Content Notes

Quick run down on what content is up.

Total: 639 Entries
Creatures: 87
Skills: 425
Bosses: 36
Skill Trainers: 78 Skills Listed (Ascalon City)
Conditions: 12 (Dummy)
Areas: 54 (Multitude of Dummies)
Rest: Misc

We are slowly but surely gathering more content

Are you guys gathering AL for each type for all the critters, or is that a little too much detail?

No, we are not gathering creature AL. I would, if I knew how

At the moment, we are gathering: Name, Profession, Skills, Location, Behavior, Species & Common Drops

Just get a few data points of each type elemental damge, compare the listed damge to the actual damge, and you can quickly work out the AL. Takes about 5 mins per critter. I'm still trying to come up with a quick way to to work out physical AL.

Well, knowing the damage equation you can figure out AL based on how far displayed damage is off from expected damage. Ie Your skill says you'll do x damage, target takes y damage, then the target's armor is z. It's not quite as simple as y = x*z, solve for z, but it's not that far off once you know the function you have to plug z into. You just pick a skill that doesn't ignore armor and has a big damage value so you can see minute differences and blast every monster you can find with it. The problem is in A) finding the time to do it. B) accurately recording it. C) making sure you have the damage equation right before you try to calculate. and D) what happens if various monsters have the sorts of armor bonuses that players can get or E) what happens when monsters use skills hat provide protection from things. So, to test things you'd need to blast every monster in the game with three or four skills, making sure to note what the skills say they should do and what the damage actually rings up as.

Eh, Ensign or Nefser or another of our math engineering wizards can probably figure out a better/faster way of doing it.

Edited to add :

Pharalon, for physical damage use a skill that ignores the varience in weapon damage. Wild Blow (guaranteed critical hit, unlinked, too) works well because it's spammable.

I also have all the shiverpeak bosses for everything besides Frost Gate on paper- I just need to take the time to figure out how to add in the bosses(and probably shiverpeak areas, at least in a dummy state). I've got the centaurs on paper as well- I'll try to get those up ASAP, as well as snow ettins and gryphons, which should be all that's left for creatures in the northern shiverpeaks.

Wild Blow is definately the way to go (except against tall bosses, because it's generally hard to get an angle where you can see what damage you're doing in melee), except that it's a little hard to work out your base damage. You need to find a willing volunteer with a known AL to sit there and get clobbered a few times to get an accurate enough measurement.

I've also got a sneaking suspicion that there may be a few vaiables involved with critical hits, based on the lvl of the linked weapon attribute, or perhaps even some armor penetration happening. The numbers I've collected just don't seem to fit properly. Maybe I'm just bad at math....

Perhaps something like Power Shot may be the way to go, if its damage is displayed separately.

Critical hits are apparently based off of the maximum damage of your weapon's damage range. Not the displayed one, but the actual one. Weapon attributes influence that (Chuckles worked out just how much for at least a small range of attributes *somewhere* but in general you don't get to 100% of your weapon's reported damage until you're at a rank of 12 in its attribute. That's pretty consistent with what I've found although I'm not sure just how it applies to different attribute ranks or to lower than optimal weapons. But, get a good weapon, put the attribute to 12 and you shouldn't have to whack someone with Wild Blow, you just need to work out what the actual high damage is.) so they'd influence your critical hits. Roughly, a rank of your weapon attribute is worth 6~8% damage. Armor penetration influences your damage range, too, so that's another 1~2%. You should idealy have no Strength or customization or anything else when trying this out.

Skills and critical hits are the fastest and easiest ways to figure out a monster's AL. Critical hits will always do 150% of your weapon's maximum damage - skills always do the damage listed so they're fairly straightforward to calculate. What's important to remember is to minimize the variables - you want zero strength, zero secondary effects, just criticals and plain skills with known damage.

For now you're going to have to be hitting things with a level 12 attribute in the weapon mastery of choice - for melee and bow damage, at least. You need that attribute level to do 100% of listed damage, and until I have better data to nail the equation for weapon attribute scaling we're going to have work with the known point.

You figure out physical resistance using a fire sword, or a fire axe, or whatever. First you hit them with flare, which gives you their fire Al, and since the fire axe triggers both physical *and* fire resistances you can work out the difference between the two. Most melee monsters have +20 defense vs. Physical, at least the higher level ones, by the way.

Skills like Power Shot, Power Attack, and the like would seem to be good targets at first glance, but they have one little curiosity - last time I checked the extra damage ignored armor and weapon attributes. Run up to a Rift Warden with a level 0 Swordsmanship, a 2-4 sword, and a level 10 Power Attack, swing and deal...23 damage, or 22 from the Power Attack and 1 from your weapon. Useful to know (and exploit) but completely useless from the standpoint of gathering data.

The real rub you run into is granularity. Targets with Al ratings over 60 compress normal weapon damage to a fraction of what's expected, so instead of a critical hit with a good weapon giving you a single, distinct Al value, it gives you a range. I still don't know whether Rift Wardens have an Al of 117 or 118, for example. (my numbers make more sense for 117, but I can't say for sure...)

Anyway, if you're interested in gathering armor level values, or even finishing off weapon attribute linkage, hit me up with a PM somewhere and we can work out the fastest way to gather this data.

Peace,
-CxE

Granularity isn't a problem with elemental damage, as you can get 15 data points in a matter of a minute or so. That's almost always enough to give you an exact AL rating. Physical is harder becuase you can't accurately get that many data points in short order.

I'm sure Power shot will be the solution, as the description specifically states "before armor", so unless it's bugged, you should be able to get the data points with the same speed as elemental skills.

As long as you're willing to keep re-creating characters to get the refund points back, yeah, it's not a problem. If you don't have instant access to every mission with a new character, though, and actually have to trek around...well, it can get a bit more irritating.


It really isn't a big deal - once you have some sort of baseline Al your physical armor is going to be "+20 vs. physical" or something along those lines. Unless you expect to see monsters with stuff like +1 armor vs cold or whatever you only need one really solid Al rating, and the rest you can calculate from there.


They may have fixed it, but last time I checked (December BWE) the extra damage from Power Shot ignored armor. Skill descriptions are useless sometimes.

You have to remember that bow damage is affected by Marksmanship, too, so unless you want to help finish up that particular formula anything but a level 12 weapon attribute is going to be completely useless since you don't know what your before-armor damage is going to be.

Peace,
-CxE

Did I miss something or do AI monsters not have locational armor (Or equal armor across locations)? That could really screw with any attempt at a calculation.

In my experience monsters do not have locational armor. If they did, you would notice it via getting different critical hit values as you repeated tests. I've done this an awful lot myself, and, basically, critical hits come up exactly the same every time, so it's reasonable to conclude that monsters, at least every one I've tested, does not have hit locations - or, at least, different armor at different locations.

Peace,
-CxE

Yeah, they might have hit locations but it could very easily be just like player armor : every location is the same AL for a given set so it doesn't really matter unless someone's mixing and matching. If they've got head, legs, and arms all at 60 AL what's the difference between that and having just one AL of 60?

From my experience, Chuck's right and there's no appreciable difference between hits that would lead to thinking that monsters have separate armors at different locations so it's probably best just to simplify and act as if they've simply got a universal armor level unless we're proven otherwise. Besides, even a universal armor rating for a monster is more than anyone else has at this point and that counts for something.

As you said, if it was locational we would have noticed it. But I think it is rather important to know whether this is true or not, as I'd rather not take the time (as I did with my test Wa/Me) to circle around to the back of the mob (or at least opposite whoever else was contributing to its demise).

Another thing to watch for is that some monsters appear to have weaknesses to certain elements(juniper barks and fire, for instance) which could skew the AL calculations if you're using that element to check elemental defense. To find out their AL for the elements, you'll probably need to check it out with at least one spell from each element.