Accuracy or Damage Type?

[Kal Adan]

I've a dilemma.

 

Should I use weapons my characters have higher accuracy with or use damage type that gives bonus against that particular enemy? As far as I understand I want high accuracy to not miss or graze enemies and get hits or critical hits them. On the other hand, damage type gives me extra power when I hit and my accuracy isn't that much worse overall (a few points). Problem is I have no idea how to gauge when accuracy is good and when too low. How you deal with this?

 

 

Additionally, should I want to sacrifice accuracy while boosting my deflection as much as possible or not when my characters have heavy armor on them? Should I have as much deflection as possible on my key frontline characters only? Additionaly, does damage reduction helps only against attacks versus health or versus endurance as well? I try to use heavy armor on Kana Rua and I am underwhelmed by his longevity in combat when he fights side-by-side with my two warriors (Eder and myself). He just doesn't last very long for all that iron he wears on himself.

Edited April 5, 2015 by Kal Adan

[Matuse]

During a fight with something, you can mouseover an attack messege and get an exact breakdown in how it worked. It will show your Accuracy, their Defense, your roll, and what the result was. If you assume that you'll roll about a 50 each time, that will give you a reasonable idea of how much bonus your accuracy is giving you.

 

 

 

Should I have as much deflection as possible on my key frontline characters only?

 

Generally, yes. The other characters are (in theory, anyway) not going to be attacked very often and deflection won't help them very much. Heavier armor will drastically reduce their damage output.

 

 

 

Additionaly, does damage reduction helps only against attacks versus health or versus endurance as well?

 

There's no difference between the two. Endurance is per-fight, Health is per-rest. Any damage you take hits both equally.

 

 

 

I try to use heavy armor on Kana Rua and I am underwhelmed by his longevity in combat when he fights side-by-side with my two warriors (Eder and myself). He just doesn't last very long for all that iron he wears on himself.

 

Give him a shield and/or some defensive talents to keep him up longer, or give him a reach weapon so he can stand behind the frontline and still hit stuff.

 

One of my biggest issues with PoE's combat mechanic is the "Holy Trinity" approach, which I absolutely detest as a design mechanic. Tanks become so tanky that in order to hurt them, the monsters have to be so overwhelming that they turn any non-tank into finger paint in half a second. It squeezes out rounded characters and puts absolute priority on creating absurdly specialized cogs.

Edited April 5, 2015 by Matuse

[Lasci]

It depends -- which probably isn't the answer you're hoping for.

 

In general, however, getting through DR (or avoiding it entirely by using the right damage type) is more important than being hyper accurate. This might be a different conversation if we were talking about a game based on D&D where every roll is a d20 and that +6 from weapon focus is large compared to the variance in the dice, but PoE uses a d100, and you can only miss 15% of the time if your accuracy is even with your target's deflection -- which is never the case (your accuracy is almost always higher) unless you're on PotD. To put that into perspective, that would be like saying that if your attack bonus in D&D is equal than the enemy's AC bonus, you only miss on a 1, 2, 3.

 

Of course, you don't always hit -- you can graze as well. But that puts a larger emphasis on how much damage you do and not necessarily how often you hit.

 

tl;dr you need accuracy but in most cases getting through DR is almost always better because this game is so lenient on how easy it is to hit enemies, but not so much on how easy it is to do damage to them.

 

There are exceptions, namely the final boss and a couple before him, but they're few and far inbetween.

[Kal Adan]

During a fight with something, you can mouseover an attack messege and get an exact breakdown in how it worked. It will show your Accuracy, their Defense, your roll, and what the result was. If you assume that you'll roll about a 50 each time, that will give you a reasonable idea of how much bonus your accuracy is giving you.

Here is what I've found:

 

- It looks like high accuracy is better than damage type bonus. Bonus damage gained from critical hit resulted from high accuracy is way bigger than bonus gained from damage type.

 

- Deflection seems to be not that important if you wear really heavy armor, because heavy armor reduces damage taken to grazes anyway. It's more important for characters who want to avoid attacks altogether, so I guess it's better to equip shields on characters with high deflection rather than give shields to heavily armored characters and since all that matters is accuracy you're better off using high accuracy (and high damage, if possible, weapons).

 

There's no difference between the two. Endurance is per-fight, Health is per-rest. Any damage you take hits both equally.

I see. This means that if non-fighters gets engaged they'll suffer dramatically due to health damage sustained as they don't have that much health.

 

Give him a shield and/or some defensive talents to keep him up longer, or give him a reach weapon so he can stand behind the frontline and still hit stuff.

I just wonder why he gets downed so quickly. He has deflection as good as that of fighters and his endurance is not that much lower. Is endurance recovery that significant a bonus? I suspect it might be a combination of both not having good enough deflection (meaning enemies hit him anyway) and no endurance recovery. He just losses endurance faster than warriors while fighting same enemies. If I give him the heaviest armor the best he can do is try to survive until help arrives. Mages and priests are in much worse position...

 

One of my biggest issues with PoE's combat mechanic is the "Holy Trinity" approach, which I absolutely detest as a design mechanic. Tanks become so tanky that in order to hurt them, the monsters have to be so overwhelming that they turn any non-tank into finger paint in half a second. It squeezes out rounded characters and puts absolute priority on creating absurdly specialized cogs.

I thought the goal was to get away from pre-designed roles by making any approach viable? Edited April 5, 2015 by Kal Adan

[Matuse]

 

 

I thought the goal was to get away from pre-designed roles by making any approach viable?

 

Whatever the goal may have been, what we have is a game where tanks are nearly indestructable, and everyone who isn't a tank is a grease stain as soon as they get a monster's attention. The other deliterious side effect of this situation is that it strongly biases DPS characters to being ranged (since any character in melee is going to get hit), which makes the Chanter reload chant even more powerful and desirable. So, I'm seeing the exact opposite of the expressed goal being the game's reality.

[pi2repsion]

One of my biggest issues with PoE's combat mechanic is the "Holy Trinity" approach, which I absolutely detest as a design mechanic. Tanks become so tanky that in order to hurt them, the monsters have to be so overwhelming that they turn any non-tank into finger paint in half a second. It squeezes out rounded characters and puts absolute priority on creating absurdly specialized cogs.

This. So very much.

 

I find that PoE's implementation of the "Holy Trinity" is better than most since at least they don't give the "tanks" taunting abilities that force enemies to engage them but operate on an attack of opportunity engagement system, but there's no hiding that as consequence of the combat model they've chosen, any damage that can seriously threaten a character in heavy armour with defensive talents will slaughter characters without defensive talents who wear less armour.

 

That is why - from a purely min-maxing approach to gameplay - we end up with constitution being a good dump stat for just about everybody except tanks, and we get characters either wearing some of the heaviest armour available, because they are tanking or offtanking, or as little armour as possible if they are not, because wearing armour makes them worse at damagedealing, healing, crowd controlling etc. due to longer action times without significantly affecting their survivability when they occasionally do get attacked.

 

Anybody wearing medium armour for other reasons than looks or some unique enchantment that's somehow powerful enough to be worth the recovery penalty should have their head examined.