Unlinearity in Recharge / Resistance mechanics.

[cel]

This is something that has stirred up alot of discussion with -recharge mods and I feel that it would be beneficial to change the way the game handles/calculates recharge / resistances.

Here's the theory behind the way it currently is calculated, I will refer to this method by '-penalty' from now on, as it is a good description of the way it handles the calculations:

-penalty basically means that you have something that is at 100% and the mods / items will be reducing that towards 0%, thus, they have a negative effect to some penalty, like received damage (resistances) or skill recharge time. Currently all resistances and recharge work like this.

The problem with -penalty mods is that the bigger bonus you have from items to this, the bigger the effect of adding to it is, lets look at an example using resistance:

When we add +10% to a resistance, the real benefit from this 10% depends on the amount that you already have stacked: If you have your resistance at 0%, the effect will be a flat 10% - the damage you currently recieve from that source is reduced by 10% - but if your current resistance is at 70%, the real benefit from that extra 10% will be a whopping 33% - you were receiving 30% of the base damage, after adding that 10%, you're only recieving 20%.

So the actual value of 1% with this kind of math can be anything between 1% and 4.7%, depending on how much you had already stacked (1% @ 0, 4.7% @ 79%):


As you can see, the benefit from the addition of 1% increases exponentially as the base value (how much you already have) gets higher, which makes the required value for resistance to be quite high before they start being effective (getting 25% in a resistance is almost squat (effective value 25%), but add that 25% on top of an already existing resistance of 50% and the effective value of this will be a whopping 50%). This graph is valid for all resistances and recharge.

The suggestion would be that the way resistances / recharge are calculated/handled would be changed, there is a way that the extreme exponentiality can be dealt with while maintaining relative simplicity and even create some extra benefits:

Making the different mods work with the current value (after the last mod being applied to it) instead of the base value, making them multiplicative in nature instead of additive, this is most likely easiest to explain using an example:

Having mods that gave 10%, 15% and 20% resistance or recharge would be calculated as follows:

100% * 90% * 85% * 80% = final reduction value instead of just adding them all together, so these 3 mods would add up to 61.2%, instead of 55%.

This may look odd when it is mentioned as a "fix for unlinearity", as at first glance it looks just as unlinear, but in reality, this is perfect linearity: Each of these mods decrease the currently incoming damage by exactly the amount that they add to the resistance (or recharge time for that matter), if you were receiving 100 damage from a source and added a 10% resistance mod, you would then be receiving only 90 damage regardless of what resistance value lowered the base damage to that 100.

I also mentioned extra benefits:

It would make the handling of resistance mods much more interesting for players: Using 3 mods with +30% resistance to each single element would be a bit more beneficial than using 2 mods with +15% to all resistances and the use of lower number of mods (per resistance) that increase a bigger number to resistances would be more beneficial than using a large number of mods that increased it by a very small amount and mixing them together would be even more beneficial, creating a situation where the player benefits greatly from upgrading his older, lower resistance giving items rather than just slapping an extra +x to all resistances mod somewhere to cover the extra need for them.

This would also make balancing the game much easier, as the unlinearity of resistances would be gone. (currently a linear path from 0 to ~80 would be: 20 - 36 - 48.8 - 59 - 67.2 - 73.8 - 79, with jumps of 20% less damage each jump, the last one is only 5.2%, making that resistance mod almost 4 times as powerful [addition of that last 5% reduces incoming damage by 20%] as the first one that was added to 0%)

There is one other way: the +benefit way, but that does not fit well with recharge time nor resistance calculations, but I will discuss it here anyway, to save time from those who might want to suggest it.

Attack / movement / casting speed work this way, you start at 100% and increase that value, effectively having double (or 1/2) at 200% and triple (or 1/3) at 300%.

The con of using this is that this is the exact opposite of the -penalty way, creating an unlinearity in the opposite direction: the effect of a single percent diminishes as the value gets higher (0.5% at 200% and 0.33% at 300). It would be very hard for the player to achieve high values, for example: 300% would only mean 66% decrease in recharge times, but that +200% in recharge speed is quite hard to get while one only needs +100% to get a 50% decrease, which is why this method does not suit either resistances nor recharge time.

[Renevent]

Yeah, I dunno, sounds overly complicated

[medierra]

From a balancing standpoint it would be nice but I think the first time someone put on two pieces of gear and their character's resistance didn't match the sum of the resistance on the items, people would complain there was a bug.

They do a similar thing in WC3 with modifiers like movement speed but it is a little easier to follow and explain. I wouldn't want to do this for something as common as resistances but I could see doing it for -recharge.

Of course, the old standby is to just plan items better.

[cel]

Indeed, that would most likely happen :/

I just feel that an additive percentage based system creates a certain kind of unbalance; it will be hard for the player to balance the resistances when adding 20% to one can have an effect of anything between 20% and 50% in the current damage in-take (assuming the cap is at 80%), making it so that at one point you're getting killed every 10 seconds due to low resistance, then able to have a picnic in the middle of the monsters after equipping something that gave a medium amount more into that resistance.

One solution would be to change the % given by items into a 'rating' value, then making the [rating] -> [resistance %] slightly logarithmic to balance the exponential behaviour caused by the addition, kinda like armor -> damage reduction is handled in many games.

But I understand if you wish to keep the system as it is, it is quite straightforward and clear and altough unlinear, it works and as they say: If it works, don't fix it

[Yggdrasil]

In your character screen, you already have the total resistances, calculated by summing similar resistances given by items and skills. The players already consider these numbers to know the percentage of damage of each type they can absorb. These informations aren't enough ?

[cel]

Well, in case that resistance mechanics are kept the way they were in TQ, I'd strongly suggest at least considering lowering the max. resistance from 80 to at least 70, as even only doing that would reduce the unlinearity greatly.