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How removing CPs can improve your damage mitigation

Tyagar
Tyagar
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Some while ago, while I was testing some finer details regarding damage mitigation in the game, I stumbled across some curious phenomenon which can occur under certain circumstances. In theory, this phenomenon can be responsible for up to 4% damage mitigation being either applied or not applied, without you noticing which of the two cases it is. I think that I can explain precisely why and when it is happening, and I even have a conjecture where exactly in the programming of the game some part was implemented wrongly, in order for allowing this phenomenon to happen.

Being the uncaring scientist I am, I was pretty much satisfied once I understood how this phenomenon can occur, and didn't think about it much anymore thereafter. However, the other day it so happened that I showed and explained these things to an ingame friend of my mine again, and we had a lot of fun wondering about yet another of the many miracles that ESO has in store for us^^ Following up on this conversation, I decided it might be interesting after all to share this observations with everyone, both to provide some amusement for the community, and in order for ZOS to be able to fix a probably unintended inconsistency in some of their game mechanics. In order to make things a bit more interesting, I will however not explain immediately what is going on, but instead offer to you to follow the subsequent small list of steps to be taken, to first discover for yourself some pretty unexpected details about this game:
  1. Make sure your Vampire Stage is at least 2 and that it does not change over the course of the following steps
  2. Log into one of your characters and travel to your home.
  3. Put your Elemental Defender and Ironclad CP passives to 100.
  4. Choose some standard PvE Overland mob that deals direct spell damage and travel there (you can take, e.g., one of the Fire Atronachs at Spellscar in Craglorn)
  5. Let yourself being hit by the mob and write down the damage you received.
  6. Lower your Elemental Defender CP to 56.
  7. Let yourself being hit by the mob again and write down the damage you received.
  8. Think about it.
  9. EnjoyxD

Finishing this small advertisement and turning a bit more serious, I want to add the following comment: I am currently unaware whether this phenomenon is something that other people discovered before or not, and I am interested to hear feedback on that. Those of you that are here already a while longer might remember some ~2 years old thread of @Asayre on how the order of spending your CP points in the Warrior category can affect the total damage mitigation you receive. The phenomenon is similar here, and some of the more knowledgeable people among you might already be able to deduce from this earlier discussion and the list of steps that I posted above what is happening. (Actually, I could never confirm the observations discussed in the quoted thread of @Asayre myself. This might be due to the fact that following the publication of his thread, the game mechanics were changed, and I only tested his observations after the responsible problems had already been patched out. It might also be that the conditions triggering this phenomenon had not been understood correctly at the time, though of course I wouldn't dare to imply that @Asayre had missed something in his analysis;) It's not really important which of the two cases is correct, the one insight it would provide, however, is whether the formulas for calculating damage mitigation have been flawed in just one place or in at least two places.)

I'll leave another post with an explanation of the phenomenon in a few days;)
Edited by Tyagar on September 11, 2019 2:11PM
Guild Lead of Tamriel Wolf Pack
  • SirAndy
    SirAndy
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    I wish i could say i am surprised ...
    dry.gif


  • Bluestin
    Bluestin
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    I had thought this was stated to have been fixed in a past update; is that not the case and this problem is still observable in-game?
  • OG_Kaveman
    OG_Kaveman
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    All damage mitigation is multiplicative in this game. Leading to the effects you see. To read more about this, checkout this thread- https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/279426/damage-mitigation-explanation-updated-15-07-2019 by the brilliant @paulsimonps
    Edited by OG_Kaveman on September 10, 2019 6:44PM
  • Tyagar
    Tyagar
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    As promised, I will try to explain now, to the best of my understanding, what is happening if you follow the steps described in my first post. Since some concerns have been declared on whether or not that phenomenon might have been patched out, I went and tested it again today. In particular, the numbers I will present below are from these recent testings. I have to add one comment, namely, in order for something interesting to happen, you actually need to have a Vampire Stage of at least 2. I missed to mention that in my inital post and updated it accordingly now.

    My explanation will consist of 2 steps. First, I describe the observations, in particular the precise damage numbers that I can obtain empirically. In the second step, I propose an explanation what is happening here.

    Step 1. Observations
    I did the testing with my CP 160 Dragonknight. Spell Resistance was arranged to be 0, I did not wear any equipment and had no skills on my skill bar. The attack I was testing was the Flare attack of a Fire Atronach. (I used the area south of the Willowgrove Wayshrine in Reaper's March as my testing ground.) I first arranged my Vampire Stage to any given number, afterwards I performed exactly the steps that are described in my post above. By proceeding this way, I can observe the following damage from the Flare attack; the first number indicates the damage I took with both Ironclad 100 and Elemental Defender 100, the second number indicates the damage I took after setting my CPs to Ironclad 100 and Elemental Defender 56.

    Vampire 1: 996 / 1027
    Vampire 2: 1229 / 1213
    Vampire 3: 1307 / 1291
    Vampire 4: 1384 / 1369

    The interesting observation here is of course: While my Vampire stage is at least 2, removing 44 CP in Elemental Defender actually decreased the damage I was taking!

    Step 2. Attempt of an explanation
    From what I can tell, there are at least two different times when the total damage mitigation you receive is recalculated. One time is whenever you do what I will call a "hard reset" of your user interface - relog your game, travel to a different zone, or travel to a player in any zone, i.e., any action that will trigger for example your queued ingame messages to being delivered to you (interestingly, the command /reloadui is not doing this). The second time is when you reset your CP.

    Now it seems to be the case that, while your Vampire Stage is affecting your damage taken, i.e., while your Vampire Stage is at least 2 and while you are receiving fire damage, that the formulas that are applied to compute your total damage mitigation in the above two cases are actually different. Namely, it seems that the bonuses of your Ironclad and Elemental Defender CPs are counted multiplicatively after a hard reset of your user interface and additively after a reset of your CP. More precisely, it seems the follwoing formulas are being used to obtain the above numbers:

    Damage Taken = RoundUp[ Incoming Damage * RoundUp(0.75 * 0.85 + Vampire) ]
    Damage Taken = RoundUp[ Incoming Damage * RoundUp(1 - (0.25 + 0.12) + Vampire) ]

    Here the first formula is for the case Ironclad 100 (i.e., 25% Mitigation bonus) and Elemental Defender 100 (i.e., 15% Mitigation bonus) after a hard reset of your user interface - note that the mitigation of your CPs enters multiplicatively. The second formula is for the case Ironclad 100 (i.e., 25% Mitigation bonus) and Elemental Defender 56 (i.e., 12% Mitigation bonus) after you reset your CP - note that the mitigation of your CPs enters additively. "Vampire" is one of the numbers 0.15 / 0.2 / 0.25, depending on whether you have Vampire status 2 / 3 / 4. The base damage of the Fire Atronach's Flare Attack is 1555. Using this base damage and the above two formulas you get exactly the numbers that are observed in the game.

    If these formulas and the conditions triggering them are deduced correctly, then this explains why removing CPs actually increases your damage mitigation here: When you remove your CP, your individual mitigation numbers get lower, but since at the same time you move to a more beneficial computation method (counting the CP bonuses additively is more benificial than counting them multiplicatively), the total damage mitigation you receive is still better.

    Conclusions
    Now while the oberseved above phenomenon is certainly interesting, does it actually have any practical implications? This I do not want to answer in any definite way at the moment. To begin with, the setting in which this phenomeon can happen is quite limited - you need to have Vampire Stage at least 2 and you need to take fire damage. If these conditions are met, however, then in theory you currently would be able to receive a small mitigation bonus by resetting your CP only after you ported into a trial: By resetting your CP in the trial you will migrate to the more beneficial computation method for your damage mitigation; if you reset it before you port into the trial, then the subsequent porting will trigger a hard reset of your user interface and you will end up with the less beneficial computation method once you arrived in the trial.

    I also have to add that I am almost sure that more things are off with respect to computing the damage mitigation. For example, when I did the testing today, and did not follow exactly the order of steps above, but instead for example changed my Vampire Stage only after porting into the zone where I would engange the Fire Atronach, then sometimes I would get even more different numbers. In fact, with my DK at 0 Spell Resistance and Vampire Level 4 I was able to observe any of the following 4 damage ticks from the Fire Atronach's Flare attack (yes I was always above 50% of my max health, and yes I always had the same distance to the Fire Atronach):

    1305, 1369, 1384, 1416.

    At some point the damage ticks even changed in the middle of the same fight: I was just standing there getting one Flare attack after the other, and suddenly the damage would increase a bit, and then never return to its original value. Even if I restarted the fight only the new higher number would appear. I mean... well, don't ask me, I couldn't figure it out so far. It seems that there are probably more times than just the two I listed above, at which your damage mitigation is recalculated. And it seems that also at these times slightly different formulas are being used. As I so far don't understand the details on these, I cannot say if a potential positive effect from resetting your CPs only after you ported into the trial would persist throughout the whole trial.

    To summarize, what I can say at the moment is the following:
    1. It makes for a good party trick, that under the correct circumstances it is possible to increase your damage mitigation by removing some of your CP.
    2. The formulas for computing damage mitigation are inconsistently implemented. The developers should check the different places at whicht a recalculation of the mitigation is triggered, and make sure that the formulas applying at these places are the same.
    3. It is unclear if from these observations you can actually obtain a consistent advantage over the whole duration of a trial, but if you want to bet on it, then the way you would have to proceed is to only reset your CP after you have ported into the trial.
    Edited by Tyagar on September 11, 2019 3:08PM
    Guild Lead of Tamriel Wolf Pack
  • Morgul667
    Morgul667
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    Quite interesting thanks

    So mitigation calculation seem to be inconsistently coded

    Quite disappointing from ZOS but.... not really a surprise
  • Gilvoth
    Gilvoth
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    probly true.
    i hate this
  • OG_Kaveman
    OG_Kaveman
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    @paulsimonps any input on this?
  • paulsimonps
    paulsimonps
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    OG_Kaveman wrote: »
    @paulsimonps any input on this?

    TL;DR

    Might look at it later.
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