Survivability comparison help, please

I'm going to kind of mass quote respond here because there's a lot of ideas moving around in just one page that I want to try and hit on without getting too gummed up in the works.

On a personal level, I see this spreadsheet as an awesome assistant in trying to gauge the abilities of a character—notably in a static enviornment—and compare it to other characters. The biggest thing I've seen that can show how much variance is going on in these is by lining up my KM/SR and Claws/Regen. Both builds have similar potential damage and mitigation in their primary, but the secondaries are massively different in their true nature. The */SR Build scores 3073, has 48% Positionals, 398% Regen, a base HP/s of 31.1, and access to Aid Self and can run Tough, but doesn't. The */Regen (which is found in the 'Example' build with the spreadsheet) scores 3890 (both of these are with Rebirth +Regen on) . Since the Regen is publicaly accessible I wont dive into all his specifics, but he scores higher—mostly just on good looks and charm (significant +Regen). If I threw both of them into a pit and told them to "have at it," I'm certain the */Regen would floor sooner as its active mitigation is precognitive in nature, and has a huge margin for player error.

There is a reverse here, though, in recent late game changes. If I were to "iCap" (Incarnate Cap, 59%) both toons and put them through an iTrial, I'd probably give the benefit to the */Regen for having more in the way of dealing with the damage they still take, especially the large forms it can still come in. So no, the spreadsheet is not perfect in it's static-realm, but I definitely appreciate the information it does provide me, and how it can help with planning and building a toon. Flipping numbers around in the Matrix gave me a better grasp of determining directions for defensive building; what kind of impact is a 2% loss here versus a 1% gain somewhere else. This is, of course, all theoretical, but it helps if you want that min/max effort without a lot of the min/max effort.

I do also understand (and this was notably brought up by Werner on more than one occasion this month alone), that others who see the sheet are going to approach it with two potential responses. A.) Awesome, it helps, nice to have, but it's not perfect. Great for Guidance. B.) My 3,890 trumps your 3,073, your build sucks. Unfortunetly the only thing I can do for that is leave a slew of notes all over that say "Not Perfect, don't bet the house on it," which I did. I've taken almost all of Werner's actual notes and slathered the thing in them to help others understand it and hopefully etch subconsciously that it'll guide you, but it wont play for you, the rest is all Player Skill.

When it comes to attempting the inclusion of things like DPS, its partly a personal desire to try and find a way to quanitfy it as mitigation, and also just the morbid curiosity in me on if its even possible to simplify something that intrinsically complex into SUM(X/Y+4)*6(Z;W); and no, that's not seriously an equation anywhere, just an example of trying to put a value on what we are capable of configuring: X Mob, Y Damage, % Average, and say X now has a value of 15 and turn that into X= HP/15 so that we're trying to determine what X – DPS = Y. That is kind of a simple breakdown, but as it stands trying to blend the active portions of that together is less than that. There's ST DPS and AoE DPS, is AoE in ST or vice versa? How should AoE calculate into X, how should ST calculate into X; if this is a consistent flow of incoming damage in a static-realm that never ends, how quickly does X refill? What value does HP have?

I'm sure if I could find the answer to that, quantifying things like Controls will be easy sailing and everyone from Dominators to Masterminds can play around with this thing, but right now I don't see this as moving past being (nearly specifically) a better gauge for Melee toons, and only marginally approachable by anything else. Furthermore, if X – DPS = Y does not break down into a fairly simple process, then there's not much use in attempting to include it. Both on the side of effort involved in making it work, and in the amount of Input data that may or may not be required to achieve that. I already have a DPS spreadsheet, so the inclusion of attacks is very simple, just the inbetween is in question.

This also begs the confrontation with the Margin of Error (as Werner mentioned). Is attempting to figure out a wider-spectrum formula really beneficial, or will the data produced be too specific and ultimately a harmful tool if it starts going around saying "You must be THIS tall to ride." No matter what, above all else, Player Skill ultimate trumps any score this will put-out, and can push on the side of saying "where the spreadsheet is currently is sufficient enough."

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shred_Monkey Heh... you know... at some point you do have to step back and ask yourself... am I creating a computer simulation to model the output of what is, in some respects, another computer simulation? It's ok.. I've done the same thing.

In short, this is exactly it. The more I thought about ways to include a measurement of DPS against static damage, the more it started borderlining the idea of a lite program that took an input DPS value and weighted it against a mob, and as things died, replaced them based on either a flat Timer, or backlogged them if you weren't killing fast enough and put that against an overall score. It would, in a sense, be something that would run infinite until cut short and say "you killed A in B time producing C mitigation" and turn that around as a reductable value in the Matrix data.

Going that far is a bit unrealistic, so looking back at basic math equations to decide on a straight forward average, and this isn't even saying I'm looking in the right direction.