Just to say i’m agree
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I was making a skeleton summoner that stacked all the ways of armor stripping I could find, guess thats not going anywhere 
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Yea I’m sorry D: Just go for raw damage
There are several “numbers” that doesn’t scale correctly. That are kinda ok at start but are quite ineffective later.
For example, I started a thread in january to talk about the healing effect on skills or some passives nodes that gives a few hp, often with a low chance to occur (at least, penetration is always there). They are not really worth the investment at start, when you have a little more than 100hp and do next to nothing later, when you have more hp.
But there wasn’t much response to my thread.
More things should work as a percentage. Or have a way to improve them globaly.
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You’re very right!
And with all these feedback posts, the devs will have a lot to look at and think about, on how to rework or improve those mechanics. So maybe we don’t get a response right away, - they could also just be focused on other stuff - but most, if not all, of our posts get noticed by someone 
So keep the feedback coming. Everything helps. Can you link me to that old post? I’d like to see it.
For sure. Some mechanics scale better than others.
Thanks! I mean it had plenty of comments from other people, but the comments are closed now since it’s old. We also can’t expect every post to get replies from the devs. But they still see them. I agree that later on the flat health gain on hit mostly falls off late game and is taken over by leech in many cases.
I wasn’t talking only about the devs. There weren’t a lot of reactions from players. A few replies and that’s all.
Tbh. Outside of a few core players who are very active and involved in the development of the game at this early stage, I don’t think we can really expect robust and engaging conversations with the community at this point. Several of the suggestions I had also went completely silent. But it is what it is at this point.
So to those who are providing feedback and suggestions at this stage, thank you for doing what you do. So that the game can be so much better for the rest of us down the road 
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We had more feedback and communication from the devs then other dev studios ever offered O.o. On top of that those guys a pretty honest and don’t hide behind politicly correct speeches that leave people behind with more questions then answers.
I’m not talking about the devs. I’m responding to the observations that very few players are discussing the game. And that the (player) community is very small at the moment because of the development stage the game is in now.
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Discord is the way to go for this because discord people think very highly of themselfs and make fun about ppl who use forums or steam discussion. They only take reddit for another viable source ^^. So if you want a more living discussion go to the discord channel I always found someone there to discuss stuff with or game mechanics ^^.
I disagree though. Discord is amazing sure, and it has more of the community. But more in depth discussions tend to happen on the forums, I feel like the more dedicated people go here and discuss in more detail. It is also here most of the builds are shared, which often start discussions and questions. This is at least how it is with the Last Epoch community, Idk about others. It is very quick and nice to discuss mechanics in the Discord. On here people don’t have to be on at the same time, so they can discuss things over a period of time, on their own terms. When the Discord is busy, you will have to scroll up and you can lose track of discussions or miss them entirely. Here you can see the records, comments and posts and easily find what you’re looking for or start a new discussion.
It is also easier for the devs to follow discussions and join in on the forums, about bugs, feedback or suggestions. So I use the Discord and forums quite differently now.
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Hey guys, sorry if we don’t respond at times. The analysis that @ReimerhArts has provided is much appreciated and we’ve actually already had a small discussion on it internally. We acknowledge that some stats aren’t scaling well late game, that it is a problem, and we have some ideas that aren’t ready to be discussed yet publicly.
I’ll ask the team to acknowledge these threads more especially if we even bring it up as an internal meeting topic. Thanks again for the feedback guys!
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Thanks a lot!
Happy to provide in depth feedback and it’s exciting to hear that these are being discussed internally.
The basics here are that penetration should be percentage base. if you want to use a protection rating like you currently are, then what you’re doing is essentially saying that stacking penetration has diminishing returns on dps until the point when you make penetration negative, at which point each point of penetration becomes worth more than the previous point as far as dps increase goes. That’s fiiiiiiine enough but if enemies are getting waaaaay more protection than we can feasibly shred, then it’s not really a great system. Since every point you invest into penetration is actually less effective than previous points until that magic number which as the game currently is, we basically can’t hit.
Seperate but related Marked for death’s increased damage taken should probably more or less be the last calculation for determining damage. Add up all the flat/base dmg modifiers, multiply by increased damage modifiers, then multiply by the more multipliers, then figure in resists/penetration. Then multiply that by increased damage taken modifiers. If people aren’t seeing a noticible difference from 55% increased damage taken something is very wrong with the way the game calculates it, as that should be a very powerful modifier.
I find the math related to Damage Reduction very interesting and it’s something I’ve done lots of math on in all the games of this genre I play. I love finding ways to make characters as tanky as possible.
I’d like to offer some more math on this topic that may help with perspective, because people like to throw around “Diminshing Returns.”
The formula Last Epoch uses is based off a simpler formula found in other games.
Simple formula: Armour / (Armour + Special Value), where Special Value is the number required to get 50% damage reduction. ie: 50 Armour / (50 Armour + 50 Special) = 50% DR.
In this formula each point of Armour is worth as much as the last, even though each point of armour gives you a smaller percentage increase than the last. This is a fact. There are no Diminishing Returns. It is an illusion. Knowing how Effective Hit Points works will illuminate this truth.
Moving on to Last Epoch, the formula is: Armour / (Armour + Max Hit Points). Here you can see that the special value is now variable instead of constant. This changes very little, but some notable differences are:
Each point of maximum hit points are equal in EHP value to increases in Armour. In the simpler formula this is not true. Each point of armour would be worth more than each hit point.
So in Last Epoch increasing HP is better against ALL damage types, and increases Armour (or a specific resistance) is better against that damage type only.
Except… Increasing damage reduction is still strictly better even if your EHP is the same, because of how it relates to healing / regeneration.
In the simpler formula armour gets better the more health you have, making it better in pretty much all circumstances compared to health. In Last Epoch they are more equivalent even though armour still has circumstances where it is strictly better (in regards to healing). In fact your armour value is worse the more health you have, but this is actually an equalizer, rather than a strict downgrade to armour. So even though armour is nerfed, technically, it is still really good.
Moving on we get to penetration. In games where armour (and resistance) is basically the best form of mitigation penetration is really good. Practically the best way to multiply damage. In PoE and D2 it’s basically broken because resistances are too effective. Even worse when you get into negative multipliers because assuming each percentage is better than the last, you get exponential increases from 0% to negative percentages.
All games that use a formula based on the same one that Last Epoch uses has the same problem. Negative armour/resistance values have exponential effect where as positive values have linear effect. That’s not even getting into the divide by zero problem.
In order to fix this all of these problems, the formula needs to be changed to:
Armour / ( |Armour| + Special )
or in Last Epoch’s case: Armour / ( |Armour| + Hit Points)
Regardless, we’re talking about the value of penetration in Last Epoch’s current iteration.
I did some math and I think you’ll find that 200 armour shred is better than you think, even at a “2%” increase in damage.
Enemy has 10k HP, and you do 1k damage. Let us assume it has a positive armour value that doesn’t go below 0. If it did, we can assume damage even better, but we’ll ignore that.
200 armour shred is definitely an increase of 2% damage from 1000 to 1020. But you know what else is?
If you had a base damage of 100 it would take 900% increased damage to get 1000 damage. Or 1000% total damage. +20% damage is the same 2% damage jump.
As far as I’m aware 20% is pretty good.
If you had a base of 200 it would take 400% increased damage to get to 1000. That’s still a single 10% increase to get that same 2%.
So if you spend points and you get 200 armour shred, that’s about the same as a 10%~20% damage increase if your base damage is anywhere from 100-200. If it’s any less, it’s better. Not to mention it gets exponentially better if your target goes to negative armour.
So the complaint here is really that late game scaling slows down (which it should). Not that penetration is bad. 
Edit: Also it’s hard to scale penetration when it’s effectiveness changes depending on how strong you are, unless it scales with your character.
Another possible solution is to give enemies less health scaling and more armour/resist scaling just like a player. Then give you a penetration of a percentage of their armour/resist. To make your damage numbers look like they scale properly they could just report the enemy’s average EHP instead of real HP.
Edit 2: Dev confirmed the formula is functionally Armour / (|Armour| + Health Pool); negative armour values scale at the same rate as positive ones. So you actually don’t get an exponentially increase from negaitve values. I’m going to update the wiki to reflect this.
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I’m confused. The game refers to ‘shred armour’. Which reduces armour by 100, I assume, for each time the monster is hit. So will 20 minions hitting a target each second reduce armour by 2000 each second?
Is shred different to armour penetration?
From the combat calculations wiki, if we have a 1000 physical hit vs a 10K monster with 10K armour (is there any way to find the realistic estimate of monster armour?)
damage mitigated = 10K/20K = 50%
So we hit for 500 damage.
After 2K armour ‘shred’ , I assume the monster has 8K armour,
damage mitigated = 8K/18K = 44%
So we hit for 560 damage
If we manage to shred all the armour over, say 5s , then:
damage mitigated = 0, so we do full 1000 damage
Then what happens if the shred goes into negative armour?
mitigation = -2K/12K = -17% (is this 17% more damage?)
or even further into negative
mitigation = -10K/20K = -50% (this doesn’t seem linear?)
Penetration has a linear effect on reducing your targets EHP, not a linear effect on your damage. This is true until your target’s armour becomes negative value where it has a diminishing multiplier effect on their EHP.
Here’s a calculator I whipped up if you want to use it:
Edit: fixed part of the calculator.
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Cool calculator, thanks. So assuming armour shred is the same as armour pen, on a 10K HP, 5K armour target, 2000 pen results in 20 hits to kill them, instead of 22! In other words, armour pen becomes close to useless, as the title of the thread suggests.
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