Blackswans minions have a to hit buff power now?

It wasn't any visual power like aim or buildup but I was tanking for a team tonight and noticed I was getting hit way more so than normal. My current defense was 60% negative, smashing, lethal, energy. Now as I always understood it 45% makes most enemies without to hit buffs only have a 5% chance to hit you. (or does that only apply to Melee, Aoe and Range dodge defense rather than smashing, lethal, etc block defense?) When I checked the combat log it was reading that they were having anywhere from 8 - 10% chance to hit me for each attack that did hit me.

These aren't the first enemies I've noticed this on though. Did they make some changes to things during all the AE farm nerfs? Because paragonwiki doesn't list these mobs as having any kinda of to hit buffs or team buffs of the sort.

In game, type:

[Black_Swan_Minion.Dark Blast]
[Black_Swan_Minion.Shadow Punch]
[Black_Swan_Minion.Gloom]

You'll see that they have 1.2 for accuracy. That would raise their chance to hit. What level were they? If they were higher level than you, that would that would also raise their minimum chance to hit. Edit: After running some numbers, I'm guessing they were +3, maybe +4 levels higher than you?

Take note, they were floored on their base chance to hit you, but their base chance was a bit higher than 5%. From the Attack Mechanics wiki page:

"Any attack with more Accuracy bonuses than penalties will have a guaranteed chance of hitting greater than the well-publicized 5% minimum. To be exact, it'll be 5% × AccMods."

Thanks for the link and that information. They were +2 to me at the time. It must just be dark melee because so far this tank has proven virtually indestructable to energy, neg, smash and lethal. Its a ice tank if I didn't already say that and I have over 60% to those 4 damage types when I turn on energy absorption.

Is darkmelee just one of those power sets that you can't knock down to 5% chance to hit? Or will it require significantly more defense for me to reach that point? I guess I need to make sense of the formulas at that link.

They don't have ToHit buffs, they do have Accuracy Bonuses in their attacks, which you can't "knock down to 5%"

The Accuracy bonus combined with them being +2 to you is what produces those higher ToHit numbers.

I see your information and the link but I guess I still can't completely make sense of how or why to hit even exists when accuracy seems to do the same thing based off the information I'm seeing here.

I always thought accuracy was for just plain hit or miss such as you take a swing at someone and you just miss them because your aim was poor, while to hit allows you to punch through defense. I guess that is how it works yet it doesn't. When accuracy bonuses are involved.

What you need to realize is that there is a fairly lengthy math formula the game uses to figure out whether you hit something, or something hits you. It uses Accuracy in one spot, and ToHit in another spot, and it has different dependencies on them.

Arcanaville wrote a long (I'd guess 10 pages, been awhile since I read it) article on the forums defining the differences and their consequences and what kind of critter modifiers there are. It takes that long to explain fully, and is hopefully stickied in the guides section. And it took her a couple of years to use that analysis to convince the devs to change their basic defense formula so that defense actually works decently now against higher con foes.

The short version is what you got, and the formula means that Lord Recluse in the STF, for example, will always have around a 10% chance to hit you even if you are at the defense cap (over 300%, I believe) and he is at the attack floor.

TL;DR version- To Hit is complex but there are good reasons.

I think of it as "Final To Hit = Acc Term * ToHit Term".
In the original version of the game, Defense came off the Final To Hit. SR had about 70% Defense, I think. So you'd drop every even-con enemy to the 5% base. But if you were fighting +2s, minions had 5% to hit, Lieuts had 10% and Bosses had 25% chance to hit. So the enemies went from "never killing you" to "killing you all the time" with almost nothing in the middle.

Currently, Defense comes off the To Hit term. To Hit is almost always 50% for critters. So if you have 40% Defense you will turn 80% of "what would have been hits" into misses, no matter what the "what would have been hit" percentage is.

That's probably incomprehensible. Let me try again.

... I just did this in another thread. Hope that helps.