Armour scaling

We had a bit of a discussion about this in global chat, but really there's no way we can do anything about it, so here's the feedback.

Corynn devised a build that can crit for thousands of physical damage. The sheer height of this damage, combined with the way armour diminishes based on the height of the damage, means that his damage enjoys an average damage reduction of about 5%. In other words, excluding Granite Flasks, his damage is uncounterable through means of armour.

The armour curve is currently balance for PvE content, where a physical hit for more than 3000 damage is pretty rare. In PvP, however, critical hits of that size are going to be very common, making armour substantially weaker than every other form of defense; it's simply not balanced according to the same standards.


Of course just upscaling the DR is not a possibility, that would make PvE content significantly easier. Additionally, PvE gives room to rely on Endurance Charges, which further boost the benefit of armour; in PvP, there's no room to use Enduring Cry or Ambu's Charge, and obviously Warlord's Mark doesn't even help.

Someone suggested armour to get the same benefit as Evasion: additional reduction against critical hits. Can't say how viable that is as a fix, but it may be worth considering.

What about using the non-crit damage to calculate the %reduction rather than crit damage?

Or a change that would fix armor/charges in pve as well as pvp:
Change endurance charges to stack with armor as if it were a separate roll, rather than additively (ie if you have 60% reduction from armor and 6 endurance charges, your charges reduce 30% of the 40% damage you take, bringing you to 72% total reduction). Armor could then be rebalanced (buffed) around this new mechanic. Also since this would reduce the utility of endurance charges substantially, I'd suggest adding +1% max resists per charge so they'd still be attractive to pure tank builds in pve.

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0nin wrote:

Corynn devised a build that can crit for thousands of physical damage.

Are you talking about lvl 28 PVP ?

No, endgame.

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dzordzo wrote:

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0nin wrote:

Corynn devised a build that can crit for thousands of physical damage.

Are you talking about lvl 28 PVP ?

I think he means thousands AFTER the pvp penalty is taken into account.

I personally think that is very hard to get both a lot of critical dmg and a lot of critial chance, it's viable but requires a lot of points in your skill tree.

The problem comes becouse of the existance of always-crit flasks. You can basically reach 999% increased critical strike dmg, with a miserable 6% critical strike chance, and always get the critical strikes using the flasks.. is nonsense, why are there so many critical strike chance nodes if you can just skip them all to get only critical dmg boost? I suggest to remove these flasks to balance pvp..

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Ows wrote:

I personally think that is very hard to get both a lot of critical dmg and a lot of critial chance, it's viable but requires a lot of points in your skill tree.

The problem comes becouse of the existance of always-crit flasks. You can basically reach 999% increased critical strike dmg, with a miserable 6% critical strike chance, and always get the critical strikes using the flasks.. is nonsense, why are there so many critical strike chance nodes if you can just skip them all to get only critical dmg boost? I suggest to remove these flasks to balance pvp..

The issue is people can just fly around with whirling, and flicker whenever, OR chain flicker with the multiple-flicker sockets.

It's not just a problem against cory however, Maras somewhat dominate end game pvp, and physical damage in general from an RT mara is unmitigatable after a point if they just hit enough damage. I get 43k armor with granite, and Jerk/Mouze 2 shot me, I also have 4k hp. The issue is armor scaling is simply too low, players can easily hit hard enough to make armor relatively irrelevant

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EpsiIon wrote:

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Ows wrote:

I personally think that is very hard to get both a lot of critical dmg and a lot of critial chance, it's viable but requires a lot of points in your skill tree.

The problem comes becouse of the existance of always-crit flasks. You can basically reach 999% increased critical strike dmg, with a miserable 6% critical strike chance, and always get the critical strikes using the flasks.. is nonsense, why are there so many critical strike chance nodes if you can just skip them all to get only critical dmg boost? I suggest to remove these flasks to balance pvp..

The issue is people can just fly around with whirling, and flicker whenever, OR chain flicker with the multiple-flicker sockets.

It's not just a problem against cory however, Maras somewhat dominate end game pvp, and physical damage in general from an RT mara is unmitigatable after a point if they just hit enough damage. I get 43k armor with granite, and Jerk/Mouze 2 shot me, I also have 4k hp. The issue is armor scaling is simply too low, players can easily hit hard enough to make armor relatively irrelevant

And to emphasize this..
The damage on weapon bases are balanced around pve, so that slower ones do slightly more dps.
That's good, but then in pvp they don't just do slightly more dps, they do WAY more dps... since they pierce armor way better than fast ones at the same dps.
So when I wack people with my super-slow, super-powerful marohi erqi mace...

One thing to realize: the crit build won't be terribly viable in an endgame arena, once those are implemented. He needs diamond flasks to do what he's doing. When you're in an arena with twice as many granite charges as he has diamond charges? You'll be able to counter it comfortably. Even if you don't he only gets two kills.

Just a thought!

There are also ways of countering a crit build in open world PvP. Think block/acro/evasion.

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Zakaluka wrote:

One thing to realize: the crit build won't be terribly viable in an endgame arena, once those are implemented. He needs diamond flasks to do what he's doing. When you're in an arena with twice as many granite charges as he has diamond charges? You'll be able to counter it comfortably. Even if you don't he only gets two kills.

Just a thought!

There are also ways of countering a crit build in open world PvP. Think block/acro/evasion.

Indeed, but the fact is it UTTERLY renders ANY armor reliant concept INVALID. No pvper atm needs to carry diamonds, let alone a flicker-dagger. The just whirl back and forth, in relative safety and you have no way to harrass or kill them (Or if you do hurt them a bit, blink and they're gone). Just throw in flicker whenever CD is up, its simply a matter of time before you are dead. Even acro/block/eva don't fix this, they simply may extend the time of death until after the match is over. There is still the chance, however infitismally small, that they will roll a crit flicker and 1 shot you. No amount of skill, gear or combination of the two can counter this.

The issue is there's no way to have any sort of fight that doesn't end in insta-gib, due to the nature of mobility in this game. Puncture is an interesting solution, and does help somewhat, but then we are again, talking about physical damage, which is near-unresistable. It also means non-caster ele users are boned, as they have no way of forcing a fight, nor, due to resists, do they have a chance to insta-gib.

In a balanced or even semi-balanced-broken pvp, your suggestions would work Zak; but they simply don't apply in this game. Yet.