Survivability Analysis - How Tough is Your Character?

Hey everyone, I've gone and moved this to my blog, where I will be keeping all my guides in one place, free to format as I please.

There was a similar Arcanaville analysis once [considerably pre- IOs]. I think she decided the "immortality line" gave misleading results- as you dial the damage up Regen is immortal, immortal, immortal, dead-in-10-seconds. I was always arguing that the immortality line for Invuln was disproportionately low because it's a slow-death set. Regen actually hits its lowest HP in the start of the fight and, as enemies get killed, it gains HP back. Invuln doesn't work like that. So maybe the dead-in-30-seconds line is worth considering. Of course, as long as you don't run out of endurance, anything that doesn't kill a Dark before Dark Regen comes back... won't.

Hm. I've wondered about how these things compare when using differing kinds of mitigation. How, for instance, would you compare a dominator with permanent domination and mass control overlaps to a softcapped character?

@Fulmens,

Well then I guess that is the use of my "Fatal Burst" column. If that kind of damage ever hits you, you're dead.

But you have given me a great idea for another section to add to my tool. I'm going to figure out how to best do some kind of "Time to Fatality" analysis here.

Perhaps come at it as a function of the Sustainable DPS and max HP. At 25% over your DPS, you have 200 seconds to live. At 50% over, it's 60 seconds. Or whatever the math works out to be.

how is that resistance when the foes are not attacking?

I'd say thats even better than soft cap, as there is (as long as the dom has them secure) 0-chance of being hit back (as opposed to a 5%)

Heya Dechs,

Thats a great analysis tool. Good work !

I would like to copy some of the concepts over to my own Defender analysis that I have been working on, if you are OK with that.

Creepy, I've been making on one of these in open office for the last few weeks.

GL all and have fun

Ohh Shiny! I'll take a look at home!

Thanks Dechs!

@Dechs...Gotcha.

Res/defense, then, are easy enough to calculate. They're based off of crunching the numbers of how much incoming damage there is, and it's accuracy, and comparing that to how much an armor will reduce/deflect that. While +res/+def powers skew the recieving scale, the debuffs -dam/-tohit change the incoming scale. The only trick is perhaps taking into account how much the foes resist these effects. All that seems easy enough.

+regen is basically the opposite of damage over a time period. Heals can be averaged into a regeneration-like value, based off of their recharge.

Wouldn't mez, then, be somewhat similar to how heals work? Disregarding immobilizes, all other mez stops an enemy from attacking you for a certain time. As such, the calculation would be what % of the time is an enemy incapacitated? If the power recharges in 30 seconds, and lasts 15, that's 50% damage survivability, assuming it hits. With full accuracy you're right about the 5% hit chance, but that doesn't apply vs. the second mez laid down. I'm betting the chances or two powers @95% accuracy missing the same target is a bit low.

The perma-dom, especially a perma-Mind dom sporting 3 AoE controls on fast enough recharges, is an extreme example. But since you brought in a dark armor character, I wonder how oppressive gloom and cloak of fear stack up? Or a dark miasma character that has an AoE fear/-tohit alongside +res and -dam/-tohit.

Hm. Fear is an odd one, as it's basically a -rech in function...for a certain duration, the enemy can only cower. Every 10 second, or when damaged, they have an action chance before they are returned to the cowering status. This continues until the fear duration is up.

Yikes, that gets complicated in a hurry.

Going back to more traditional mitigation calculations, one thing that might be good to add is a way to handle non-permanent max HP buffs. If you've got something like high pain tolerance or a +max hp set bonus, you can just put it into the HP box and be done. But if you've got something temporary like dull pain, it gets rather more complicated.

First off, your regeneration rates will be different with DP up and DP down. The overall regeneration rate will be an average weighted by the uptime of the power, which would be relatively simple to display pre-calculated on the sheet. Alternatively, you could simply calculate how much extra you regen over one cycle of the power compared to your base regen, and include that as a heal.

Second, the temporary +max HP effect will need to be quantified. The best way to deal with this, I find, is to treat it as a sort of pseudo-resistance. If you think in terms of 'fractions of your health bar', then a +max HP buff makes each incoming chunk of damage represent a smaller piece of your health and thus functions somewhat as a second layer of resistance that stacks multiplicatively with the first. The formula is:

pseudo resistance = 1 - (normal max HP/boosted HP)

This is then added multiplicatively with normal resistance as 1 - [(1 - resist)*(1 - pseudo resist)]. It could then be averaged in the same way as the tier 9 resistance values are.

I actually did this manually for my shield/mace build that's currently part of the document. One with the shield isn't providing the 49.6% S/L resistance indicated - it's providing 45%, and the other ~5% comes from the +max HP in the power. Similarly, my regen isn't actually 17.98 all the time - it's higher when OWtS is up, and lower when it's not, and that is just the weighted average. It would be nice to have this calculated automatically, though.

Finally, I second the suggestion for a 'X second survivability' column. I added a 60 second survivability column to my build's page, it's pretty trivial to calculate.

I used to do this on excel except with the secondaries damage levels and control levels. It's alright if you enjoy getting into it as it takes alot to really get into and keep doing as the game keeps changing. At no point should anyone I feel be influenced by these things in deciding what tankers work best. They have to be played differently. Most survivability models assume a brain dead player in the middle of mobs where as I have no doubt that the Devs like to lean nearer assuming a skilled player amongst some brain dead mobs.

Is there anywhere to download a copy of the spreadsheet please? I can't seem to do that from Googledocs, nor can I seem to work on a copy of the template on googledocs.



Nice work. Thanks.