cctobias

Multi-Druid encounters are the bane of my existence, because if you don't manage to lock them all down you're going to lose a big chunk of health off of your whole party more often than not. It sounds like having at least one Wizard would really help this group out, as spells like Slicken are really important for dealing with big groups of annoying enemies, especially since Scrolls of Paralysis have been bumped to a higher Lore level and weakened. Yeah that is what I was thinking is basically slicken + a couple nice AoEs can make certain things much nicer. Most likely swapping the chanter for a wizard would be a better party. On the other hand part of the fun is only having one real caster, and that caster is a mini-rogue as well. I have to say priest of Skaen is pretty cool when you have 4 AC's to draw all kinds of attention. And all my guys have 18+ dex and wear clothing, so they get things off fast even in the thick of it. With the druids yeah, basically if you let it drag on they will do that Maw spell that does massive damage and prones people or that stag horn spell. And another problem is moonwell if you are not killing them fast (which with over 300 end is kind of hard to do on two of them). However in my double druid fights i will say it can take them a rather long time to get to cast Maw. Also to some extent with later priest "trap" spells it may be moot. I really wish the rangers had a third weapon slot though (I could maybe still get it, tough choice) because hunting is certainly best ranged interupt but man would a crossbow do way more damage. The party destroys stuff at range with low DR, but around DR8 or so its a real steep fall off. In the end melee is like double the interrupt throughput though. I may scrap hunting bows entirely. They do interrupt pretty decent, but you gotta kill stuff.

As a point of reference I have cleared Od Nua 1,2,3, and 4 with the 1pr/1ch/4rng party I mentioned above. On hard at main lvl 5 and party lvl 4. I haven't done Raedrics yet. Clearing the ogres was fairly rough. Strangely although some people find them easy to interrupt, they are not actually easier to "shutdown". You can foil that big ass swing of theirs but they will eventually channel (whatever that purple swirly icon is) a large hit out. But I was able to "tank" 4 ogre pulls using chokepoints and a wall of stags. The combination of Priest and interrupt and their OK DR makes it work surprising ok. I am currently suffering from two big issues, lack of DR penetration and lack of real AOE (priest has some). Both of those have some remedies via better equipment or scrolls. Considering I am running no tanks and only one true caster and everyone has like 5 Con, its pretty persuasive for how strong of a mitigating strategy a few interupt rangers + priest is. You do need the priest though. A couple animal companions + interrupt + consecrated ground is pretty strong. I was thinking a variant of 1 priest 3 rangers and two mages might really killer (possibly battle mages). OF course 6 melee focused mages is probably really killer too. As might be expected and was mentioned in this thread certain large encounters are pretty rough. The one on levle 2 that involves 4 wurms and something like 6 melee/ranged xaurips was probably the worst although the 1 ogre + 2 ogre druids was pretty bad too. That 4 wurms one was just plain too much in the way of high damage ranged coming me. I couldn't find a neat way of making it work, so I spilt my stags from my party and had everyone go melee. I had the stag come from one direction and distract two wurms and a priest while I bum rushed the other two wurms with melee rangers and threw out some priest AoEs. Level 4 was easy. Trolls are no real problem and as long as I lay covering fire on the adra beetle the beetles are manageable, but slow to kill. Edit: For the 1 ogre + 2 ogre druid, since I am not really hitting hard against their 10 DR, the chokepoint method didn't work so well. Eventually the druids, and this can take a while, will do some series of nasty spells and mess you up. If I killed faster it'd be fine (everyone has 16 or high might so I could do something like massive arbalest alpha on them). So instead I split the party 2 party per ogre and one stag per ogre. This was fairly messy and did not shut them down that well but it worked ok. Considering ogres can one shot my normal party members at this level (had them hit for 68 damage before).

I did a bit of testing on a single Forest Lurker in the woods east of defiance with these results: You basically are probably gonna get hit by something's first attack without some kind of ranged prep, so ignoring the first hit. This is for level 4 guys. On hard diff. Rangers are dual wielding a mix of weapons that in general are working crappy agains the lurkers DR (spears etc, against is 16 peirce DR). So about 2 damage sometimes a lucky 7. They are using IB + swift aim+ DW feat, no focus yet. They have a 45 interrupt rating. 4 rangers + 2 stags = Lurker is completely nullfied can't do anything, no attack after rfirst 3 rangers+2stags = nullfied 2 rangers + 2 stags = Lurker got one attack off before dying. All attacks were against a stag as I have them go out first, which means even with 2+2 there is no long term health damage. Although 2 lurker hits on a stag at level 4 is close to knocked out.

So after messing around some with concentrated interupt I am fairly convinced that its extremely important to NOT have your guys attack in a synchronized manner especially at range. You can get like 4 interrupts all at once and the guy you want "slowed" can slip the noose in the interval between. You can have an entire party of guys beating on some one, but if they are all attacking in a sync'ed manner you just delay the guy for whatever the longest interupt was. So basically interrupt time does not stack (or possibly it just makes one "bar" to fill up whose maximum is never large than the cast time or largest interrupt not sure on that but not matter what 4 simultaneous 0.35 interrupts does not make a 1.4 sec time delay), as far as I can tell. So while you could have enough interrupt to make something not able to attack you have to somehow line it up right to keep resetting their actions. Due to the way the game works if you are using similar weapon on many guys this can actually happen quite often unless you specifically micromanage delays between you guys, like start one guy shooting, move one guy a few paces over and start him shooting. For melee this is probably less of an issue due to movement "naturally varying" attack initiation but for ranged they get synched real easy if if they are all using same speed item with same range if you select them together. This is rather a pain in the ass to manage, but doable. Update: going through a few easier fights will spell casters I made sure to stagger ranged attack initation on xaruip priest and high priest and also a pair of trolls. There is a very obvious difference. Completly preventing something from casting takes more than just a lot of interrupt you have to micromanage it well or you can get anything from slowed to a cast fairly quickly to complete shutdown. I suspect two properly syncopated melee dw/swift aim/IB rangers can completey shutdown a caster (maybe a lot of other things), but am not sure since this mechanic makes it very hard to really say.

I don't think its too strong, I think the problem is more that some other one kind of suck or are just way way too situational.

I don't think there is any way to seriously AoE interrupt in such a way that it really matter except maybe 3+ barbarians. Even with two fast melee attackers with good interupt rating (like 30) things will get attacks off. I mean I cleared the temple with the shades in gilded vale pretty easy at level 4main level 3 party, but of alot of that is using the "stag wall" smart and shooting. I have barely used preist powers, but I think with some of the priest healing fields it can work pretty ok In melee even with a lot of interrupts one of those shades can still teleport then daze one of your melee interrupters and your guy takes a fairly big hit. In general focus fire on trash kills really fast such that I am hoping I can get by with things. But I have a suspicion that I can't actually stop something like Adra Dragon from doing nasty things even with this much interrupt. One nice thing about it though is that when the stags are taking all the damage you don't need to worry about health at all. Unfortunately its one of those all or nothing things. Either it works or it doesn't. It almost seems like its more the companions that make it work decently in that although I don't shut things down I shore up their lack of defense and there are 4 of them. I picked stag for AoE and because they have 15 per. But I am starting to think maybe 4 bears is better, I dunno I am too low to say and I really have not fully matured out the strategy yet, the shooting behind meat wall has worked well so I have not really tried a full split melee with 2 party+stag trying to neutralize three things. Also I think you somewhat overstate the pet deathpenalty, yes it sucks, but at range it just brings a ranger to Fighter level accuracy and on my guys they still have 16+ stats even with the penalty. It is a problem for melee though. I doubt a full interrupt party really works right but it is pretty interesting. I have a suspicion that a 3 interrupt ranger + tank/cipher/mage party is incredibly strong. I think people are perhaps overlooking how good of an offtank a cluster of companions is with some support. In the party I am running I am trying to wring as much interrupt (and therefore damage to some extent) out of the companions as I can and we'll see how that works.

Well I killed the two forest lurkers (hard) in black meadow with a 3rd level main and level 2 mercs using the above party. They really are not set up right yet, I don't even have swift aim or interrupting blows. So far its seems like you can really "slow" attacks down to a significant amount, but shutting things down completely is pretty iffy. Its interesting in that you can actually turn 4 stags into decent-ish tanks. I had no special weapons or armor, in fact I am using as low of armor as I can without being naked, used hunting bows and wands, had the priest beating on one with clubs. 3 of my stags died, my chanter went down towards the end. Considering they have 8 DR and are level 7 that is not bad for a new party. 3 stags were alive by the time we took down the first one, I was dealing with DR via Mark prey and the chanter invocation that reduces DR. I am not sure how this plays out with all rangers going swift aim + DW melee. The concetrated interrupt clearly adds pretty significant mitigation, but its not exactly a shutdown, although sometimes it is. Its weirdly spotty, sometime something just slips through, even when they appear to be "flinching" a lot. I am running all these guys with like 5 con too. I have a suspicion unlucky hits will make this party somewhat frustrating, at the same time its kind of like having a whole party of 10 off tanks.

This is something I was thinking of trying with a 1 priest 1 chanter 4 ranger party. All wood elves with max perception and dex. Basically use hunting bow/swift aim on any casters at start and use melee dual wield for damage. Priest is skaen with dw clubs/stillettoes, chanter uses -10 concentration and fear and possibly increase shoot speed in some cases, rangers use stags. Leverage as many "of Marking" weapons as you can. The main issue I have with this idea is the animal compaions really do attack slow. Still 4 animal companions should be roughly equal to one more interrupter party member. Not sure if its good enough to to actually work, if not you could put in a paladin tank instead of the chanter or replace a ranger. Also wounding shot works with melee. Edit: yes I would dump int on the ragners but not chanter and priest. One ranger would probably go noble for the rapiers you mentioned. Two rangers go peasant for hunting bow and spears (alot of nice spears, one can be marking and coordinating) and even hatchets Priest goes ruffian There are also a good rod and good wand, which fire as fast and interrupt same as hunting bow. So that rod can be used for the Noble and One ranger as Adventurer can dw flails. The chanter maybe go two handed and the marking poleaxe then use that really nice marking estoc from Paths However I am not really sure that is this level of all or nothing interrupt would really mitigate enough damage to not have a tank. You really need to lay down alot of interrupts to seriously cripple a mostly melee fighter.

Priests do have a special synergy for Interrupt builds toward the lategame, with a couple of spells that add huge Perception bonuses. -- Testing, testing... - party buffs work on ACs, including Chanter's Burn damage thingy - Burn damage thingy works on Monk's Unarmed attacks, too tricky, very hard to decide on 4 or 5 rangers.

Based on the AC's Perception. Different ACs have different stats e.g. Antelope Per 15 vs. Lion Per 11. A mixed animal approach might be amusing, using Lion's roar to reduce Concentrations by 6 and Stag to proc .5 second Interrupts in an AoE (Stag gets an ability similar to Barb Carnage). So 1-2 lions and rest antelopes (who also have best defenses, which I think may suck no matter what though). Chanter has a concentration reduction chant at 1st level. Maybe the lion replace a chanter, but still the weapon fire aura would still be real good with so many actors. Does that work for animal companions/unarmed? Priest is good just for AoE accuracy bonuses. Maybe 1 priest 5 rangers, 1-2 lions and 3-4 antelopes? Make your priest actually fight too for more interrupt. Let's say 3 actors on one monster for "safe" interrupts means 3.5 monsters "disabled". And for some cases make an "antelope wall" for AOE/overlapping interupts. Pure spitballing numbers there. Edit: if priest is main you can make him Skaen for mini-sneak attack too, and its possible to leverage a lot of flank and sneak attack on the rangers too. Edit2: or make a paladin with accuracy aura instead

For the most part just Armor ie. DT, and that is problematic in its variance. For offense there really isn't, Crit won't work out that way, its at best a straight 50% increase in damage. All damage stuff adds to the multiplier figure But the other side of the coin of of course is the defense DEBUFFS can be very imporrtant if you are finding yourself having trouble, and of course you want to avoid them like the plague on a tank. Most of my education on this topic comes from posts by Arcanaville on the City of Heroes forums. Unlike many MMORPGs, City of Heroes allowed an encounraged various defense buffs to be stacked on top of each other to significant maximums. There were no dedicated "healers". The various power sets of the Defender Archetype, might buff avoidance or resistance and some had some amount of healing. You could run an team with two forcefield defenders and only be buffing avoidance with no healing. The buffs from both those defenders would stack up to an archetype maximum. Those forums are probably gone, but she made a comprehensive analysis of the various defensive sets in that game. The power sets involved %dam resistance, avoidance, and healing. Some being all around one type, some mixing things. The game could also involves fight with few or very very many opponents, with a very wide range of damage. To compare things in a way that did not come to down how it "felt" she attempted to be very comprehensive. Due to her analysis the Devs actually altered certain powersets as she essentially proved mathematically that the avoidance based power set was a) weak in general and b) extremely weak in certain circumstance (alpha strikes of spawns when in a large party). CoH's content was generated dynamically, the more people in your party the more and tougher things that spawned. This exposed a weakness of avoidance as even though over time the mitigation may be the same as % damage when 20 things are shooting at you and some of those things can take off half your health or more, well you may have a problem. Especailly when a full team may 3-4 boss level mobs at +2 or more level. Having one of the powersets be weaker the more it teamed up in an cooperative game was obviously bad. Similarly the Willpower set was a combo of all three mitigations and it had modest amount of regen similar to the PoE fighters inherent. Well how do you rate that healing? Alone it was fairly poor, but layered on top of both ok avoidance and ok %damager she proved it was actually quite strong. In a game where your character development involves enahcaning some aspects of your power this is very important, do you enhance the accuracy penalty or the healing effect on your aura power? At some price point it, since you may have a lot of mitigation already healing becomes stronger and stronger as well. As an off topic aside this is also why CoH was the best party based MMORPG that has ever existed. Not that it was the best MMORPG, but the majority of its players would play cooperatively and teams would run for hours swapping people in and out, varying how things spawned and what the offensive and defensive make up of the team was. Unfortauntely it was a bit too generic due to the dynamic content model. It is important to note that while everything above is phrased in terms of effective health, you can put all healing into that equation as well. So in theory, the Might bonus that applies to healing will be multiplied by the effect of defense as well, so this can be an important factor when considering a defensive fighter build. Might is possibly considerably stronger than CON. However that strategy is complicated by endurance vs health as the fighter will eventually die no matter what, given enough time and that dynamic favors Con. Same goes for paladins and lay on hands. This is one of the reasons that later in CoH's career for the eventually fixed Super Reflexes power set the Heal generic power (something any type of character could take) was almost always selected by such builds. "Time to live" is fine but if you can make damage coming in be eclipsed by health coming in, you are immortal (without the end/health mechanic of PoE). Super Reflexes was a power set that offered no healing and no extra regen. If I remember right all archetypes could, in theory, achieve 95% avoidance (whereas Tank archetype could get 85% res and others were 75%), so the effect of a heal + high avoidance was quite huge, I beleive Arcanaville had that combo rated as one of the most powerful defensive things in the game even though Heal itself was just an ok healing power compared to the 4-5 other major heal powers on some Defenders etc. People would basically say you ruined your build if you were an SR without Heal power taken. Of course others would say 95% avoidance was enough and they didn't really need it etc etc and that gets rather subjective and never really resolved beyond personal taste. Note that a really good group in CoH could have layered defenses of avoidance+%res+healing due to stacked buffs and multiple defenders etc, so offense in that game could get scaled to much higher numbers than might be initially thought. So getting one shotted or very quickly one-two-three shotted even with really excellent avoidance was something that actually was an important case to handle. Generally you wouldn't see that with high amounts of all three layers, but there could be a very large varaince in both difficulty and group make up and sometimes you would see a lot of insta-gibs when things didn't line up right or a certain enemy group had certain debuffs. Which again caused a lot subjective arguing back and forth about what powers to pick, generally people who did PUGs a lot and were SR always took Heal. And one of the great advantages of Ninjitsu was that it had a heal already and saved you a power slot although it didn't handle debuffs as well etc etc. One interesting conclusion of this multiple year forum discussion was a general concensus that layered/multi-spectrum defenses were really surprisingly good. This was mostly due to the Willpower defense set for Scrappers and Tanks being released later in the game. It had basically a bit of everything and it was surprising good at staying alive even though none of its powers was really on the large up slope of any particular type of defense. It didn't even have on-demand healing just good regen. Not that it was the best Defensive power set but it was something that performed better than anticipated. Of course people knew a Heal with high mitigation was strong. But Willpower was like 3-4 medium level mechanics and performing as well as sets with high values for one type of mechanic. So oddly Might is actually possibly a better defensive stat than Con. Even though might is linear, the effect will piggy back on the exponential defensive curve. Its still linear but it will have such a large multiplier with better defensive stats that even really crappy heals become really good. Making each point in Might go from meh to very interesting for self heals. However each point of Might is of the same weighting. But I am not saying that for certain (due to health/end and resting) and that only applies to self heal. But due to needing Fort you should have the combination of those two stats at a decent level no matter what. For fighters specifically this should be a real consideration because that heal is always in effect, and while going from 3 to 4 (or whatever close enough) maybe seem small, with the addition of defense and DT and the fact that its not an action its considerably more than it may seem. For an offensive fighter with no armor and only ok defense, meh whatever maybe ignore it. Specifically for high defense with significant regen it is hard to get a "feel" for how valuable it is. I never really quite got a good feel for it until I made a Willpower based scrapper in CoH and pushed it to its limits. You can fight at medium and low health for far longer than you may think, its a sort of energizer bunny type feel to it, it just keeps going, especially if you play smart and buy yourself some time when in a bad situation. For the most part though such analysis is only necessary in this game for the offtank with good damage sort of build. The question being something like is really good defenses + might as a fighter enough to make up for, say, not using heavy armor so you can attack fast? Pure defense just stacks everything. But very high defense + decent regen could be very tough and being naked is essentially similar to good armor + high dex. So it may be the case that a naked low DEX high MIG high PER/RES fighter build is actually similar in performance damage wise to high migh/high dex with big armor and possibly actually better defensively. I am not real sure on that though.

Does anyone know the stats for interrupting on ranger pets? Make a party of all rangers, maybe you can keep the pets alive with by having 14 things dispersing tons of interrupt? Or possibly a chanter/priest for some buffs (interrupt/accuracy).

(It's been confirmed that 1 point of defense translates to a 1% shift as well, i.e. it's not per 5 points increments.) So the effetcs of extra defense to any pre-existing value is confirmed to be always the same in terms of chance to dodge. Now how does chance to dodge translate in terms of damage reduction ? Damage reduction can be expressed with the difference in actual damage vs full damage, i.e. if you take 75 damage when you were supposed to take 100 without some bonus stats, you have a 25% damage reduction going on. If you dodge successfully, you take no damage. If you fail you take anywhere from 50 to 150% of whatever your opponent's damage is supposed to be. Since our purpose is to prove that there is no exponential growth in usefulness to getting +1 Def, we don't need to obfuscate reasoning with variance in damage or armor DR because as you point out, it is going to be negligible in the face of exponential growth. So we can safely consider that we take 100% damage whenever we fail to dodge. For our purpose we thus have dodge equal 0% damage and no-dodge equal 100% damage: This equivalence shows that you can substitute 1 to 1 damage reduction with chance to dodge, and therefore if +1 Def translates to the same increase in chance to dodge no matter the amount of pre-existing Def, it follows that +1 Def translates to the same amount of damage reduction as well. There is no exponential I graphed out the mitigation above and accounted for both grazes and crits. Mitigation is not exponential. In fact it begins to grow slower due to grazes but would otherwise be linear. In your example above you die in less than two hits at 10%, you die in 10 hits at 90%. The "time to live" is many times larger. This is why the equation drainbramage posted is more useful.

Yeah but all defenses go against accuracy and the various stats give those as well. This is a reason why a defensive build also has less dump stats than an offensive, however the same math applies to all defenses. The only sticky point is that grazes affect duration and on some spell a lower duration may still be a very dangerous situation so you may want a higher target number for Fort vs Def. But stats like PER or RES give deflection and REF or WIL as well. Defensive builds need to be careful about dumping Con or Mig or Dex so they can get decent non-deflection defenses, but the deflection stats give DEF and the exact same amount of other defeneses as whatever the other stat for that is. Oddly for defensive build Fort is often the troublesome defense because Con is such a weak stat. Frankly the stat system in POE is really messed up both thematically and in that it does the exact opposite of what it was supposed to for builds.

I just quoted you cuz you had the right formula as conversation sort of thing.

This is wrong. Here is why: <condescending crap snip> I have 1000 HP. My defenses reduce incoming damage by x%. Thus my effective HP are at 1000 HP + 1000 HP * 1.x. <bad maths snip> So kids, stay in school, don't take drugs and stack your defensive stats. Unless you have diminishing returns. Then act smart and look at your overall gain. Would you agree that 100% mitigation means the enemy is doing no damage? If the enemy is doing no damage would you agree that you have infinite effective hit points? Hopefully you answered 'yes' to both of those, because that means that this formula is clearly wrong: Because that predicts that having 100% mitigation merely doubles your EHP. Rest of your post is garbage since it was based around that. FYI, the correct formula is 1/(1-x), and it's grade school algebra to figure out that result. Stay in school indeed. PoE is a d100 system. 3rd Ed D&D is a d20 system. They work essentially the same as far as the math goes. For one system each point is 1/100 for the other each point is 1/20. The main trick with these system is that they are a sliding scale due to opposing stats (accuracy versus defense) and are completely dependent on content (monster accuracy). However while they are dependent on content they are quite simple to plan for, you just need to know the high end of the range of accuracy. If you are at 80% avoidance against the most accurate monster in the game, then you are at least that good against everything else. The equation quoted above is the correct equation, there are some important differences between % chance to take no damage and %damage resistance. Over enough time they will be effectively similar but there are consequences to avoidance on small sample since it is probablistic, i.e. you can get one shotted instantly even with 99% avoidance. So the "effective health" model has some flaws with avoidance. In a practical sense, if you are getting hit by smallish amount of damage say 1/5 to 1/4 of you rhealth and have any kind of healing at all then the model works fine. If you are getting attacked by things with that could one shot you over and over and often its still OK but becomes problematic The damage threshold on armor in POE is not damage resistance and is somewhat different and more of a pain in the ass to express. However it can still see a similar trend as well, this is plainly seen by comparing extremely high DT where you only do 1 point of damage, use something that penetrates 3 DT and you quadruple your damage. Yes you still do crap damage, but its still quadruple. However since most (but not all) games have variable damage it can a gigantic pain in the ass to quantify and is generally kind of eyeballed. It is important to note that since you have two defense mechanics that are both exponential in there effects combining the two can be very very powerful. However DT has little to do with stats. Additionally you can be hit much much harder by the really big enemies than you would be able to get DT for. As with most games DT is uber powerful against small hits and can be very low on the curve for large hits. 25 DT is incredibly strong against things hitting for 20, but its only pretty nice against things hitting for 50 and only modestly useful against something hitting for 100. All of those hit numbers are possible (in a rough sense) at endgame in PoE so the "value" of DT is extremely variable due to content. You are not likely to get enough DT to get into the powerful or really powerful portion of the exponential curve for 100 damage hits. This does not mean it should overlooked by any means. Straight up % damage resistance is not content dependent even though it uses the same base equation for establishing a "time to live". Since PoE is a d100 system, when you take any single opponent in isolation for your analysis each point of a defense (any of the 4) is +/- 1% its useless once it is too far above or below the range of contention (this range is massively extended in the case of crits when compared to defenses). This requires qualifications for PoE in form of additional multipliers since mitigation is not a straight up binary 0% or 100% like AC in 3rd ed D&D due to the Crit/graze mechanics. This is still pretty straightforward but somewhat of a pain in the ass. It would essenitally be a spreadsheet that calculated the relative mitigation due to graze(50%)/hits(0%)/misses(100%). Pure binary hit/miss avoidance mitigation is a simpler case as it is equivalent to to miss chance when taken over time. Crits can be completely nullified, grazes/hit/misses are a straightup range. At the -50 portion of the curve you are only rolling over whether you miss or graze and can never actually hit. So one could argue that at this point each point in a defense has become reduced in effectiveness since you never take more than 50% damage etc. First this does not change the fact that the curve is still exponential. Second all the the d# systems eventually reach a point where additional points are useless, either because they are 100% or because a 20 is always a hit and you are at 95% or whatever. The last point is radically powerful and subsequent points are completely useless until you run into something with higher accuracy. This statement even holds true with the PoE graze system, 50% is not enough to curtail the massive growth of an exponential curve. That last point is still radically powerful. Over the broad context of the game since the d# systems use opposing checks (in the parlence of 3rd edtition D&D a Difficulty Check) the relative value of the 1% ( or 5% in the case of d20 ) can change quite radically. Now it is not at all necessary to express these things as percents, which is a just way of expressing ratios and therefore lends itself naturally to any d# system, however it is necessary to understand that the closer you are to the maximum end of the avoidance curve the more and more powerful each advancing numeral of the "roll range" becomes. You can think of it however you like but this is the curve of the graph. This analysis does not come from WoW, although it has been replicated there since the equation for damage resistance is basically the same. This analysis has been well understood since 3rd ed D&D. And probably earlier as well since D&D was using d20 thaco rolls etc. But 3rd ed D&D everything was a DC on opposing stats so trying to figure the relative value of a point in a skill or +to hit become of central importance and this became more well known and rigorous. For skill checks, of course, this is different as their results are often a binary outcome rather than an outcomes whose result is a countable number ( ie. an integer ), again this is very content dependent. Many people building for skill check DC just go for 100%. For example in DDO certain dungeons would have traps that basically one shot most people, thus they want a rogue with a DC that assures 100%, but for dungeons with many less damaging traps they are ok with 90% or 95% and extremely occasionally have to run through a trap, because the dynamic is the same; the trap burden is reduced by a HUGE amount at those DCs. Generally they won't go much below a certain DC range because in the d20 system the difference between 1/2 and 1/10 things hitting you is 8 points (50% roll versus 90% roll is 8 skill points in the d20 system), so if you accept someone into your party with 8 less skill points you will be rolling bad 5 times as often. If you accept someone with 4 points less (70% vs 90%) you have 1/10 vs 3/10, so you are still getting bad rolls 3 times as often. That is a figure of extremely high statisitical significance. These things are known in games like DDO, that is why people generally tolerate a swing of 2-3 skill points (generally for rogues/traps) when recruiting for various dungeons that they really want to succeed at, if they are just running for fun its different of course. If one is truly convinced that this is some sort of %damage resistance WoW exclusive type thing I would invite you to read through the D&D Online boards for tanks and rogues or through various Never Winter Nights boards. It might be hard to find though unless its stickied as its pretty well settled. Please note that of course x% chance IS always the same probability as x% chance. This is an obvious identity. All of these analysis are about quantifying the consequences of this identity. % damage resistance IS simpler because there is no probability involved in it and it covers burst and it has no content dependence etc etc. It would be a mistake to assume that a model covers everything. But in the end the ratio based damage mitigations can be analyzed in this way with a good amount of accuracy. This does not mean that the outlier cases of avoidance should not be accounted for, games like City of Heroes expressly addressed such things over time in regards to the "large hits makes it all one big casino problem". "Mitigation" above corrects for the +/- 50% mechanic of grazes and crits. So that mitigation curve is, on average, what PoE defense will do for damage. It is important to note that various afflictions can operate on grazes so this is an important factor for the non-deflection defenses. So the above graph is mainly for damage based things. As the graphs above show, while your mitigation does actually slow down in its improvement due to moving into the graze range, your effective health still increase extremely fast. Note I left off the last 5 points because effective health becomes so much higher (20,000 for base 100 health) that it makes the rest of the curve harder to visiualize. This is the main reason that defensive stats are radically more important than offensive stats for defensive builds. If you are at, let's say, -60 due to equipment abilities etc. and your stats bump you up to -80 (stats giving this much is reasonable) then you have gone from 800 to 4000 effective health from a base health of 100. Conversely going from 20 to 0 (acc-defense) is about 110 to 150 effective health, which isn't bad but all in all is not really likely to seriously matter in a tough fight and against heavy hitters will feel extremely spotty and like gambling high stakes.

According to the wiki a Graze will essentially reduce your interrupt rating by 50%. I'm not sure if interrupt duration is also reduced. So while you can interrupt on a graze you are much less likely to do so versus a normal hit. Crits are similarly more likely to interrupt. Therefore accuracy is a rather important aspect of interrupting. High perception with bad accuracy would still be a terrible interrupt build.

Yeah its kind of weird too, because when you read stuff about guns in the world they specifically mention how important it is to counter Arcane Veil. Its like its a mechanic they had in mind but forgot to actually put on things.

Well first off its not by class but by build. You can come up with a good use for every stat (except maybe Con) for the various fighter builds. That being said the attributes are not created equal. The defensive attributes are far more important to defensive builds than the offensive stats are to offensive builds. Defense in this game and other games with similar rolling systems (D&D 3.0 for example) work in such a way that each point closer to the "max" is stronger and stronger. It is also important to note that the defensive attribute DO NOT give the same absolute effect for an offesnive build vs a defenseive build. Suppose there is something that will miss you 98% of the time when it has 100 accruacy. Now suppose we change your defense such that it will miss you 99% of the time. This effectively doubles your defense simply by adding 1 point of defense. This is the extreme, but not unattainable case. Similarly suppose you will be missed 50% of the time by that something, when we add 1 point of defense you are missed 51%. This is not nearly as big of an increase. A good way to quantify this is to multiply your mitigation by your health. At 50% miss rate you, over time, have 2x your health in "effective health". At 99% miss rate you have 100x. As you can see going from 50% to 99% is a 50 fold improvement. But going from 50% to 51% is a very small improvement. If someone had 100 health their effective health goes from 200 at 50% (100 *(0.50/1)) to 204 at 51% (100*(0.49/1)) to 10,000 at 99% (100*(0.01/1)). So even when we only take the later half of the mitigation curve we get a HUGE difference in the "effective health" that 1 point of defense gives you. So while 2 points in PER or RES can be extremely impactful for a defensive build it can be very unimpactful for an offsensive build. This can heavily depend on equipment and other factors. But if you roughly in the middle ground of defense don't expect attributes to noticeably do that much for your "effective health". If you are planning on being on the high end get every single point of defense you can, almost nothing else pays off as well. It can literally pay off 10:1. The offensive stats on the other hand are essentially linear. A few percent extra damage is exactly that and adds onto the total increase just like it seems. Its nice but the difference between a character 1.2x damage and 1.25x damage is exactly as it appears and probably not that huge of a deal in general. The difference between 17 and 18 might is quite straightforward and not that big of a deal. The only real question there is do you need the effect for you build, this is most debatable for Int especially regards for duration. For example some people may say the longer DoT's from int are worthwhile for some builds, but in point of fact it can actually harm you DoT damage overall in some circumstances. Although DEX vs MIG is sometime a bit of an open question since DEX affects attack speed and recovery and is the only thing affects both. However in general for most builds that would want both DEX and MIG they really can have pretty crappy PER and RES since they are probably "peeing in the ocean" so to speak when it comes to defense. Its really only for builds that want some kind of 75% offesne 75% defense type thing where they are a decent offtank with good damage that it gets rather hairy and not that straightforward. You would need to be very particular about defense numbers, equipment and monster accuracy numbers to have any idea of the relative value of PER and RES versus STR/MIG etc.

I suppose the main use, in a perfectly designed world, might be to make things like Arcane Veil not as much of an issue for Barbs. So anything that is like a caster that buff deflection would probably have low Fort and still be hittable. Whether that is all that useful in reality I am not that sure. I would guess in general it might translate to like 10% more hits overall? Since Def and Fort seem to be highly correlated it would seem to be more a counter to buffs since most Def buffs do not buff Fort. Even then it may not be worth it if some other pure accuracy thing can be taken instead. Against Arcane Veil with its now hefty bonus sure, but some other Def buffs can be 8,10 or 20 and some +6 accuracy thing like a weapon focus is either clearly better or at least better on average at 10 and up for debate at 20 and very dependent on frequency of use.

I am fine with a conversation being introduced via the first sentence or two being VA. I think narration actually work a lot better than many things for an isometric game with a main protagonist. I think cut scene like things actually often need VA. As a hard rule I would say that once I have started reading don't intterupt me with VA, by that point its too late. I think the storyboard/picture books are also good candidates for VA as are the various quips and back and forth while the game itself goes on. People saying to hire amateurs. I don't think you are being realistic. Are there great amateurs out there? Of course there is always some future star out there. Mark Hamil didn't start out being the quintessential Joker VA, he was stuck in a George Lucas franchise that convinced most people he was a terrible actor yet he is a magnificent VA (and does more than just the Joker). Finding a diamond in the ruff at bargain basement prices is not realistic. Heck even finding someone you think is a good fit is hard There are a lot of people who make quite a bit of money whose sole purpose is to find people who are the right fit for a creative project. Professionals make money because they are known. People who want successful project don't want to a) gamble on some chance these people are good enough when they have no idea what their strengths and weaknesses are or b) spend an inordinate amount of their budget on the search itself. I dunno what they spent on VA money-wise and I know various such as Interesting NPCs for Skyrim has some decent voice acting by volunteers. I am not saying its impossible. But there really isn't any formal or known way to RELIABLY get a nice cast of VA from volunteers/amateurs. Maybe there will be in the future due to things like mod communities pulling something together but there is not one now and a studio has to deliver in a decent timeframe with a reliable idea of how they will procure their resources for various reasons.

A BG3 that was likely a AAA, fully voiced, 3D game for PC and Console. Yeah, but if that's what they thought they needed to make the game, I don't really see the issue here. The issue is that people who make thing professionally sometimes get, unavoidably, discconected from what people think by the echo chamber of the general games industry at large. Its simply an assumed thing sometimes that because everyone is doing VA that its always the next thing to put resources towards. But in reality as this poll shows, and I am pretty certain a very large sample size would only swing it 10% or so, a assumption that more VA would be good if we only had the money is probably less well founded than may be generally thought. Reviewers rave about VA, other games spend tons of money on it, its a naturally forming self-reinforced misconception. Most people playing RPGs or Indie of various stipes simply don't care that much or only care in very specific instances. Reviewers can rave all they like about it, but the audience in general only raves about very particular VA performances in very particular sequences and they are smart enough to know this(on some level often not entirely consciously formed). We're talking about the guys that brought us Pillars. I'd be with you if it was Atari going "hey, here's $20 million", but it wasn't. Its not about what they think about VA. Its about what they think we think about VA. The prevailing industry meme is that VA will bring in more rubes, oops, I mean broaden your appeal. Obsidian is not immune to prevailing opinion. No one is. They may even think its complete BS but simply feel its the "safer" choice business-wise since there is not really anything solid to hang their hat on.

Um no the OP is obvious hyperbole. Also don't patch the game if you don't like it. Or mod it. Refusing to play it, ug, its such a depressingly silly reaction I can't even muster the energy to post a picard faceplam image. Is this a troll post?

A BG3 that was likely a AAA, fully voiced, 3D game for PC and Console. Yeah, but if that's what they thought they needed to make the game, I don't really see the issue here. The issue is that people who make thing professionally sometimes get, unavoidably, discconected from what people think by the echo chamber of the general games industry at large. Its simply an assumed thing sometimes that because everyone is doing VA that its always the next thing to put resources towards. But in reality as this poll shows, and I am pretty certain a very large sample size would only swing it 10% or so, a assumption that more VA would be good if we only had the money is probably less well founded than may be generally thought. Reviewers rave about VA, other games spend tons of money on it, its a naturally forming self-reinforced misconception. Most people playing RPGs or Indie of various stipes simply don't care that much or only care in very specific instances. Reviewers can rave all they like about it, but the audience in general only raves about very particular VA performances in very particular sequences and they are smart enough to know this(on some level often not entirely consciously formed).

That was 100% a design call. Mark Darrah wanted a game that could take "20 to 200 hours to complete". Yeah and I think its a kind of silly goal since I can easily make a game that takes 10000 hours to complete just by changing the metrics on the grind. But I think I wasn't clear enough in that I meant once they went down that design path it was a done deal as far as this phenomenon. Its not just DA:I all these F/TPS "free roam" things have the same repetitive souless, grindy feel nowadays (Assassins's creed, Far Cry 4, Prototype etc. etc. etc.). It was cool for one iteration maybe 2 but now its just deadly effing dull no matter how much they voice act the living bejeebus out of it. The core gameplay of these various isometric RPGs (POE, all the IE games, WL2, Divinity OS etc etc) is basically solidly and reliably interesting when crafted well. Not all get crafted well but that is the nature of making things. Even these really well made/craftted "open" f/tps games are so meh I mean I can't even play them anymore with a few notable exceptions to some extent. I liked the initial installments of them and I am not even burned out, they are just a mile wide and an inch deep no matter how much fake progression or bells and whistles get put in them. You start playing one and you are like "Oh this is pretty cool, looks like nice plays nice". 10 hours later I am feeling an oppressive sense of deja deja deja vu. They are all flash and that is one of the reasons they have so much voice acting, because without it they just have shallow repetitive gameplay and usually poor writing. I don't know if its still the case but in the first months of release you could easily solo every single dragon in DA:I with a Knight Enchanter build. And you just did the same thing over and over rinse and repeat in the fight. The actiony gameplay of it was pretty cool feelingwise in that you were basically an elemental jedi with a staff and a mana-saber, but in the end completely shallow just like most MMORPGs it was just a sequence of moves that will pretty much work as a formula. I actually don't particularly care that the build itself was pretty OP, I am fine with swing like that really. More the problem is the typical formulaic gameplay stuck in a vast shallow lake of repetition. These things are barely even games. They are just toys not games.