Quote (legen @ Nov 16 2013 05:54pm)
#voodood2mechanics2013
Ok look, aside from the trolling war we always get into about this, let me explain why I came to the conclusion that this is indeed real.
Keep in mind while reading this that (ignore target defense) does not work in PvP
and GA (albeit it requires no AR to hit) still is effected by this secondary mechanism of defense rating
Awhile back I had a guy who was very into melee ladder PvP tell me he knew a secret which is why he was winning.
He then begins telling me about how defense rating effects the rate of how often you roll minimum damage as compared to your maximum, I laughed it off and did not take this seriously.
Then a couple months later I had a buddy of mine in a game and we were doing ZvZ for practice.
He was using a GMB setup including 60/160 armor and I was using Fortitude with a Diamond Bow.
our zons were pretty evenly matched as far as statistics are concerned, life value, DR%, runwalk, block rate. The only difference on screen is that his GMB should have been beating my diamond in damage.
After about an hour of practice he started getting a bit frustrated because he claimed that (he was getting bad damage rolls against me) and I was getting lucky damage rolls against him.
At first I just ignored his claim and assumed he was doing the classic D2-excuse shit but after a few more rounds I did start to notice that when his GA's would hit me, I was taking really low dmg from singular hits
and when I hit him he would get slammed almost every time for what seemed to be critical hits or max damage rolls and I started to wonder wtf was going on.
Then I remembered what this self-proclaimed melee expert had told me a couple months back...
and I realized that Fortitude Armor does possess a significantly larger amount of defensive value (especially the buff from chilling) than a white socketed armor with 60/160 in it.
I called him into a damage test because now I was confused as to why this was happening, it was happenign to frequently to be *luck*
Essentially here is what the first test consisted of:
* Me taking hits while wearing Fortitude after chilling armor has been proced. We only recorded (actual hits that deal damage)
* and then me taking hits while wearing a 60/160 (much lower defense rating on your character)
We did this for almost an hour and the results were showing that higher defense rating was somehow effecting how much damage you receive from physical attacks.
When I wore the 60/160, I would more often get slammed hard with crits and high-end damage rolls that would half my life bar.
but with Fortitude on, I would more often take normal damage rolls that did 1/4th life bar damage, rather than slamming crits that deal 50% life bar damage
(at this point I assumed that chilling armor had something to do with it and that it was not defense rating)
So I call in his Barbarian who has a very high leveled shout and we ran a 4 hour test on this shit, long story short, let me summarize our findings:
Running the strings with a GMB:
(With Shout Off) we would fire 10 GAs, record the damage dealt for individual GAs, then tally the 10 hits for a total damage dealt by 10 GAs
Then we repeated this proccess countles times which resulted in me with a peice of notebook paper that was entirely filled with tests and damage results, very detailed mind you.
(With Shout On) same exact thing, the only difference was shout was now ON. this resulted in a 2nd piece of notebook paper filled to the brim with test string results, very detailed data
So what I did was I took the 1st 10 arrow string test with (shout off) and compared it to the 1st 10 arrow string test with (shout on)
and it was showing that with (shout on) he only took about 3/4ths of the damage he had taken when (shout was off)
Did the same thing with test results #2 (shout off) against test results #3 (shout on)
nearly the same exact result, (shout on) seemed to only take 3/4ths the damage as when (shout was off)
I compared every single damage result in numerical order against eachother and it was showing the same results consistantly.
The next day we repeated the entire process with my Diamond Bow
The results showed that the Diamond Bow was less effected by Shout On or Shout Off
(With Shout On) he would take about 5/6ths the damage that he was taking (With Shout Off)
and we also noticed that the Diamond Bow was somehow slightly beating the GMB in overall damage against the high defense Barbarian
This is when I decided we needed to test a weapon that had a closer min-max, even more so than a Diamond Bow
We used a grief for this (obviously) I had my amazon slapping the piss out of him with a grief while wearing angelic set (to make sure I could hit through shout)
and those results showed that shout made no difference while attacking with a weapon that basically has the same min-max damage. No difference whatsoever
This is when I came to the conclusion that High Defense Value does cause incomming damage to hit minimum damages more often than if you had a low defense rating
I don't know man, we did alot of testing on this, whatever the exact mecahnics are, I am unsure of but there is definately something going on here.