The mantra we hear over and over again is that "monsters have way more armor in HM, therefore only armor-ignoring damage is worthwhile" - also arguments that "Searing Flames flattens normal mode but fails in hard" - both claims that don't totally square with experience. For example, SF does indeed flatten NM Nightfall through Kourna, but significantly falters in the realm of torment. I also was curious about the relation between monster armor and level, and whether the armor adjustment in HM was simply related to monster level.
To test I mostly used a Shatterstone ele with 15 water magic, which yields 100 damage vs 60 armor. That base 100 is just a number that makes calculating percentages convenient. I take the damage result, divide by 100, and look at the damage adjustment on the Extended armor rating and damage multiplier table. From this I can get the armor rating of whatever mob I'm facing.
I didn't test a huge range of monsters, but the ones I did arrive at were done fairly randomly. I fought them in both NM and HM. A large number (but not all) of monsters follow a simple baseline:
Level * 3 = Basic Armor
This notably parallels 20 * 3 = 60, which is basic caster armor. You then add the typical bonuses for the class: +10 for rangers with an extra +30 vs elemental, +20 for warriors and and extra +20 vs physical, etc. Caster classes typically get no bonus.
In the calculations to arrive at armor, you may often notice a discrepency of 1 armor point. I assume the game is rounding differently than a human looking at the above chart would. However I'm never off by more than 1 armor point.
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Name Lvl Dmg Arm
Flesh Golem 26 74 77
24 83 71
Minotaur 20 71 80
26 53 97
Dune Burrower 22 45 106
26 37 118
Forgotten 20 100 60
26 74 77/78
Sand Giant 22 64 86
31 41 112
Mandrag Smo Dvl 24 41 112
26 37 118
Pine Soul 28 33 124
30 30 130
Calculating Monster Armor
FoxBat
There may be additional bonuses or penalties based on mob (e.g. titans get -20 to cold), as can be seen here. They still follow the baseline of lvl * 3, such as 28 * 3 = 84, -20 = 64 armor. (+20 again for the burning titan warrior)
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Name Lvl Dmg Arm Enchanted Ham 20 41 111/112 26 41 111/112 Enchant Swo 20 30-32 125/126 20 30-32 125/126 Enchant Bow 20 57 92 26 50 100 Avalanche 28 25 139-141 cold dmg 76 76 fire dmg 30 25 cold dmg 76 fire dmg Finally I tried this trick on some bosses. Golems followed the expected 3 armor per level, although it matched the monsters' new level. It didn't matter whether it was a "ranger" version (like melandru's cursed) or a caster version, so it appears that armor is determined by the class of the base monster type, not the boss itself.
For the enchanted sword boss, his armor is near the range that's identical in NM and HM- I assume he just got a bad shield.
Code:Name Lvl Dmg Arm Golem Boss 28 67 83 30 62 88 Ench Swo 30 33 123 From this data, it appears there are two types of monsters; the majority, which follow a lvl * 3 baseline, plus class bonii (and occasionally special monster bonii), and this accounts for their armor differences in bosses and/or hard mode. And there are a minority class which have an arbitrarily set armor level that does not scale past 100 (would need to find more enemies like the ranger to really test). Not tested were "special" boss monsters, I wouldn't be surprised if Mallyx or something has an extra armor boost in hard mode, but those kind of bosses are a tiny minority.
So what's the significance of this? For the most part, it looks like level determines armor, moreso than hard mode itself. Now a difference of lvl 20 vs lvl 26 enemies is significant- 18 more armor is about 25% damage reduction for you eles, while it's still zero reduction to armor-ignoring types; but in the more "elite" areas, level 24 vs level 26 enemies is just 6 armor, just a 10% difference.
So for "elite" areas, HM doesn't really add all that much armor. There are other factors though, such as greatly increased hit points, which means you could run out of savvanah heats before your monsters fall over; when enemies don't instantly fall over en masse to one or two AoE spells, suddenly it might make sense to take the time to set up and individually target them with discord spam. That's not to mention that HM enemies both move faster, and they detect AoE quicker and try to escape it.
The other view might be that Eles were never all that amazing damage in the NM elite areas in the first place, and they only really noticed how they were ineffective when going to every single HM lowbie area. Even in Realm of Torment Normal I noticed how much smoother things went going from SF spam to some armor-ignoring setup like sab/discordway or physicals+orders, but of course you have the "call to torment" compounding the AoE issue there. But such setups are really slow compared to how you can blow through NM Kournan insects with fire magic.
TL; DR: most enemies have level*3 + class bonus armor.
Enemies in HM and/or bosses have at most 3*extra levels worth of armor.
Konig Des Todes
And thus proving those rumors wrong, that if one can handle a NM Elite area, as long as they can accomidate to the area, builds, and damage, there is no to little problem.
Nicely done.
Don't matter to me much as I've always done armor ignoring/degeneration as a Necromancer and as an assassin I see little difference as well.
Edit: I have forgotten something - health also increases 20*level difference for HM, which also counts to what makes it hard, having 60-240 additional health in the later areas would also be impacting the difficulty, however it does not go against the point of this thread - damage is not that much different due to armor.
Nicely done.
Don't matter to me much as I've always done armor ignoring/degeneration as a Necromancer and as an assassin I see little difference as well.Edit: I have forgotten something - health also increases 20*level difference for HM, which also counts to what makes it hard, having 60-240 additional health in the later areas would also be impacting the difficulty, however it does not go against the point of this thread - damage is not that much different due to armor.
Skyy High
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Age
What does it say on it when it drops as I haven't done enough of HM?I can say in NM most lvl 24 have al32 to 35.
Chthon
1. Excellent work.
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Originally Posted by FoxBat
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[The claim] "Searing Flames flattens normal mode but fails in hard" [doesn't] totally square with experience. For example, SF does indeed flatten NM Nightfall through Kourna, but significantly falters in the realm of torment.
The places where the NM-to-HM armor difference is the smallest are also the places where armor-sensitive damage was already starting to fail in NM.
Improvavel
Its the sum of several factors - a bit less damage, a bit more health, more damage dealt by mobs at a faster rate, etc.
Guess it is just hard to convince people that are used to only do one thing (in this case damage) to also have to provide other. All elemental damage is affected in the same way, but MB+RI with support builds, Earth and even water/air builds that provide some kind of support work better because it can buy the extra time needed to kill the slightly stronger enemies. |