Also, the follow up on the ground slam is a bit worthless... I guess it's because the slam pushes them back out of range (whyfor it no longer knocks them down, like in DS1? Why you make Glal sad, From?), but the follow up up-swing tends to miss unless I'm way in their face when I hit them with the original attack.
0
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited May 2014
Incidentally, this is the proof of Elemental Defense
So there's an invader named 'GET REKKED N****' (the game doesn't censor it, but I'm going to). He sits in the undead crypt and invades people clearing the bell hall. I don't think he's classy gent, tbh.
First time he invades I get him to low health, he falls back and heals, a blue bro pops in to help as I pop a seed of giants. The ghosts kill them both and I feel kind of bad. 10 minutes later he invades again! I pop a seed immediately, run away around a corner and catch him with a 3 hit combo as he runs to catch up. He then falls back into the ghosts, but to his credit: tosses an alluring skull first. He pops an estus...and they pyro him to death. This time I did not feel so bad. I don't think alluring skulls work on those ghosts anyway.
I started up a man mode run last night, beat the first couple of bosses.
Man, dual caestus is POWERFUL. I'm sitting at +3/+3 after the Pursuer, and I am pretty much wrecking stuff. After getting the stats for dual wield power stance, I am dumping everything into adaptability until 30, then I'll focus on damage or heavier armor. So far, it's a lot of fun! I should probably learn how to parry, too...
No reason to parry when you have that good a dodge. Caestus is legitimately an incredibly weapon. Make sure you're using the stone ring as well.
I just invaded a guy called HULK SMASH using power stance caestus twice. I killed him both times, second time he pulled the plug on his internet as I landed the killing blow. Guess he certainly has the rage of hulk.
Rami on
+1
DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
DS thread, what should be my next stat to focus!?
I DW Mastodon Greatswords
I have my STR at 50 so i think I'm done with that. My life doesn't really need to go up any more. My VIT has hit diminishing returns but i'm at 50% so it's cool.
I guess I could dump some points into END? The little tiny increases it gives don't really help that much as it's never really too much of a problem. I dunno.
I just don't know what to do with all these souls any more...
I have my STR at 50 so i think I'm done with that. My life doesn't really need to go up any more. My VIT has hit diminishing returns but i'm at 50% so it's cool.
I guess I could dump some points into END? The little tiny increases it gives don't really help that much as it's never really too much of a problem. I dunno.
I just don't know what to do with all these souls any more...
Basically, check how much stamina a swing in your combo takes. Then work out how much more stamina you'd need to extend your combo by an extra swing, and buy that. It's what I did, and being able to swing that much more is actually super handy.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
0
DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
I have my STR at 50 so i think I'm done with that. My life doesn't really need to go up any more. My VIT has hit diminishing returns but i'm at 50% so it's cool.
I guess I could dump some points into END? The little tiny increases it gives don't really help that much as it's never really too much of a problem. I dunno.
I just don't know what to do with all these souls any more...
Basically, check how much stamina a swing in your combo takes. Then work out how much more stamina you'd need to extend your combo by an extra swing, and buy that. It's what I did, and being able to swing that much more is actually super handy.
By the formulas you provided for defense, Morning, assuming they are valid, physical defense doesn't matter one bit. High or low physical defense, as long as a weapon isn't dropping to zero physical damage after resists via infusion, the damage loss from infusing is the same.
You already know, or have stated to know, how the damage formula works, but the way you've explained criticals would run completely contrary to that. Splitting damage should not gut the crit damage in any sense, besides that the elemental part is reduced by a percentage. If it was gutting the damage (beyond "the elemental part is only hitting for 80%"), the damage formula you have posted before would have to be incorrect.
Math is not actually my strong suit man.
I use a calculator for all of this.
Could you, like, lay it out for me because I can't follow it intuitively.
You described physical protection as being subtractive and magical protection as being multiplicative.
So let's take a hypothetical enemy with enough armor to negate 100 physical damage and enough fire resistance to negate 20% of fire damage. You attack him with a weapon with an AR of 200. 100 physical damage is absorbed and you deal 100 damage. Now let's say you attack with a weapon with 100 physical damage and 100 fire damage. Armor is applied, reducing your physical AR by 100, so you hit for zero physical damage and only the fire damage gets through. Which sounds bad, but it doesn't actually matter that much, because one way or another you lose the same 100 physical damage to armor. The 100/100 weapon still hits for less, because the 100 fire damage hits at 80% effectiveness whereas a second 100 physical damage would hit at 100% effectiveness once armor is breached, but outside of that, there's no special penalty for having split damage. If an enemy's resistances are all equal and you aren't using a weapon buff, a 200/200 weapon and a 200/50/50/50/50 weapon should hit equally hard. Against an enemy with 100 armor and 20% magic resistance, a 200/0 and 100/125 should also hit equally hard.
You said that split damage would have crappy critical hits specifically because it's split, but I see no reason why it should be different from any other kind of hit (I'm assuming that critical multipliers are applied before armor rather than after, or else daggers couldn't possibly crit as hard as they do).
I have my STR at 50 so i think I'm done with that. My life doesn't really need to go up any more. My VIT has hit diminishing returns but i'm at 50% so it's cool.
I guess I could dump some points into END? The little tiny increases it gives don't really help that much as it's never really too much of a problem. I dunno.
I just don't know what to do with all these souls any more...
Basically, check how much stamina a swing in your combo takes. Then work out how much more stamina you'd need to extend your combo by an extra swing, and buy that. It's what I did, and being able to swing that much more is actually super handy.
Is it possible to check exact stamina consumption values? I know 20 endurance and a Third Dragon Ring isn't enough to roll after a Defender Great sword's R2>R2>R2, but I don't know if I'm one stamina short or ten.
I have my STR at 50 so i think I'm done with that. My life doesn't really need to go up any more. My VIT has hit diminishing returns but i'm at 50% so it's cool.
I guess I could dump some points into END? The little tiny increases it gives don't really help that much as it's never really too much of a problem. I dunno.
I just don't know what to do with all these souls any more...
Basically, check how much stamina a swing in your combo takes. Then work out how much more stamina you'd need to extend your combo by an extra swing, and buy that. It's what I did, and being able to swing that much more is actually super handy.
Is it possible to check exact stamina consumption values? I know 20 endurance and a Third Dragon Ring isn't enough to roll after a Defender Great sword's R2>R2>R2, but I don't know if I'm one stamina short or ten.
Unfortunately what I had to do was buy 1 stamina, swing my sword a bit to test, then buy another, etc. You only get 1 stamina per point after you hit the soft cap, so you have to test after each point. It only takes a few minutes.
Keep dying to NG+ Scorpion. Mainly when I don't dodge the rise from underneath ground move as it oneshots me.
Doesn't help that most phantoms I'm summoning die to normal moves constantly.
There's a trick to this that I learned from someone recently. I think it might be completely impossible to avoid that attack by any other means, because all my previous attempts to wait her out or bait the hit failed and I had taken to just letting her hit me on purpose.
There's a small stone outcropping you can stand on--it looks like the corner of a square pillar buried in the sand, I think--that she can't burrow under. If you wait there for a while she gives up.
I like to stand there on the big one and beckon hosts over to join me, but most seem to prefer running around and hoping to not die.
Hiryu02 on
Sev: Your gameplay is the most heavily yomi based around. Usually you look for characters that allow you to force guessing situations for big dmg. Even if the guess is mathematically nowhere near in your favor lol. You're happiest when you have either a 50/50, 33/33/33 or even a 75/25 situation to go crazy with. And you will take big risks to force those situations to come up.
Keep dying to NG+ Scorpion. Mainly when I don't dodge the rise from underneath ground move as it oneshots me.
Doesn't help that most phantoms I'm summoning die to normal moves constantly.
There's a trick to this that I learned from someone recently. I think it might be completely impossible to avoid that attack by any other means, because all my previous attempts to wait her out or bait the hit failed and I had taken to just letting her hit me on purpose.
There's a small stone outcropping you can stand on--it looks like the corner of a square pillar buried in the sand, I think--that she can't burrow under. If you wait there for a while she gives up.
THANK YOU! FUCKING THANK YOU!
I didn't have a 100% dodge rate on it so... once it hit me I died.
Doing this I beat the fight and got my +3 Spell Slots ring. I wanna hug you.
Well, I guess if this was something people didn't know, here's another tip, this time for the final boss:
Equip the Ring of Binding to avoid getting your humanity drained. YOUR HEALTH WILL STILL DRAIN WHEN BEING CURSED. This however means your max health will stay the same (or stop at 80%, don't remember) and you can just estus it back up. I verified this myself.
By the formulas you provided for defense, Morning, assuming they are valid, physical defense doesn't matter one bit. High or low physical defense, as long as a weapon isn't dropping to zero physical damage after resists via infusion, the damage loss from infusing is the same.
You already know, or have stated to know, how the damage formula works, but the way you've explained criticals would run completely contrary to that. Splitting damage should not gut the crit damage in any sense, besides that the elemental part is reduced by a percentage. If it was gutting the damage (beyond "the elemental part is only hitting for 80%"), the damage formula you have posted before would have to be incorrect.
Math is not actually my strong suit man.
I use a calculator for all of this.
Could you, like, lay it out for me because I can't follow it intuitively.
You described physical protection as being subtractive and magical protection as being multiplicative.
So let's take a hypothetical enemy with enough armor to negate 100 physical damage and enough fire resistance to negate 20% of fire damage. You attack him with a weapon with an AR of 200. 100 physical damage is absorbed and you deal 100 damage. Now let's say you attack with a weapon with 100 physical damage and 100 fire damage. Armor is applied, reducing your physical AR by 100, so you hit for zero physical damage and only the fire damage gets through. Which sounds bad, but it doesn't actually matter that much, because one way or another you lose the same 100 physical damage to armor. The 100/100 weapon still hits for less, because the 100 fire damage hits at 80% effectiveness whereas a second 100 physical damage would hit at 100% effectiveness once armor is breached, but outside of that, there's no special penalty for having split damage. If an enemy's resistances are all equal and you aren't using a weapon buff, a 200/200 weapon and a 200/50/50/50/50 weapon should hit equally hard. Against an enemy with 100 armor and 20% magic resistance, a 200/0 and 100/125 should also hit equally hard.
You said that split damage would have crappy critical hits specifically because it's split, but I see no reason why it should be different from any other kind of hit (I'm assuming that critical multipliers are applied before armor rather than after, or else daggers couldn't possibly crit as hard as they do).
But doesn't that prove that there is an inherent drawback for having split damage. You cant have a pure fire damage weapon, so all infuses are inherently split, but a pure physical sword is going to do more net damage, correct? Unless you are fighting something that would shrug the physical entirely anyways, and magic is the only damage you are actually dealing?
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Keep dying to NG+ Scorpion. Mainly when I don't dodge the rise from underneath ground move as it oneshots me.
Doesn't help that most phantoms I'm summoning die to normal moves constantly.
There's a trick to this that I learned from someone recently. I think it might be completely impossible to avoid that attack by any other means, because all my previous attempts to wait her out or bait the hit failed and I had taken to just letting her hit me on purpose.
There's a small stone outcropping you can stand on--it looks like the corner of a square pillar buried in the sand, I think--that she can't burrow under. If you wait there for a while she gives up.
Also, another way:
I'm pretty sure if you summon Manscorpion Tark for that fight, she can't actually surface at the same location as he is, so if you stick next to Tark, you'll be safe. I'm not 100% about that though. Just something I noticed.
I killed Manscorpion Tark on my first playthrough. All I saw was a big ass man scorpion thing that was sleeping, so I got the drop on him with my Zweihander before he could wake up and kill me.
By the formulas you provided for defense, Morning, assuming they are valid, physical defense doesn't matter one bit. High or low physical defense, as long as a weapon isn't dropping to zero physical damage after resists via infusion, the damage loss from infusing is the same.
You already know, or have stated to know, how the damage formula works, but the way you've explained criticals would run completely contrary to that. Splitting damage should not gut the crit damage in any sense, besides that the elemental part is reduced by a percentage. If it was gutting the damage (beyond "the elemental part is only hitting for 80%"), the damage formula you have posted before would have to be incorrect.
Math is not actually my strong suit man.
I use a calculator for all of this.
Could you, like, lay it out for me because I can't follow it intuitively.
First, key assumption: I do not know exactly how crit damage is calculated, so I assume it is simply a damage multiplier (though the first hit on certain crit animations always seems to do 15 damage, then two big hits). I assume this multiplier is applied after the normal resistances, e.g. if you're hitting for 120, your crits will be 360; if you're hitting for 30 your crits will be 90 (or some multiplier).
So let's take the same weapon against two guys. One is a naked skeleton, and one is HAVELTRON 3000. For our purposes, let's assume that we're using a lightning weapon and that they both have 200 lightning resist (20% reduction). Naked skeleton has zero physical defense, HAVELTRON has enough physical defense to knock 150 off any attack.
Now let's hit them with a bigass sword. Let's pretend that bigass sword has 300 physical damage uninfused and 210 physical 210 lightning when infused, and gets a total multiplier of 300% from landing a crit.
You crit naked skeleton with the sword. He takes (300)*3 = 900 physical damage.
You crit naked skeleton with the zappy sword. He takes (200*3)+(200*.8*3)=600 physical damage and 480 lightning damage, for 1080 damage total. High def damage rendering!
Damage change from infusing (in this test): 180.
You crit HAVELTRON with the sword. He takes (300-150)*3 = 450 physical damage.
You crit HAVELTRON with the zappy sword. He takes (200-150)*3 +(200*.8*3) = 150 physical damage and 480 lightning damage, for 630 damage total.
Damage change from infusion (in this test): Also 180.
Mathematically, long as the assumption of "All multipliers are applied after defenses" holds, the damage change from infusion will be the same on any two targets with the same elemental resist unless physical damage is brought to zero by the infusion. If physical damage can be brought to zero via infusion, it is almost definitely the right choice to infuse, unless the target is also immune or nearly immune to that element... in which case using a +10 magic soup ladle on a magic immune havelmage is silly.
I killed Manscorpion Tark on my first playthrough. All I saw was a big ass man scorpion thing that was sleeping, so I got the drop on him with my Zweihander before he could wake up and kill me.
Take that, evil scorpion man
It's pretty hilarious that if you talk to him, he comments on people either running away when they see him, or trying to kill him on reflex. :P
By the formulas you provided for defense, Morning, assuming they are valid, physical defense doesn't matter one bit. High or low physical defense, as long as a weapon isn't dropping to zero physical damage after resists via infusion, the damage loss from infusing is the same.
You already know, or have stated to know, how the damage formula works, but the way you've explained criticals would run completely contrary to that. Splitting damage should not gut the crit damage in any sense, besides that the elemental part is reduced by a percentage. If it was gutting the damage (beyond "the elemental part is only hitting for 80%"), the damage formula you have posted before would have to be incorrect.
Math is not actually my strong suit man.
I use a calculator for all of this.
Could you, like, lay it out for me because I can't follow it intuitively.
You described physical protection as being subtractive and magical protection as being multiplicative.
So let's take a hypothetical enemy with enough armor to negate 100 physical damage and enough fire resistance to negate 20% of fire damage. You attack him with a weapon with an AR of 200. 100 physical damage is absorbed and you deal 100 damage. Now let's say you attack with a weapon with 100 physical damage and 100 fire damage. Armor is applied, reducing your physical AR by 100, so you hit for zero physical damage and only the fire damage gets through. Which sounds bad, but it doesn't actually matter that much, because one way or another you lose the same 100 physical damage to armor. The 100/100 weapon still hits for less, because the 100 fire damage hits at 80% effectiveness whereas a second 100 physical damage would hit at 100% effectiveness once armor is breached, but outside of that, there's no special penalty for having split damage. If an enemy's resistances are all equal and you aren't using a weapon buff, a 200/200 weapon and a 200/50/50/50/50 weapon should hit equally hard. Against an enemy with 100 armor and 20% magic resistance, a 200/0 and 100/125 should also hit equally hard.
You said that split damage would have crappy critical hits specifically because it's split, but I see no reason why it should be different from any other kind of hit (I'm assuming that critical multipliers are applied before armor rather than after, or else daggers couldn't possibly crit as hard as they do).
But doesn't that prove that there is an inherent drawback for having split damage. You cant have a pure fire damage weapon, so all infuses are inherently split, but a pure physical sword is going to do more net damage, correct? Unless you are fighting something that would shrug the physical entirely anyways, and magic is the only damage you are actually dealing?
Assuming perfectly equal AR and no weapon buffs, 400 physical is better than 200 phys/200 magic because a percentage of the magic damage is lost to resistance. That's the only penalty, and it's only related to the magical portion of the damage. Outside of extremely resistant foes, it's almost impossible for a 300/300 weapon to be worse than a 400/0 weapon against a typical enemy, because they'd need to have more than 670 magical protection.
In Dark Souls 1, there was an essentially subtractive penalty applied to both the physical and magical damage separately. That could be a pretty huge factor. 300 pure physical AR would be fine, and 300 pure magical damage would be equally fine, but 240/240 might completely suck because barely any of your physical OR magical damage breaches the target's armor, and a 275/150 weapon might be worse because close to zero magical damage might get through. In Dark Souls 2, if a 240 phys/240 fire damage weapon sucks, a hypothetical 0 phys/300 fire weapon would also suck, because magic resistance affects large and small amounts of damage equally now.
Put another way, an imaginary 240 fire/240 dark weapon would be good against most targets in Dark Souls 2, but would probably be pretty bad in Dark Souls 1 (if it had been possible for weapons to deal more than one kind of magical damage), because back then the act of splitting your damage was inherently punished regardless of the damage types involved. In Dark Souls 2, casting Flame Weapon on a physical sword for just the base +65 fire damage will always increase the damage you deal by some amount. If a spell like that existed in DS1, it would almost always add zero effective damage because 65 wouldn't be high enough to breach anyone's fire armor by itself.
By the formulas you provided for defense, Morning, assuming they are valid, physical defense doesn't matter one bit. High or low physical defense, as long as a weapon isn't dropping to zero physical damage after resists via infusion, the damage loss from infusing is the same.
You already know, or have stated to know, how the damage formula works, but the way you've explained criticals would run completely contrary to that. Splitting damage should not gut the crit damage in any sense, besides that the elemental part is reduced by a percentage. If it was gutting the damage (beyond "the elemental part is only hitting for 80%"), the damage formula you have posted before would have to be incorrect.
Math is not actually my strong suit man.
I use a calculator for all of this.
Could you, like, lay it out for me because I can't follow it intuitively.
First, key assumption: I do not know exactly how crit damage is calculated, so I assume it is simply a damage multiplier (though the first hit on certain crit animations always seems to do 15 damage, then two big hits). I assume this multiplier is applied after the normal resistances, e.g. if you're hitting for 120, your crits will be 360; if you're hitting for 30 your crits will be 90 (or some multiplier).
I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Daggers are known to have really strong critical hits even though their AR is so terrible that they deal barely any damage through any kind of armor. Critical hits are really inconsistent from weapon to weapon, though, so I have no clue what the exact formula is.
Is it just me or is the 'grind' a new thing in DS2? I just finished getting the mad warrior set and holy crap, was that boring. I was so sick of climbing that stupid ladder by the end that I was ready to kill myself.
I can't remember DS1 having anything this grindy. The closest thing was probably getting the trident but DS2 takes it to a whole new level.
Raw raises base damage but tanks scaling. Would be useful for a non-melee orientated character except they put elemental infuses in the game so they aren't particularly.
Can someone explain mundane and raw to me? Raw seems totally useless.
Raw boosts base damage, but removes scaling. It straight up improves weapons with no-scaling or poor-scaling for no stats required other than minimum equip requirements.
Mundane adds S+ scaling to any weapon in the game based upon your lowest stat. It becomes really good once you have all stats at 20+, and works on weapons that inherently don't sale at all pre-infusions.
By the formulas you provided for defense, Morning, assuming they are valid, physical defense doesn't matter one bit. High or low physical defense, as long as a weapon isn't dropping to zero physical damage after resists via infusion, the damage loss from infusing is the same.
You already know, or have stated to know, how the damage formula works, but the way you've explained criticals would run completely contrary to that. Splitting damage should not gut the crit damage in any sense, besides that the elemental part is reduced by a percentage. If it was gutting the damage (beyond "the elemental part is only hitting for 80%"), the damage formula you have posted before would have to be incorrect.
Math is not actually my strong suit man.
I use a calculator for all of this.
Could you, like, lay it out for me because I can't follow it intuitively.
First, key assumption: I do not know exactly how crit damage is calculated, so I assume it is simply a damage multiplier (though the first hit on certain crit animations always seems to do 15 damage, then two big hits). I assume this multiplier is applied after the normal resistances, e.g. if you're hitting for 120, your crits will be 360; if you're hitting for 30 your crits will be 90 (or some multiplier).
I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Daggers are known to have really strong critical hits even though their AR is so terrible that they deal barely any damage through any kind of armor. Critical hits are really inconsistent from weapon to weapon, though, so I have no clue what the exact formula is.
The assumption is less *generally* valid but still approximately correct if the multipliers are relatively small and the differences in armor are not as extreme. I am inclined to believe you (crits, and even heavy strikes and 2 handing, don't seem to be straight multipliers), but if your crit is not huge and/or the armor compared is not hundreds of points off (650 between naked skeleton and HAVELTRON), then you still approach pretty close to the limiting case of infusions always changing damage by the same amount regardless of target.
I ate an engineer
0
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
By the formulas you provided for defense, Morning, assuming they are valid, physical defense doesn't matter one bit. High or low physical defense, as long as a weapon isn't dropping to zero physical damage after resists via infusion, the damage loss from infusing is the same.
You already know, or have stated to know, how the damage formula works, but the way you've explained criticals would run completely contrary to that. Splitting damage should not gut the crit damage in any sense, besides that the elemental part is reduced by a percentage. If it was gutting the damage (beyond "the elemental part is only hitting for 80%"), the damage formula you have posted before would have to be incorrect.
Math is not actually my strong suit man.
I use a calculator for all of this.
Could you, like, lay it out for me because I can't follow it intuitively.
You described physical protection as being subtractive and magical protection as being multiplicative.
So let's take a hypothetical enemy with enough armor to negate 100 physical damage and enough fire resistance to negate 20% of fire damage. You attack him with a weapon with an AR of 200. 100 physical damage is absorbed and you deal 100 damage. Now let's say you attack with a weapon with 100 physical damage and 100 fire damage. Armor is applied, reducing your physical AR by 100, so you hit for zero physical damage and only the fire damage gets through. Which sounds bad, but it doesn't actually matter that much, because one way or another you lose the same 100 physical damage to armor. The 100/100 weapon still hits for less, because the 100 fire damage hits at 80% effectiveness whereas a second 100 physical damage would hit at 100% effectiveness once armor is breached, but outside of that, there's no special penalty for having split damage. If an enemy's resistances are all equal and you aren't using a weapon buff, a 200/200 weapon and a 200/50/50/50/50 weapon should hit equally hard. Against an enemy with 100 armor and 20% magic resistance, a 200/0 and 100/125 should also hit equally hard.
You said that split damage would have crappy critical hits specifically because it's split, but I see no reason why it should be different from any other kind of hit (I'm assuming that critical multipliers are applied before armor rather than after, or else daggers couldn't possibly crit as hard as they do).
But doesn't that prove that there is an inherent drawback for having split damage. You cant have a pure fire damage weapon, so all infuses are inherently split, but a pure physical sword is going to do more net damage, correct? Unless you are fighting something that would shrug the physical entirely anyways, and magic is the only damage you are actually dealing?
Assuming perfectly equal AR and no weapon buffs, 400 physical is better than 200 phys/200 magic because a percentage of the magic damage is lost to resistance. That's the only penalty, and it's only related to the magical portion of the damage. Outside of extremely resistant foes, it's almost impossible for a 300/300 weapon to be worse than a 400/0 weapon against a typical enemy, because they'd need to have more than 670 magical protection.
In Dark Souls 1, there was an essentially subtractive penalty applied to both the physical and magical damage separately. That could be a pretty huge factor. 300 pure physical AR would be fine, and 300 pure magical damage would be equally fine, but 240/240 might completely suck because barely any of your physical OR magical damage breaches the target's armor, and a 275/150 weapon might be worse because close to zero magical damage might get through. In Dark Souls 2, if a 240 phys/240 fire damage weapon sucks, a hypothetical 0 phys/300 fire weapon would also suck, because magic resistance affects large and small amounts of damage equally now.
Put another way, an imaginary 240 fire/240 dark weapon would be good against most targets in Dark Souls 2, but would probably be pretty bad in Dark Souls 1 (if it had been possible for weapons to deal more than one kind of magical damage), because back then the act of splitting your damage was inherently punished regardless of the damage types involved. In Dark Souls 2, casting Flame Weapon on a physical sword for just the base +65 fire damage will always increase the damage you deal by some amount. If a spell like that existed in DS1, it would almost always add zero effective damage because 65 wouldn't be high enough to breach anyone's fire armor by itself.
I didn't realize that pure physical weapons got a flat 140% bonus in base AR when infusing.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Raw raises base damage but tanks scaling. Would be useful for a non-melee orientated character except they put elemental infuses in the game so they aren't particularly.
Works well with the halberd for a while.
XBL - ArchSilversmith
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
Raw raises base damage but tanks scaling. Would be useful for a non-melee orientated character except they put elemental infuses in the game so they aren't particularly.
Raw seems designed for weapons with no scaling - get the required stat, infuse with raw, don't worry about stats for damage, end up with a pretty decent weapon.
By the formulas you provided for defense, Morning, assuming they are valid, physical defense doesn't matter one bit. High or low physical defense, as long as a weapon isn't dropping to zero physical damage after resists via infusion, the damage loss from infusing is the same.
You already know, or have stated to know, how the damage formula works, but the way you've explained criticals would run completely contrary to that. Splitting damage should not gut the crit damage in any sense, besides that the elemental part is reduced by a percentage. If it was gutting the damage (beyond "the elemental part is only hitting for 80%"), the damage formula you have posted before would have to be incorrect.
Math is not actually my strong suit man.
I use a calculator for all of this.
Could you, like, lay it out for me because I can't follow it intuitively.
You described physical protection as being subtractive and magical protection as being multiplicative.
So let's take a hypothetical enemy with enough armor to negate 100 physical damage and enough fire resistance to negate 20% of fire damage. You attack him with a weapon with an AR of 200. 100 physical damage is absorbed and you deal 100 damage. Now let's say you attack with a weapon with 100 physical damage and 100 fire damage. Armor is applied, reducing your physical AR by 100, so you hit for zero physical damage and only the fire damage gets through. Which sounds bad, but it doesn't actually matter that much, because one way or another you lose the same 100 physical damage to armor. The 100/100 weapon still hits for less, because the 100 fire damage hits at 80% effectiveness whereas a second 100 physical damage would hit at 100% effectiveness once armor is breached, but outside of that, there's no special penalty for having split damage. If an enemy's resistances are all equal and you aren't using a weapon buff, a 200/200 weapon and a 200/50/50/50/50 weapon should hit equally hard. Against an enemy with 100 armor and 20% magic resistance, a 200/0 and 100/125 should also hit equally hard.
You said that split damage would have crappy critical hits specifically because it's split, but I see no reason why it should be different from any other kind of hit (I'm assuming that critical multipliers are applied before armor rather than after, or else daggers couldn't possibly crit as hard as they do).
But doesn't that prove that there is an inherent drawback for having split damage. You cant have a pure fire damage weapon, so all infuses are inherently split, but a pure physical sword is going to do more net damage, correct? Unless you are fighting something that would shrug the physical entirely anyways, and magic is the only damage you are actually dealing?
Assuming perfectly equal AR and no weapon buffs, 400 physical is better than 200 phys/200 magic because a percentage of the magic damage is lost to resistance. That's the only penalty, and it's only related to the magical portion of the damage. Outside of extremely resistant foes, it's almost impossible for a 300/300 weapon to be worse than a 400/0 weapon against a typical enemy, because they'd need to have more than 670 magical protection.
In Dark Souls 1, there was an essentially subtractive penalty applied to both the physical and magical damage separately. That could be a pretty huge factor. 300 pure physical AR would be fine, and 300 pure magical damage would be equally fine, but 240/240 might completely suck because barely any of your physical OR magical damage breaches the target's armor, and a 275/150 weapon might be worse because close to zero magical damage might get through. In Dark Souls 2, if a 240 phys/240 fire damage weapon sucks, a hypothetical 0 phys/300 fire weapon would also suck, because magic resistance affects large and small amounts of damage equally now.
Put another way, an imaginary 240 fire/240 dark weapon would be good against most targets in Dark Souls 2, but would probably be pretty bad in Dark Souls 1 (if it had been possible for weapons to deal more than one kind of magical damage), because back then the act of splitting your damage was inherently punished regardless of the damage types involved. In Dark Souls 2, casting Flame Weapon on a physical sword for just the base +65 fire damage will always increase the damage you deal by some amount. If a spell like that existed in DS1, it would almost always add zero effective damage because 65 wouldn't be high enough to breach anyone's fire armor by itself.
I didn't realize that pure physical weapons got a flat 140% bonus in base AR when infusing.
Yeah, it can generally be assumed that the gain to base AR is going to be more than enough to offset the damage lost to magic resistance regardless of how the damage is distributed. This was not at all true in Dark Souls 1. The question is whether the lost scaling is also offset by the increased base damage.
In Morninglord's test build, he should be losing more than half of his total physical damage bonus and gaining barely anything out of fire/lightning/whatever bonus because his test character has no magical stats. That's where the lost damage goes. The split damage isn't really important; it's the hidden scaling penalty on infused weapons. If he was running 28 strength and 42 faith, it would probably be a wash in terms of scaling (the lightning scaling would suck compared to a natural lightning weapon, but it's good enough to offset the loss from physical scaling that was middling to begin with) and the extra base damage would be essentially free, and then further boosted by Sunlight Blade. That's the difference between an infuse BUILD and just randomly infusing a weapon. Incidentally, a weapon with naturally split damage but no infusion and decent physical scaling (like a Black Knight Halberd, if he had the dex for it) would do fine in his hands if the AR was comparable.
By the formulas you provided for defense, Morning, assuming they are valid, physical defense doesn't matter one bit. High or low physical defense, as long as a weapon isn't dropping to zero physical damage after resists via infusion, the damage loss from infusing is the same.
You already know, or have stated to know, how the damage formula works, but the way you've explained criticals would run completely contrary to that. Splitting damage should not gut the crit damage in any sense, besides that the elemental part is reduced by a percentage. If it was gutting the damage (beyond "the elemental part is only hitting for 80%"), the damage formula you have posted before would have to be incorrect.
Math is not actually my strong suit man.
I use a calculator for all of this.
Could you, like, lay it out for me because I can't follow it intuitively.
First, key assumption: I do not know exactly how crit damage is calculated, so I assume it is simply a damage multiplier (though the first hit on certain crit animations always seems to do 15 damage, then two big hits). I assume this multiplier is applied after the normal resistances, e.g. if you're hitting for 120, your crits will be 360; if you're hitting for 30 your crits will be 90 (or some multiplier).
I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Daggers are known to have really strong critical hits even though their AR is so terrible that they deal barely any damage through any kind of armor. Critical hits are really inconsistent from weapon to weapon, though, so I have no clue what the exact formula is.
Critical =/= counter.
Critical is a hidden stat that is not shown on the stat screen. It only applies to backstabs and ripostes. It is a multiplier (eg in DS1 it was x10).
Counter is when you hit an enemy in their animation and it IS shown on the stat screen. It's a percentage of your hit added as extra damage. If it lists 130, it is 30%. Greatsword is 30%.
Critical is entirely irrelevant for this test. Old Iron Knights cannot be backstabbed or riposted.
Thankyou for your explanations regarding the math.
I think any assumption regarding how counter percentage increases are applied need to take two things as true
1). the way defenses work: each part (physical/elemental) has convincing proof
2). any answer that comes up with a higher number for infuse must be wrong, because it was consistently lower on every element.
perhaps looking at the resins mightbe a clue to figuring out how high the percentage on the resist is? we know they add a flat 65 to a physical weapon. the physical counter was 554. the fire did 660.
i am also thinking that bonus damage might actually be handled differently. if your weapon breaks your stats screen shows 0 for base damage but lists the full bonus damage. if you hit something you still do damage. you only dont do damage if your weapon does not scale at all.
its most notable with a broken mundane weapon.
Raw raises base damage but tanks scaling. Would be useful for a non-melee orientated character except they put elemental infuses in the game so they aren't particularly.
its for weapons that don't scale like crossbows or even sants spear when you dont have the stats for mundane
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
How does pyromancy work in this? Is it optimal to rely solely on your upgraded glove, or do you need to sink points into the required stats to make a lot of gains damage wise?
Posts
And this is the test for how physical defence works.
http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkSouls2/comments/232m89/physical_damage_testing_results/
So its about a million times more likely my math incompetent analysis is wrongo than it is that the formulas are wrong.
I think I'll just focus on presenting the data rather than crunching it at this stage.
First time he invades I get him to low health, he falls back and heals, a blue bro pops in to help as I pop a seed of giants. The ghosts kill them both and I feel kind of bad. 10 minutes later he invades again! I pop a seed immediately, run away around a corner and catch him with a 3 hit combo as he runs to catch up. He then falls back into the ghosts, but to his credit: tosses an alluring skull first. He pops an estus...and they pyro him to death. This time I did not feel so bad. I don't think alluring skulls work on those ghosts anyway.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
I have begun my no death run today and it's going good so far, then NG+ will be no bonfire. Sl150 of course. It is TENSE.
Sure is nice having completely silent movement.
Man, dual caestus is POWERFUL. I'm sitting at +3/+3 after the Pursuer, and I am pretty much wrecking stuff. After getting the stats for dual wield power stance, I am dumping everything into adaptability until 30, then I'll focus on damage or heavier armor. So far, it's a lot of fun! I should probably learn how to parry, too...
I just invaded a guy called HULK SMASH using power stance caestus twice. I killed him both times, second time he pulled the plug on his internet as I landed the killing blow. Guess he certainly has the rage of hulk.
I DW Mastodon Greatswords
I have my STR at 50 so i think I'm done with that. My life doesn't really need to go up any more. My VIT has hit diminishing returns but i'm at 50% so it's cool.
I guess I could dump some points into END? The little tiny increases it gives don't really help that much as it's never really too much of a problem. I dunno.
I just don't know what to do with all these souls any more...
Basically, check how much stamina a swing in your combo takes. Then work out how much more stamina you'd need to extend your combo by an extra swing, and buy that. It's what I did, and being able to swing that much more is actually super handy.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Hmmm that is actually p smart.
I will look into the mathening.
Thank you.
So let's take a hypothetical enemy with enough armor to negate 100 physical damage and enough fire resistance to negate 20% of fire damage. You attack him with a weapon with an AR of 200. 100 physical damage is absorbed and you deal 100 damage. Now let's say you attack with a weapon with 100 physical damage and 100 fire damage. Armor is applied, reducing your physical AR by 100, so you hit for zero physical damage and only the fire damage gets through. Which sounds bad, but it doesn't actually matter that much, because one way or another you lose the same 100 physical damage to armor. The 100/100 weapon still hits for less, because the 100 fire damage hits at 80% effectiveness whereas a second 100 physical damage would hit at 100% effectiveness once armor is breached, but outside of that, there's no special penalty for having split damage. If an enemy's resistances are all equal and you aren't using a weapon buff, a 200/200 weapon and a 200/50/50/50/50 weapon should hit equally hard. Against an enemy with 100 armor and 20% magic resistance, a 200/0 and 100/125 should also hit equally hard.
You said that split damage would have crappy critical hits specifically because it's split, but I see no reason why it should be different from any other kind of hit (I'm assuming that critical multipliers are applied before armor rather than after, or else daggers couldn't possibly crit as hard as they do).
Unfortunately what I had to do was buy 1 stamina, swing my sword a bit to test, then buy another, etc. You only get 1 stamina per point after you hit the soft cap, so you have to test after each point. It only takes a few minutes.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Doesn't help that most phantoms I'm summoning die to normal moves constantly.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
THANK YOU! FUCKING THANK YOU!
I didn't have a 100% dodge rate on it so... once it hit me I died.
Doing this I beat the fight and got my +3 Spell Slots ring. I wanna hug you.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
Steam ID: 76561198021298113
Origin ID: SR71C_Blackbird
But doesn't that prove that there is an inherent drawback for having split damage. You cant have a pure fire damage weapon, so all infuses are inherently split, but a pure physical sword is going to do more net damage, correct? Unless you are fighting something that would shrug the physical entirely anyways, and magic is the only damage you are actually dealing?
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Also, another way:
Take that, evil scorpion man
First, key assumption: I do not know exactly how crit damage is calculated, so I assume it is simply a damage multiplier (though the first hit on certain crit animations always seems to do 15 damage, then two big hits). I assume this multiplier is applied after the normal resistances, e.g. if you're hitting for 120, your crits will be 360; if you're hitting for 30 your crits will be 90 (or some multiplier).
So let's take the same weapon against two guys. One is a naked skeleton, and one is HAVELTRON 3000. For our purposes, let's assume that we're using a lightning weapon and that they both have 200 lightning resist (20% reduction). Naked skeleton has zero physical defense, HAVELTRON has enough physical defense to knock 150 off any attack.
Now let's hit them with a bigass sword. Let's pretend that bigass sword has 300 physical damage uninfused and 210 physical 210 lightning when infused, and gets a total multiplier of 300% from landing a crit.
You crit naked skeleton with the sword. He takes (300)*3 = 900 physical damage.
You crit naked skeleton with the zappy sword. He takes (200*3)+(200*.8*3)=600 physical damage and 480 lightning damage, for 1080 damage total. High def damage rendering!
Damage change from infusing (in this test): 180.
You crit HAVELTRON with the sword. He takes (300-150)*3 = 450 physical damage.
You crit HAVELTRON with the zappy sword. He takes (200-150)*3 +(200*.8*3) = 150 physical damage and 480 lightning damage, for 630 damage total.
Damage change from infusion (in this test): Also 180.
Mathematically, long as the assumption of "All multipliers are applied after defenses" holds, the damage change from infusion will be the same on any two targets with the same elemental resist unless physical damage is brought to zero by the infusion. If physical damage can be brought to zero via infusion, it is almost definitely the right choice to infuse, unless the target is also immune or nearly immune to that element... in which case using a +10 magic soup ladle on a magic immune havelmage is silly.
It's pretty hilarious that if you talk to him, he comments on people either running away when they see him, or trying to kill him on reflex. :P
In Dark Souls 1, there was an essentially subtractive penalty applied to both the physical and magical damage separately. That could be a pretty huge factor. 300 pure physical AR would be fine, and 300 pure magical damage would be equally fine, but 240/240 might completely suck because barely any of your physical OR magical damage breaches the target's armor, and a 275/150 weapon might be worse because close to zero magical damage might get through. In Dark Souls 2, if a 240 phys/240 fire damage weapon sucks, a hypothetical 0 phys/300 fire weapon would also suck, because magic resistance affects large and small amounts of damage equally now.
Put another way, an imaginary 240 fire/240 dark weapon would be good against most targets in Dark Souls 2, but would probably be pretty bad in Dark Souls 1 (if it had been possible for weapons to deal more than one kind of magical damage), because back then the act of splitting your damage was inherently punished regardless of the damage types involved. In Dark Souls 2, casting Flame Weapon on a physical sword for just the base +65 fire damage will always increase the damage you deal by some amount. If a spell like that existed in DS1, it would almost always add zero effective damage because 65 wouldn't be high enough to breach anyone's fire armor by itself.
I can't remember DS1 having anything this grindy. The closest thing was probably getting the trident but DS2 takes it to a whole new level.
Raw boosts base damage, but removes scaling. It straight up improves weapons with no-scaling or poor-scaling for no stats required other than minimum equip requirements.
Mundane adds S+ scaling to any weapon in the game based upon your lowest stat. It becomes really good once you have all stats at 20+, and works on weapons that inherently don't sale at all pre-infusions.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
The assumption is less *generally* valid but still approximately correct if the multipliers are relatively small and the differences in armor are not as extreme. I am inclined to believe you (crits, and even heavy strikes and 2 handing, don't seem to be straight multipliers), but if your crit is not huge and/or the armor compared is not hundreds of points off (650 between naked skeleton and HAVELTRON), then you still approach pretty close to the limiting case of infusions always changing damage by the same amount regardless of target.
I didn't realize that pure physical weapons got a flat 140% bonus in base AR when infusing.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Works well with the halberd for a while.
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
Raw seems designed for weapons with no scaling - get the required stat, infuse with raw, don't worry about stats for damage, end up with a pretty decent weapon.
In Morninglord's test build, he should be losing more than half of his total physical damage bonus and gaining barely anything out of fire/lightning/whatever bonus because his test character has no magical stats. That's where the lost damage goes. The split damage isn't really important; it's the hidden scaling penalty on infused weapons. If he was running 28 strength and 42 faith, it would probably be a wash in terms of scaling (the lightning scaling would suck compared to a natural lightning weapon, but it's good enough to offset the loss from physical scaling that was middling to begin with) and the extra base damage would be essentially free, and then further boosted by Sunlight Blade. That's the difference between an infuse BUILD and just randomly infusing a weapon. Incidentally, a weapon with naturally split damage but no infusion and decent physical scaling (like a Black Knight Halberd, if he had the dex for it) would do fine in his hands if the AR was comparable.
Critical =/= counter.
Critical is a hidden stat that is not shown on the stat screen. It only applies to backstabs and ripostes. It is a multiplier (eg in DS1 it was x10).
Counter is when you hit an enemy in their animation and it IS shown on the stat screen. It's a percentage of your hit added as extra damage. If it lists 130, it is 30%. Greatsword is 30%.
Critical is entirely irrelevant for this test. Old Iron Knights cannot be backstabbed or riposted.
Thankyou for your explanations regarding the math.
I think any assumption regarding how counter percentage increases are applied need to take two things as true
1). the way defenses work: each part (physical/elemental) has convincing proof
2). any answer that comes up with a higher number for infuse must be wrong, because it was consistently lower on every element.
perhaps looking at the resins mightbe a clue to figuring out how high the percentage on the resist is? we know they add a flat 65 to a physical weapon. the physical counter was 554. the fire did 660.
i am also thinking that bonus damage might actually be handled differently. if your weapon breaks your stats screen shows 0 for base damage but lists the full bonus damage. if you hit something you still do damage. you only dont do damage if your weapon does not scale at all.
its most notable with a broken mundane weapon.
its for weapons that don't scale like crossbows or even sants spear when you dont have the stats for mundane
Hunting invaders: the real post game.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW