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

[Llama8]

Effective HP is a broader term that includes stats that, while not being hp, allow the character to take more damage before dieing. In Last Epoch these would be

• protections (reduces the damage you take from a particular damage type)
• block (chance to use a higher protection figure)
• dodge (chance to not take any damage from a hit)
• glancing blow (chance for a hit to do 1/2 damage)
• ward (equivalent to health but decays over time)

Edit: From your figures, with 1,000 hp & 300 protection, they would take 77% of the damage from each hit (1,000 / (1,000 + 300)), so a total of 692 damage.

In Last Epoch, protections currently function to dilute the damage your hp takes based on the ratio of hp to protection. It has diminishing returns (it’s impossible to achieve immunity to a damage type as that would require an infinite amount of protection), however once your protection becomes high enough such that your recovery (life regen, leech, life per hit & ward regen/recovery/per hit) is higher than the damage you take you become functionally immune to all damage that’s not a one-shot.

The lowest damage hit that can kill you in the current scheme is were damage > (life + ward + protection). So with your previous figures, if you took a single hit of 1,301 damage, your character would die. However, if you spread that 1,301 damage over a few hits with time inbetween them such that you could either regen hp or leech, your character wouldn’t die.

[Peredur]

If someone has 700 HP (easier to illustrate) and 300 Resistance, it’s like he have 1000 HP (700 + 300).
When he takes 100 damages, 70% go into its actual HP and 30% is resisted.
When he takes 10 times 100 damages (a total of 1000 damages), 10x70 (700) go to its HP, and 10x30 (300) are resisted.
As he needs to take 1000 damages to die, even though he only has 700 HP, it’s like he have 1000 HP, hence “effective” HP.

[McFluffin]

Misha, I like your Blood Shield idea, but how does it incentivize the player to stack more health? It seems to me that this would give players a benefit for stacking leech, but it doesn’t really solve the hp stacking problem unless having more health somehow also allowed for a higher blood shield.

[misha]

I wrote that max hp will increase Blood shield effectiveness, so more health=more blood shield(maybe i should clarify it more, thx)

[McFluffin]

No worries, i noticed the stats increasing it but not the HP. This is definitely intriguing to me!

[XLVI_carpo]

@Stormquake

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.

This is exactly the trap we fall into by looking on the percentage of the stats screen. You are right that from this point of view the resistances get more and more meaningless the more hp you get. But the resistances % is no indicator of survivability. While on the 500 eHP example the resistance % gain is lower than with 100 to 101 the result is the same. Your eHP has an increase by 1. And it does not matter if that 1 comes from health or protections. 1 hp = 1 prot against all - ever.

@Macknum

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.

Why is that so? It’s not that the protection works like a never fading shield. 50 protection doesn’t mean that you can subtract 50 damage of every hit you take.

Take this example.

1. hp 200 / prot 0 (mitigation 0%) = 200 eHP
2. hp 50 / prot 150 (mitigation 75%) = 200 eHP

Both chars have the same eHP and thus the same survivability under the same circumstances.

Now they get hit with 100 dmg.

1. 100 dmg taken / 0 dmg mitigated / 100 hp left / hits needed to die = 2
2. 25 dmg taken / 75 dmg mitigated / 25 hp left / hits needed to die = 2

The % on the stats screen are only a hint how dmg mitigation is calculated. The only way to compare survivability is with pure eHP numbers. The sum of hp and protection matters not the ratio or the shown %.

[Macknum]

@XLVI_carpo

Why is that so? It’s not that the protection works like a never fading shield. 50 protection doesn’t mean that you can subtract 50 damage of every hit you take.

Wooot? Then again I ask myself why enemys on the same level deal no dmg to me. From your point of view I have to take damage always and I realy don’t think there are no level 100 enemys that do 2 points of dmg.

[Llama8]

Things do seem to be a bit odd. prior to 0.7.7 my Forge Guard build would basically steamroll through Arena to something like wave 200 apparently not taking any damage which I find difficult to believe when you’re surrounded by mobs. Perhaps damage is subtracted from life leech/health regen/health on hit first then any damage over the top is taken off from health?

[XLVI_carpo]

My post is based on the following post, that was confirmed officially.

Unintuitive Mechanics Guide for LE

So there’s a few more hours to beta, in the meantime here’s a little mechanics guide for some of the less obvious systems in Last Epoch : First up, Protections (resistances in other game) : This includes armor, which actually means “physical protection”, acting the same way as other protections do. They are relative to your total HP pool. Each point of protection will act as one point of hp when taking damage, meaning the mitigation percentage formula is damage resisted = protection_value…

Else the whole mitigation % would be meaningless. The formula even is in the ingame tooltips since the last patch. Why do this when it is not calculated this way?

May be that there are additional mechanics that calculate how much damage an enemy deals depending on your level or something else. I don’t know.

I hope I am not telling nonsense. I only repeat what I’ve discovered here on the forums so far. But I cannot believe that protection acts like a shield so 400 protection blocks 400 health and you only take the difference in damage above 400. This would make this discussion meaningless.

[Kotli]

People are talking about effective HP in other words how much damage a monster need to do in a single blow to insta-kill your character.
Protection absorbs damage based on this formula Protection/(Protection + Maximum life).
That is 100 max HP +100 Protection = 50% of damage you take is absorbed by the protection (that is 1 damage taken for every 2 the mob deals) that means to be insta-killed you need to be hit for 200 damage just like another character who has 200 maximum HP and no protection.

[Neyhoum]

It doesnt work like that indeed.

As for the impression of “not taking any damage”, it is simply because the sustaining mechanics make up for it at low levels/against weak ennemies, and for a blocking character like forge guard one of the major factors is probably heal on block(+ some life regen which now scales with player levels since a few patches ago).
So as a quick example, lets imagine you take 100 hits, with 70% block, high block protection and 40 hp on block.
Lets imagine a nonblocked hit does 50 damage and a blocked one does 20.
Damage taken :
70x 20 = 140
30x50 = 1500
Damage healed :
70x40 = 2800

Of course these are just some quick numbers i pulled out of nowhere but it just shows that when you’re swarmed by a horde of small inconsequential monsters in the arena, things like heal on block become incredibly potent. And then if you’re not standing afk you need to add the big leeching numbers and the regen numbers too.
This is why the paladin’s heal on block was nerfed, as it was “too much” when stacked on top of the sentinel’s base heal on block passives. By nerf I mean it was made a bit stronger but with a cooldown, so its a bit better vs bosses/strong mobs but weaker when swarmed as it really was over the top

[XLVI_carpo]

@Kotli

Protection absorbs damage based on this formula Protection/(Protection + Maximum life).

That’s right. I was replying to a previous post.

[Macknum]

Yeah but I think something isn’t working as intended then. With the old monolith at wave 50 when enemys did arround 500% more dmg due to modifiers they did 18 dmg to me and bosses and the endboss 50ish with my Werebear at 1khp and 75% resis. I realy don’t see any way how this is possible. On the other hand when I increased my HP from 800 to 1k I first took a lot more dmg untill I got my protections back up and this left me with the conclusion that protections ARE in fact mitigationg dmg in some way far more then they should.

@Llama8

Perhaps damage is subtracted from life leech/health regen/health on hit first then any damage over the top is taken off from health?

This is a possibility but it seems strange anyway.

[marc7694]

Hmm that’s an interesting idea. Just keep in mind. that if you compare damage taken with 60% resist, and then 70% resist, in the current time of calculating the dmg, you are actually reducing your overall damage with 25%, if i am understanding the protection mitigation correct.

[Llama8]

Yup. You’ll go from 40 damage down to 30.