Grace Xisthrith
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I'm starting with my basic view on the idea in the initial post, then the idea of lean ramping, my view of the pros and cons, some potential in game numbers it could come out as, since the other numbers players have posted are about half incorrect. I'll end the post with some thoughts on other posts, particularly those most relevant to this post.
One of the highest repeatable dodge setups without any blinds / colds / statuses gets ~70 (buns x 2) + 15 (logos) + 12 (madm) + 24 (Shadowfall) + 20 (Louie) = 131 bonus MRM. This is an expensive setup, and there are ways to make it go higher temporarily and situationally, but I thought I might use the general limits of player dodge later on, so I calculated it here. I didn't really end up referencing this later on.
The post's goal seems to be to propose that dodging is too powerful and dodgelash is too powerful. I disagree that dodging is too powerful, because as stated by several people here before, dodging is not mathematically overpowered. If the player is able to pay a significant amount of resources to reduce monster damage, they can reduce monster damage by that much %melee. That is not a problem with mathematical game balance. It is also not a problem for the player, after expending significant resources, to be able to sustain infinitely and survive as long as they want against a monster by reducing their damage via dodge or another method, healing, or a combination of both. If you followed the player turn model blindly, you would expect a Frogzard to kill you in twenty turns. If anyone with a fleshed out build died to a Frogzard in 20 turns, I would probably not think they were very good at AQ. For this reason, I think it's ridiculous to argue that surviving for a long long time, or indefinitely, shouldn't be possible. If you would like to argue that, and argue that Frogzards should be a deadly threat, you'd be better of arguing about the player's ability to use and regain resources and utilize them, as Dardiel has pointed out. Separately, I also feel that a 25% accuracy floor is ridiculously high. This leaves the player with a greater than 5% chance of getting beaned twice in a row, even with optimal dodge. It would leave dodge a hugely inconsistent playstyle, and give them no benefit for it. You're not dealing with the entirety of the Thesis. The OP is arguing that the Player should absolutely die to a Frogzard if the Player is not in an Earth Armour and they fail to dodge. If the Player was in an Earth Armour that emphasized Dodge, the Player wouldn't die. You're cherry picking parts of the thesis to exaggerate the consequences. In the short term, it would be fair to say that this may happen if a 25% accuracy floor is implemented especially if the Player is not in an Elementally-Appropriate armour. In the long-term when Elemental-Dodge Lean armour variants are released, there is no possible way for the Player to be 'beaned' as long as they sit in Elementally appropriate equipment. The very Adaptation solution you go on to discuss assumes that the Player is in an Appropriate Armour/Shield. ~Ward
I entirely agree that on dodge effects, or dodgelash, are overpowered. My opinion is that having dodgelash dynamically scaled on actual dodge chance as I believe Telocontar wrote up in detail would effectively put dodge playstyles in an effective place of not longer being extremely overpowered. Staff could make it provide only the %melee invested, or give the players extra output for using item synergies by not fully reducing the output (IE cap them at 2x output or something) Going forward my arguments / ideas account for this implementation. For example, it makes me unconcerned with the idea that lean ramping would weaken dodgelash more than it was supposed to, because it wouldn't.
Moving on to lean ramping. There are pros and cons to the lean ramping idea. I think the obvious pros are it weakens the dodge playstyle and gives monsters the ability to fight back, while still rewarding players who dodge by dramatically reducing the damage they take, and it fulfills the goal of motivating dodge builds to use element appropriate gear.
There are obvious cons too, one is that it makes dodge players dodge less even if they're still being rewarded, which isn't thematic, and might not be fun for players. It overlaps with eleshield mechanics, although I argue dodge does this anyway, just less that it's behind the scenes normally, on average, it's all the same. Another is that it isn't active turn one or turn two, at least not to a significant degree. Another is that it's not intuitive, if a player dodges a bunch, then gets hit, and they don't know about the system, they might think dodge is not worth using. Given that there seems to be (from my time scrolling character pages on the top legends page) a silent majority of AQ players who aren't active in the community, I think that's a real concern. A less obvious downside is that it actually weakens the mathematical value of dodge. Monsters with a high BTH lean would deal more damage to dodging players than you'd expect given the %melee they've invested into their dodge.
A benefit that's unrelated to dodge, but significant, is the ability for monsters to punish players with exceptionally low MRM by gaining a negative BTH lean. In some discussions, players promote that MRM loss basically isn't a penalty, which isn't true, it effectively increases monster damage by the %melee you gain, although less visibly than something like an elevuln. That being said, any MRM loss the player gives themself that goes past the monster's base accuracy is truly not a penalty, because the monster was already hitting them every turn. The ability to gain a negative BTH lean would remove this issue, and could make players think twice about trading endless MRM for effects.
So there are some pros and cons. I'll post some numbers below, but after thinking about it, while I like the advantages of lean ramping, I think there's a system that accomplishes most of those same benefits with fewer downsides, and could be a nicer change. It is: Using the same expected dodge value proposed for dodgelash items, if the monster's expected accuracy is less than 15%, grant them a BTH lean that takes their accuracy to 15%.
So, if the monster's base accuracy was 55, and the player's effective MRM was 155, the monster has a hit chance of less than 15%, so they would gain a BTH lean to take them up to 15%, or in this case, a +15 BTH lean. If the monster's accuracy was 55 and the player had 110 MRM, the monster still has a 45% chance to hit, so they would not gain any BTH lean.
I believe this is explains the idea clearly. If you're curious why I picked 15% accuracy, that's an arbitrary number that I picked, staff could pick a different number. I think it shouldn't be higher than 20%, 25% chance of getting hit leaves you a greater than 5% chance of getting hit twice in a row, which I don't like, but those are just my opinions.
For anyone confused by the numbers, this would function identically to an accuracy floor, except that the monster's damage would be reduced more or less depending on how high the player's effective MRM is. The higher the MRM, the greater the damage reduction. At my "highest" MRM calculated above, this would be a +46 BTH lean for ~35% damage reduction for monsters, and they'd have a 15% chance to hit. The numbers would change significantly if staff upped the 15% to 20%, 25%, or 30%. This is objectively less punishing than the current accuracy floor, and that is intentional.
I'm very open to critiques on this idea, since I haven't had it for as long, it's certainly received less review.
That being said, here are the BTH lean ramping tables I made. To be clear, this is not the idea I described just above, this is my initial idea of giving monster lean ramping of a sort. The 3 smaller ones on the left are manually made without a formula, just trying things out. I also capped those, since I think caps are ideal here, staff would of course decide where caps should be. The three on the right follow the formula currently used for player DEX ramping with minor adjustments to the variable that changes the speed of ramping, the number used listed at the top left of each, I'd like for these to have an upper and lower cap implemented as well, but those would be up to staff so I didn't include any. Currently, players use a variable of 32, and a lower variable increases the speed of ramping up and down. It's extremely easy to change (at least in a spreadsheet, idk about action script), so staff could pick any speed of ramping they desire. The three labels are BTH lean, X (for the variable assigned to hits and misses, currently misses add -2, hits add +1) and dmg, which refers to what damage would be multiplied. To make this super clear since I didn't in my first post, I haven't added any of the punishment mechanisms that affect the player past a +20 and -20 BTH lean, since I don't think those make sense on monsters.
Tables didn't work, preview isn't working for me ATM since apparently I triggered the security check, I suppose that's a forums limitation
For now, google spreadsheet published link https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSnKEPnsV78Ha7jLSltK5urVE3qDR7XBa1TdvqFfwemT0wiJx8Xww0FlO6nSYp_ruQ3hAHRYwPV1pCd/pubhtml
32 25 20
Lean X Dmg Lean X dmg Lean X dmg Lean X dmg
60 -5 0.586
40 -4 0.680 75.00 -15 0.53 127.50 -15 0.40 255.00 -15 0.25
20 -3 0.810 66.11 -14 0.56 108.18 -14 0.44 198.33 -14 0.30
10 -2 0.895 58.16 -13 0.59 92.08 -13 0.48 157.86 -13 0.35
5 -1 0.944 51.00 -12 0.63 78.46 -12 0.52 127.50 -12 0.40
0 0 1.000 44.52 -11 0.66 66.79 -11 0.56 103.89 -11 0.45
-2.5 1 1.030 38.64 -10 0.69 56.67 -10 0.60 85.00 -10 0.50
-5 2 1.063 33.26 -9 0.72 47.81 -9 0.64 69.55 -9 0.55
-10 3 1.133 28.33 -8 0.75 40.00 -8 0.68 56.67 -8 0.60
-20 4 1.308 23.80 -7 0.78 33.06 -7 0.72 45.77 -7 0.65
-30 5 1.545 19.62 -6 0.81 26.84 -6 0.76 36.43 -6 0.70
15.74 -5 0.84 21.25 -5 0.80 28.33 -5 0.75
Lean X Dmg 12.14 -4 0.88 16.19 -4 0.84 21.25 -4 0.80
25 -5 0.773 8.79 -3 0.91 11.59 -3 0.88 15.00 -3 0.85
20 -4 0.810 5.67 -2 0.94 7.39 -2 0.92 9.44 -2 0.90
15 -3 0.850 2.74 -1 0.97 3.54 -1 0.96 4.47 -1 0.95
10 -2 0.895 0.00 0 1.00 0.00 0 1.00 0.00 0 1.00
5 -1 0.944 -2.58 1 1.03 -3.27 1 1.04 -4.05 1 1.05
0 0 1.000 -5.00 2 1.06 -6.30 2 1.08 -7.73 2 1.10
-2.5 1 1.030 -7.29 3 1.09 -9.11 3 1.12 -11.09 3 1.15
-5 2 1.063 -9.44 4 1.13 -11.72 4 1.16 -14.17 4 1.20
-10 3 1.133 -11.49 5 1.16 -14.17 5 1.20 -17.00 5 1.25
-15 4 1.214 -13.42 6 1.19 -16.45 6 1.24 -19.62 6 1.30
-20 5 1.308 -15.26 7 1.22 -18.59 7 1.28 -22.04 7 1.35
-17.00 8 1.25 -20.61 8 1.32 -24.29 8 1.40
Lean X Dmg -18.66 9 1.28 -22.50 9 1.36 -26.38 9 1.45
50 -5 0.630 -20.24 10 1.31 -24.29 10 1.40 -28.33 10 1.50
40 -4 0.680 -21.74 11 1.34 -25.97 11 1.44 -30.16 11 1.55
30 -3 0.739 -23.18 12 1.38 -27.57 12 1.48 -31.88 12 1.60
20 -2 0.810 -24.56 13 1.41 -29.08 13 1.52 -33.48 13 1.65
10 -1 0.895 -25.87 14 1.44 -30.51 14 1.56 -35.00 14 1.70
0 0 1.000 -27.13 15 1.47 -31.88 15 1.60 -36.43 15 1.75
-2.5 1 1.030 -28.33 16 1.50 -33.17 16 1.64 -37.78 16 1.80
-5 2 1.063 -29.49 17 1.53 -34.40 17 1.68 -39.05 17 1.85
-7.5 3 1.097 -30.60 18 1.56 -35.58 18 1.72 -40.26 18 1.90
-10 4 1.133 -31.67 19 1.59 -36.70 19 1.76 -41.41 19 1.95
-12.5 5 1.172 -32.69 20 1.63 -37.78 20 1.80 -42.50 20 2.00
Kinda a ton of numbers, definitely hard to really think about when it's in this format, but we're limited on the forums, since there's no table function that I know of. Some of these would punish dodge players and increase their damage taken more than an accuracy floor of 25%. There's some ways to change that, but I don't like that aspect as much.
Some thoughts I have on other posts
-Hairmuffs provide 4 MRM. This doesn't seem to be accounted for in those calculations. Minor nitpick
-Increasing your own MRM is mathematically balanced, this is just a fact, you receive the reduction in monster damage you pay for. I think we're clear on that now but I figured I'll say it again
-Post 8 / 26: The idea of making MRM boosts stack like most eleshields stack (always increasing duration by one turn) would certainly limit some current very meta dodge options. It's also possible that this would be achievable system side, as to my knowledge, unlike eleshield items, dodge items don't have hardcoded stacking rules. Wouldn't be a change to all dodge setups on its own, but would certainly limit super simple setups that grant extremely high dodge chance, and might be very easy to implement backend
-last I checked there's still some posts saying that the accuracy floor would change basic hit assumptions, those posts are incorrect, I was incorrect about this until a few weeks back, thanks Dardiel for correcting me, don't think it's a big issue just thought I'd say it
-Post 25: you're defending the idea that healing 325 HP is twice as powerful as healing 300 HP. I don't see how you can feel confident in that argument. Would you also defend the idea that healing 350 HP is infinitely more powerful than healing 349 HP? The reason I'm saying it's a terrible way to determine the value of something is because if you use it to determine the value of a mechanic, you wind up believing that healing 350 HP is infinitely more powerful than healing 349 HP, or that healing 337.5 HP is twice as powerful as healing 325 HP. It's a very bad way to determine something's value because of that. Also, as I said initially, I think it's ridiculous to argue the player shouldn't be able to survive indefinitely against a monster if they dedicate their resources to it. Frogzards shouldn't be killing people. Effective HP is a terrible piece of evidence to support any claim. Cherry picking without context. You have a right to express the other opinions, but excluding numbers that are important to the context of the case presented paints your rebuttal in a poor light ~Ward
-post 37: You state you think arguments based on equipment are a whataboutism. It's not a whataboutism to address how items work when they're being used as evidence to support someone else's ideas.
-Post 39: as you say, this is an impossible example, and in my opinion useless. I don't know what you're trying to argue other than if you break all the rules and ignore basic balance, you've broken all the rules and ignored basic balance.
-Post 39: "Please note that this doesn't mean I agree with my ardent critics, only that I don't want to have the conversation derail into a debate on which metric is "better". " if you think that a metric that says that 350 HP is infinitely stronger than 349 HP is a good metric, you're wrong. It's a worse metric, %melee is a better metric, your impossible theoretical example doesn't change this. Again, cherry picking without wider context, and adds nothing to the wider debate on 'Should the Player be allowed to be invincible?' You have stated your opinion as 'Yes, subject to conditions.' In my opinion, the EHP metric is really only relevant with respect to the accuracy floor solution, since the proposed Accuracy Floor at 25% stops exponential returns. Again, ultimately irrelevant since pundits seem to prefer Lean Adaptation, which is where the ongoing discussion to the Proposed Solution is going. ~Ward
Post 40: I believe I understand the logic of your critiques. "One, it significantly devalues items that provide smaller DefBoosts compared to items that provide bigger ones, because smaller-DefBoost gear will end up pulling down the per-turn DefBoost bonus due to the averaging." Since it's your opinion I'm not going to argue with you, but I do want to say this is the state that most eleshield items are in. Kurgweenboh, or the Mermazon turtle, lose utility from this.
-Post 46: Pretty cool idea with a dynamic floor, which could relatively quickly go from 0 to 50 to 0. I think this overly punishes the player for dodging, particularly with longer duration effects (like a 5 turn defboost on Fujin, or a 3 Turn blind on one of those blind spells), since you're losing a ton of value from the effects on the turns where the accuracy floor is much higher. I'd propose my lean based on accuracy instead of a raw accuracy floor, IE instead of getting autohit at those rolls, gain a lean to have the X% chance of hitting each turn dynamically changing as you describe. The change on dodgelash I like as well.
< Message edited by Ward_Point -- 1/13/2025 1:24:12 >
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