Leafiara (prime)/Mechanical Musings/Frequently Asked Questions (and Ones That Should Be)

Preamble

As a mentor and also just as a player, I see and hear a lot of mechanical questions from people who feel that they've done something wrong with their training. Sometimes they've veered far off track from what they intended, but sometimes they've accomplished exactly what they wanted and just never knew that. Other times there's no right answer at all.

At first I was going to name this page something like "New Player Pitfalls" or "Common Mechanical Misconceptions," but while I started making my list, I realized that's not quite what I'm reviewing.

The most important thing I can say is that if it works for you, it works. The only mistakes we can truly make are when we both A) don't know why we've done what we've done and B) don't like the result. So my hope is that, when that happens, that's when you can come to this page and many others on the wiki to figure out what's gone awry.

On with the questions!

Do I Need Dodging on a Character in Full Plate with a Tower Shield?

This is one of the most fascinating questions I hear. There's so much packed into it, yet it's usually treated as a one-dimensional question--and, even stranger, the aspects of it that I believe are the most important to consider almost never get discussed.

So what am I talking about? Well, usually, when people ask this, it's because they've heard or read that evade DS, which comes almost entirely from training Dodging, gets cut into by heavier armor and heavier shields. So they ask a completely logical question:

If I'm wearing the heaviest armor and carrying the heaviest shield, does Dodging help me enough to be worth it anymore?

I've found it pretty rare that people do the math; they just see a double penalty and don't necessarily ask how severe it is. Ironically, I actually agree--albeit for entirely different reasons--that it's not worth doing the math, but I'm going to anyway for the sake of completeness.

Here's the Evade DS formula taken straight from the Evade DS page:

Base Value = Dodging Ranks + (AGI Bonus) + trunc(INT Bonus / 4)
Evade DS (Melee) = ((Base Value × Armor Hindrance × Shield Factor) - Shield Size Penalty)) × Stance Modifier

That's to calculate total Evade DS, but that's not the question we're asking--it's whether Dodging is worth training. That means we can actually ignore some of this, as Agility, Intuition, and Shield Size Penalty would all have exactly the same impact regardless of whether you had 0 or 303 Dodging. Once Agility and Intuition are out of the picture, this also means that Base Value = Dodging Ranks for our purposes.

So, to re-frame and simplify this:

Evade DS (Melee) per Dodging Rank = Armor Hindrance * Shield Factor * Stance Modifier

Let's say we have various characters in offensive stance and plug in some numbers. (These also come from the Evade DS page.)

Robes and Buckler Monk = 1 * 0.78 * 0.75 = 0.585 DS per Dodging rank
Full Plate and Tower Shield Paladin = 0.83 * 0.54 * 0.75 = 0.33615 DS per Dodging rank
Full Plate and Large Shield Paladin = 0.83 * 0.62 * 0.75 = 0.38595 Ds per Dodging rank
Brigandine and Medium Shield Ranger = 0.94 * 0.7 * 0.75 = 0.4935 DS per Dodging rank
Augmented Chain and Buckler Bard = 0.92 * 0.78 * 0.75 = 0.5382 DS per Dodging rank

I realize that including shield monks is odd because almost nobody trains that way, but you'll see why since now I'm going to invoke warriors and rogues, who have additional considerations of Light Armor Proficiency or Scale Armor Proficiency giving (respectively) a 120% or 115% multiplier to the end result.

Brigandine and Medium Shield Warrior = 0.94 * 0.7 * 0.75 * 1.15 = 0.567525 DS per Dodging Rank
Robes and Buckler Rogue = 1 * 0.78 * 0.75 * 1.2 = 0.702 DS per Dodging Rank

So what's the takeaway? Well, even if you're looking purely at the DS numbers of two extremes such as a light armor and buckler rogue (or warrior) vs. a full plate and tower shield paladin (or warrior), the paladin is still getting about 47.88% as much DS benefit from Dodging as the rogue. I believe that's more than what most people imagine when they hear about getting doubly penalized.

Like I said, though, this is all sort of moot because looking purely at DS numbers doesn't tell the whole story or anything close to it.

A point of DS isn't merely a point of DS because this isn't nearly that linear a game.

If you want to go down the rabbit hole of what in the world that means, have at it and I'll see you in four hours, but the short answer is that full plate (regardless of shield type) is also piling on low damage factor multipliers, which reduce raw damage, and high crit divisors, which increase the amount of raw damage an enemy needs to inflict to deal stronger criticals.

What that means is...

If you're just trying to philosophize your way through without even looking at the math, then the same logic that would say "I don't want Dodging because Evade DS benefits get doubly penalized by full plate and tower shields" gets cancelled out by identical logic that would say "I want Dodging because Evade DS benefits get doubly reinforced by full plate damage factor and crit divisor." 

But we still haven't actually answered the original question of whether you need Dodging while wearing full plate and using a tower shield, because it's such a multifaceted one. From a DS standpoint, you might very well not need it. Just because it adds extra DS--and possibly more DS than you might think--doesn't mean that extra DS will be helpful. Maybe you're already impenetrable to enemies' AS attacks, either in the literal way where they can't possibly hit you, or in the functional way where your DS is high enough that enemies' AS attacks do minor damage that doesn't slow you down.

So with all that said, the final answer ironically has nothing to do with any of that. The final answer comes from an underlying question that often isn't being considered by the person asking the original question, and that answer is:

If you wear full plate, you need to train something to mitigate the impact of enemy maneuvers unless you either avoid every enemy that uses them or don't mind getting consistently nuked by them.

That something could be Dodging. It could be Physical Fitness, Perception, or Combat Maneuvers. It could be overtraining Armor Use. Ideally it's several of the above, but if it's none of the above then you're probably in trouble. Out of these five options for improving maneuver defense, Dodging also adds DS, Physical Fitness also adds stamina and stamina regeneration, Perception is (for most professions) the cheapest, Combat Maneuvers also adds melee AS and maneuver points, and Armor Use adds armor specialization points. You decide which route suits you best!

Should I Stop at 24 Physical Fitness?

This one's a bit of an older mentality that I hear mostly from players returning after a long absence. 24 ranks of Physical Fitness, or somewhere around there, will max out the health increases you get from training this skill. Decades ago, that was probably the single largest benefit of training PF, but much has changed:

• Enemies more widely use maneuver attacks, which PF helps defend against.
• Combat maneuvers have gone through numerous revisions and finally arrived at a point where players are making heavy use of the active combat maneuvers--which means they need more stamina, and therefore more PF.
• Mstrikes, which use no stamina when they're outside a cooldown period, have largely given way to assault techniques and area of effect techniques, which always cost stamina but use RT more efficiently and typically offer additional temporary buffs.
• And if all of that isn't enough, every 10 Physical Fitness bonus now also reduces encumbrance by 1 pound.

So when should you stop?

Well, if you're extraordinarily selective about hunting grounds to avoid enemy maneuvers, don't use combat maneuvers or weapon techniques because you're a casting pure, and rarely get encumbered because you're a giantman or dwarf, then sure, maybe stopping at 24 still makes sense.

For everyone else, the benefits from going to 1x, 2x, or even 3x are large and many, so it's just a matter of whether other options competing for your training points are even better--and that's a question only you can answer.

Questions to be Added Later

• How Much Ambush Do I Need?
• How Should I Split My Spell Ranks While Leveling?