Walkure
Apr 23, 2014, 11:36 AM
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.
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.