Another take on Resilience problem

General Discussion General Discussion
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About Resilience issue.

I don’t own any Resilience items or run a crit build so I’m almost neutral. I came here to learn about how the perk works but the discussions on this forum have left me confused and worried what the fix might be.

First of all, there should be no unnecessary semantics in this game. Critical hit, critical damage and critical hit damage should all be the same thing and a player should not need to read a freaking wikipedia to understand what a perk does, the tooltip should be enough. So when a game says critical hit or critical damage, it should be ALL of the critical hit damage, not some portion of it. I assume this is how most people understand the meaning of it and it should stay.

Secondly. When people complain a critical hit damage should not be below the normal damage threshold, they are totally correct. However, switching the damage reduction to the added critical damage portion will be a very substantial nerf:

  • an item with 4% resilience coupled with a potential 1.4x critical hit will make the critical hit be 1.39x damage, which is 0.7% damage reduction. 0.7% damage reduction that only works in pvp and even that is really impactful on a specific type of builds. That’s not a fix, that’s a mindless nerf hammer.
  • the constitution perk will also get nerfed. From 10% critical damage reduction on criticals for tanks, to 2.8% damage reduction on critical hits (1.36x critical hit after 10% deduction on 1.4x). Compare it with the damage perk at 150 int: +15% elemental damage (not just critical), or with 150 healing perk: +20% healing.
  • it will also create confusion about how bonus to critical damage perks work, as in that case they should be adding % to only the additional portion of critical damage as well.
    Clearly changing how resilience works to only the critical hit portion of the damage is not the way to balance it.

Thirdly, I believe the root of the problem is not that the damage reduction is applied to all of damage (many people assume it’s a bug) but due to the fact that this game has very low critical damage multiplier compared to other games. If the base critical damage multiplier was 2x, there would be no problem at all. And maybe it was in the early stages of the game.

Forth, the discussions on resilience are dominated by people using dex builds (this one will probably be as well, so Im prepared to heavy criticism) but the thing is, they are not looking to balance Resilience, they want it nerfed into the ground because it counters their build. And using the correct point that critical damage should not be below normal, they advocate for much harsher nerfs than necessary (an option described above).

Fifth, the nerf should concentrate on putting a cap to resilience type damage reduction like there is with empower or fortify, but it should apply to all of the critical damage.

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It’s not just dex builds but int builds too, considering int gives you a higher crit.

Also as someone who uses crits, I don’t want resilience to be nerffed, I think it should protect against crits, I just don’t think it should affect base damage. Other than that i think you have a great post here. Either keep it with what it is but never let it go past base damage, or rework it (as you mentioned) where the percentages go more in line of being able to block all our most of crit damage. That’s honestly way more simple than the current design and make since based on the tool tip.

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Before we get into the math, we need to get a groundwork on how game mechanics should work, especially in New World’s combat system.

  • You want to encourage skill based behaviors; high risk high reward, which for Crit means Headshots, and Backstabs.

  • Crit should always deal more damage than your non-critical attack.

  • No mechanic should completely nullify critical damage bonus as it goes against any mechanic taught to the user.

The point of Crit reduction is to normalize the users damage taken, flattening the curve. That is never a bad thing and one of the most important defense stats in PvP, but it should never make that curve completely flat.

Math

The way Crit DMG bonus and reduction works is with this formula.

(Base Crit Modifier + Crit Modifier Bonus [1, 2, 3…]) * (1 - Crit Reduction Modifier [1, 2, 3…])

Let’s use your 1.4 base Crit DMG with a 4% Crit reduction.

(1 + (.4)) * (1 - .04) = 1.344

Let’s say we have a 100 base damage.

100 * 1.4 = 140
100 * 1.344 = 134.4

134.4/140 = 96% as effective.

If we applied a 4% reduction to the Crit bonus instead it would be a formula that would look like this

Base DMG + (Base DMG * (Base Crit Modifier + Crit Bonus Modifier [1, 2, 3…]) * (1 - Crit Reduction Modifier [1, 2, 3…]))

Again with a 100 base damage

100 + (100(.4)*(1 - .04)) = 138.4

138.4/140 = 98.9% as effective

The Issue

I hate myself for doing all this on my phone, but as I ventured more and more into the math, I came across the issue and why the first method isn’t a simple line fix.

Since our base crit modifier ranges from 1.2 to 1.4, and we have bonus crit modifiers we can gain via equipment, attribute or mastery perks it changes the what x needs to be at or below to stop from reducing total damage.

So going back to our first method, the Crit reduction portion is in essence (1 - x)

If we start with a base crit of 1.2, x would need to be 0.16667 or below to keep that portion of the multiplier at 1 or above.

Meaning you would only need four pieces of 5% resilient armor, no con perk; or 2 pieces of 5% resilient armor with con perk. Either one would completely nullify critical damage. Going further would start to reduce your total damage

Let’s plot the basics out. Solving for y=1

  • 1.2(1-x) = 1 ; x = .16667
  • 1.3(1-x) = 1 ; x = .23077
  • 1.4(1-x) = 1 ; x = .28571

So on and so forth.

As you can see you can completely negate those base crit modifiers already, as a fully kitted out person will be at 35% Crit reduction.

With a full 35% Crit reduction, Solving for x.

  • x(1-.35) = 1

You would have to have a critical modifier of 1.53846 just to break even.

To touchback in case you’re lost as to why let’s go back to our 100 base damage.

100 * (1.53846 * (1 - 0.35)) = 99.99999

I was team first method not even an hour ago but seeing how this effects it already I am now team reduction of the bonus damage even though the formula seems dirtier.

The longer term issue

@TheLawRich @DaveNW

This is where I have the most issue with the first method. Even if you do have a clamping formula that changes depending on the Crit Modifier, it breaks a huge game mechanic. We are basically already capped for resilient, not even needing five pieces of gear. That nullifies any future content growth; unless the whole design is to just have a few pieces of resilient, which I don’t think is the case.

With the second method you are giving yourself a way larger scaling resolution which would promote good game design as it would take a full 100% resilience to break even, which again should never be reached.

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@TheLawRich @DaveNW

Here’s a Google Sheet I made showing the issue and the solution

Play with the Total Crit Multi and Total Crit Reduction and you’ll see the effects on output damage. I also posted the Clamping you would need to make sure it doesn’t go below 100% so long as the most crit reduction you can get globally is 100% max.

Also the there’s too many differences in how you guys are adding/multiplying different sources of Crit %, Crit Dmg, Crit Reduction.

They should all be additive with each other respectively no matter the source. IE. 10% crit reduction from Con. or Weapon Perks Multiplying Crit Dmg vs adding.

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Your first numbers are off by a bit. But I agree that Resilient needs to be either changed or just removed/replaced entirely.

an item with 4% resilience coupled with a potential 1.4x critical hit will make the critical hit be 1.39x damage, which is 0.7% damage reduction. 0.7% damage reduction that only works in pvp and even that is really impactful on a specific type of builds. That’s not a fix, that’s a mindless nerf hammer.

4% of 40% is 1.6 which means new multiplier is 1.40 - 0.016 = 1.384

And this is a change of 0.016 / 1.40 = 0.01142857142

Which is 1.1423% less damage.

In my opinion they should replace resilient with a different perk until they can decide on a new formula for resilient. But also, they should only release a new formula for resilient once they have added new perks in the same category as resilient. Because either way, you are basically forced to use resilient on every armor piece. There should be some more choices, currently there isn’t many for PVP perks.

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I want to add an example of how to “replace” resilient easily.

Resilient 2.0:

“4% chance to recover from fatal blow.”

For example you have 500 health remaining, you are hit for 1000 damage. This perk will cause you to instead of die, be at 1 health and still live. It can also have some sort of cooldown.

This is basically the same effect as the hatchet, except it will only apply to 1 hit. Meaning you can immediately die if hit a 2nd time.

It will basically prevent you from being 1 shot killed or from burst damage, and give time to drink a health potion.

This is fitting because its similar to preventing critical damage, as resilient already does, and crits are typically the cause of 1 shot kills or burst damage.

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Nice work on the maths.

I really find it odd how some modifiers work pre-modifiers, some work post-modifiers, some affect total, and some affect a specific portion. It’s really a mess with no consistency, and not what the player at all expects.

When you see “30% bonus to healing” for light armour, most players would assume that once they change their armour, that their heal numbers will jump by 30%. But they don’t. There are so many heal %age boosts scattered all over items, perks, skills, buffs, mastery, etc. What applies when? It’s super confusing for players and they get frustrated when the numbers don’t match the claims.

All it would take is a tooltip showing the “current” heal number for a particular skill, as well as something showing the base number for that healing. Like it could say with a 500 damage weapon “This skill heals for 16% (80) of weapon damage each tick. Currently will heal: 104 per tick”. Now this of course would change per buffs you have on, and effects on players you heal. But at least you can fiddle with perks/mastery and other effects and see what they do to your heal numbers.

Criticals right now have the issue where there is so much damage reduction that exists and most people are in heavy armour, that it feels like it’s not doing anything. Very high fortify stacking %ages, resilience damage reduction %ages, and other generic %age damage reductions.

It could help changing how resilience works, but also restrictions on fortify and other damage reductions. But I think it’d need a broader rework in general.

In the current system, most strength combat classes can easily be as tanky as a full tank build (excluding blocking), while outputting ridiculous amounts of damage (often AoE). In theory, a tank should be by far the tankiest role, not just ahead of melee combat roles. Tanky brawlers should have to effectively trade off tankiness for damage or vice versa.

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The only argument I would have against these percentage % chance perks in general, is that the game should avoid operating based on random chances.

Fights will be more enjoyable if everything is predictable. And damage should just be based primarily on light/medium/heavy archetypes which are easily distinguishable by appearance alone (one reason why cash shop skins are bad).

Losing a fight because you happen to have crit less often than the opponent is not very interesting for an action rpg game type of game.

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Healing numbers and life staff perks are also super bugged right now. Alot of things simply not working as intended. Its also arguable they need to make diminishing returns more clear, as you say the “30% healing” actually gets ‘squashed down’ to something like 20% or even 10% in extreme cases because of diminishing returns.

Overall there are alot of game design choices which have been made poorly, or are just simply undocumented and therefore cause problems to gameplay as a side effect of nobody knowing whats happening.

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Yeah thus why I wanted to see more info given to the players, or a simplified structure for modifiers that was explained somewhere so players know what to expect. Right now it’s impossible, you change stuff for higher numbers, and cross your fingers, hoping you actually get higher numbers now.

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They have to go through their formula that’s the biggest issue right now.

Also they need to make keywords that describe what is additive and what is multiplicative.

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