How do you use the survival test??

Originally Posted by Werner

I don't think I'll have much time to do much tonight, but I'll clean up and post the spreadsheet when I can. In the mean time, I'll try to explain the basic idea. And it's a long post since I'm short on time. Hopefully that makes sense to some people.

Well, the BASIC idea is the old immortality line (the name of which Arcanaville I believe regrets to this day).

I divide incoming damage into a matrix by position and type. I divide that across types by blue side percentages given by Besserwisser a long time ago. I split apart into melee, ranged and AoE by 70%, 20% and 10%. Multiply to get the matrix. In theory you can enter every cell in the matrix individually, but I never have because I'm not sure what I'd change.

Now, your resistance and defense combine to form a matrix as well. Each cell in this matrix is a specific damage type from a specific position. Do the opposite of a mitigation calculation in each cell, a "% damage allowed" calculation based on your typed defense, positional defense and resistance. Multiply that by the percent of damage in each cell from the earlier matrix.

Now, sum up the second matrix, and you have an overall percent of damage allowed. That's one fundamental number, basically 100% - mitigation, though "mitigation" here is not the forum consensus definition. It's not a problem, though, as it just means my numbers will be twice as high as if I calculated using the forum consensus. Since I give no scale for the number, and use them only for comparison with other similarly-calculated numbers, this isn't an issue.

Now you need to look at your average damage recovery per second. No matrix here, since you recover from all types of damage equally. Just time average your healing and regeneration.

Divide this total by the damage allowed, and you get survivability. And survivability here is basically the amount of enemy damage output per second that you can survive. More precisely, it's the amount of enemy damage output (split according to that first matrix) that would produce a random walk of your hit points instead of an upward or downward trend.

What it DOESN'T recognize is that a random walk that takes you to zero hit points WILL KILL YOU. That's a big limitation when you're talking about these survivability levels, which on paper are enough to survive crowds of AVs pounding on you.

Hit points, for instance. The more hit points you have, the less likely the random walk will kill you in any reasonable time frame. Resistance. The more resistance you have, the less likely the random walk will kill you. Ability to match healing to the spikes of damage. The better you can do this, the less likely the random walk will kill you. And so on.

It also ignores other things, like debuffs. That's kind of accounted for by being able to plug in a to-hit number, though. It won't give you one number, but you can get an idea how tough you are when things get nasty.

So, tons of problems. The way around them is to write a program that simulates the entire game. That's beyond my interest, and possibly beyond my capability. Certainly beyond my capability in the time I'd be willing to devote to such a project.

Or I could just say that I already HAVE such a simulator. The devs have been kind enough to provide it. I can take my build, build it, and go test it out in their simulator against an amazingly good recreation of the actual game. Why, I'd almost think I was playing the game when I was using their simulator. Unfortunatly, it only does the calculations in real time, so it takes a very long time fiddling with their simulator to get any good numbers out of it. Ah, well. At least they made it fun to use.

Hmmm, it doesn't explain how I account for Barrier or for the defense and resistance buffs. I basically create a matrix for each, and weight them by the average time each is up. I don't calculate survivability for each, because let's say that once per minute, you had a five second power that gave you 100% resistance. Hopefully it's obvious that wouldn't overall give you infinite survivability, even if it did for those five seconds.