What'd be the general interest in something like this?

[Walkure]

A while back, I mused this to Chdata on damage mechanics:

I was considering something for a while:


Minimum and maximum damage [formula] is known.
Exact enemy modification spots are known (through datamining here (http://www.pso-world.com/forums/showthread.php?t=210766)).
Enemy DEF, for any enemy, can be found using the above.
Any hidden modifier on attacks/PAs/techs can be found in a similar manner.
HP for every non-boss, and even most minibosses can be precisely found by burning/poisoning them. Tick damage mechanics are on swiki somewhere. Other boss HP can be approximated by recording a fight, keeping numbers in recordable view, and using attacks that make data logging easy.

With all this, you could find out how much attack you'd need to reliably kill a particular enemy in X number of hits. "Reliably killing" requiring either minimum damage or close to it, with no random-ish modifiers. And, for practically any purpose, that's what really matters, and average damage is just a tool used to try to improve that goal. You'd just need the exact defense and HP of an enemy (and DEX if you're using a crafted weapon) to find this out. Which, mind you, would get tedious to re-measure all the new data as more content comes out.

You could probably describe an enemies defensive stats and HP in terms of another enemy's stats. For example, regardless of difficulty, you might be able to describe Rockbear's HP as a multiple X of an Oodan's HP of the same level, and some shift for the DEF. That'd mean that if you knew the relationship between a Rockbear's stats and an Oodan's stats, finding an L60 Oodan's defense/HP would allow you to instantly find an L60 Rockbear's defense/HP.

What if you could relate every mob to that single Oodan? You'd be able to get any level 60 mob's stats just by collecting a single set of data, once you've proven all the other relationships are true.
IFF properly set up, I could imagine a calculator that could, with a weapon and your lists of modifiers, could break down

-How many hits it'd take, max, to kill a mob if you're hitting them on the same spot repeatedly
-How much additional attack you'd need to reduce that number.

Something that could be really useful for finding BiS affixing for dedicated TA runs, seeing if adding an extra round of attack-boosting affixes affects gameplay at all, you know, the good stuff.

What'll this need? It'll take a lot of work:


Transcribing and organizing the raw data of hitzones into something useful and accessible.
Testing to confirm monster defense, and correlations to other monsters.
Testing to confirm monster HP values, and correlations to other monsters. If there's an easy way to correlate based on poison/burn tics, try finding a way to correlate boss HP in there.
If someone is feeling particularly masochistic they could work on finding enemy DEX and finding a correlation for mobs as well. Since it's not relevant for finding the minimum damage of weapons OUTSIDE of crafting or non-rares, and either of those will have really, really weak minimum damage, I'd just as soon write off those.
Lots of cussing at random PSE effects messing with the above measurements.

In short, it's going to be a LOT of work to get it up and running to a nice precision. And before that, I'd like to get a general gauge on if people would actually be interested in such a thing before going out and getting seriously started on something with a scope this big.


Some notes and basic observations:
[spoiler-box]

Chdata has done some testing on Dragonkin, I did some on forest SH mobs. He found that a 65 trash mob had a TDEF around 258, which was the same as the 65 Rockbear I had found. So, it might actually be that the defense values themselves are exactly the same by level.
This kinda matches up with what I've looked at; oodans, za oodans, and gulfs have the same modifiers, and they seem to pop up with the same critical damage on each attack (implying the same defense). The exception to this was a Garongo, which looking at the spreadsheet may have some slightly different modifiers:

[spoiler-box]http://i.imgur.com/D5s53U6.png

armadillo_a seems to be a garongo, and beast_a seems to be an Oodan (beast_b has a rock hitzone, it's most likely a Za oodan).


If you look at the columns to the left, it suggests they have the same modifiers. If you look at the columns to the RIGHT, you'll see what look like damage modifiers, but the garongo's are lower for anything not 1.2. So that might be more precise information? It's odd and worth investigating

[/spoiler-box]


Enemies are uniform in level in TAs (exceptions being some minibosses like Nab II splitup enemies, catadraan in amduscia, etc), and AQs. So those would be ideal spots for finding mob HP/DEF correlations.
AQs are probably more reliable for collecting data on miniboss HP, since there's no PSE effects fucking with everything. HOWEVER, the boss room is random chance, and they can be infected/rare/named (but that can be accounted for I guess).
I tried using burn I on different TA NAB I difficulties to prove/disprove HP correlation as a spur-the-moment test, but I forgot about PSE effects so that might explain why I have a very different ratio for one set.
I burned an Oodan twice, and the second time it took 20% more damage. So there's that.

Shitty testing:
[spoiler-box]http://i.imgur.com/UJrDgIw.png[/spoiler-box]
[/spoiler-box]

So. Discuss.

[Chdata]

Actually I was going to do that whenever I get a list of enemy HP/DEF/DEX

Maybe I should go visit that other forum some time, but I haven't been playing PSO2 for a few weeks now due to college. It's all I need to make a program telling you how much X-atk you need for stuff.

All I have so far is something that can take your code string from the skill calculator and tell you your max/min against an enemy with X defense and X dex.

Here's the Enemy HP/DEF/DEX (http://www.pso-world.com/forums/showthread.php?t=218660) thread.

[Walkure]

Well, if I compiled a list of enemy DEF/HP I'd pretty much have the framework for a spreadsheet done.

Yeah, main problem in setting this up is I'm busy with other stuff, and my free time on games is mostly spent on other games for now. I mainly wanted to float this idea around and see interest in a project like this.

[IndigoNovember]

Kinda surprised nobody else thought this was interesting and useful. I'd totally use it. I get the feeling I'd be upgrading equipment a lot less frequently if I could get some hard data (close approximations are fine as well) that 37 more ATK will not bump me up from 2 shotting to 1 shotting certain mobs.

[Sanguine2009]

i would really dig this sort of thing too. just last week i was thinking how great it would be to have something like this

[Gardios]

Kinda surprised nobody else thought this was interesting and useful.

I had considered doing a complete character calc before, but the lack of known enemy stats and scaling pretty much put an end to that immediately.

[Zipzo]

I think this would be handy, of course, why not, but the sort of effort it would take combined with the seemingly non-existent details we'd need to keep something like this accurate and covering every legitimate point of reference just seems...well...unlikely.

[Chdata]

I don't see what the issue is aside from getting a lot of enemy DEF/DEX/HP amounts in the first place.

Depends on what these non-existent details are that you speak of I guess. Is there something in particular that was bothering you?

It shouldn't be hard to keep it accurate; I doubt sega will go around changing the stats of tons of enemies for no reason. The only hard part I imagine is finding the HP of MPA boosted enemies and categorizing boosted enemies in general. I hope to find out that an enemy being boosted just means it has 2x or 3x HP or something.

[Zipzo]

I don't see what the issue is aside from getting a lot of enemy DEF/DEX/HP amounts in the first place.

Depends on what these non-existent details are that you speak of I guess. Is there something in particular that was bothering you?

It shouldn't be hard to keep it accurate; I doubt sega will go around changing the stats of tons of enemies for no reason. The only hard part I imagine is finding the HP of MPA boosted enemies and categorizing boosted enemies in general. I hope to find out that an enemy being boosted just means it has 2x or 3x HP or something.

What I mean is we can tailor the definitions to a pretty fine point based on what we see with our eyes, but we still might be missing something in terms of the actual data in the game.

It's kind of like the mechanics behind Standing Snipe, or the Brave and Wise stances, there is just a few inherent & strange oddities about certain ways in which their effects come in to place, enough to the point that it's hard to just simply say "You get extra damage for attacking from behind/front" or "You get extra damage if you shoot while standing still".

You can notate a defense value based on the critical damage you can achieve on every single mob, but you'd have to do it for every single mob of every single existing level of that mob, and even that, you still haven't learned if there's some kind of consistent equation for how much DEF goes up per level, or what the increase in def is, if it's just blatantly and arbitrarily tinkered by the developers or if there actually is a scaling mechanism or not.

So essentially we're just making our own stuff up without SEGA telling us anything based only on what we see. We're saying "based on the maximum damage I achieve with this pa, on this mob, at this level, with this weapon, with this amount of striking/ranged/tech, it would take x amount of hits to kill this mob using a PA of this power quotient", and then having to scale and/or find an equation that essentially roots that in to every single value of attack power, PA power, taking all skill trees bonuses in to account and etc, in order to understand the answer your looking for without simply going to the damn area and just trying it yourself, how many hits it takes an Oodan to die.

So essentially I'm saying that, despite the potential usefulness of such an all encompassing chart, the kind of work necessary would just make going to an area and trying it yourself look way easier.

[Walkure]

The end goal itself is a long way off; I'll admit that. Finding precise mob HP is something that not a lot have people have looked at in detail, and that's honestly the main stumbling block to the process.

But it's a process of gradually refining things, that will, eventually, lead to some calculations that get more and more precise until they can predict most situations with minimal input.

For example:
The most promising part right now is that, barring hidden modifiers on attacks, we can already start calculating for maximum and minimum damage fairly precisely. Finagling the datamined mob hitzones will help a lot for this. From this, we can look at hidden modifiers by seeing what stands out from calculations, finding them, and correcting for it.

If mob defense is really a static amount per level across all mobs, then that'll be really simple to keep up-to-date even just by measuring certain levels. Maybe a noticeable pattern will crop up, maybe not. If so, yeah mob DEF could be predictable based on just a few factors.

If there really is static mob defenses by level, then there probably is something really simple behind mob HP as well. If there's a difference based on the type of mission then that might be easy to find out.

The absolute worst-case scenario I can think of is that the project scope get limited to something very specific, like baselines for one/twoshots for trash mobs on TAs. And - hey, that's probably what 90% of people would be looking for anyways.