Analysis of Defenses across Masteries

General
1

Hi,
I was bored and decided to calculate defenses across all the Masteries.

Here is how I did it:

  • I used only the Passive Trees for each Class + Mastery
  • I added each type of number together
  • For Resists, I added them all together (i.e. if a mastery granted 25% Fire and 25% lightning, that’s shown as “50” in my chart)
  • For “Other damage reductions” I summed up any reduction in any type of damage - Damage over Time, damage while moving, etc.
  • if something was variable, I used general values. Example: % of health (I used 2000 health), “Per minion” (I used 10 minions), etc.

Here is the Google Sheets link:



My Conclusion
Looking at the “Overall” score seems misleading, as the bars aren’t too different. But when you look at specific defenses which are key to survival in Empowered + high Arena, the classes aren’t really balanced well.

3 Likes
2

Your Defense-comparison.zip is empty for me.

I love these types of posts so rather than discourage you, I’d like to gain some insight into your process by asking some questions. Framing your conclusion as “Class balance” doesn’t do you any favors as there is simply too much nuance your tables are incapable of properly representing such as Spellblades who spec into Shattered Aegis, how crit builds are unlikely to pick up Outlast, or how some nodes are easily accessible to all masteries given their placement within the tree. I think a “by the numbers defense comparison” with proper weights and caveats could lead to a fun discussion nonetheless. Questions below.

  1. How did you gather the data?

  2. Why are percentage increases and flat values treated equally?

  3. Why did you decide to exclude base stat increases such as strength from Doom Knight from the calculations?

  4. It looks like some conditional nodes are included (I’m assuming you’re counting Reactive Ward as 200 points in your ward line for Sorc and Spellblade) while others such as Woe in VK are excluded. Can you explain why?

  5. Why is Crit Avoidance excluded?

3

You’ve not called out the crit strike avoidance on Paladin, though I think that’s the only on Paladin so probably not worth it.

I’m surprised that the Sentinels don’t get more armour than the Druid/Shaman/Bladedancer though.

Thanks for this. :slight_smile:

On a more spreadsheet-y level, you might want to alternate colours on the rows on the tables to help the eye flow across. Plus I’m not sure how useful the graph is if it’s just adding up all the numbers & displaying them.

1 Like
4

Every class gets 3 attribute points which is a tiny effect compared to the rest of the passives.

5

Very nice!
It helps me to understand what Mastery focus on which defence-mode.
Two things:

  • What about health leech?
  • Defensive stats on equipment are very different for each Class. Maybe it’s worth to take this into account too?
6

First of all, I would like to note or agree that a weighting of the stats is missing.
+1 HP is weaker than +1 % from max HP.

Nevertheless, thick bars are almost always somehow interesting, and we all know the phrase:
“Don’t trust any statistic you haven’t faked yourself!” :grin:

Because there are such jokes like “Armour from Shapeshifter (-Buff)”, basically nobody takes them.

2 Likes
7

When I see Shaman having more defenses than Beastmaster I know something’s wrong :smiley: 16% damage reduction from all sources is not equal to 1000 armour. It is much much more valuable. It is just an example. You are trying to compare apples with oranges.

8

Can someone see if the Zip is fixed?

9

Nope, still says it’s 22 bytes.

10

OK, converted to Google Sheets - can you see it there?

11

Yup. :slight_smile:

12

Look at the google sheet doc, it breaks down “similar” defenses into more logical groups.

13

I think this is a great starting point. I have experience performing statistical analysis in other games and I combine that with what I learned from college years ago. So let me give you a few friendly tips. TNY asked some great questions, but I would like to start with some more fundamental points.

  1. Comparing apples to sandwiches isn’t quite the best metric. Still food though so that’s good. I would suggest converting all of these metrics into a final score of EHP (effective health points). This is a LOT of work, but it will give you a more accurate view for comparison. You would need to map out HOW you do your calculations and that gets into the true substance of your numbers. For example, if you wanted a simple analysis then you could say bladedancer has 200 hit points with 10% armor, 15% resist vs cold, and 50% dodge. This would roughly (again very simplistic, which is fine to start) be calculated as 200/(1-.1) + (200/(1-.15))-200 + (200/(1-.5))-200 = 479.74 EHP against physical cold damage, meaning that you could eat 478.74 raw physical cold damage and live. You would have to look up the actual calculations though, as I just added the EHP together from each individual mitigation. In reality, there are likely multiplicative interactions between different mitigation types as well as stat caps. This also factors in the average mitigation across multiple hits because in reality dodge is binary mitigation AND you have to factor in things like glancing blows, crits, crit avoidance, flat penetration, % penetration, etc.

  2. Not discouraged yet? Great! To begin with, you need a baseline of each character’s stats. If you want to get fancy then you can do a 1-100 scale, but start simple with each character at level 100 and calculate their raw stats without passives, gear, or any other modifiers to create something akin to a control group.

  3. Active mitigation is also a HUGE factor. For example, You might only have enough hp to avoid getting 1-shot by bosses, but if you have 100% life leech or 8 seconds of invulnerability on a 7 second cooldown then that COMPLETELY changes the game. I realize these are massive, impossible outliers, but hopefully that gets the point across regarding the relative importance of active mitigation.

  4. I realize that this would be a LOOOOOONG project, but if you decide to go full-steam all-in on it then consider builds that use maximum mitigation and builds that use typical levels of mitigation. The second one would utilize an average across builds with a bias on functionally usable levels of defensive mitigation in builds so that you don’t have someone with 4 defensive skills, a movement skill, and auto-attack. This will enable you to get realistic levels of defensive skills and compare them to their maximum so that you can establish a spectrum of possibilities to determine overall impact on class usability (i.e. how many defensive skills and mastery points must you sacrifice in order to achieve the state of “hp > 0”).

1 Like
14

I didn’t want to add leech because its extremely variable based on the rest of the build (attack speed, gear, etc.).
Same goes for equipment. I realize that, for example, Sentinel Armor is higher than Mage armor, but felt it muddied the water too much to try to factor it in.
I also didn’t include Crit Avoidance for similar reasons, mainly because 2 gear slots and a Blessing could cap anyone.

15

Yes, the charts do show any source of that defense, even ones people might not take in their build. But after all, isn’t that their fault for not taking it? :slight_smile: lol
j/k

There could be differences in “practical” defenses vs. what my charts are showing which is “theoretical” defenses.

2 Likes
16

Updated the OP to show the breakdown charts rather than that Overall one, which isn’t very useful.

17

Very nice.

Just in regard to

Weighing different defenses against each other maybe a bit more complicated and in some cases also a subjective matter.

I haven’t downloaded the files, just looked at the pictures in my phone. So pls forgive this question: When you say you summed up passive bonuses from class + masteries you mean for FG you used Sentinel and FG passives? If so wouldn’t it be a nice info to add all passive defensive stats from other mastery trees that are within range of the FG. Because the FG can use Paladin and VK passives from the first half of the trees, too.

If you already did this, great :laughing:

1 Like
18

Can you elaborate on that?

I mean, it’s clear that the archetypes of a Forge Guard or Beastmaster have different (higher) stats than a Sorcerer.

It occurs to me that in order to be able to represent a more useful because more practical “result” “in your way of representation” you would have to somehow include the “first half” of all other class masteries (we are not even talking about skills yet) in the respective class. After all, my Druid, for example, can benefit quite well from some of the passive strengths of a Beastmaster.

It would take quite a bit of calculation, which fortunately is partly available through tunklab’s EHP calculator.

Translated with DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator (free version)

19

The reason I decided not to “dip” into the bottom of neighboring Masteries was that I didn’t want to pollute the information as to what that mastery was given from the Devs. Also, it’s difficult to tell if you’d have enough points to get all defenses from all neighbors + your own mastery + points in offense and other passives. So, I decided to keep things “pure”. Just Base Class + Mastery.

2 Likes
20

Maybe as additional info?

Sentinel is an example where you have very good defensive nodes at the bottom of every mastery that I usually take on my toons.

Would be interesting to see if the defensive potential equals out or shifts.

And saying That FG only has x% block when you could just get additional block from only one point in the Paladin mastery would be a bit not so accurate.