How does avatar skill affect the crit reduction?

Okay, so we have this new feature:

Bertha Bot said:

Changes (in VU 14.4)

• It is now possible to reduce the amount of critical damage received. A base chance to reduce critical damage by up to 15% has been introduced and is calculated automatically based on avatar skill level in relation to the attacking creature’s level. Items and boosts will also be introduced which will allow incoming critical damage to be reduced even further.

Click to expand...

Let's see if we can figure out how it works. Please post here when you take a crit how much the crit was for and how much it was reduced, the mob and mob level, and specify if the attack was ranged or melee, and your dodger or evader level (according to the type of attack).

Angel O2 Mercer said:

It was a level 10 Halix Stalker, I am level 20.74 evader.

Click to expand...

For reference we have this information on how PvP evading works, which might be relevant. Or the system might be the same as the chance of evading mobs in general, with a 15% max, which would mean each mob will be different in spite of its level.

Update

Here's the conclusion. I still welcome new data to refine the equation or challenge the conclusion. If you report, please include:

• Type of crit (armor penetration or additional damage)
• crit reduction
• your Evader profession level (not Evade skill level) or Dodger if it's a ranged attack mob
• the mob level, maturity, and name
• for armor penetration crits, your armor+plates worn and the damage you received

If your Evader level is more than three times the mob level, you should be maxed and the information isn't needed.

Reduced 0.5 points of critical damage
Critical hit - additional damage! You take 5.1 points of damage.

Click to expand...

From L1 puny mob which my evade is 30 lvls above

Reduced 0.3 points of critical damage
Critical hit - additional damage! You take 2.9 points of damage.

Click to expand...

same puny mobs second crit

maybe a d&d type of crit system; with added double and triple crits

ehh, stop giving MA's idea's acro...

so... a max 15 % chance to get maybe around max 10 % reduction? Don't sound like something to get to excited about But everything that gives benefit from higher skills levels is a good thing I guess because it gives values to skills.

Tried to establish a baseline on caud/bery punies. (BTW these obviously do two types of damage, which differs from their parents and entropedia. I got max of 6 dmg with pioneer, but 8 was expected with just impact.)

Mob: puny (level 1), Max damage 10
Evader level: 41.33
Damage crits (had 6) were always reduced by 1.5, which means i'm maxed for crit reduction on these (15% of the crit amount, which is the max of 10 on top of the attack itself).
I've only been able to get one Armor penetration crit, and it was reduced by 0.6, for 8.6 actual damage

7 crits for 372 attacks means crits are still 2%. Since the minipatch, i haven't been able to get a crit. Maybe they are broken now? oO

Could not get a second armor crit. It used to be 50:50 so i'm not sure if i had really "bad" luck or if something has been changed.

Right off it's clear that the two work differently. It could be that the damage crit reduction is x% of max damage while armor crit is x% of actual hit. Until i get another armor crit hit, i won't know.

jenny ferr said:

From L1 puny mob which my evade is 30 lvls above


same puny mobs second crit

Click to expand...

Hmm wow, not only is it not the same but it's not nearly maxed. Huge difference in % between 30 and 40 levels above. ETA: Which puny mob is this? Caly punies?

billairboy said:

so... a max 15 % chance to get maybe around max 10 % reduction? Don't sound like something to get to excited about But everything that gives benefit from higher skills levels is a good thing I guess because it gives values to skills.

Click to expand...

No it's a 100% chance to get a 15% reduction, depending on skills. Buff that % up with more new nanobots from MA and it's huge for hunting big mobs. Gotta give 'em "credit": they're showing amazing brilliance at finding new ways to get players to pay for buffs.

Doer said:

Hmm wow, not only is it not the same but it's not nearly maxed. Huge difference in % between 30,96 and 43 levels above. ETA: Which puny mob is this? Caly punies?

Click to expand...

Some Cyrene puny, not sure which exactly as two had aggro on me as they run a mile every time they move, will get some data on some L3 mobs later

jenny ferr said:

Some Cyrene puny, not sure which exactly as two had aggro on me as they run a mile every time they move, will get some data on some L3 mobs later

Click to expand...

It would help to know max damage for them.

Doer said:

No it's a 100% chance to get a 15% reduction, depending on skills. Buff that % up with more new nanobots from MA and it's huge for hunting big mobs. Gotta give 'em "credit": they're showing amazing brilliance at finding new ways to get players to pay for buffs.

Click to expand...

Okey, I misunderstood, I thought it was a 15 % chance to get some reduction

Really could use more data. I haven't taken a crit since the minipatch, and am still not fully convinced they didn't "break" them entirely.

Feffoid Bandit L15 - Reduced 3.0 points of critical damage

Critical hit - additional damage! You take 36.3 points of damage.

Evader lvl - 29.17

Evader 34.83

L22 Argo Scavenger Elite:

Reduced 4.8 points of armor piercing damage
Critical hit - armor penetration! You take 53.9 points of damage.

Reduced 5.7 points of critical damage
Critical hit - additional damage! You take 69.2 points of damage.

Reduced 4.8 points of armor piercing damage
Critical hit - armor penetration! You take 51.5 points of damage.

L30 Hogglo young:

Reduced 7.3 points of critical damage
Critical hit - additional damage! You take 146.7 points of damage.

Reduced 7.3 points of critical damage
Critical hit - additional damage! You take 156.6 points of damage.

Something has really changed. For 1 hour hunts of each: 2 crits from Hogglo, 3 from Argo elites, 0 from big Allo, 0 from Rexs

L25 Maffoid Hunter
Armor crit: 3.2 reduced, 47.6 damage

L30 Maffoid Clan Warlord
Damage crit: 4.5 reduced, 59.0 damage

L58 Warchief Kazrak
Armor crit: 1.5 reduced, 62.5 damage

Evader: 41.34

L13 Berycled Stalker
Armor crit: 4.7 reduced, 78.0 damage

L13 Berycled prowler
Damage crit: 4.7 reduced, 85.2 damage

L12 Berycled Old Alpha
Armor crit: 4.7 reduced, 63.9 damage

L12 Berycled Old Alpha
Armor crit: 1.5 reduced, 31.4 damage

Level 20.74 Evader.

Angel O2 Mercer said:

L13 Berycled Stalker
Armor crit: 4.7 reduced, 78.0 damage

L13 Berycled prowler
Damage crit: 4.7 reduced, 85.2 damage

L12 Berycled Old Alpha
Armor crit: 4.7 reduced, 63.9 damage

L12 Berycled Old Alpha
Armor crit: 1.5 reduced, 31.4 damage

Level 20.74 Evader.

Click to expand...

You must have put on heavier armor toward the end or have an odd piece... What was your total impact protection during each of those crits? If it was something like 5B+ghost for the first few, you're maxed.

Meant to post this last night but fell asleep first:

So some observations and issues so far:

• damage reduced is always the same for each type of crit per mob or mob level vs evader level:
  1. maximum reduction on damage crits is 0.15*mob_max_dmg
  2. maximum reduction on armor penetration seems to be 0.15*armor protection (e.g. my 4 points protection against punies*0.15=0.6) This should mean it's no longer possible to get armor penetration crits without armor on, as i was told and seem to recall you could -- please report if you do get an armor crit without armor now. Alternatively, if you aren't wearing armor the armor penetration reduction defaults to the following...
  3. The limit for damage crits is also the limit for armor crits if it's the lesser value of 1 and 2 (seen in O2's data where the armor crit and damage crit were same)
• Even with mobs of higher level than evader, there is some reduction of crit.
• Not having sure data on mob_max_dmg makes it tricky to decipher the results so far, however, due to armor crits being relative to armor protection, we can hopefully bypass that by measuring what % of armor protection the dmg is reduced by, and use that as a gauge to how close to maxed each (evader, mob level) pair is. An interesting side effect is that this means under the right conditions you can use an armor crit and damage crit together for a mob to find its max damage!

I'm 100% sure that all of the hits were taken using the same armor. I was using:

6x Adjusted Pixie + Mark.5A
1x Flimsy Thori Hat + Mark.5A


I've got screenshots of all of them, the only thing that I'm not sure is the maturity of the third hit. I'm sorry but it is possible it wasn't an Old Alpha. You might want to ignore it.

Sorry for the confusion, I was a bit busy to write it down and it's possible I was wrong.

Angel O2 Mercer said:

I'm 100% sure that all of the hits were taken using the same armor. I was using:

6x Adjusted Pixie + Mark.5A
1x Flimsy Thori Hat + Mark.5A


I've got screenshots of all of them, the only thing that I'm not sure is the maturity of the third hit. I'm sorry but it is possible it wasn't an Old Alpha. You might want to ignore it.

Sorry for the confusion, I was a bit busy to write it down and it's possible I was wrong.

Click to expand...

Oh man. Guess the first hypothesis about how armor crit reduction works is wrong. It should only be protecting 11+7 = 18 against berys, so the armor crits are being reduced by more than 15% of the armor protection. A 15% reduction would require you to be wearing 31 points protection (ghost+5b, among others). Back to the drawing board.

Svarog said:

Evader 34.83

L22 Argo Scavenger Elite:

Reduced 4.8 points of armor piercing damage
Critical hit - armor penetration! You take 53.9 points of damage.

Reduced 5.7 points of critical damage
Critical hit - additional damage! You take 69.2 points of damage.

Reduced 4.8 points of armor piercing damage
Critical hit - armor penetration! You take 51.5 points of damage.

L30 Hogglo young:

Reduced 7.3 points of critical damage
Critical hit - additional damage! You take 146.7 points of damage.

Reduced 7.3 points of critical damage
Critical hit - additional damage! You take 156.6 points of damage.

Something has really changed. For 1 hour hunts of each: 2 crits from Hogglo, 3 from Argo elites, 0 from big Allo, 0 from Rexs

Click to expand...

It would be helpful to know which armor setup you had on for the argos.


Based on the unconfirmed argo scavenger elite damage of 76, you are getting 5.7/76= 7.5% reduction, or 50% maxed, with 12.83 levels over it

Based on the unconfirmed hogglo young damage of 129, you are getting 7.3/129=5.66% reduction, or 37.7% maxed, with 4.83 levels over it.

O2 said:

L13 Berycled prowler
Damage crit: 4.7 reduced, 85.2 damage

Click to expand...

Based on the unconfirmed bery prowler damage of 59, you are getting 4.7/59=7.97% reduction, or 53% maxed, with 7.74 levels over it.

We've already got disagreement between results, so it may depend on different factors or the damage numbers may be wrong.

Doer said:

L58 Warchief Kazrak
Armor crit: 1.5 reduced, 62.5 damage

Click to expand...

most likely ~43 or ~44 protection (christmas tree set :/), so 1.5/43= 3.4% or 22.7% maxed with 16.68 levels under it. Seems, based on O2's post, that it's back to the drawing board on armor crits, though.

Doer said:

A base chance to reduce critical damage by up to 15% has been introduced and is calculated automatically based on avatar skill level in relation to the attacking creature’s level.

Click to expand...

I think you are assuming that "based on avatar skill level" means "based on avatar Evader/Dodger level".

You could be right ofcourse, but it could also be that "avatar skill level" here means the total number of skills your ava has. That number is being used by MA already for other things (eg. soc rating) so it would be just as easy to use that to program with as the Evader/Dodger level.

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate that you try to dig out the specifics behind this new feature, but I just want to point out that it can be dangerous to make assumptions like the one above.

Quint said:

I think you are assuming that "based on avatar skill level" means "based on avatar Evader/Dodger level".

You could be right ofcourse, but it could also be that "avatar skill level" here means the total number of skills your ava has. That number is being used by MA already for other things (eg. soc rating) so it would be just as easy to use that to program with as the Evader/Dodger level.

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate that you try to dig out the specifics behind this new feature, but I just want to point out that it can be dangerous to make assumptions like the one above.

Click to expand...

Yeah i agree but if i don't make some assumptions it's too complicated to make any comparisons. If it's based on total avatar skills or some combination of defense skills, etc. then there's not much chance i'll ever figure it out, anyway, so i wanted to see if it was obviously related to evader.

Doer said:

It would be helpful to know which armor setup you had on for the argos.

Click to expand...

Jarhead+5B (with defense enhancers I on all parts) on both argo and hogglo.

Doer said:

Yeah i agree but if i don't make some assumptions it's too complicated to make any comparisons. If it's based on total avatar skills or some combination of defense skills, etc. then there's not much chance i'll ever figure it out, anyway, so i wanted to see if it was obviously related to evader.

Click to expand...

Ok, you are free to take that approach ofc. But making assumptions in order to make the issue less complicated or to make sure you get a conclusion, might lead to a wrong conclusion imo.

Maybe I'm just too 6-sigma minded

Good luck with your search, I honestly hope your assumption is correct !

Doer said:

Based on the unconfirmed argo scavenger elite damage of 76, you are getting 5.7/76= 7.5% reduction, or 50% maxed, with 12.83 levels over it

Click to expand...

Well let's do a sanity check. There are several assumptions here anyway but assuming full protection in both impact+cut against the argos, the armor crit of 4.8 gives 4.8/(62*1.1 it's 10% for a single enhancer?) = 7.04% reduction, which is not too far off from the value arrived at using damage crit. Of course it could be a coincidence, but it does fit far better to the hypothetical value than O2's data. Let's see what other direct comparisons give.

The most useful data at this point is both types of crit received from the same mob/maturity.

Let me upload the screens and explain my data again because I think there was a miss comunication.

First Crit:

Berycled Stalker: 4.7 reduced, 63.9 damage

Second Crit:

Berycled Prowler: 4.7 reduced, 85.2 damage

Third Crit:

Berycled Old Alpha: 4.7 reduced, 78.0 damage

Fourth Crit:

Berycled Old Alpha: 1.5 reduced, 31.4 damage
^This one is the one that I'm not sure about maturity, I could swear it was an Old Alpha but might be better to ignore it.


Lol sorry for all the mess, hope it's useful information now that you have the screenies and all.

Reduced 2.9 points of armor piercing damage
Critical hit - armor penetration! You take 15.2 points of damage.

Reduced 3.2 points of armor piercing damage
Critical hit - armor penetration! You take 21.4 points of damage.

L8 Drone gen. 1

Dodger lvl 24.31

Rascal + 3b

Stefan 008 Bond said:

Reduced 2.9 points of armor piercing damage
Critical hit - armor penetration! You take 15.2 points of damage.

L8 Drone gen. 1

Dodger lvl 24.31

Click to expand...

What's the protection of that tin suit of yours against those?

MA use the term 'attacking creature's level'. Can I point out that the L number seems to be a composite of a mob's damage, hit points and aggression. We know MA are not very good at precision in their announcements, so perhaps the reduction is proportional just to the mob's damage, not to the L number. After all, the Evade mechanism existed before the advent of the L numbers. So comparing one's Evader level with the L number would not give an accurate picture.

chevrons said:

MA use the term 'attacking creature's level'. Can I point out that the L number seems to be a composite of a mob's damage, hit points and aggression. We know MA are not very good at precision in their announcements, so perhaps the reduction is proportional just to the mob's damage, not to the L number. After all, the Evade mechanism existed before the advent of the L numbers. So comparing one's Evader level with the L number would not give an accurate picture.

Click to expand...

I don't agree, been hunting big Kingfishers & their crits don't get reduced much compared to the dmg( talking about 150-250 crits)
then again, I evade them pretty well so only took 2 crits so far & been too lazy to screenshot them

Good job, Doer and all you other guys.

Just throwing in a couple of other theories, which can be proved wrong? later:
- I would assume that the crit reduction does not depend on the armor at all.
- Could it be the players max prof level compared to the mobs level, that gives the reduction amount?

I had some crits and reductions today, but didn't see this thread until just now, so I didn't record any of the number. Will do tomorrow.

Keep up the good work, and gl with the number crunching.

chevrons said:

MA use the term 'attacking creature's level'. Can I point out that the L number seems to be a composite of a mob's damage, hit points and aggression.

Click to expand...

Right, so the question is do we take them literally at their word or not. As in my previous response to assumptions about Evader and Defender being the relevant values, i'd say that starting with the most literal (and simple to evaluate) interpretation is probably the way to go. If it fails, spread out the search.

We know MA are not very good at precision in their announcements, so perhaps the reduction is proportional just to the mob's damage, not to the L number.

Click to expand...

We've already seen that the stated maximum (unbuffed) of 15% reduction is achieved in extreme cases (me vs. punies), and lower % reductions with other mob level/evader level combinations. Could it be something besides level and something besides Evader working here? Yeah of course. Would it be as simple as the max damage of the mob that determines the reduced amount? Possibly. I'll be considering various things as more data shows up.

After all, the Evade mechanism existed before the advent of the L numbers. So comparing one's Evader level with the L number would not give an accurate picture.

Click to expand...

My own opinion/expectation is that it works in one of two ways:

(1) either the reduction results from a comparison between the avatar's Evader (or Dodger) level and the mob's new "L" value,

(2) or from a comparison using the same mechanism that is used to determine evading, that is to say Evader/Dodger vs. some (probably unseen) mob value, using a function with diminishing returns. This type can be seen in the article linked in OP to entropedia based on my testing of evading years ago.

If it's indeed the first case (based on new "L" value), i think we have a very good chance of coming up with an exact formula. In the latter case, we can at best come up with some general expectations, just like with frequency of evading.

Vedder said:

Just throwing in a couple of other theories, which can be proved wrong? later:
- I would assume that the crit reduction does not depend on the armor at all.

Click to expand...

Could be, but if so we need to find another explanation why it can be different from the damage crit reduction, but in no clearly fixed way is always lower, and (for the most part) seems to be the same for a given armor vs a mob.

It would be really useful to have damage and armor crits from the same mob on two or more different armors.

- Could it be the players max prof level compared to the mobs level, that gives the reduction amount?

Click to expand...

I would think/hope it would be Evader, but this is definitely an area where all kinds of things are possible.

2.6 reduction and 29.5 damage on a crit from a L16 molisk guardian. This is about 8.09%. My evader is 30.42.