. A world where there's a diverse set of damage types but no way to build around a lot of them is a nightmare!

P.S If you want to give players more damage resistance, I would say a good way to add it in fairly would be to put it on equipment as a base property (Possibly dropping near the mob or from it). That way everyone can use it, but by taking up an equipment slot it means players need to make choices between that resistance or other items in that slot.

The high-powered versions are also supposed to be pretty rare, so if you're getting enough of them to reliably run GK with them, that sounds like there's a bug somewhere...

I have over 50, mostly from buying them from used vendors like Niph said. Since the potions are inherently useless to many players, it's very easy to buy them. They might be troublesome for one player to farm, but the player base collects a lot overall. I don't think players would have trouble buying enough Canine from other players as two or three is all you need for one run. Even if it was very hard to collect, the weaker versions of the potion are still quite useful as well. Even the molar version, which is half as strong, has a higher value than Elemental Ward according to my estimates, and that's one of the biggest reasons to run Shield in a tanking set! I honestly don't think the withdrawal effect matters, because the potion is so useful and easy to collect (In some version) that you should basically have it up all the time anyways and only suffer withdrawal when you're done fighting.

I hate to ruin stuff that makes the classes unique, but even if there are planned to be similar items for other races, I'm not sure if I like the idea of them boosting specific things. Telka's Tooth is most helpful to tanks who use melee attacks, so this essentially makes Rakshasa THE race to play for melee tanks (And makes anyone playing Human/Elf tank regret their decision). Unless if the other race's versions do the same thing, this goads each race into playing a certain style. If the Human/Elf variant boosted ranged damage instead, then that would make them the ranged class (And make anyone playing ranged builds on Rakshasa gets upset).

Something that might make the potions a bit less painful is trying to make their effects more flexible so they aren't "Role specific". Right now the Telka's Teeth is much more helpful for melee users than ranged users, and while melee evasion is helpful for anyone, it's significantly more helpful for tanks, so anyone who wants to make a melee tank should clearly play Rakshasa unless if the other racial consumables do the same thing or are even better. However, if the potions increased all direct damage and gave burst evasion instead, that would be helpful to all Rakshasa in general. If all the racial consumables were designed in a similar manner, this would avoid the issue of certain roles being blatantly better on specific races, while still allowing for useful, racially locked consumables. Some balance problems are still unavoidable, as it's almost certain that some race will have better general boosts for a specific build than another race (At least in someone's opinion), but at least it will be better than having no, or minimal boosts for "Picking the wrong race" for the kind of build you want to play.