Yo! So I made a quick flow-charty thing to demonstrate some of the considerations I’m making when looking to try new builds. Kind of a checklist I run through when I’m looking for what my build is missing.
For me there are typically three overarching questions:
Where does the damage come from?
How does it reduce incoming damage?
How does it heal itself after taking damage?
And then from there, are other considerations like - if you’re going for a weapon damage build, what’s the attack speed, what’s your RR like, how many WIPS do you have and how often are they likely to proc etc.
Are there any obvious things that I’m missing, or that you feel definitely should be on the list?
I suppose there are things like Slow Resist or Skill Disruption Protection which can affect your damage output, your healing output and your survivability in some ways (can’t cast circuitbreaker skills or mobility skills to escape impending doom etc)
joking aside i really like the idea
think you typed WPS wrong tho?
unsure about the structuring for now, but looks pretty darn solid potential undiscovered nitpicking aside
Some values feel off, like there’s no target number for most stats, but unexplicably sky high benchmark for DA? Never needs to be that high unless you’re pushing past SR 100.
No mention of flat damage for weapon damage builds
Resistance reduction should be broken down in flat and -x% categories.
Pierce/bleed res don’t need to be overcapped at all aside from very specific scenarios (like fighting Ravager of Flesh)
I definitely typed WPS wrong, ty. Sheepish moment, what does WPS stand for again? I used to remember.
And yeah, I trust there’ll be some nit-pickery to do. I suppose this is fairly ‘higher level’ consideration, rather than things like “you can lack physical resistance as long as you have 5k armour and don’t want to fight Cally” or something. I haven’t mentioned anything to do with shields or blocking, either. Or, now that I think of it, minimum OA to aim for…
I like the idea of specifying the RR into flat and -%.
I suppose I didn’t include flat weapon damage because it’s a way bigger hassle to specifically calculate when just looking across the character sheet. I suppose I usually check on the Weapon Damage stat for that. Even though, you’re absolutely right in that it doesn’t matter how much % damage boost you have if your baseline damage to boost is very low.
I suppose in my mind, a build should generally be aiming to have a minimum of 3k DA because it helps SO MUCH with damage mitigation, and then good tanks should have up to ~3.7k so that even when heavily debuffed, they still have great DA to avoid crits and avoid damage altogether. High DA and it’s effectiveness really can’t be understated in terms of… well, defensive capability. For example, Fabius with his blade spirits can reduce your DA by 458 points. He has an OA of 2500ish (SR75), so even if your DA is around 3k, he’s going to be doing some big hits from time to time when those debuffs are up.
Are you sure about pierce and bleed resists overcap? There are some enemy attacks that reduce all resistances by a chunk flat, iirc, so fighting in some groups and receiving those debuffs can be pretty fatal, no?
I used to be team 3k+ DA too, years ago. Then I started experimenting with lower DA and my builds just got better. Played my fair share of hardcore too in leagues, so this isn’t just a softcore thing.
DA was such an ineffective stat that Crate bumped monster crit damage in crucible and SR cause people were ignoring it. It’s less of a joke stat now, but some builds can still safely disregard it.
I think this is a good checklist chart when you generally know what you’re doing. I think the tricky bit, particularly for newer players, is to figure out what to prioritise, because different things are more useful to different builds (i.e. flat damage / lifesteal vs cast speed / %damage). Or things like “do I need skill disruption protection or am I just full-time face-pummeling?”
I.e. it could be coupled with a decision tree or priority guide of sorts:
Am I melee or caster (or hybrid)?
→ Melee → Am I using WPS or spells
→ WPS → flat damage / lifesteal, etc…
→ spells → cast speed / %damage, etc…
Etc.
The surviving incoming damage is very interesting, because there are different approaches:
→ Do I use mobility or facetank?
→ Mobility → movement skills, circuit breakers, allres, dodge etc
→ Facetank → Armour, allres, HP, absorption, DA, regen etc
I assume in the chart Heal Procs also includes skills like Pneumatic Burst, Word or Renewal, etc?
Tbh I’m very impressed and keen to try out your tank build. Really good points, and thanks for the updates re: Pierce/Bleed overcap. I suppose that’s why they’ve since moved to Sundered as it’s a more reliable way to make players take more damage when debuffed.
That said though… Didn’t they also say that now with enough DA you have up to a 55% chance to dodge attacks altogether now? I suppose that’s not necessary if your tankiness allows you take minimal damage from any attack that hits you. But it’s sometimes also nice to have attacks miss you entirely… I’m gonna have to play around with that
Out of curiosity, if you were trying to create a ball park minimum figure that would suit, say, 80% of builds for DA, what sort of number might you recommend?
Sure, interesting thought. You’re right in that I suppose I was thinking of it as a checklist after you’d already made a build - “Here’s my build concept, now, have I dotted all of my 'i’s and crossed my 't’s ? Let’s see. Oh whoops, my attack speed is low and I’m using weapon damage. Mkay.”
That said, it could be fun to create a second chart or an app walk-through or something that resembles this flowchart , but without pointing to specific builds, just specific considerations.
ie: first question:
Tank
Melee
Ranged ** select ranged **
Caster
Second question:
Dual wield
Pistol + Shield
2h Ranged ?
(etc etc). Then you’d really be getting into creating a “CharacterBuilder” type of app or something, where at the end of that it recommends things like “Runebinder set”, “Harbinger set”, “Valduun’s Set” or “Shaman class” for 2h ranged and so on.
While that would likely be more useful for newer players, I feel like that’d be a much, much more detailed tree that I don’t think I have time to flesh out But I’d happily contribute thoughts if someone else was taking lead on it?
I assume in the chart Heal Procs also includes skills like Pneumatic Burst, Word or Renewal, etc?
Yes, that’s what I was thinking Anything from Healing Rain to Blood of Dreeg or Wendigo Totem or Augur’s gloves or set bonus and so on.
I think you probably wouldn’t need to go so far as gear suggestions, just things like making sure if you’re DW you remember some lifesteal and weapon damage (and check that your skills have %weapon damage), or if ranged take a circuit breaker for those unexpected hits.
Perhaps it could even be more simple: “am I glass cannon or tank” and make those simple choices first, before getting into things like Channelled skill → disrupt resist etc.
In the end you just want to ideally see a filtered chart at the end that shows you a targeted checklist: i.e. you must absolutely make sure you always prioritise X, Y and Z if you want to be a melee tank.
As an example - I’m no top tier builder - I had a cold spellbreaker that relied on mobility and high damage and I could get through SR80 HC (pre-1.2) with ~2400DA, 11K health and under 2000 armour because I had 3 circuit breakers, good lifesteal and 2 mobility skills. Basically, hit hard, move around and then give myself space for a bit if all the circuit breakers are on cooldown. I’m not pushing for SR time records, so I can break as needed. Fun with a bit of risk, prioritising the core things based on playstyle.
That’s another DA “buff” from latest patch. Minimal chance to hit is 55% now, so very high DA can provide up to 45% “dodge”. But that requires roughly 1200 discrepancy between attacker’s OA and defender’s DA according to TqFan’s calculator OA/DA to calculate your ETH? - #9 by tqFan. To get that level of dodge vs something like Ramzul in SR 80 (accounting for DA shred) would require you to have roughly 4700 DA which is not only hardly attainable, but also a very expensive investment with very litte return.
Do you give minimum benchmark for dodge chance? For flat absorb? For armor? For amount of +max resist? A generic baseline would be essentially meaningless because different classes and different builds have access to different defensive mechanisms. DA is just one of them. And honestly, I barely look at that number. Whatever number I end up with while optimizing the rest of the stats is the number I roll with. If I can get it for free I’ll take it, but it’s not part of the decision process.
There’s only 1 way to tell your DA is good or not - by playing the game. It also depends on what content you play.
For example when I was testing some build against Ravager I didn’t like the occasional Crits so I bumped up DA by like 150 which was easy to do for this character, the Crits were gone and consistency improved.
For some other characters increasing i.e. Health might be easier / better instead and not bothering with DA because it wouldn’t be optimal.
I theorycrafted some super tanky retal character yesterday and it has about 2.6k effective DA. I’ll see during testing if it’s good enough for all superbosses.
Sure, but using Ramzul as an example, surely that’s even more reason to have a higher DA, so that when you’re debuffed by 650 you don’t get crit by everything in the area.
I see your point about benchmarks for dodge or flat absorb - they’re so character specific, how could we have benchmarks? But I suppose my understanding of DA (I’m yet to try your tank and rethink my understanding of DA and it’s relevance) is that it is universally required or at least helpful and useful for almost every character.
I dunno though, that 650 DA shred alone gives me reason to think that having DA of above 2000 is vitally important for every build. Having DA of 2500 with 650 DA shred according to the OA/DA calc gives all enemies in the area a 17.5% chance to crit you. That’s huge and potentially devastating. In my opinion, this encourages having DA of 3000-3200 as a minimum, so that even with sever debuffs, it’s unlikely that you’ll be taking crits. Again, in some builds, hits are so heavily reduced it doesn’t really matter, but in many builds, taking one or two crits, especially while sundered or whatever else can be a wipe. No?
This is all based on the assumption that crits somehow instantly kill you, which isn’t the case. Most enemies in main campaign have +0% crit damage, including Celestials. So if a single 110%-115% crit puts in danger, the build was already very squishy to begin with; and DA isn’t the best way to improve tankiness in many cases. Some Nemesis have more crit damage, but if you can tank Callagadra hits, you can laugh in Fabius’ face when he crits you all day. In the end, it’s just fancy dodge chance and rather low % chance to reduce incoming damage by a certain %.
Now, enemy crit damage becomes relevant in SR cause it scales up every shard. It’s hard to speak for every build you can think of, but generally I think it’s better to build in order to be able to tank and sustain through some crits than to push DA to avoid them. Getting to 3k+ often means you have to invest heavily into DA and make consious decisions to improve it over something else, which in my opinion often isn’t worth the investment.
Do you have one of those 3.7k DA builds (intended for solo play ofc) we could look at, so we can see where you’re pulling those numbers from and what you’re giving up in order to get there?
Actually relatively to others I’m not that much of DA hater but I don’t like general recommendations in general. I feel like they stifle creativity and GD is not simple enough to be encompassed by diagrams. Reddit folks follow such requirements and then they are shocked when someone posts a build that doesn’t meet them.
Anything from Healing Rain to Blood of Dreeg or Wendigo Totem or Augur’s gloves or set bonus and so on.
