An Explanation of Game Mechanics: The Damage System
Hi. My name is HarryTasker. You probably haven't heard of me. I come to you tonight to share with you just how the damage system work after facepalming from some of the gearing recommendations I've seen from around the forum. This topic covers how damage rating works, critical rating, critical damage, brutal strike rating, brutal strike damage, flat vulnerability, %vulnerability, and artifacts with %damage based on range.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Damage rating: A flat number that affects how much damage nearly every skill in game does. Multiplied by your hero stats and critical hits.
Critical rating: Your chance to critically hit an enemy.
Critical damage rating: A bonus stat that grants bonus damage on criticals based on a coefficient. Is not multiplied by the critical multiplier or player stats.
Critical multiplier: How much our damage is multiplied by on a critical hit. For example, the default modifier is 1.5, or 150% damage dealt on criticals.
Brutal strike rating: Essentially a crit of a crit. If you have no crit chance then you will never land a brutal.
Brutal damage rating: The same as critical damage rating. Bonus damage on a brutal strike.
THE SUPPRESSION SYSTEM
The suppression system is a hidden mechanic that makes bosses more difficult. Your chance to critically hit a boss level mob is reduced by 40%. So for example, if your paper doll displayed 30% chance to critically strike it would be reduced to 18% on a boss. Extremely important to know for calculating your dps and potential gains from bonus critical damage.
THE JUICY BITS: HOW DAMAGE RATING WORKS
So, now onto the fun stuff. Damage rating is simply a measure of how much damage our skills gain from it. It is modified by our synergies, player stats, and the critical multiplier. Nearly every skill in the game has a hidden coefficient attached to the skill that determines how much damage it gains from damage rating. For the sake of variety, we will exaime 2 different skills when understanding the damage system. The skills that I will model are Scarlet Witch's Chaotic Hex and Cable's Energy Pulse.
Chaotic Hex has a .45 damage coefficient attached to it, meaning we gain .45 damage per every point of rating or for a larger scale every 100 damage rating is 45 damage gained before modifiers are applied. So, to apply modifiers, we look at our Energy stat+synergies. For this example we will assume a 3% energy synergy and +25% mental damage from Rank 7 Energy stat. Our model for this example will be as follows:
.45 * 100 * 1.28 = 57.6 damage
So, for every 100 damage rating we attain our Chaotic Hex will go up by 58 damage due to rounding.
For our second model, we will now look at Energy Pulse. Energy Pulse has a .26 damage coefficient and also scales off 2 different stats, Fighting and Energy, due it to being an energy power with the Fighting tag applied to it. In this equation we assume 25% damage from Rank 7 fighting, 20% energy damage from Rank 6 energy, and a 9% synergy:
.26 * 100 *1.25 * 1.29 = 41.925 damage
As you can see, hybrid powers scale insanely well compared to non hybrids and these tend to be the skills that get maxed on the majority of player builds that have hybrid scaling available.
CRITICAL DAMAGE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP STACKING IT AND LOVE DAMAGE RATING
Critical damage, for the most part, is generally an undesirable stat for how little the gains are. Unlike damage rating, critical damage is only active when you can score a critical hit. It's damage is not multiplied by player stats or the critical multiplier whereas damage rating scales with both. It also has a coefficient attached to it that is the same as your damage rating coefficient (unless you are using a power that ticks twice a second). Let's do some simple models, the first being on Chaotic Hex and the second on Energy Pulse. We will assume 100 crit damage rating and 25% boss critical chance:
.25 * .45 * 100 = 11.25
.25 * .26 * 100 = 6.5
Our equation reads simple. Since critical damage rating will only be active 25% of the time, we simply multiply our .25 crit chance with the coefficient to find out how damage we truly gain from it and as you can see, the results are horrendous. Let's do this again but with 500 critical damage:
.25 * .45 * 500 = 56.25
.25 * .26 * 500 = 32.5
As you can see, even with 5x the amount of critical damage rating as normal damage rating is still a dps loss compared to gaining 100 damage rating over 500 critical damage rating. Obviously the results will vary based upon your critical chance, but a general rule of thumb is damage > crit damage.
THE CRITICAL MULTIPLIER
The critical multiplier is fairly straight forward and favors damage rating for reasons I'm about to delve into. The base multiplier is 1.5, or 150% damage when you score a critical hit. So, to calculate how the critical multiplier affects our DPS from damage rating the formulas get a little bit more mathy. Again, 25% critical assumed for a boss:
(.25 * .45 * 100 * 1.28 * 1.5) + ( .75 * .45 * 100 * 1.28) = 64.8 damage
On paper the gains aren't very high but we're also working with smaller numbers here. Energy Pulse requires a different model as each rank has a scaling critical multiplier. For our example we will assume a rank 40 Energy Pulse granting a 2.3 multiplier on criticals:
(.25 * .26 * 100 * 1.25 * 1.29 * 2.3) + (.75 * .26 * 100 * 1.25 * 1.29) = 55.5550625
As you can see once again, the hybrid nature of Energy Pulse in addition to the 2.3 multiplier causes it to scale insane with damage rating. Now, as for why damage rating trumps critical is fairly simple. Compare our two sets of numbers on each power:
Chaotic Hex with 100 Damage Rating: (.25 * .45 * 100 * 1.28 * 1.5) + ( .75 * .45 * 100 * 1.28) = 64.8 damage
Chaotic Hex with 500 Critical Damage Rating: .25 * .45 * 500 = 56.25
Energy Pulse with 100 Damage Rating: (.25 * .26 * 100 * 1.25 * 1.29 * 2.3) + (.75 * .26 * 100 * 1.25 * 1.29) = 55.5550625
Energy Pulse with 500 Critical Damage Rating: .25 * .26 * 500 = 32.5
It's no contest that damage rating is exceptionally better than critical damage because of all the modifiers it gains.
THE STAT THAT NOBODY LOVES: BRUTAL STRIKES
As you can probably guess by now, brutal strikes are bad. Crit of a crit. If you have 10% assumed brutal on a boss and 25% critical assumed you will only land 2.5% of your attacks as brutals. I don't think I really need to go into much detail on brutals so I'll just leave this simple equation:
.25 * .1 * .45 * 500 = 5.625 damage
.25 * .1 * .26 * 500 = 3.25 damage
Simply rubbish. Under no circumstances do you ever want to itemize for brutals because of how poorly they scale. While the example above only proves brutal damage rating, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that damage rating is flat out more desirable as it is active 100% of the time and not 2.5% on our model.
VULNERABILITIES
This section is short and sweet as there is little to explain. % based vulnerability skills, which are Eye for Weakness, Jungle Snare, Turbulent Winds, Web Spray, and Demolition Stomp, multiply your damage by whatever percent they are. For example, rank 39 Eye for Weakness increases your damage by 62.5%, so our 100 Damage Rating Energy Pulse will now be 90.269765625 damage.
Flat damage vulnerabilities are bugged and are generally stronger than intended. Rank 21 Enervating Hex provides a vulnerability debuff of 230.8 damage. Now, under normal conditions (aka not bugged) this would simply add 230.8 additional damage rating to be modified by our skills. Unfortunately, it's applying as an additional 230.8 more damage per hit that isn't modified by stats. So for example, a power with a rate of fire of 8 shots per second would gain an additional 1846.4 damage per second from this debuff.
NETHERANIUM JEWEL/MOTION TRACKER
This section is also short and sweet. Your total damage rating is modified by 15% (or whatever the roll is on your item). So, if you had 5000 damage rating at max range with a 15% motion tracker you would then gain 750 bonus damage rating to your abilities.
And that's a simple explanation of how damage works in this game with numerous examples.
http://forums.marvelheroes.com/discu...mage-system/p1
