The strange interface damage procs

Out of sheer curiosity, I decided to experiment around with the mechanics of the various interface damage procs to see how effective they are, and how they behaved. I haven't seen anyone else do this, nor have I read about any explanation as to how these damage procs work. The three I had tested were as follows:

Preemptive Total Radial Conversion on a Willpwer/Battleaxe Tank
Spectral Total Radial Conversion on a Sonic/Archery Defender
Cognitive Total Radial Conversion on a Grav/Thorn Dominator

All fights were against even con and above enemies. What I found as far as observations go was... weird. First, general observations:

1)The damage procs will tick anywhere from 1 to 5 times. Ticking once or twice is far more common than 4 or 5 times.
2)At level 50+1, all procs did 11-16 damage per tick while unboosted on even con and higher enemies.
3)Procs only trigger once per attack, and not once per each hit in multi-hitting attacks (I.e. flaming arrow will only trigger the proc when it is fired, and not for the additional fire damage it does)
4)Procs trigger with PPP pets and troller/dom pets, but not lore pets.
5)Procs trigger on judgement
6)For continuous patch damage like caltrops, interface procs trigger at the same time and rate as regular damage procs.
7)The procs hit for the same amount of damage, regardless of the strength of the attack used.
8)The difference between a minor DoT and a moderate DoT is that minor DoT does 11 per tick, while moderate does 13 damage per tick.
9)The damage did not change from one AT to another.

I do find that the differences between "minor" and "moderate" were very hard to observe, with only one or two points of damage difference at 50+1. I also find it strange that, for a sizeable portion of hits, the damage proc will only tick once. This is somewhat misleading to the nature of the damage procs in the interface slot, and unfortunately means that the damage procs are doing far less damage than I expected.


Now for the weird, some of the stranger things I've seen are the following:

*On preemptive, after the proc first activates, hitting the enemy again will cause the damage to jump from 12-13 to 16 damage per tick, despite showing no evidence of additional activation. When multiple procs hit at the same time, they will both tick for 16 damage.

Also, in one instance while repeatedly attacking a phased enemy, when the enemy unphased the next hit triggered an 80 damage "tick".

*Spectral shows random effects regarding resistance debuffing. There are instances where debuffing the resistance would cause damage to jump from 13 to 17, and there are instances where debuffing resistance had absolutely no effect. All effects of debuffed resistance only changed the damage of the next triggered proc, and not if the target was currently under a DoT effect from the previous proc.



I do hope this helps anyone who is indecisive about whether or not they should go radial for damage or core for their effects. I do wonder if there is any outline that explains *exactly* what happens with the interface damage procs. What are your guys' thoughts on this?

I've seen my lore pets triggering procs, so not sure how you're not managing to do so. o_O

That is a bit odd, since I let my lore pets run loose on a council base while I stayed behind them and watched. After killing three spawns there was no interface trigger on any of them. I guess it is possible that lore pets do get the interface proc, and I was just extremely unlucky (.25^x) when I did that test. Damn you third standard deviation!

The mission that I tested the spectral damage proc on was against Nemesis. I had predicted in advance not to run the damage resistance tests on mobs that received vengeance, so I am unsure what could be causing spectral to randomly not buff it's damage against enemies hit with Sonic Siphon.

Yeah number 4 is definitely wrong.

I probably spent more time in beta messing with the new interfaces than anyone, and the rest of your observations seems right.

I am pretty sure my Lore pets can trigger Reactive. If you are not seeing it, then it could be a bug with the new Interface. There used to be a bug that pets couldn't trigger Interface.


I didn't know the DoT proc has different tics. I thought when it's triggered, it does a "fixed" amount of damage and you can trigger up to 4x on the same target?


And I thought caltrops/rain of fire trigger once per 10s? I thought they fixed that?

It's supposed to only proc once every ten seconds. It makes sense for those types of powers, however, I completely disagree it should affect damage auras that way.

Well, I've learned something new today. I did not know that bruising existed. It sounds awesome for tanks, but then again makes my sonic feel sadder now.

Well, that kind-of explains one quirk. The other quirk is how the damage procs aren't supposed to be effected by damage resistance, and yet the are but sometimes aren't.

That the "minor" categorization of damage for the Psi and Toxic DoT has some history behind it. In beta, they were both originally 50% the damage of Reactive's DoT and given the "minor damage" label. Then, based on testing and feedback in beta, they were changed to be around (IIRC) 80% of Reactive, but the "minor" label stayed. I guess they don't have a standard designation between "minor" and "moderate", and making them both "moderate" would also be misleading, so "minor" is the least misleading of the two. So that's why they are qualitatively labeled as having different damages that aren't actually very different.

I think the reason you don't always see all 5 ticks, but usually see one or two, is that each tick has its own [edit2] 75% chance of happening, but when a tick doesn't happen, it ends the rest of the chain. I haven't tested this empirically, however.

Edit: If correct, and if I did my math right, that would mean you have the following odds of each number of damage ticks.

0 Ticks: 25%
1 Ticks: 18.75%
2 Ticks: 14.25%
3 Ticks: 10.547%
4 Ticks: 7.910%
5 Ticks: 23.730%

It doesn't seem like that lines up with reported observations, since it makes five ticks the most likely outcome.

So I managed to make a 25% damage interface proc and ran amuck in an arachnos base. And... I'm fairly certain now that the interface does go through a probability check for each tick. The whole time while I cleared that base, the proc rarely ever hit for more than one tick of damage. It hit for two ticks on rare occasion, and only once did it hit 4 times.

This, of course, speaks as a glaring deficiency in the way the interface slot was handled. The addition of a 25% chance for DoT is really translating to an 18.75% chance to do a negligible amount of damage, a 4.69% chance of doing slightly more meaningful damage, and a 1.56% chance of actually mattering.

It would've made more sense to just have a bell curve applied to the damage proc tick amount.

Those seem nice, until you realize that they add up to be greater than 100%.

How we have the above numbers follows a tree diagram for statistics. It is kind of hard to construct on the forums, so I'll make a custom image for it.




Each junction represents a path that can be taken with the damage proc, and the numbers represent the the probability of going down each path from that junction. At each junction, the proc can either hit and continue down the line, or it can miss and the chain terminates. To get the probability of any particular outcome, you need to multiply the probabilities of each leg together. So, for 4 hits, that would be .75 x .75 x .75 x .75 x .25.