How Armor Works

Jimmy B

Indioni Jones
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Introduction

Since VU9.1 there's been quite an intensive spell of research into Armor. I'm going to try to summarise everything we know about armor into this one thread. Please post any corrections or omissions! If you have anything you'd like added, please ask!

How plates work

How plates work is widely misunderstood and misinterpreted so I'll put an explanation here. The way it works was discovered by Witte and is documented in this thread. It's been checked and verified on many occasions. It is a little confusing at first, as it may not be how you'd expect it to work. I've tried to explain it as clearly as I can, however, there's more discussion and examples within the thread.

When you receive a hit wearing armor with plates both the armor and the plates receive the full damage. They do not act as one piece with combined stats.

What happens when you get hit

(i) The full hit is offered to your armor. Its absorbs as much as it can and decays accordingly.

(ii) The full hit is also offered to your plates. Its absorbs as much as it can (regardless of how much the armor absorbed) and decays accordingly.

(iii) The damage absorbed by the armor and the damage absorbed by the plates are subtracted from the total damage. Whatever is left is what you get hit for, if its negative (or less than 1) you get hit for 1.0.

This can result in some unexpected things occurring:

Unexpected protection

Imagine taking 20 damage from a mob that does 50%; Impact damage and 50% Acid damage.

You're wearing an armor that protects 10 Impact and no acid. You also have plates that protect 10 Impact and no acid.

You may expect the combination of your armor and plates gives you 20 Impact protection and 0 Acid protection. Thus you'd expect to protect against the 10 Impact but not the 10 Acid and so take a 10.0 dmg hit.

However, this is not how it works. The full damage is offered to both the plates and the armor. So the armor absorbs 10 Impact from the attack. The plates also absorb 10 Impact from the attack. These are added together and the result is that you have absorbed 20 damage from the attack. Thus, even though you have no acid protection, you take a 1.0 Hit.

This has caused some confusion in the past. There was a big debate about Kreltin and how they can't do acid damage. People would go up against them in Angel+5B (with no Acid protection) and yet still take 1.0 hits. This was the result of the phenomenom described above, Kreltin do actually do Acid damage.

Unexpected decay

If used inappropriately, using plates can cause you more decay than you'd expect.

Imagine taking a 10 damage hit from a mob that only does Impact damage. You're wearing an armor that protects 10 Impact damage, and plates that protect 10 Impact damage. Both will absorb the 10 Impact damage and decay accordingly. Thus you'll get roughly double the decay you'd expect since both the armor and the plates will decay as if they had absorbed 10 damage. Even without the plates on you'd take a 1.0 hit, so the extra decay from the plates is a waste.

However, note that when used well plates improve your economy. (see discussion below)

Minimum Decay

As discussed below, all armor decays according to a formula that is used to calculate the decay based on the amount of damage absorbed and the durability of the armor. The only exception to this is for small hits. Every armor has a minimum decay.

Minimum Decay in pecs = (Sum of protection points of armor)/100

Example - Shogun

Shogun protects 10 Impact, Cut, Stab, Burn and 5 Penetration for a total of 45 protection points. Thus its minimum decay is 0.45pec. This is roughly equivalent to a 7 dmg hit. So its probably not going to be a problem unless you are using Shogun against some really tiny mobs.

Example - Ghost

Ghost has 84 protection points. Thus its minimum decay is 0.84. This is roughly equivalent to a 12 dmg hit. So you pay more than you expect with Ghost if you take a hit from an all Electric mob (11 protection) or an all Burn mob (11 protection) or more critically an all acid mob (1 protection).

Note that its almost impossible to avoid minimum decay (apart from for plates) for all-electric mobs. The only armours that manage it are Ghoul and Orca. However, other armors such as Ghost and Zombie aren't too bad.

How armor decays

Upon the release of VU9.1 MA informed us they had modified the way armor decays. This brought about a spell of research to figure out how it had decayed. We also discovered some errors we had made regarding durability and mob damages as a result. The main research and findings are presented in this thread. Many of the 'usual research crowd' were involved and it was nice to see some new people getting involved. Thanks to everyone who helped! And a special thanks to Coop, who started the thread, did a significant portion of the testing and who extended some ideas developed by Witte and Doer in order to obtain what we believe is the formula used by MA. (if its not, its certainly remarkably accurate)

I will try to summarise the findings below.

Change to decay

Everyone is very keen to know how armor decay changed with the VU. For very small damages absorbed it was increased a little. This occurred in the range 0-14 damage absorbed and peaks at about a 20% increase for 7 damage absorbed. The decrease for larger damages is much more significant. For instance, for over 100 damage absorbed it was more than halved. The graphs below tell the story (note in the past we mistakenly thought durability had no effect so these graphs are just a general overview of the change):

OldNewSmall.jpg

OldNewBig.jpg

The decay formula

Armor decay obeys a reasonably simple formula. As the function is not smooth in durability, I'll split it into two formulas for simplicity.

For armors with durability below 10000 the formula is:

Decay = (0.003 x dmg^1.75 + 0.05 x dmg) x (1 - Durability/100000)

For armors with durability above 10000 the formula is:

Decay = [0.0015 x (3-Durability/10000) x dmg^1.75 + 0.05 x dmg]x (1 - Durability/100000)

In both formulas, dmg represents the total damage absorbed by the armor piece in the hit.

Note that further research has shown that the smallest detail MA keep track of appears to be 0.001 pec. Anything smaller than that is truncated out (i.e. if the formula yields 4.22578 pec, the actual decay will be 4.225 pec).

Note also that if a mob hits a piece of armor that covers its entire damage, you do not pay decay for the 1.0 dmg you receive. In other words, if a mob hits you for 10 Impact, Goblin would only decay for 9 damage absorbed since you receive a 1.0 hit.

Consequences of the formula

Basically, decay per damage absorbed increases as the damage increases. So doubling the damage absorbed results in more than double the decay.

This means choosing a suitable armor for a given mob is important. If you're getting mostly 1.0 hits, you're overprotecting against the mob and you're paying for it with significantly extra armor decay.

Also, its generally more economical to use a combination of armor and plates than to just use armor. A good example of this is using Rascal+2A instead of Ghost for Impact protection.

For a full 19 impact damage absorbed, Ghost will decay 1.439 pec.

The combination of Rascal and 2A will decay 1.372 pec for a full 20 impact damage absorbed. Thus you not only save 5% on your decay bill, you do so with an extra point of protection too.

Another good example is Goblin+5B. For 24 Impact protection you pay 1.646 pec. If you were using just an armor, for 24 Impact protection you'd pay around 1.943 pec. So the armor+plate combo saves you 15% of your decay bill!

Note the discussion in the first section, you should avoid using plates that cause you to be overprotected. Both the armor and plates are offered the full damage by the mob, so if you're overprotected using plates will increase your decay.

Effect of Durability

Whilst good choice of armor for the mob you're hunting is much more important than durability generally, durability does have an effect on your decay.

For unlimited armors, an extra 1000 durability decreases your decay by 1% (for the same damage absorbed).

For limited armors, the effect of durability increases by even more and also increases for larger hits. A good rule of thumb is that a limited armor will be about 16% more economical than its unlimited counterpart. However, this will increase for the limited armors with really high durability (eg. for 90 damage absorbed, Rutuba is around 25% more economical than Angel).

When comparing two limitted armors, a good rule of thumb is that a difference of 1000 durability represents about a 2.5% saving in economy. This however increases with damage absorbed (for 90 damage absorbed its more like 3.5%) - note that this only applies to limited armors.

This guide may be helpful for determining whether or not to use an L armor because of its durability.

Some example graphs

DecaySmall.jpg

DecayBig.jpg

Wiki and armor

These effects have been coded into wiki. If you haven't encountered it already, I recommend trying out this page. You can use the options to select and armor and mob and it will tell you what your average damage received will be and what your average decay will be.

One thing to bear in mind is that not all mobs have the correct damage proportions on wiki. This is an area of ongoing investigation discussed below.

Effect of decay on protection

Limited armor sets provide the full protection they offer, regardless of how much the armor has decayed (until its broken).

Unlimited armor sets lose protection as they decay. The current assumption (tested by Witte as documented on pg.2, but maybe requiring some checking following this VU) is that the protection offered is in proportion to the amount it has decayed. So a piece of armor that has decayed 50% is thought to provide only 50% of its full protection. It will also decay less, continuing to obey the formulas above based on the actual damage absorbed.

As long as you repair your armors after a hunt this doesn't generally have much effect. However, it can impact some armors with low tt value quite significantly. Its well worth being aware of if you're using something like Pixie for instance as it has a very low tt.

Ongoing research

I'll also outline some areas that require more research. Anyone who wishes to help should just jump into the relevant threads I've linked to. All help is much appreciated!

Distribution of attacks

Its fairly well-known that mobs tend to favour hitting certain armor pieces more than others. For instance, your Harness will generally get hit more than other pieces.

Since the introduction of foot guards this distribution has clearly had to change. Also, Marco has stated that different mobs favour different parts - suggesting that a mob that crawls along the ground will hit lower parts of your armor more than a normal mob for instance.

Some early testing has been done by Oleg and TimUnleashed (see here), however there's plenty of data and analysis left to do.

Mob damage distribution

As a result of our testing armor decay, we have also discovered that quite a number of mobs don't do the damage we thought they did. Sometimes this has been caused by difficulties in testing such things, other times its been caused by old results that possibly needed revisiting, other times its been caused by the misunderstanding of how plates work. The main research thread is located here.

Some interesting things we've discovered so far:

(i) Mobs don't do damage in the fixed percentages we've been used to. Their damage is much like a weapon. In other words, thinking of it as 33% Impact, 33% Cut, 33% Stab is not really accurate as this can vary with maturity.

(ii) Some mobs do completely different damage types to what was previously thought.

(iii) Some mobs do completely different damage types depending on their maturity.

Some examples:

(i) Feffoid Bandit does: 12 Impact and 21 Cold. (Each attack will be between 50% and 100% of that in the same proportion). Feffoid Champion does 18 Impact and 39 Cold.

(ii) Atrox Old does 23 Impact, 20 Cut and 13 Stab.

(iii) Atrax Young does 10 Impact, 13 Cut and 14 Stab.

(iv) Daikiba Old does 21 Impact, but Daikiba Old Alpha does 65 Impact and 13 Stab

(v) Attacker 01 does entirely electric damage. Other generations do Penetration and Burn

(vi) Formicacida does Cut, Stab and Acid damage (not Impact and Cut as previously thought).

Such differences clearly may affect what armor you use. For instance if you've ever hunted Formicacida with Ghost+5B, you'd actually have been better off using Gremlin+5B!

There's also some theories around that suggest that mobs may do closer to their min damage more regularly as your evade/dodge level increases. Although this is very much unproven (in fact early studies have suggested its not the case) its something that should probably be investigated more.

HP breakdown

Not directly related, but we've been trying to work out the exact breakdown of how skills contribute to your HP level. MG Mighty started a great thread where he worked out the contribution from skills very accurately. It gives a very good approximation in general, however, we never quite got it exact (possibly due to the difficulty of working out how much attributes contribute). With the new skills window that gives a better indication of your full Health level, this should be solvable now.

There's also a couple of gaps, and a couple of new professions to investigate in the impact of skills of professions thread.

Effect of attachments on miss rate

Again not really directly on topic, but I'll include it as something else relevant to hunting that needs more research. The standard figures are that with HA=0/10 you will miss approximately 20% (without other external factors) and with HA=10/10 you will miss approximately 8% of the time. This may need confirming itself. However, what is really not understood well is how lasers and scopes change this.
 
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Awsome, helped me alot to understand how it all works in this new VU.

BUT one thing remains a mystery to me..dmg types and decay.

Assume a mobe that dose 25% cut and 75% impact, you recive a hit of 28.

Now this will be 7cut and 21 impact, is the decay counted on each damage type separatly meaning that 7dmg cu whould decay the armor 20% more then before, and will the 21dmg impact decay the armor 30% (aproximatly from looking at the graf).

OR is the dmg counted as one so the decay is calculated from 28 dmg irrelevant of what type?
 
OR is the dmg counted as one so the decay is calculated from 28 dmg irrelevant of what type?

Yes, decay is calculated from the total damage.

It may have worked differently in the past though (I think armors used to have a specific durability for each damage type, but now they just have one durability for everything).
 
This is a very well deserved +rep!!
Thank you very much for this great job and precious information!:)
 
+ rep and you have a PM. Amazing amount of work you, coop, jedgre, and all the others do in figuring out how things work. I know I missed some names, that does not minimize the work that everyone has done - only shows that my memory is weak in pulling up names.

Zar
 
Great post, with very pretty graphs :)

You might clarify in the damage-->decay formula that damage refers to the amount of damage absorbed by the armor, not the total damage done by the mob. I've had some questions along those lines in my soc.

Oh, and the mob damage type thing is just insane! The Wiki will need a whole new setup to deal with that, I guess fields in the maturity damage chart for each mob. Now that the armor things is pretty well figured, maybe I'll help with that some.
 
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I vote this the best thread ever, and not just because I'm namechecked in it.

Make it a sticky - if Jimmy is too modest to do it himself then I'll PM 711 till he does it :D
 
Make it a sticky - if Jimmy is too modest to do it himself then I'll PM 711 till he does it :D

It was already sticky when you posted this, :D

I agree that this is a very valuble thread, useful to old and new Entropians alike. Great job Jimmy, Coop_, Doer, Witte and all the others who contributed!

:wtg:
 
It was already sticky when you posted this, :D

Ah, well in that case, whine grumble whine, stupid Jimmy gets a sticky just cos he's a mod... pah ;)
 
damn it Jimmy you are real monster..
I mean you are like entropia scientist, how you get all these data?
 
Supper maga uge +rep for this. very good explenation of everything and nicely put together of all the results of the other tread :)

I think I understand in now :D
 
Nice work and well written ;).

About the "Effect of decay on protection" part, I tested that using both pixie and kobold, ranging from 10% to 100% (about 5 steps inbetween). I tested the decay, and it corresponded exactly to the damage it would absorb when the condition/protection relation is linear. For one point I also tested the damage (as that is much harder to test) and it also corresponed to this relation. I never posted this as the testdata got lost.
However, in a more recent test I think coop had a bit of an odd result, so this might need more testing. A little addition to this section may be that when protection is less, so is decay.
 
do the mobs use diff style of attacks... coz like allophyl does electric+impact... and sometimes they do the electric attack and sometimes they kick does it have an effect on the dmg u take? like allo is 67%ele and 33% impact... will u only get the impact dmg while the allo kicks u?
 
this is a master piece of research, a superb collaborative job, and can't give enough +rep to everyone involved!
great great job, guys.
 
+rep and +respect....one of the best threads ever, Just wish I could comprehend it all...need more time to absorb...:scratch2:
 
very cool .... if i understand this right then boy am i happy i stuck to making L armor.

Jimmy could you be bothered to make the calculations as example with gremlin+5b and serum + 5b for dome 1 mobs ? if i get it right serum will be amazing compared to gremlin ?
 
great job with this jimmy.

and as i suspected, the if you are seeing 1.0 damage you are probably overprotected part is very important. glad you put that in terms that i think most ppl can easily understand. this is the type of information that will save a new player a ton of ped.
 
Jimmy can you convince 711 to change the forum rules so that I can rep you 5 times in a row?

One of the greatest posts of all time IMHO.
 
Jimmy, AWESOME work and thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)

I have to spread rep though or I'd rep you 100 times over again :D
 
Thanks for all the nice comments people, I hope its useful. And its just a summary of lots of work done by many people, the credit goes to them!

Now, sorry for the mass one-post reply:

You might clarify in the damage-->decay formula that damage refers to the amount of damage absorbed by the armor, not the total damage done by the mob. I've had some questions along those lines in my soc.

Thanks, done.

Make it a sticky - if Jimmy is too modest to do it himself then I'll PM 711 till he does it :D

I have no shame...I made it sticky when I originally posted it :D

Ah, well in that case, whine grumble whine, stupid Jimmy gets a sticky just cos he's a mod... pah ;)

:rofl: I'm always open to making other threads sticky on request ;)

damn it Jimmy you are real monster..
I mean you are like entropia scientist, how you get all these data?

Thank-you. All these data come from the amazing contributions by people from this community. People put in a lot of time, and sometimes expense. Its very much appreciated by myself, and I think by the community as a whole. Certainly you shouldn't think I did it all myself, that is very far from the truth.

Nice work and well written ;).

About the "Effect of decay on protection" part, I tested that using both pixie and kobold, ranging from 10% to 100% (about 5 steps inbetween). I tested the decay, and it corresponded exactly to the damage it would absorb when the condition/protection relation is linear. For one point I also tested the damage (as that is much harder to test) and it also corresponed to this relation. I never posted this as the testdata got lost.
However, in a more recent test I think coop had a bit of an odd result, so this might need more testing. A little addition to this section may be that when protection is less, so is decay.

Thanks Witte - I've made a few amendments as you suggested.

do the mobs use diff style of attacks... coz like allophyl does electric+impact... and sometimes they do the electric attack and sometimes they kick does it have an effect on the dmg u take? like allo is 67%ele and 33% impact... will u only get the impact dmg while the allo kicks u?

Yes this is something that we've wondered about a little. Its the topic of the mob damage thread I linked to in the first post.

Currently, I've seen no evidence that mobs do different attack types with the different animations but I can't say for sure it doesn't happen. There's an example with Warriors for instance that do two different animations (one that looks like its shooting you, and one that looks like its hitting you with a knife). Although its an old study and needs retesting, Avery had a look at Warriors a while ago and found that they do Burn, Penetration (shooting) and Impact, Cut (hitting) with each attack.

But like I say, this is something that needs more investigation.

Jimmy could you be bothered to make the calculations as example with gremlin+5b and serum + 5b for dome 1 mobs ? if i get it right serum will be amazing compared to gremlin ?

I could of course - I'd have to know how much it costs you to make the Serum though.

Looking quickly at the graphs for a rough guess I'd say Serum will decay about 20% less than Gremlin (for the same damage absorbed). I don't know if the savings due to durability will be enough to justify it after the markup? However, it also has more CP protection, and with the attack speeds on CP the fact you get constant protection as it decays is a bonus.

I've been using a set of Zombie (L) in place of Ghost recently. I got it at half-tt from Auktuma's shop and he was selling it for the very low price of 105% presumably because it wasn't full tt. I really like using it and its lasting quite well :) There's definately some mileage in the L armors.
 
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Bravo

Very well done Jimmy. One of the best posts I've ever seen. Enlightened me a lot +rep for you, I wish I could rep you more.
 
so if serum was supplied at 120-140% it could be as good or better then using gremlin .. thats quite nice
 
so if serum was supplied at 120-140% it could be as good or better then using gremlin .. thats quite nice

Yes I'd say if it can get to somewhere in that range its certainly becomes an interesting option. It has quite a bit more protection than Gremlin (and other low markup UL armors) for CP too. So it could make a bit of difference in the maturities people could handle too.

That's not necessarily all that surprising. Given the 10000 bonus durability, MA clearly wanted to make the L armors more competitive.
 
yeah i noticed the shooting and melee type of attack vs warriors and troopers.. usually happens when u go very close to em.. so they try to hit u with melee
 
Thank you very much for this.

I have to say though I don't like how lack of one protection type for an armor can be made up for with another protection type. So if a mob does 25 impact and 25 electric damage, the armor could absorb all the damage with 50 impact protection and no electric. This doesn't make sense. If an armor doesn't have electric protection it shouldn't be able to protect against it. This means, for example, that you could take ghost with 1 acid protection, slap 5b's on it and have 32 acid/impact protection (31 impact and 1 acid), if the mob also does impact damage. Or am I misunderstanding?
 
Thanks for the info. this is the most useful thread in quite a while, I think.
Thanks, and +rep to all the contributing parties.
 
Nice Job Jimmy + Rest :)

Hmm id like to know exactly what % will Serum bee wery good to invest = with 8aL Plates also % = it.

What iv cheked now on entropedia infos with diff mops dmg to diff armor
ghost+5b boar+5b Serum+8a

I would LOVE!! :wtg: to have 1 or 2 these Serum 8a Sets
in near future if the % is good enouf. :wtg:

Cheers + rep
 
Jimmy, Doer, Coop, Witte ... You guys did some amazing work and quite fast too I must say! +rep to everyone for sure!

Jimmy thanks for this summary thread in laymans terms, it's my opinion that it of tremendous value to the community as a whole, I read all 33 pages of the research thread that Coop started and clarified some things there but I must admit that your summary has further increased my understanding of the inner workings of armor decay, plates and durability as a whole.

Thanks again and hopefully I will have the chance to contribute on a future project!

Legends
 
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