Sacred 2 Direct Damage is ... ?!

[gogoblender 3,365]

"Direct damage increases the weapons basic damage before other damage % (tatics lore, smith arts, other modifiers etc.) are calculated."

Grabbed that from a post slevin made in the SIF.

The Wiki's definition page for this has been red for this for a while now, I wanted to know if our mechanics experts all like this definition for SacredWiki.

Do we have a winner?



gogo

[chattius 2,674]

Perhaps someone who has the luck of finding a direct damage weapon and a weapon of same type and damage without direct damage could do a test. By using a weapon of same type damage from stats should be same.

 

Remove all equipment except the weapon. Now put on equipment piece by piece which has only whet-sockets, but adds no stats, other damage, skills, ---

 

Plot the curve with damage in tooltipp on y-axis and x% damage on x-axis, it should be a line.

 

Now do same with the direct damage weapon.

 

Compare the ratio of climb of the 2 lines. The difference should be just the factor brought in by direct damage.

[Furian67 15]

I remember that Cheops' Eye dagger pre Ice and Blood was like this.

[Munera 1]

Slevin convinced me when I saw his post at SIF. It cannot be anything else. But let's be cautious and don't add any non-verified information

[lujate 578]

I could not even find a reference on the wiki to Direct Damage%. I first checked the page for the set item I was looking up, but it does not even show the Direct Damage% (I am guessing that page is pre-Ice and Blood). I did a wiki search and found this thread.

[gogoblender 3,365]

I don't think anyone's put forth information for it yet that is absolutely tested. Would love it if the links in the wiki for this item mod could go blue one day, but there's still been discussion on this mod. Unless one of the mechanics here for the game has come up with something new?

 

 

gogo

[locolagarto 18]

Would it be ok to pre-face the page with a tidbit about how mysterious this new modifier is, and then post Slevin's hypothesis as the best guess we have. it gives our readers something, while at the same time leaves the definition open for additional comments or facts.

[gogoblender 3,365]

I think that's actually a very fair beginning, and would leave it open for any new considerations or findings.

 

 

gogo

[chattius 2,674]

I think the closest we could do is to give some statistics: so people could see the results. As far as I know we don't even know how stats effect the damage.

 

An approach would be:

 

Step1: Eleminating stat points from the equitation

take a naked character without tactic lore with a white weapon

write down the base damage, the shown damage and the damage modifier from stats

Now add armour which just adds x% damage. Plot the function for each weapon.

Try to find weapons with same base damage but different stat modifiers.

try to find out if stat damage modifiers is: base damage (like damage x-x rings) or direct damage multiplier (what we guess for direct damage) or x% damage modifier(like tactics lore)

 

Step2: plotting a function using several damage x-x rings

Once we know how stat damage is put in the formula we could take a weapon with direct damage multiplier. But this time we would not change the x% damage part but the damage x-x part.

 

If a weapon would have 20% direct damage and adding a damage x-x ring would have 1.2 times the effect then on a weapon without direct damage we could quite sure that direct damage is as we guess.

 

Will be a hell of numbers to play with and my main sacred testers are both real life busy for some more weeks to come. So to prevent wasting too much time, perhaps we should do the scientific approach: doing a theory, trying to find an experiment which would confirm the theory. Currently we are at discussing how the experiment should look.

 

To make all this worse: I think there is a damage multiplicator which depends on difficulty. And this modifier could either be applied direct to the base damage or to the final damage.

[Silver_fox 399]

For a long time, there was little to no reliable information about Direct Damage, mostly due to its rarity. I had my theory about how it works, but somehow never got to test it. Now that I'm working on making stats for new items in the Item Mod, I decided to look a bit more into how Direct Damage works and compare its effectiveness with other modifiers. So, I wanted to share my findings and my opinion about them.

 

In the beginning, I wanted to mention one fact: in the game's scripts, Direct Damage goes under the name "sb_off_bonusNOarmor", so it is logical to assume that this modifier offers some damage that ignores opponent's armor rather than just boosts the characters' weapon damage.

 

Now to my testing. Being a modder, I made simpler tests than Chattius suggested. I used dual Power of NIF lightsabers for testing (only level 40 ones, with total Direct Damage 15%), and run two series of tests - first, I used the swords as they are, then went to the scripts and removed the Direct Damage modifier from these weapons, thus testing with all the same conditions except for this modifier.

 

The damage listed in the tooltip was the same in both test runs - regardless of whether or not Direct Damage was present, my character's damage was listed as 570-710, average 639 (not much, but I was running with reduced gear to see the effect more clearly). This is usually an indication that the modifier is applied only during the damage outcome calculation. As Direct Damage is not a chance modifier, the fact that it can't be applied without an enemy implies that its impact on resulting damage varies depending on the enemy's stats.

 

Now going to hit some enemies. My weapon damage is fire+magic+physical, in equal quantities, so at first I took only the enemies with purely physical resistance or physical+poison, so that they could be compared to each other:

• First on the way are the guys with 48-50 armor: with Direct Damage, my character is dealing an average of 551 damage to them (made a lot of hits, of course, then calculated average value for statistics). Without Direct Damage, the average is 452 damage. Increase seems to be 99.
• Then various opponents with 76-78 armor, and skeletons with 244-245 armor, half of which is physical: With Direct damage, the average is 534. Without Direct Damage, the average is 430. Increase seems to be 104.
• Now let's try opponents with mixed 144 physical+fire resistance so that they are better protected against my weapons: With Direct damage, the average is 496. Without Direct Damage, the average is 403. Increase seems to be 93.

Now, 15% of my character's average damage is 95. Statistics might be uncertain, but the increase of the final damage seems to be around this value.

 

Then I used a damage calculation formula which Mibbs left on the wiki to determine what my character's supposed damage against those opponents should be (I know, he said that the formula was for spell damage, but I tried it for melee just to see if the result would be similar to statistics). According to that formula:

• Against opponents with 48 armor again my damage types, I should be dealing 639*639/((639+48)*1.3)=456 damage. Looks similar to what I'm getting. And 456+95=551.
• Let's see about opponents with 76 effective armor: 639*639/((639+76)*1.3)=439; 439+95=534
• For 144 effective armor: I should be dealing 401 damage... you see where it is going.

Funny enough, but Mibbs' formula keeps giving me average damages that are exactly 95 digits different from the average of what I see flying when Direct Damage is active.

If Slevin was right and Direct Damage was an increase of a player's base damage applied before other bonuses, then this modifier would have been less effective on more armored opponents, just like normal damage is. Not to mention that the modifier that can be calculated using only player character's base damage would not need an enemy to be applied and could show in tooltip immediately.

Instead, the damage increase from this modifier seems to be about the same regardless of which enemy you are fighting. Direct Damage X% appears to be adding X% of your damage total to the amount of damage you are normally dealing to an enemy after the damage/armor calculation is done. This additional part is not affected by opponent's armor, but probably can be mitigated. And, of course, if the entire hit is blocked/reflected/evaded, this part does not come through. Still, this modifier seems to be something that allows to deal better damage to highly armored opponents.

This stands up to Chattius' statement that the effectiveness of Direct Damage changes with difficulty. On higher difficulties opponents have better armor than on lower ones, and the better resistance enemies offer to the main part of damage, the more noticeable the not-resistible part feels.

 

My testing is of course, not perfect, I did not want to spend entire day just documenting the damage values so more representative samples may be required. But my theory about how this modifier works seems to be a bit better match to the internal name, as it really is about adding some damage which is not affected by armor.

Edited July 16, 2014 by Silver_fox

[Flix 5,198]

Thanks for the testing that finally confirmed this one. I'm glad it turned out to be what you had theorized, Silver Fox. I had been adding Direct Damage to some items in the CM Items Mod under the assumption that you were right. Now we have something to put on the Wiki page.

Edited July 16, 2014 by Flix

[Silver_fox 399]

Well, it did not turn out as I originally expected it would, but it does not look any weaker than that.

 

At first, I thought that having Direct Damage X% makes your damage consist of X% that are not modified by enemies' armor and (100-X)% that are. But that would have given smaller damage increase and way less uniform between differently armored enemies. The way it looks in tests, you still have 100% of damage calculated normally + additional X% that ignore armor. So in a way my test results surprised me.

 

The testing is still incomplete. For example, I'd like to know if this additional damage is affected by opponent's Damage Mitigation. But for this I'd need to test it on some opponents with known mitigation values (most probably by slapping mitigation on Sloeford Wolves).

 

And well, I'm not claiming it to be 200% correct, just trying to make a theory that would explain the damage I'm seeing.

[xcessive 55]

I can help u with this. I have a seraphim with 96 % damage mitigation. I can bring it up to 100 % and we can test it on a pvp server. Just send me a PN, if yo are interested.

[gogoblender 3,365]

I would love to know the results of this as well.

Has anything definitive and proven been put into the Wiki?

 

 

gogo

[MortalKombat 6]

I would love to know the results of this as well.

Has anything definitive and proven been put into the Wiki?

 

 

gogo

Actually, default enemy armor values in Sacred 2 are negligible, so you can simply take "X% Direct damage" as "X% more damage" (for attacks / weapon CA).

Even if you increase enemy armour by factor of 10 (like I did for myself), it still wont make a big difference.