Andor's Trail

I have posted this concept in a couple of threads, but I am myself bad in remembering where. Oskar has asked me to post this concept in a thread, after asking me to explain my ideas. You can find this thread also in the Development Corner, for developers to discuss and share well-thought out ideas. I post it also here to provide open discussion and finetune the concept.

First, some definitions to avoid misunderstanding.The base stats are defined as the AD, AC, hp and BC without equipment or skills. These are the only 4 statistics that are affected by the level of the player. AP, DR and ECC, both very important a well, can only be gained by equipment and skills, so are left out of scope in this concept. These stats might be taken into account later, or when considering broadening the options when leveling up, these should be taken into account.

Now, since the amount of AP is set between 10 (without skills) and 12 (with level 2 Combat Skill), it is evident that the amount of AP used of the wielded weapon(s) defines the potential total damage a player can deal in one round. For brevity, let's define this as DPR, for Damage Per Round. With the current system, as soon as decent AC is gained, all levels can be put into AD. My character for example, has had 120% base AC (12 levels put in AC) since ages and is now at 35 base AD, level 72. When weapons add a set amount of AD to the character, the value of this damage ranges from extremely high (new character with 1 AD base) to totally irrelevant (my character is getting there, for level 100+ this is worse). Since I can do, for example, 45 - 54 damage per hit with a Dagger of the Shadow Priest (DotSP) which uses 3 AP with Jewel of Fallhaven (JoF), this means that, without criticals, my DPR is 180 - 216. Would I be using the widely discussed Xul'virr, with 6 AP including JoF, my damage would be 48 - 66 but my DPR would be 96 - 132!

Without having to change the level and skill system, I think a fundamental change in equipment (specifically weapons and armor) could solve the current disbalance, while adding a lot of realism to the different weapon types. Why not work with weapons having a percentage of your base AD? The higher level the player, the higher the base AD resulting in a higher DPR. But not in an unbalanced way, when a certain range is applied for each type of weapons. Daggers, for example, should not be dealing as much damage per hit as a 2h weapon. But the DPR should be around the same, for equally leveled and skilled builds. So this would for example put the most basic knife to 20% and the most vicious (damage-wise) to 70% over the base AD. Barehanded fighting should also be fast and somewhere in this range (I train more than 15 years full contact karate -the way of the empty hand-, experts in barehanded fighting could maybe even go to 90% of AD, but these are details). 2h weapons however, should maybe range from 120% up to 350%. They are slow, but deal massive damage per hit. A 2h weapon that is powerful like the Xul'virr can then deal as much DPR as a DotSP. No imbalance between lower and higher level players! Of course, implementation needs thorough testing to find the right balance between the ranges.

This same principle should be applied through the other base stats. So any weapon, but also armor! should add percentages over base AD, AC, hp and BC. Why should I care for an armor that adds 8 hp, since I have 224 hp anyway (with 10 DR as well)? Or would a malus of 20 hp, as one extraordinary weapon has, be any trouble at all? Now if it would be -20% of my base hp, this is a whole other story!

Another reason why this would be awesome, is that certain 2h weapon builds are far more effective in killing very high resistant enemies. I could think of golems, tortoises or spellcasters with defensive spells having 50+ DR. My puny DotSP character can at level 72 barely damage such characters when my damage output is 70% of base AD per hit, I would need criticals or more levels in AD. I will have lower AC (because of focus on AD with levels, but also the weapons should add less AC), more chances to connect a hit per round (more hits since low AP) and also way better defenses (BC on weapons, or shield, high DR, focus on BC with levels), so I can 'tickle them dead', missing some hits isn't so dramatic. My Dark Knight would at level 72 smash these enemies dead, because he would do (with a 250% AD weapon and current AD of my character) 2,5 * (45 - 54) per hit, so the 50 DR wouldn't matter much. But then, lower defenses, higher AC and less chances to hit per round is the big con for this type.

Another idea related to this concept, would be to change the proficiency skills to affect the AP used with those type of weapons. If you are skilled with a dagger, you will probably not only be more damaging (this is actually already included in the level system, experience gives you HP, AD etc. when leveling up) but also makes you faster. So, the keyword is 'effective'. There are already skills that add damage (Hard Hit), accuracy (Weapon Accuracy) and critical hit skill and multiplier (More and Better Criticals). Current Dagger Proficiency, adding a percentage over the used item on AC, BC and CHS isn't impressive at all. But would I get 10% or 20% reduction over AP... although this would require to work with 1 or 2 decimals, or multiply AP with 10 or 100 to avoid decimals. Maybe, as Oskar suggested, weapons with low AP (say 4 or below) will get focus on CHS, which also makes sense for experts and avoids dagger types to become too powerful. Currently only adds 10% CHS of the weapon, and the 30% of BC is useless since daggers don't add BC or even have a malus.

Feel free to post your thoughts, let's discuss.

One comment - DPR isn't exact since no amount of AC can provide 100% chance to hit. You can try adding in your CtH as a % of total DPR but it won't be accurate since each swing of your weapon is entirely independent of the others. At this point I would refer you to the mathematical concept of compound probability of independent events which is explained quite well in this video.

Allow me to demonstrate the issue: Your average damage could be computed as simply your (Chance to Hit) * (Damage) * (# of Attacks). Assume you maxed out AC just to make my calculations a wee bit easier and that puts you at about a 90% CtH. For damage, we'll set our two examples to be a quick but low damage weapon and a slow but high damage weapon and again, to make numbers easier we'll just use half and double so a 3AP weapon that puts your damage at 20 and a 6AP weapon that puts your damage at 40. Given a total AP of 12 (because who doesn't take 2 points in combat speed?), that gives us two equations that look like this:

90% * 20 * (12 / 3) = 72 DPR

90% * 40 * (12 / 6) = 72 DPR

However, the chances of you landing every hit in that one round are actually higher with the slow weapon than they are with the fast weapon because each attack is an independent roll. Furthermore, each fight is independent so the more rounds it takes to kill a monster, the more this issue is compounded.

In other words, in both scenarios, the max possible DPR would be 80 because 20 * 4 = 80 and 40 * 2 = 80. However, the chances of getting that max number are different because each attack is independent. The chances of getting max DPR can be calculated as (Chance to Hit) ^ (# of Attacks).

90% ^ (12 / 3) = 65.61% ... that's nearly a 35% chance that you WON'T get your max damage

90% ^ (12 / 6) = 81% ... only a 29% chance that you WON'T get max damage

To draw this out, picture these possibilities...
Only 1 out of those 16 possibilities has you hitting all 4 times. Even though your chances of getting a hit are 90% and your chances of getting a miss are 10% that's still only a 65.61% chance that you will hit all 4 times.

So the likelihood of you getting that 72 DPR average is actually lower the more attacks you have. Because we're dealing with high variance (missing one attack of 4 is quite a bit different than missing one attack of 2 as opposed to missing 1 attack of 800 is not all that different from missing 1 attack of 820) any one player is quite likely to experience vastly different average results. This is why most multiplayer games try to use big numbers to help balance things out. If one player is averaging 20 damage and another player is averaging 30 damage, that 10 damage difference is huge but if one player is averaging 40,980 damage and another player is averaging 40,990 damage then that same 10 damage difference becomes minuscule. There's more leeway for imbalance with large numbers. The biggest numbers we see in Andor's Trail are typically in the low hundreds which means any imbalance at all becomes a fairly big deal because the ratio is higher.

tl;dr
DPR won't look right when the numbers used are low and different. One player may be spot on and another player wildly off even though the difference in actual numbers used for the calculations is fairly small. Yes, you should be able to get reasonably close to what your calculated average would appear to be but that's about it.

I think your concept makes a lot of sense Thystonius. Why would one use a high AP weapon when the DPR is so much lower in the current system. Not only would this tpye of system add balance, but it would add more complexity and diversity to the game, allowing players to develop even more builds than what we got with the latest update. Fiernaq, you are correct in stating that DPR isn't exact, but when comparing the use of DotSP versus Xul'virr or any high AP weapon, how else can one easliy compare the two besides looking at the simple factor that more attacks per round leads to more damage.

Thanks for your thorough comment fiernaq, I love mathematics so I do agree

To make the concept clear, I have assumed same statistics (AC) and kept the formula simple (maybe too simple). It might be necessary to take the compound probability of independent events into the equation to make it really balanced. Do you have a suggestion, how this could work taking the amount of AP of the weapon as a variable? Any formulae?

In any case, working with the concept of DPR and using a percentage over base AD is more balanced than the current hard numbers, reason why I do not even think of changng my DotSP for anything slower, it is just not worth it.

Ha ha, I wasn't suggesting you change anything. I was merely commenting on your use of DPR. To simplify, I merely stated that your DPR numbers aren't entirely accurate because we will always have less than a 100% chance to hit. You can probably get close enough with educated guesswork to make the system work though because to build a formula that would work for every monster would be rather difficult... far more mathematical skills than I have. Monster HP would dictate how many attacks you would get which tells you how much of a variance you would have but then add in different AC% numbers and the formula would be a giant rolling ball of disaster. I think you'll just have to throw numbers at the items and then tweak as needed to avoid overpowered stuff while minimizing underpowered stuff.

omg; this thread again.


Q: a sheep eats one kilo of grass per day; how many kilos of grass are eaten per day by 1.5 goats? (feel free to answer this)

being able to do math is nice; applying it to real world situations is trickier.

DPS depends on whatever mob you are facing. You can have teh bestest dee pee ess in the woarld but if your enemy is resistent to critical hits or has 200% BC your maths will be completely off. You are only calculating the potential output of a single equation but are ignoring the input, which is a different equation altogether.

So since we have the power of hindisight, a high AC / AD build with QSD has the highest DPS.

BECAUSE NOTHING RESISTS HITS. (well actually DR does, but fortunately in this game nothing has a very high DR .. yet)

so pls stop posting the same wall of text every .. single ... time .. or use the search function ?

Actually, you could take AP out of the equation entirely by basing your number on Damage Per Attack rather than Damage Per Round.

@SirGrindsalot, DPR/DPA/DPS already assumes you hit and don't get blocked, resisted, deflected, or anything else like that. It is an ideal number rather than an actual number. However, if you can balance the ideal number then you can change actual numbers by simply making different kinds of monsters... some with high BC or high DR... if using DPR then creating monsters that can slow your attacks down would work. Besides, the goal is to make it so that items no longer have static number on them. We see this the most with AD where at level 1, having a weapon with 5AD on it is a HUGE deal whereas that same weapon at level 100 seems rather pitiful because your base AD is so much higher but it's actually true of AC, BC, and HP as well (as Thystonius mentioned). Side note, if a level cap existed then this wouldn't be a problem but for now at least there is no level cap which means that it IS a problem. So yes, I'm definitely open to a system that can change that and a % of base # system certainly seems like a viable option.

Thanks for your totally non value added response SirGrindsalot

hmm.. im not intrested DPR... IMO it is all about can you kill (or not) monsters (and how many of them) in single round.

Sarumar wrote:hmm.. im not intrested DPR... IMO it is all about can you kill (or not) monsters (and how many of them) in single round.

This concept is about balancing the game, something that should be of interest to you. Your level 300+ character won't matter to these changes since you can kill anything right now and will be able to in the future...