Overall DM Destroyer damage

[ameaeth 50]

For Dragon Mage's Destroyer combat art (CA) the 'Swarm" mod increased its number of destroyers while the 'Explosive' mod increases their damage. Excluding the 'Endurance' mod either 'Swarm' can be taken twice and 'Explosive' once or vice versa. In addition, according to the wiki, the base number of destroyers (4) slowly increase with CA level.

 

I hope that the skills.txt knowledgeable people here can help on these questions:

1. At which CA level does the number of destroyers increase naturally?
    
2. Assuming skill level 100 and 200 and factoring out armor and mitigation, which mod combination would net the most Destroyer CA damage overall?

 

On a side note on the wiki article:

Quote

Damage: 70 + 35 per CA level Physical (CM Patch adds Fire damage to the destroyers)

Playing with CM0160 Destroyer CA damage is shown to me as pure physical. There is also no chance of burning displayed or burning detrimental effect triggered on enemies.

 

Quote

 

The Destroyers' self-destruct explosion attack is called "dm_zerstoerer_bomb" in spells.txt and has the following values:

Magic damage: 40 + 20 per CA level

Physical damage: 50 + 25 per CA level

Chance to stun: 20% + 0.3% per CA level

 

Similar with CM0160 there does not seem to be a magic damage source or weaken detrimental effect connected to Destroyer CA.

 

Cheers

[gogoblender 3,070]

3 hours ago, ameaeth said:

For Dragon Mage's Destroyer combat art (CA) the 'Swarm" mod increased its number of destroyers while the 'Explosive' mod increases their damage. Excluding the 'Endurance' mod either 'Swarm' can be taken twice and 'Explosive' once or vice versa. In addition, according to the wiki, the base number of destroyers (4) slowly increase with CA level.

 

I hope that the skills.txt knowledgeable people here can help on these questions:

1. At which CA level does the number of destroyers increase naturally?
    
2. Assuming skill level 100 and 200 and factoring out armor and mitigation, which mod combination would net the most Destroyer CA damage overall?

 

On a side note on the wiki article:

Playing with CM0160 Destroyer CA damage is shown to me as pure physical. There is also no chance of burning displayed or burning detrimental effect triggered on enemies.

 

Similar with CM0160 there does not seem to be a magic damage source or weaken detrimental effect connected to Destroyer CA.

 

Cheers

Good seeing you back Amaeth. Happy New year and spring wishes to you and your family. Thanks for the thoughtful tips... Dragon Mage FTW! 

gogo

[Flix 5,116]

15 hours ago, ameaeth said:

At which CA level does the number of destroyers increase naturally?

Yeah the Wiki's not quite correct for that CA. The numbers don't increase naturally as far as I can see, only if you take the mods.

15 hours ago, ameaeth said:

Playing with CM0160 Destroyer CA damage is shown to me as pure physical.

I think I wrote with Llama's mod installed. I later put the change into Enhanced Edition. But yes, CM Patch, like vanilla, has pure physical.

15 hours ago, ameaeth said:

Similar with CM0160 there does not seem to be a magic damage source or weaken detrimental effect connected to Destroyer CA.

That was actually an honest mistake, since the Destroyer's have a self-destruct CA in defined in spells.txt, but it's not actually used for anything. Rather, the damage and properties are taken from the main Destroyer CA instead.

[ameaeth 50]

Thanks Flix! Based on the skills.txt can you say which mod combination would get the most bang for the buck for the "min-maxers" out there in terms of basic damage on the CA overall?

[chattius 2,527]

Depends on armour of the target. If there is nearly no armour number of destroyers is better. If the target has high armour it is better to get less but harder hits.

And to complicate it even more there is the Maelstrom CA. And to make it even more complicated: CM patch added fire(?) damage to the former pure physical.

 

[ameaeth 50]

14 hours ago, chattius said:

And to complicate it even more there is the Maelstrom CA.

Thanks chattius! Looking at Maelstrom CA if modded with 'Grind' bronze mod on level 1 it would reduce physical armor by 100,5 % but I doubt that would set enemy armor to 0. Do you know how the calculation works for this physical armor debuff?

 

Cheers

[chattius 2,527]

I think you can't go below 0. I hoped for boosted damage at negative armour values but never noticed them. The damage to armour formula is quite interisting from neegative numbers to 0,

[ameaeth 50]

13 minutes ago, chattius said:

I think you can't go below 0. I hoped for boosted damage at negative armour values but never noticed them. The damage to armour formula is quite interisting from neegative numbers to 0,

Then does the modded Maelstrom CA actually set enemy physical armor to 0, effectively negating phys armor?

[chattius 2,527]

Think yes. But enemies may still have physical damage modification.

[ameaeth 50]

14 hours ago, chattius said:

Think yes. But enemies may still have physical damage modification.

True, against physical damage mitigation only Ancient Magic (AM) mastery at skill level 75 comes to mind from the top of my head. But this makes Maelstrom CA a very powerful CA with the 'Grind' bronze mod as most of the DM's Elemental Magic Aspect is around physical damage CAs.

Are there any other sources of negative physical damage mitigation that could stack with the AM mastery?

 

 

Edited April 7, 2023 by ameaeth

[idbeholdME 394]

Sources of specific element mitigation reduction are very rare. Pretty much only Temple Guardian and High Elf have access to them and it's only for ice and fire.

However, actual physical damage mitigation is very rare on enemies. It's mostly about their physical armor. And that can be reduced in a lot of ways, with many CAs, Mods, or even weapon bonuses.

[ameaeth 50]

17 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Sources of specific element mitigation reduction are very rare. Pretty much only Temple Guardian and High Elf have access to them and it's only for ice and fire.

However, actual physical damage mitigation is very rare on enemies. It's mostly about their physical armor. And that can be reduced in a lot of ways, with many CAs, Mods, or even weapon bonuses.

I assume since the DM is mostly non-weapon based Mealstrom CA really comes in handy for him. Or do you have additional suggestion for DM to reduce enemy armor?
Since enemies do not often have phys mitigation, would Ancient Magic mastery reduce their phys mitigation into negative values and thus increase physical damage additionally?

[Flix 5,116]

10 hours ago, ameaeth said:

Since enemies do not often have phys mitigation, would Ancient Magic mastery reduce their phys mitigation into negative values and thus increase physical damage additionally?

Yes. They don't actually have to have any damage mitigation at all (or armor) for Ancient Magic to make them more vulnerable.

[idbeholdME 394]

On 4/14/2023 at 9:29 PM, Flix said:

Yes. They don't actually have to have any damage mitigation at all (or armor) for Ancient Magic to make them more vulnerable.

Are you sure? Because I was pretty sure Ancient Magic Mastery just penetrates a percentage of armor and mitigation. If the target has 0% mitigation and armor to the element of the attack, the Mastery part of Ancient Magic won't do anything (other than the increased damage %).

Things like Icy Evanescence or Fiery Ember can bring enemies into negative damage mitigation values because they are flat reductions, multiplying the damage instead of reducing it. Target has 20% fire mitigation, comes under the effect of Fiery Ember with 50% resistance reduction, meaning the enemy has -30% mitigation and takes 30% extra fire damage.

Ancient Magic Mastery reduction is relative, not flat, so the less armor/mitigation the target has, the less effective it is. The wiki claims so and I tend to agree from my gameplay observations and that's how I always treated it.

If an enemy has 50% fire mitigation and the player has AM Mastery with 50%, the enemy would end up with 25% fire mitigation. Same for armor. 500 fire armor would become 250.

Although I'm not sure how negative mitigation and AM Mastery would interact.

Edited April 16, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

Well, I'm sure that's how the "prone" bonuses (as they're called in the scripts) work, at least. It is essentially damage mitigation in reverse and there's no bottom cap that I can see.  It does not act on armor at all. 

31 minutes ago, idbeholdME said:

If an enemy has 50% fire mitigation and the player has AM Mastery with 50%, the enemy would end up with 25% fire mitigation

I believe they'd end up with none.  Prone works as a direct counter to damage mitigation, so they would cancel each other out.  But enemies would still be more vulnerable even if they had no mitigation or armor in place at all.  In fact they would be the most devastated.  There's no issue with going below "zero" for mitigation like there is for armor.  Opponent's Armor -X% could never reduce armor below 0, but there's no such limits with the prone debuffs.

31 minutes ago, idbeholdME said:

Icy Evanescence or Fiery Ember can bring enemies into negative damage mitigation values because they are flat reductions

All the prone debuffs are percentages, though.

Now, it's possible there is some completely different mechanic coded that only Ancient Magic uses, separate from anything visible in the scripts, but I can guarantee no one who wrote the Wiki had access to the code to look at it.  I believe their observations, but not necessarily the reasoning of why the numbers turned out the way they did.

I can't think of a way to prove that Ancient Magic is the same as any standard prone debuff though, since any damage boost against an un-armored, un-mitigated opponent could just be attributed to the global AM damage boost, rather than the fact that the mastery made them more "prone" to the damage.

It might be worth investigating further.

[idbeholdME 394]

12 hours ago, Flix said:

It might be worth investigating further.

If it worked the same way as Evanescence and Ember, it would result in a very noticeable damage spike once Mastery is reached.  It starts at nearly 50%. Do all your spells start doing 50% more damage, regardless of the target?

The red dragons in dragon caves also have Ancient Magic at Mastery level and they are capable of damaging a character with 100%+ Mitigation. Although I can't tell whether the reduction is relative or absolute... Easiest test might be to jack up the mitigation value on a buff that gives mitigation to extreme levels and see how the dragon damage behaves. See if they do damage through 170% mitigation or if that would be enough to nullify it.

It's been quite a long time since I played a character with mastered AM, but I'll try to conduct some tests with the character editor this week, hopefully.

Edited April 16, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

7 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

it would result in a very noticeable damage spike once Mastery is reached.  It starts at nearly 50%. Do all your spells start doing 50% more damage, regardless of the target?

I never checked the numbers that closely.  There's another possibility though, and that is that AM might actually be granting this bonus all along, only displaying it after mastery is reached.  I forget which Skills behave that way, but there are a few - the double hit bonus on weapon lore skills comes to mind.

[idbeholdME 394]

On 4/17/2023 at 12:32 AM, Flix said:

I never checked the numbers that closely.  There's another possibility though, and that is that AM might actually be granting this bonus all along, only displaying it after mastery is reached.  I forget which Skills behave that way, but there are a few - the double hit bonus on weapon lore skills comes to mind.

Possible, but still unlikely I think. The intended point of AM was

a) to increase spell damage in general

and

b) to help deal damage to enemies resistant to your spells

If the reduction was the same as that from Ember/Evanescence, it would simply be too strong. And the main reason - look at how the Mastery value scales. The same way as pretty much all other relative % bonuses in the game.

 

Still didn't get around to testing it, but just some more thoughts. I think it does the same thing as opponent's armor: Physical -X%, but for the Mitigation values and potentially also armor values. What exactly skills and especially their Masteries do is often not easily visible/editable in the script files.

Edited April 19, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

10 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

If the reduction was the same as that from Ember/Evanescence, it would simply be too strong.

That's funny, here I was thinking that if it didn't work that way, then mastery would be laughably weak.    How many enemies have damage mitigation after all? Not many aside from bosses.  If it was an armor reduction, then that would be pretty decent, since armor is at least omnipresent.  But it would still require an opponent to have the resistance before it could be reduced.

We could ask the codemeister. 

@dimitrius154  If you have a moment, can you tell us if you can see how the Ancient Magic Mastery mechanics work? The tooltip just says it reduces "immunities."  We're not sure if affects Damage Mitigation, Armor, or both.  Also we're not sure if only reduces the opponent's existing values or if it works like a standard "BONUS_PRONETOCHANNEL" debuff, increasing vulnerability no matter what.

[dimitrius154 612]

20 hours ago, Flix said:

If you have a moment, can you tell us if you can see how the Ancient Magic Mastery mechanics work? The tooltip just says it reduces "immunities."  We're not sure if affects Damage Mitigation, Armor, or both.  Also we're not sure if only reduces the opponent's existing values or if it works like a standard "BONUS_PRONETOCHANNEL" debuff, increasing vulnerability no matter what.

It works like "BONUS_PRONETOCHANNEL", but is not considered to be a debuff. It also counteracts "Spell Resistance" on 1:1 ratio and is considered an extra "lore skill" for the final spell damage calculation. 

[idbeholdME 394]

Just did a quick test on a Wolf in Gold with a character tweaked with character editor:

- Level 1 Ancient Magic, using Ancestral Fireball with 118-118 listed damage against a Wolf at level 75 (character level also 75) - 89 Fire Damage dealt on every AF cast, no variation.

Damage coefficient: 0.754

- Level 74 Ancient Magic, using Ancestral Fireball with 216-216 listed damage against a Wolf at level 75 (character level also 75) - 172 Fire Damage dealt on every AF cast, no variation.

Damage coefficient: 0.796

- Level 75 Ancient Magic (Mastery), using Ancestral Fireball with 222-222 listed damage (damage increased from Mastering AM) against a Wolf at level 75 (character level also 75). Mastery value of AM for Opponent's Damage Resistance value :-47.4%:

177 Fire Damage dealt on every cast, no variation. The small increase in damage is from the 4% or so bump of AM going from level 74 to 75.

Damage coefficient: 0.797

Why the fireball is dealing less than tooltip is another matter, but as you can see, the damage coefficient remained basically the same.

Meaning there was no observable damage increase that would indicate that the resistance reduction of AM Mastery would simply be applied as a flat modifier to the enemies and that it does not work on enemies with no armor or mitigation to reduce. The damage of the fireball only went up with the %damage increase part of AM, the Mastery had no effect.

 

I will now also try on the bandits, who have a bit of fire armor and see if the damage goes up by a larger chunk with them.

EDIT:

Much more interesting results this time. Tested on this bandit:

So we can guess around 35 or so fire armor.

- Damage with Ancient Magic at level 1, Fireball tooltip 252 damage - dealt 173 damage every cast

Damage coefficient: 0.686

- Damage with Ancient Magic at level 74, Fireball tooltip 462 damage - dealt 362 damage every cast

Damage coefficient: 0.783

- Damage with Ancient Magic at level 75, Fireball tooltip 474 damage - dealt 373 damage on every cast

Damage coefficient: 0.787

 

Somewhat inconclusive as the increase in damage coefficient can probably be attributed simply to the higher amount of fire damage penetrating the low amount of armor better. But again, no very noticeable damage spike with Mastery.

It would probably be best to test on something like a fire elemental. I know for sure that they have both high amounts of armor against their specific element AND also mitigation on top of it. Or even better, the Carnach boss. He has massive amounts of fire armor where it would be very easy to tell. But taking a twinked character there would take a long time :/

But I am pretty much convinced, that the value can not go below 0, as is the case with Ember or Evanescence and AM Mastery can't make enemies vulnerable, at most, it will negate their resistance.

 

EDIT 2:

The best test so far. Did the test with the red dragons' fireballs, who have Ancient Magic at Mastery level (presumably as they can damage characters with 100%+ mitigation).

- Red Dragon, level 235 against a level 200 character with 81.4% Mitigation (53.2% from gear, 28.2% from Toughness) and 5348 Fire Armor - received 16863 damage from a critical hit.

- Red Dragon, level 235 against a level 200 character with 84.7% Mitigation (57.2% from gear, 27.5% from Toughness) and 5335 Fire Armor - received 16370 damage from a critical hit.

The damage should have gone down noticeably (~18%), yet the drop in damage received is minimal (about 3%).

 

These further data points were done on a Seraphim with tweaked values on Divine protection.

- Red Dragon, level 235 against a level 200 character with 117.8% Mitigation (53.2% from gear, 28.2% from Toughness, 36.4% from Divine Protection) and 5348 Fire Armor - received 11444 damage from a critical hit.

- Red Dragon, level 235 against a level 200 character with 175.8% Mitigation (53.2% from gear, 28.2% from Toughness, 88.2% from Divine Protection) 5348 Fire Armor - received 1987 damage from a critical hit.

The Dragon seems to not be penetrating the mitigation nearly as effectively as that from gear + Toughness. Once the mitigation from Divine Protection alone reaches about 105%, all damage is negated, which would suggest that AM Mastery does not affect all sources of damage mitigation the same way. The result of the last example (88.2% from Divine Protection) is simply the result of the damage from the first test reduced by that amount: 16863*0.118=1987. This would indicate that Divine Protection is completely unaffected by AM Mastery, which makes testing once again difficult as it can't be used to test for very high mitigation values. It would probably require gear fully socketed with Gruma's Talismans or Darwagon Amulets to test reliably, as this mitigation does get negated by AM Mastery. And whether it affects gear mitigation and Toughness mitigation in the same way is also in the air.....

 

When enemies have some skills, their value equals that of their monster level. Level 200 AM Mastery reduced immunities by 65.3%. Let's assume about 67% for 235 (guess). It could be both:

81.4 - 67 = 14.4

or

81.4*0.33=26.86

And if it it is the former, then it can't be reduced below 0, as the first two tests with the wolf and bandit indicate.

 

But then there is also the entire thing with armor, which will be even harder to test than the mitigation.... :/

Still, so far, I haven't found anything that would dispute the wiki description, specifically these two points (highlighted the important bits):

https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Ancient_Magic

"The Ancient Magic Skill allows to partially ignore the target's Armor as well as Damage Mitigation and DoT -% modifiers for Spell Damage Based Combat Arts. This skill causes relative decrease of these modifiers as it affects only actual modifiers the target has."

That would explain why Divine Protection seems unaffected. Because it is an additional defense layer, that is separate from everything else and it is not a modifier/bonus of the character. AM only shreds the mitigation for the damage (if any) that actually gets through the shield. So if you theoretically had 50% mitigation on DP and 50% mitigation from gear and get hit with a spell that has AM Mastery value at 50%, any incoming damage would first be reduced by 50% from DP and then only 25% after due to AM penetration. So from 10 000 damage, you would take 5000*0.75, so 3750 damage before armor.

"Ancient Magic decreases Damage Mitigation modifier by percent of target's mitigation before Temple Guardian's Fiery Ember\Icy Evanescence CAs and High Elf's Crystal Skin Buff decrease Damage Mitigation modifier by fixed percentage: thus opponent's immunity (100+% Damage Mitigation) can drop below 0 (the enemy gets more damage than indicated in the CA's description)"

So unless someone can provide clear examples and math that would prove otherwise, I'm going to stick with that.

Edited April 20, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

2 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

So unless someone can provide clear examples and math that would prove otherwise, I'm going to stick with that.

Good tests.  I'll run some tests this weekend. I need to backup the D2F build I have first and install EE since D2F has the Addendum fixes to the damage/armor calculations as well as the 85% damage mitigation cap, while EE has, well, the same code as every other version.

I'll probably create a creature with high hitpoints and only one channel of resistance, and then hit it with a single element spell.   I'll also test armor and damage mitigation separately.

[Flix 5,116]

Ok I've done some testing on four unfortunate ogre champions and here are the results.

Character level: 200
Fireball level: 112.8 - tooltip damage: 6,627 pure fire
Enemy level: 102 - no skills, no equipment, no modifiers other than the below:
    Fire Mitigation = ~100% and then ~50% (margin of error within 1%)
    Fire Armor = 3,930

No Ancient Magic

• No Armor No Mitigation - 14,911
• Armor Only - 9,349
• 100% Mitigation Only - 0
• 50% Mitigation Only - 7,455
• Armor and 100% Mitigation - 0
• Armor and 50% Mitigation - 4,674

Ancient Magic level. 36 (Damage +55%)

• No Armor No Mitigation - 16,441
• Armor Only - 10,687
• 100% Mitigation Only - 0
• 50% Mitigation Only - 8,220
• Armor and 100% Mitigation - 0
• Armor and 50% Mitigation - 5,343

Ancient Magic level. 109 (74 hard points) (Damage +105.6%)

• No Armor No Mitigation - 17,847
• Armor Only - 11,922
• 100% Mitigation Only - 0
• 50% Mitigation Only - 8,923
• Armor and 100% Mitigation - 0
• Armor and 50% Mitigation - 5,961

Ancient Magic level. 110 (75 hard points) (Damage +132.1%) (Opponent's Immunities - 56.9%)

• No Armor No Mitigation - 18,580
• Armor Only - 12,579
• 100% Mitigation Only - 10,591
• 50% Mitigation Only - 14,586
• Armor and 100% Mitigation - 7,170
• Armor and 50% Mitigation - 9,874

Ancient Magic level. 235 (200 hard points) (Damage +201.8%) (Opponent's Immunities - 66.8%)

• No Armor No Mitigation - 20,518
• Armor Only - 14,321
• 100% Mitigation Only - 13,726
• 50% Mitigation Only - 17,132
• Armor and 100% Mitigation - 9,581
• Armor and 50% Mitigation - 11,958

Conclusions:

• There is no secret/hidden reduction to enemy resistances occurring before mastery.
• The mastery bonus does not function like "BONUS_PRONETOCHANNEL". Instead it's just a relative decrease of the opponent's existing damage mitigation values.  So mastery could never push the vulnerability "below 0", and would have no effect on an opponent that lacked damage mitigation.
• The mastery bonus seems to have no effect on armor. The armored enemy did take a slightly higher percentage of damage as Ancient Magic leveled up, but I believe that was only due to the increased damage output of the fireball vs. his static armor value falling behind.

In other words, Ancient Magic Mastery is about as underwhelming as it could possibly be (for vanilla/PFP).  Master it for the nice damage boost, but don't expect much more out of it unless you're fighting elementals with their native element.

If you're playing a mod like EE or D2F, where lots of opponents and bosses make use of chunky damage mitigation, you will get more mileage out of it.

[ameaeth 50]

Kudos and a big thanks @idbeholdME and @Flix for this Ancient Magic mechanics deep dive and validation. I'm sure this will help everyone in deciding whether or not to take Ancient Magic in their builds.

[Flix 5,116]

Glad to shed some light on something even I wasn't sure about.

To link it back to the original topic, physical damage mitigation is the most common type that enemies will have, but it is fairly low values, between 5-15%.  Given that Ancient Magic Mastery can cut that in half, you might expect to be able to do an additional 2-7% damage against such foes than you would without it. So, it's not nothing, but it's not the powerhouse I thought it was.

BTW I corrected the Wiki having info about CM Patch adding fire damage to Destroyers and ice damage to Tornado.