Incomprehensible system of characteristics

HoffmannTheBest

I've been playing for 4 months now and still can't figure out what all these tons of values ​​and additional statistics are for, since it's not clear how they affect anything.

I had about 30k protection from magical and physical damage, while my character was destroyed as if he had 15k protection, while another character build with 10k penetration can't penetrate a regular mage, but if you make a 60-70% crit, both tanks and mages are immediately penetrated, and a lot of damage is inflicted. Then why do you need this penetration at all if the damage is tiny? Why was this parameter introduced into the game at all if it doesn't affect damage at all?

Sluggy

Yeah, I can see how this could be complex to new comers (especially when there are so many historic stats that kinda don't matter) and the game offers exactly-precisely zero lessons on what any of it means. I've felt for a long time that they should repurpose some of the guild dailies to actually provide 'lessons' that teach some of this stuff in an engaging way but that's neither here nor there.

It might help if you asked some specific questions about specific stats. Which ones are you trying to understand? Also, what kinds of fights were you dealing with? Worldbosses? Dungeon bosses? If so, which ones? Pvp? Well, that's a whole other beast that has hyper-evolved to the point where even the very worst players are a serious threat to anyone new to it.

HoffmannTheBest

Sluggy wrote: »

Yeah, I can see how this could be complex to new comers (especially when there are so many historic stats that kinda don't matter) and the game offers exactly-precisely zero lessons on what any of it means. I've felt for a long time that they should repurpose some of the guild dailies to actually provide 'lessons' that teach some of this stuff in an engaging way but that's neither here nor there.

It might help if you asked some specific questions about specific stats. Which ones are you trying to understand? Also, what kinds of fights were you dealing with? Worldbosses? Dungeon bosses? If so, which ones? Pvp? Well, that's a whole other beast that has hyper-evolved to the point where even the very worst players are a serious threat to anyone new to it.

Why do I deal less damage with high penetration than with low penetration but high critical hit chance?
How does defense work, what percentage of damage does it absorb, given that damage is indicated in four-digit numbers, and defense in five-digit numbers.

Let's say penetration is added to damage, and the player deals 13k damage per second 3k weapon damage + 10k penetration, it still does not penetrate defense.

In singles, everything is much clearer: the higher the armor rating, the more damage is blocked. In Morrowind, it works like this:

1 + armor rating / damage received. For example: 1 + 200 (at the maximum armor skill level) / 100 (hypothetical damage) = 3. 3/100 = 33.3 - this is the damage that the player will receive.
And how to calculate in ESO is unclear. Huge values, but in fact do not help at all.

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Besides, what is this table with additional data for if it is completely empty, although various buffs from Hero Points and equipment work for me? Okay, they write the cost of release, the cost of stealth, etc., but where is the rest of the data? Everything is completely zero there.

SilverBride

I don't even look at my characteristics any more. I just look for a build online and use the ones that seem to fit how I like to play.

sarahthes

A lot of it is going to depend on solo vs group play, and PvE vs PvP.

Against overland mobs you only need about 10K pen (it's slightly lower than that but close enough). In group content and arenas you need 18.2K pen. Pen = damage, but any pen above cap is wasted. In group content you will get some pen from other sources, so you probably don't need to build into it very much. Velothi amulet is probably enough if you're an arcanist. Add force of nature cp if you're not a class that has a pen passive.

Once you have pen sorted out, you want to get your Crit damage modifier to around 75-100%. The cap is 125%, but some of that will be covered by group buffs such as warhorn, support sets, etc. Make sure you have a personal source of minor force such as velothi amulet.

After this, Crit chance - this is where you would add a mundus (thief) and sets that increase Crit chance rating.

Finally weapon and spell damage. This is done by stacking all of your resources into a single pool, having matching armor glyphs, and also food, as these build off of both weapon/spell damage lines on sets and skills, and your max stat.

HoffmannTheBest

SilverBride wrote: »

I don't even look at my characteristics any more. I just look for a build online and use the ones that seem to fit how I like to play.

Me too, but Warden is such a weak class that no build is playable. Right now I have two panels with only one buff from each of the Warden branches, and the remaining ability slots are filled with weapon abilities and one fighters guild ability - crossbow.

The Snowstorm ultimate is weak, the Bear ultimate needs to be kept on both panels, otherwise the bear will disappear when switching. Rock Rider is weak, Shalkas take a long time to get out, Flies are weak and any treatment completely neutralizes their periodic damage. At the same time, weapon abilities are very strong, many times strong, plus they give useful debuffs to the enemy, such as a 60% slowdown and a buff to the player in the form of healing. Or the imposition of status effects, which are many times more useful than some weak Warden abilities. I won't even mention the Bow branch's ultimate. The most useful ultimate is one that knocks anyone down in a couple of seconds. 46k damage in 4 seconds and 26k damage on top over 8 seconds - that's what I call an ultimate, not the measly 10k damage in 8 seconds from the blizzard.

SilverBride

HoffmannTheBest wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I don't even look at my characteristics any more. I just look for a build online and use the ones that seem to fit how I like to play.

Me too, but Warden is such a weak class that no build is playable.

Warden is the only class I don't have. I think of them as tanks and healers and I don't want to play either. I also don't want a big pet following me around.

TaSheen

I main warden DPS, have for 7 years now. They kill stuff just as fast as any other class outside arc - and I have arcs too, but still prefer my redguard warden mains. Are they BIS? No, but I don't give a rat's patoot about BIS....

I never play tanks or healers, any class or race. Not my type of gameplay. I'm a straight up solo DPS period. I don't do group content of any kind, ditto pvp. So if that's what OP is looking for help with, I can't help.

jaws343

HoffmannTheBest wrote: »

Sluggy wrote: »

Yeah, I can see how this could be complex to new comers (especially when there are so many historic stats that kinda don't matter) and the game offers exactly-precisely zero lessons on what any of it means. I've felt for a long time that they should repurpose some of the guild dailies to actually provide 'lessons' that teach some of this stuff in an engaging way but that's neither here nor there.

It might help if you asked some specific questions about specific stats. Which ones are you trying to understand? Also, what kinds of fights were you dealing with? Worldbosses? Dungeon bosses? If so, which ones? Pvp? Well, that's a whole other beast that has hyper-evolved to the point where even the very worst players are a serious threat to anyone new to it.

Why do I deal less damage with high penetration than with low penetration but high critical hit chance?

This really depends on how you are balancing out your other stats in relation to these factors.

For example, assume an enemy has 10K resistance.

You have a build with 10K penetration and you have a skill tooltip of 9K. Well, you can assume that the full 9K damage is going to hit the enemy. Now, let's also say your crit chance is 20% and your crit damage is 50%. Assuming you do 10 attacks and 2 crits, you are looking at a total of 99,000 damage, or an average of 9,900 damage per attack.

Now, let's go the other route, you have 5K pen and a skill tooltip of 9K. With a crit chance of 50% and crit damage of 50%.
You are reducing their resistance to 5K with your penetration, which means they are negating ~7.5% of your damage. Over 10 attacks, with 5 crits you are doing the following damage: 104,063 total damage, or an average of 10,406 damage per attack.

In this scenario, the more crit chance option beats the penetration option. You could actually have a lower tooltip with the crit chance route and still beat the penetration stack. But even more realistically, a player stacking crit chance is also going to be stacking crit damage. So the damage their crits are doing is going to make the average damage done greater over a fight than someone stacking penetration.

Sluggy

For the record: Warden has never had a bad patch. They are very strong but you need to play to those strengths. They are especially proficient at AoE burst damage which admittedly comes more in handy for PvP and some of the arenas but they can still dish out well enough for all content including endgame trials. They are second-to-none at healing and defense right now and are extremely self-reliant classes since they can source a lot of penetration and with a little bit of investment in crit chance they can deal really good crit damage.


Anyway, armor works like this:
There is a soft cap at about 33k. At that number you receive 50% damage reduction. You can go higher than this but they only benefit it offers is to avoid penetration. And since only players can penetrate it doesn't really help you to go higher than that in PvE. Penetration and armor debuffs directly subtract from that number. So if you were at 33k and someone had enough to pen and/or strip away, say, 16.5k you'd only be receiving a 25% damage reduction from it.

Penetration is usually the strongest source of damage increase in the game. A line of pen on an item is *usually* more damage than a line of weapon/spell damage. But there are always caveats to that. For example, if you are already penetrating more than the target has armor then it does you no good. Or if your base weapon/spell damage is so weak that the skills and gear aren't scaling well then it can hurt too. The numbers you look for really depends on the content but like was mentioned above the number most PvErs aim for in dungeons and trials is about 18k since no NPC has more armor than that. In PvP it gets a LOT more complicated since players can have as little as 12k armor or as much as 40k (or more in some rare cases) with most sitting somewhere between 20k and 30k. As an example of how strong Warden can be in PvP, I often find my penetration sitting around the 25k to 30k mark when I go for a burst which is enough to make anyone I target feel like they are naked.

Crit resists are purely for PvP. NPC never crit. The formula for crit resists are a bit weird but the gist is that crit resists directly subtract from the multiplier that another player would get if they crit against you. I honestly don't recall the covertion factor but I want to say something like 60 crit resist subracts 1 percentage point from your attackers crit multiplier. Generally speaking this stuff is important because it helps avoid massive sudden spikes of damage that can happen when someone stacks into crit (like nightblades usually do) or if someone just gets lucky and crits multiple times in a row. Generally, more is better but like everything it's a balancing act between pen, raw damage, crit chance, and crit damage.

Critting an attack (which matters in PvP and PvE) gives a base damage increase of 50% (1.5x multiplier) to an attack and is often the strongest source of damage increase once you are fully penetrating (or nearly fully) a target since it's such a huge multiplier. Again, this still depends on base damage though since if you have a small tooltip of, say 7k and a crit multiplier of 2x then you'd deal 14k damage but if you have a 10k tooltip and the base 1.5x multiplier then you'd deal 15k. PvP has more strats than can be listed here and can range from never caring about crits to stacking heavily into them. For PvE however it usually is a worthwhile investment once you hit a decent amount of penetration first.

Hopefully that will clear a bit of this stuff up. In the end the exact numbers that gives the best result will always be a balancing act but in PvE where numbers are fixed and always known that act is much simpler - especially in organized dungeons and trials where you can at least expect a tank to provide a minimum of about 9k penetration to the group against bosses just from their taunt. Often healers and tanks will also wear other sets that boost crit damage, penetration, and raw damage even further.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that the character sheet is a bit weird for crit damage multipliers. It's listing the bonus crit damage on top of the base 50% you normally get. So if you see 50% in there that means you are actually getting 100% or a 2x multiplier.

Necrotech_Master

penetration is only effect in removing the enemies armor, there is no benefit for "overpenetrating"

most overland mobs for example, only have 9100 armor, and the max that npcs have is 18200 armor

penetration does -armor, but doesnt do anything when the enemy is down to 0 effective armor

if you have 15,000 penetration hitting an enemy with 9100 armor for example, the difference of 5900 penetration is not useful and providing no additional benefit

increasing crit chance/dmg increases your own stats instead of trying to reduce an enemy stats, so the only cap your dealing with is the crit dmg cap

Zodiarkslayer

Please understand that ESO combat is neither linear nor one dimensional. It is fast and a lot of factors play a role simultaneously.

As an example, Penetration and Armor are two aspects of only one dimension of damage dealing. These two variables have fixes boundaries of 0 and 18200. And a lot of effects can influence their respective values and that very dynamically over the course of one fight.

If you want to understand everrything to do with ESO combat, you are going to have to invest a considerable amount of time into Googling and reading.

Pevey

@ZOS_Kevin, I think this is a very interesting thread you should raise to the devs since there is at least one actively working on improving the new player experience. After playing this game for years, we get used to it and numb to how difficult it is to make sense of basic combat stats in this game.

Sluggy

Pevey wrote: »

@ZOS_Kevin, I think this is a very interesting thread you should raise to the devs since there is at least one actively working on improving the new player experience. After playing this game for years, we get used to it and numb to how difficult it is to make sense of basic combat stats in this game.

I think almost everyone I've ever talked to feels the same. The game doesn't make any real effort to actually describe what these stats do. Even a simple tooltip describing, for example, the damage reduction provided by your current armor would go a long way. And of course there's the whole half-finished hybridization thing.

At least in the past it was easy enough for new players to understand when I told them that stam and mag governed skills with their associated resources cost. Now when I explain it they always always ask why it's like this and I have to go into a short explanation of the history of changes. Just do away with the redundant stuff already! (No I don't like the current system better than the old but if we're gonna do it let's not half-bake it, yeah?)

And for the record I don't mind the way the stats work. Like Zodiarkslayer said, it's rather multi-dimensional and that's a good thing. Though again, let's not half bake it yeah? The fact that crit resists play absolutely zero aspect on the PvE side of things still baffles me (and new players) to this day as well. It's just that I think almost everyone can agree that the game provides just about zero insight as to what any of these numbers mean. For overland and questing that absolutely doesn't matter but for anything less trivial than that it starts to ramp in importance very quickly.

MidniteOwl1913

I still don't know what most of them mean or how they work together. Pen is one of the easier ones. Crit chance, critical damage, critical healing, spell/weapon damage, buffs/debuffs. Is arcane poorly described and often contradictory. Are they additive, or is one 20% buff all you get and the other 3 skills that buff are just wastes?

Half the time I don't even think that stuff works the way the tool tips say. It's a terrible mess. And don't even get me started on attack weaving.

Necrotech_Master

MidniteOwl1913 wrote: »

I still don't know what most of them mean or how they work together. Pen is one of the easier ones. Crit chance, critical damage, critical healing, spell/weapon damage, buffs/debuffs. Is arcane poorly described and often contradictory. Are they additive, or is one 20% buff all you get and the other 3 skills that buff are just wastes?

Half the time I don't even think that stuff works the way the tool tips say. It's a terrible mess. And don't even get me started on attack weaving.

most of those things are additive

pen, armor, crit chance, crit dmg, crit healing, dmg should all be additive from flat buffs

i think thats why they went with the less intuitive "crit rating" numbers to try to show its additive and actually is +3% crit instead of someone misinterpreting +3% crit as 3% increase of the current crit chance number lol

most % increases do stack too, but are not always additive, some are multiplicative and suffer diminishing returns (such as mitigation)

buffs are a bit easier, you can only ever have 1 copy of each major/minor buff active at a time, so the major brutality/sorcery that increases dmg, you cant stack that with itself, but you can stack it with the minor version (using your example, im not sure which 3 skills your referring too, but given an example of momentum from 2h and degeneration from mages guild, both apply major sorcery/brutality so these buffs do not stack, so theres no point to running both, you should pick 1 or the other)

HoffmannTheBest

Sluggy wrote: »

Pevey wrote: »

@ZOS_Kevin, I think this is a very interesting thread you should raise to the devs since there is at least one actively working on improving the new player experience. After playing this game for years, we get used to it and numb to how difficult it is to make sense of basic combat stats in this game.

I think almost everyone I've ever talked to feels the same. The game doesn't make any real effort to actually describe what these stats do. Even a simple tooltip describing, for example, the damage reduction provided by your current armor would go a long way. And of course there's the whole half-finished hybridization thing.

At least in the past it was easy enough for new players to understand when I told them that stam and mag governed skills with their associated resources cost. Now when I explain it they always always ask why it's like this and I have to go into a short explanation of the history of changes. Just do away with the redundant stuff already! (No I don't like the current system better than the old but if we're gonna do it let's not half-bake it, yeah?)

And for the record I don't mind the way the stats work. Like Zodiarkslayer said, it's rather multi-dimensional and that's a good thing. Though again, let's not half bake it yeah? The fact that crit resists play absolutely zero aspect on the PvE side of things still baffles me (and new players) to this day as well. It's just that I think almost everyone can agree that the game provides just about zero insight as to what any of these numbers mean. For overland and questing that absolutely doesn't matter but for anything less trivial than that it starts to ramp in importance very quickly.

Just add a display of the value of blocked damage in percent, speaking of defense values. This will be more than enough. Of course, here the Crossout developers mode is turned on, where they do not write exact numbers, but replace everything with sticks, because players will start asking why one data is written, and in fact completely different.

Pelanora

Yea I've given up trying to understand it, I rely on others to say what's good or not. The daily set thing on reddit is a god send.