A suggestion regarding Protections [again], led by a discussion of defensive layering in ARPGs

Feedback and Suggestions
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Hello again!

I have made this suggestion a few other times in the past, as I am really not a fan of how protections are currently implemented in the game. I believe that they either triviliaze building health, or the opposite occurs, as they are vying for the same effective health pool. My previous suggestions admittedly were not the best, and lacked coherency, as I could not really settle on what it was that I disliked about protections. However, now I have finally settled on why the system bothers me, and why it should be changed.

To begin my main points, I want to discuss what I view as fundamental when it comes to building defense in ARPGs. A key aspect of adding defense to any build is to layer it. Generally in an ARPG, your layers of defense go Health -> Resists/Protections -> Tertiary Defenses such as Dodge/Block -> Rare sources of straight Damage Reduction. What is important to this system is that all of these systems stack on top of each other. Rather, they are not fighting additively to provide defenses, but are instead working together multiplicatively. It means that proper balancing of defenses matters, and every other layer you add significantly increases your survival. Beyond this, every investment in one defense makes investing in the others better. Rather, stacking health alone is not effective, but every point in health you have makes every point of dodge mean more as it is multiplying your effective health. Conversely, having really high dodge makes every point of health mean more.

Now, how does this connect back to the problem of health and protections? It comes down to one thing, and it is that both defenses are additively fighting over the same effective health pool. Having 1000 health and 2000 protections, or 1500 and 1500 leads to the same effective health. When this happens, it means that investing in one stat makes the other worse. Consider it this way: If you have 50 health and 50 protections, you have 100 effective hp. The next point in either stat will give you 1% more effective health, but then the next gives .99%, then .98% and so on. So what does this usually lead to? It means that most times you’re either going to stack pure health or pure protections, and there will usually be one that is better than the other. This is the case because building health after building pure protections will have no noticeable effect, and in fact will usually make a build worse due to leech and regen being better on low health pools. Conversely, a newer player stacking health [which is usually the way to go in ARPGs] and then getting protections and seeing no noticeable difference brings confusion.

With this in mind, I do love the idea of protections in this game, and how they can continue to be built up and up to provide specific defenses toward elements a player may struggle against. However, I do not like its additive contention with health, and how they both exist in the same pool defenses. At the end of the day, I want both stats to matter, and I believe the way to do this is to have protections be multiplicative against base health instead of additive.

My core suggestion is as follows: Every point of Protections should add 1% effective health against an element rather than 1 flat effective health.

What does that mean? It means that your effective health goes from [Health + Protections] to [Health x [100% + Protections%]. Now, obviously this would lead to people being unkillable with how protections function right now, and from the calculations I did in balance, it seems the best method to easily rebalance everything would be to just divide current top end protections by 5, raise low-end values, and then weed out the overpowered outliers afterwards. Note that you will still be significantly tankier even after this on almost any build, which is part of what I want to achieve.

[As a quick note, per my calculations, I think T1 protections being 15-20 with T5 being 41-60 would be the best way to go.]

Moving forward, what would this system achieve? Well, it would achieve things both on the player defense side AND offense side.

Defensive changes:

  • Health and Protections will now work alongside each other rather than against each other. A build that properly balances both will be better rewarded than they are now. For example, a build with 1000 hp and 1000 protection right now would have 2000 effective health. After my proposed division, the new system would leave a player with 1000 hp and 200 protections, which would give them [1000 + (100% + 200%)] = 3000 effective hp. This also means that a player who builds into one defense after the other will immediately feel the difference. As in, getting 20 protections after having 2000 health will create a noticeable change right away, compared to getting 100 protection on the current system with the same health.

  • Classes that naturally excel against certain element types [i.e. VK against void, Mage against fire/cold/lightning] will have this specialty emphasized. If everyone is encouraged to balance health and protections, these classes will naturally end up more resistant to these elements. Of course, when protections are the meta, these differences are noticeable, but in cases where health/ward win out and nobody builds protections due to additive contention, these important class differences are lost.

  • Gear types will end up mattering more, and having higher tier armor will create a large impact on physical damage taken. This will avoid situations that currently exist where you base armor type hardly matters outside of the secondary effects that an armor piece has. Further player choice is then created, where you can go for secondary effects that make you stronger offensively or against different elements, or keep with the primary goal of mitigating physical damage, which is the most common type.

  • The system, in my opinion, is easier to grasp for new players. No longer will their protection values be constantly changing on their stat sheet, which while explained well in the tooltip, can still lead to frustration when balancing defenses. Now, if you have 100 of a protection, it gives 50% resistance to an element, no matter what. This also allows for players to set defensive goals easier, and feel good about crafting either form of defense because it will have a noticeable effect immediately. Players that then want to specialize in a protection can still do so, which I view as a strong point of the existing system, and my proposed changes will make it more gratifying to do this.

Offensive changes:

  • If protections change on us, they can change the same way on enemies. Not only does this make balancing enemy protections easier on the dev side [i.e. if you want an enemy to have good cold mitigation, just slap 200 cold prot on it without worrying about health values.], but it also makes penetration on players matter more. With my changes, penetrations would have to be divided a bit as well, of course, I would proposed by 4 or 5x, but they would still end up far more meaningful than they are now.

  • As with the defensive calculations, penetration calculations would also be easier and the stat would become more meaningful. If an enemy has 100 protections and you have 100 penetration, you are doubling your damage with your penetration investment. Essentially, players would have to put more thought into stacking both defense and offense of different kinds on this system. Resistance shred would also become more viable through the same logic.

Despite these key points, there are a few immediate things to think about that could cause problems. For example, what would happen with Ward? Surely it would become quite powerful with this system, but I contest that protections could just be made less effective on Ward. DomP343 and Beefy2 from the discord and forums suggested that halved effectiveness would work fine. If you invested into it, your protections could still mitigate quite a lot of damage when you have high ward, but it will never be as effective as with health. Other things to consider are if certain health and protection breakpoints will just become a set meta, but stat balancing always has effective min-maxing in any game, so I am unsure if this is a huge issue. There may also be concerns that players do not need to be tankier, and this change may make players too tanky. However, I would retort that only a few builds currently have worrisome levels of tankiness, and those could be specifically targeted. There could also be world where glancing blows is removed and 100 in all protections is the “affix tax” for builds to survive late game, then allowing for further protection specialization.

Anyway, this concludes by suggestion. Thank you for reading, and if you would like anything clarified, please ask here! If you agree with the concepts and think protections need to be changed, be sure to leave a vote with the button on the top left of the post! I hope that this suggestion will have some impact, as I really think protections would benefit from this change and become both easier to understand and more satisfying to build around alongside health.

3 Likes
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As we discussed on discord, I like the concept of this idea. Overall, I think that any reworked system would ideally see HP builds tankiness buffed to some degree more so at early stages than for endgame builds, without really helping ward at all. My concern is that top end builds get much tankier under this system than less geared options. Maybe with the removal, reduction of the % all protections suffixes and % health suffixes as a starting point. To illustrate, this table shows the % increase in EHP with your proposed values. As you can see, top end builds benefit much more from the changes, to a degree that is probably not balanced.

The other concern would be with how block works with this model. Even with halved values for ward, shield block would suddenly become extremely good for ward characters. Current shields can roll up to ~45% block chance with ~1.5k block protection, even dividing by 2 for ward, it’s going to be very very strong damage reduction, on the scale of 25-30% less damage taken, which would outscale all other defensive off-hand options.

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Good points. As for the block thing… One way to go about it would be to make shields block a % of damage rather than raise protections, which may be better in the long run, since it’s sort of an odd concept that a high protection character doesn’t get much from block [for example I have had consistent 10k+ armor in the past, so block didn’t help protect against phys much]. However, you also have to consider that you’d be giving up a catalyst or a staff to do this. Catalysts provide int and ward gen to make you sustain much higher ward values, and can also roll damage mods. Or you could have a crit catalyst, or a staff for even more damage. In general, I think shields need a bit of help on non-sentinels, so shields having a use for ward chars as a tanky option, which should be what shields are used for, makes sense.

Also 1.5k block protection would go down to 300 protections, so would be 75% mitigation on block a regular character, and 37.5% for ward, with a 45% block chance, would only be .45 * .375 = 16.875% damage mitigation.

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The concept of having flat % mitigation from protections is awesome.
stacking 1500 protection would instead give 150% DR from that protection and would no longer reduce the effectiness of regular HP.
+1 vote from me when i figure out how to vote.

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The vote button is on the top left on top of the post! Thank you for your support! Also on my system, 1500 protection would go down to 300, which would give 75% total reduction against that element [100% +300%, so 400% effective life or 1/4 damage taken]. 150% DR would be invincibility, after all :stuck_out_tongue: This would make you tankier than now for all situations where you have more than 500 health, so most of the time!

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yes i messed up that system i didnt mean 150% DR i meant 150% eHP but yes i love the idea!

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Ok, My own thoughts:

Problem: Life and protections do not really benefit each other now

What storm suggested is quite similar but a bit different to general ARPG system where you have % resist and %hp. But we want LE to be original and good at the same time , so I suggest a solution

Solution

Forget about making life and prots benefiting each other. Instead make a viable option of pure hp stacking build, so that players could choose if they want go full prots or full HP

Suggestion ::heart: Blood Shield :heart: (aka overleech)

  1. Make it possible to overleech health, The blood shield will be gained with health regen and leech(or just leech, choose yourself) over your max hp and will be treated as effective hp. I think hp regen is important here because you do not want to get one shotted before you started leeching, so hp regen will give you a small constant Blood shield over your hp that will save you for milliseconds. Alternative would be passives or skills that prevent one shots before leeching.
  2. The more blood shield you have the less your leech and regen will be, just like with ward retention.
  3. Make strength and dex increase blood shield effectiveness(similarly to ward retention). Same goes for leech effectiveness, it will also be more useful since the more you leech the more you have e-hp. Max health will increase the blood shield too, more hp=more overleech.

Summary

Imo this alternative solution will make many more builds viable, for example VK and harvest lich could stack dodge and max hp and go full leech (just add more leech passives for vk on top and itll be great). Same goes for rogue in the future, she will like to dodge, and will deal high damage so leech with blood shield comes handy.

7 Likes
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This would be a neat way to make leech actually benefit high health builds! It would also add more choice alongside with my proposed protection system in whether a player prioritizes certain stats. In a game like PoE, that happens through leech cap being tied to health, and this would be an interesting way to go towars something similar. Thanks for the addition!

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I think Boardman’s videos on defences support this thread. I was always complaining about no reward for investing in defences until I saw the high dodge and high resist primalist videos he posted. It turns out that I just fell for the noob trap: taking health nodes are more than useless, as sacrificing damage is guaranteeing you won’t get far.

If LE team are reading this, it did not make me want to spend more time learning the game like Boardman does, it just made me want to stop planning builds. Now I read in the patch notes that item drop rates and XP rates are even more grindy and unrewarding. If you want to reverse this trend and make the game accessible to players like me, fixing the defences would be a great first step. :wink:

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Hi Stormquake,
Very nice post. The current system is not very intuitive and can be very confusing.

I don’t agree on this:

Increasing health or protections always is good. As long as the sum of health+protection is the same, your survivability score is the same. The shown protection % of your stat sheet is misleading. With 1500 hp / 1500 prot the % shown is higher than for 2000 hp / 1000 prot or 3000 hp / 0 prot. But all these combination have the same survivability. So none of them per se is “better”.

The % of damage mitigation shown on the stats screen is just an info and not an indicator of your survivability. Because when you have an item with 50 hp on it and you take it off your prot % increases. First this looks like a good thing. In reality you have lost 50 eHP which is bad.

And with increasing health you gain eHP against all types of damage while flat protections only come for a specific damage type. To get the same amount of 3000 eHP you can go for 3000 health or 2000 health + (7 x 1000) protection (because there are 7 separate damage types).

So right now I don’t see health and protections
compete with each other. Instead they combine to an eHP. The current game design does not want you to go full hp without protection. If this was the case then you would have the competition between pure hp and pure protection builds.

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Uhm Protections are nice because protections offer eHP that never fade untill debuffed and never needed to be replenished like HP. So I’d rather have a smaller HP pool and more protections from my point of view then anything else outside of ward heavy builds. I realy wish there was a different approach to resistences but I’m almost 100% certain that there will be no changes to the systems in place sadly.

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Thanks for your points! In reply to the statement you quoted, I feel I may have explained myself badly. Let me try to flesh out my logic for that point. I know that the two combinations I listed both lead to 3000 ehp, but the point I wanted to make has to do with diminishing percentile increases on linearly scaling values.

Consider the number 100. When you add one, you have increased its value by 1%. However, when you are at 101 and you add one, the value increases by .99%, getting smaller and smaller per increase.

When health and protections are adding toward the same ehp pool, something similar happens. Naturally speaking, every point in health lowers the value of the next point of health, and the same is true for protections. The issue is that contributing to the same EHP pool lowers the value of both whenever you build one. Allow me to illustrate this with a comparison of the current system and my proposed one:

Current system:

  • You have 100 health, you build 1 protection, you have 101 EHP now, causing a 1% increase.

  • You have 500 health, you build 1 protection, you have 501 EHP now, causing a 0.2% increase.

  • You have 1000 health, you build 1 protection, you have 1001 EHP now, causing a 0.1% increase.

You can replace health with protections and the same occurs. Each point of investment in one makes the other worse from a percentile standpoint.

My proposed system:

  • You have 100 health, you build 1 protection, you have 101 EHP now, causing a 1% increase.

  • You have 500 health, you build 1 protection, you have 505 EHP now, causing a 1% increase.

  • You have 1000 health, you build 1 protection, you have 1010 EHP now, causing a 1% increase.

As one value goes up, the EHP given by the other increases, as it is always granting the same percentile increase independently of the other stat. Of course, both stats still have diminishing returns when viewed alone, but now function better against one another.

I hope this makes my point a bit clearer!

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I agree the fact that stacking health and protection work against each other is highly unintuitive and confusing. Conceptually, I do like the solution you proposed.

The other point about protection that I dislike is that there are currently too many different types of protection. All these makes me lean towards straight forward defence mechanics like ward and glancing blow. And hope this is enough for ignoring life/protection.

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They’re trying to de-emphasize specific aspects of the stock protocol common in ARPGs. I’d have to think about this awhile before I made up my mind. I guess I’m unconvinced either way right now.

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I really don’t like system where your investment in a stat or simply leveling up make the investment in another stat worse and worse. It’s like the game is punishing you for playing.

It results in an overly complicated system that is hard to balance because you have to take into account of what a value represent for various gameplays.

I can only agree with a suggestion to revert to a more simple, traditional and robust way to do something as the current new way of doing it doesn’t bring any real advantage and makes it harder to understand and use.

So have:

  • resistances directly expressed in % of damage reduction
  • resistances improved directly with flat %
  • a hard cap for resistances
  • maybe a stat to increase threshold for that hardcap (per resistance or category or resistances)
  • block efficiency (multiplicative with resistances) instead of resistance bonus on block

Main downside is for armour.
It may feel strange to have a value in %. And also strange to have a stat that do the same thing work in a different way.
But it can be renamed as physical resistance to be more explicit.

(Then, if we can also simplify attributes, it would be great…)

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I strongly disagree to this. it is just a generic ARPG system that all other games have. Especially hard cap on res is super annoying imo.

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All other games have it because it works.
I all about innovating. But the innovation should improve in a way: add something, simplify…
If the innovation doesn’t improve the game or if it brings more inconvenients than benefits, you have to go back to an effective system or continue to iterate.
Having the best experience is more important than having something different just for the sake of not doing like the others.

And a hard cap on damage reduction is quite a given as there will always be that threshold of “100%” above which you can’t reduce damage anymore.
I only saw once a damage reduction without a hard cap, where over 100% damage reduction, damage became healing. But they quite quickyl added a hard cap and allowed to reach 100% and go over it only with temporary buffs.
Immunity is not a great mechanic either.

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After some thought I kinda like Stormquake’s idea where 1 protection would give 1% eHP based on your hp. You’d need to significantly reduce all of the current values of protections the player can get at the moment but that’s certainly do-able.

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While we’re here on the topic of “things that can be confusing,” what does “effective HP” mean, exactly? If someone has 1000 HP and 300 resistance, and takes three consecutive hits of 100, 300, and 500 base damage, how much damage have they actually taken? Or, is that even thinking about it the right way?

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Thats why LE current prot system is decent, because you dont have hard cap and you cant reach immortality due to how the formula works. There is only one flow with this system: hp stacking is useless, thats why i wrote down my suggestion here, other than that the system is very good.