New ATK and Accuracy value analysis

[trevius]

So, after further testing, I am noticing that NPCs are now hitting for up to their max damage, which makes me think that mitigation isn't working the same as before. No matter how much AC/Skills/AAs I have, they can still land for their max damage. It seems like shielding is working normally so far. But I think this is a pretty major issue with the new version of the code. I am not sure what broke it exactly, but I doubt it is working as intended.

I will need to do more testing to see if the new AR and Attack settings are allowing NPCs to fully compromise player mitigation. I haven't adjusted them yet, so they are all still set to 0, which I believe should be default for their level.

Everything else seems great so far though.

[KLS]

Could you elaborate? NPCs are supposed to hit up to their max damage~ And there's always a chance to hit for max no matter how much defensive abilities you have. But if there's a problem here I'm not catching then feel free to explain and I'll try to see it's fixed.

[trevius]

Hmm, that is odd. Testing from the previous system showed that they never hit for their maximum damage. Aren't skills, AC, and AAs supposed to mitigate a certain amount of damage all of the time, or are they just a chance to mitigate damage?

If you look at the testing post I made in this post:

http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/showthread.php?t=24487

you will see that they never hit for the max damage that was set. All of my end game encounters have been balanced on that system. None of my NPCs ever hit for max on a level 70 player even with no shielding, or AAs. In the most current release, it doesn't matter how much skill/AA/AC you have, you will still get hit for max sometimes. Only shielding and shielding related discs reduce the max hit.

Here is a section of the testing of the previous system from the post I mentioned above:

NPC level 70 with 10000 Str 0min 1000max hit:

War level 70 no AA, 1511AC
Max hit around 920 min avg is 874/897
War level 70 no AA, 2893AC
Max hit around 850 and average min is 808

NPC level 70 with 1000 Str 0min 1000max hit:

War level 70 no AA, 2893AC
Max hit around 850 and average min is around 500ish with lots of range

NPC level 70 with 2000 Str 0min 1000max hit:

War level 70 no AA, 2893AC
Max hit around 850 and average min is around 600ish with lots of range
War level 70 no AA, 2097AC
Max hit around 850 and average min is around 700ish with lots of range

NPC level 70 with 2000 Str 0min 3000max hit:

War level 70 no AA, 2097AC
Max hit around 2487 and average min is around 2100ish with lots of range
War level 70 no AA, 2893AC
Max hit around 2487 and average min is around 1100ish with lots of range

I am not exactly sure what was causing the mitigation, but I can only guess it was defensive skill based. Since AC didn't seem to impact max hit, just the average hit of the NPCs. Is it possible that defensive skill is no longer being calculated?

If this is a permanent change I can readjust all of my encounters without too much difficulty, but as things are now my end game is considerably harder than before. This system may make encounters easier to tune, since max will be the real max instead of having to check the actual max the NPCs will land like I had to check before. I just don't want to go through and readjust everything again if something is messed up and will get changed.

Possibly they weren't able to land for max before because they were missing the new stats that they now have. I will have to do more testing.

Either way, I think the combat system is still making leaps and bounds towards being a really nice system for encounter balancing. The most recent additions should make a huge impact on what can be done for more consistent DPS from NPCs. I just wanted to mention that the outcome of the max hit setting has changed in case that wasn't an intended effect.

[KLS]

It's just luck of the draw, there's a chance to hit for max no matter what, this hasn't changed since I implemented the system and certainly didn't last patch. Though the more stats you gain the smaller and smaller that chance is really, I intended for it to never really disappear(I believe it's a 0.5% chance on an attack where defense is completely mitigating damage to 0 to hit for max though my math could be off a bit). Of course shielding and disc can make it impossible to ever hit max hit just how they're calculated though, but you already saw that. =p

Perhaps something that did change though is how the mitigation AAs were calculated (instead of a straight bonus they add to the AC component if you use it now). I mean I know you said no AAs but it's the only thing I can think of.

[trevius]

Weird, I did ALOT of testing on the last combat system and I never once saw any of them hitting for max. They always had another number that appeared to be the cap. Even setting the STR to insanely high of 10k would still yeild the same lower than max cap and never exceed that. It was probably close to 15% at level 70. Maybe I was doing something differently. I will just go ahead and retune my stuff some now, then.

As a note, the gear I was using to test only had AC and HPs. I then set the max for stats like STR AGI etc manually with the setstats command.

Hopefully GeorgeS will get the new stats into his tool sometime. That will speed up the process considerably for me I know he is in China right now, so probably pretty busy.