Physical Damage vs Magic Damage (in General)

I recently switched my TOJ on my character "A Melon Named Harold" to a TOI.

My score immediately skyrocketed from about 200k to almost 350k.
I find it ridiculous that my character now has a Score/PR ratio of over 1.5 with no NW invested into him (with the exception of some basic armor and the TOI) and other Tank based characters around my level (who have perfectly sound strats) often struggle to keep their Scores above their PR.

I think there are two reasons for this:

1) I think the CBF is the main culprit and has caused a tank unfriendly environment to develop in the top ranks. It is almost impossible for a Tank to be viable without requiring a CBF itself.

2) Magic damage is very high compared to that of Tanks. MY TOI does about 5 times the damage of my TOJ did and that's AFTER a large AMF has been cast on it, on top of that it is immune to the deadly CBF's. Even big tanks with large weapons struggle to match the 50k+ damage my TOI can inflict each round.

Look at the Score/PR ratios of the characters with big TOF's, TOS's and TOI's, and then compare it to those with TOJ's and TOA's. The difference in Score/PR ratios is disturbing.

In my opinion something needs to be done.

something should be done.....but that will go against you and i am thinking of changingfrom TOJ to a TOS.

final verdict: i am confused

People keep complaining that they have such high NW's and aren't doing any damage.

I say CB2 still isn't that old, and your NW still isn't that high. Yah, sure, maybe it's high for where the game is at. But the game is still mage heavy, the only thing that will balance this is time. As more time goes by, the game gains more resources, NW's go up, tanks take over. Just wait for the scale to tip.

Regardless of NW, one of the ways of judging in CB1 that your character was doing well was to have a score at around twice your pr. So even with your change you aren't doing quite that well yet. CB2 does appear to be different so far as regards score/pr. A lot of people (myself included) seem to struggle with maintaining a score that much higher than pr. But if you are then you should be proud of it, not worried about it! =)

Also, there is another reason why you're score has gone up so much. Your strat change has meant that a lot of the mage teams who could beat you previously can't now. A lot of them - my team Raven for instance - were at a much lower pr than you so lowered your score dramatically more than it should have been. You're probably now at the score that you should have been all along. So possibly nothing at all to do with magic damage vs physical....

For a general comparison;

fighting at my level a little over 200K strength + a [73 x 40] weapon (just under 1 Mil NW) deals about 20-30K a hit. With a dexterity of around 180K and a pth of +20 I do get about a fifth of my attacks as double hits.

For no NW, a DD spell of 200K would do around 100K every melee round. Some would fire for less in ranged as well.

So I HAVE to increase my NW to do damage equivalent to a mage at my PR level.

That or make me double more easily.

And triple from dexterity alone versus 20 dex mages/enchanters.

Good GL, now you know what you need to do. Now move along.

Yes I think raising the number of hits possible from dex alone from 1.6 to say 2.5 would be a good idea

GL, my tank - a quarter the size of yours in terms of strength with a (74x40) katana is hitting on average 12-16k per hit against some opponents. Endurance seems to cut that down to an average of 8k. But really we shouldn't be so close in terms of damage output. Maybe the scaling of damage output needs to be looked at? I'm confused now - a tank 4 times the size of mine only does twice the damage? =/

Well doubling STR only increases damage by about 40% and you have similar sized weapons so twice the damage sounds about right

Yup.

So for the same amount of xp (my Strength doubling, a mages DD doubling) I gain 40% damage increase, they gain 100%.

But you say, I get to make up that 60% gap with NW.

And it's true. Give me enough NW and I'll surpass that gap and start to do more damage than my equal PR mage counterpart.

Then upgrade costs will get crippling. I won't be able to increase any further.

And without dimishing returns the mage will start to take the lead again.

If nothing is changed, that is how it will happen.

In time, tanks will get stronger. And people will proclaim the riegn of mages is no more.

Then everyone will get stuck at x100, x150 whatever.

More time will pass and mages will take the forefront again.

One thing I left of the comparison, my [73x40] weapon is also named. :)

Yes but remember increasing your weapon from x100 to x101 gives more damage increase than from x50 to x51 as weapon damage is tied (somehow) to the weapon's NW. This will substantially reduce the diminishing returns factor on weapon damage.

Ah.. Good point I'd missed!

I think it's a question of timescale.

Short term: Mages win cause theres little net worth in the game as a whole.

Mid term: Tanks win, NW is enough to bridge the gap.

Long term (could be years in the future): Mages win as their damage is linear.

GL, the data in the thread A Quick Dexterity Analysis suggest that with a DX of 180K and NO pth, you should get around 2/3 of attacks as double hits (against chars with 20DX). Yet, you said that you get only 1/5 of attacks as double hits. There are three cases: either Chet's (and others) analysis was wrong, or your data are wrong (or I misunderstood what you meant), or things changed a lot, and nobody noticed. In the second case, double hits are already a lot easier than you say...

Another point: against a single mage (again, with base DX), the same data strongly suggest that a DX of 180K is (at least) 80K too much.

:( It was more of a gut feeling than emperical analysis on my part... I suppose I should do some testing on my multiple hits! ;)

One other thing to consider also.

In armor helping reduce damage, it reduces physical damage far better/more than it reduces magical damage.

My wall has an AC of 203 but only 135 of that AC works vs magic damage. Thats about 13% more damage I take vs mages.

And don't forget there's no spell to protect you against Magic damage.. oh wait.


The big bows do more damage when they double hit (which is just about always) than my Big CoC (even with no AMF) and a lot more with a triple hit.

There's also a spell to protect against physical attacks...

Bows get a damage increase from Archery and Belegs in addition to strength. But the trade is that they only hit 3 rounds out of 25.

and archers dont have as much exp to spend on hp

And i think that spell also protects against Magic.


If we replaced Belegs for Tulks and BoM, Archery for Bloodlust, and ELB for Big ol ELS.. i think the damage would be about the same with the added possibility of VA and more AC.

I have the biggest DD damage in the game (I'm sure) I'm not sure i've broken 200K damage. We could easily have a Melee weapon doing over 100K damage if people spent the same on Melee as they do on Ranged, and this would come with many doubles and a fair few triples... hence more damage than i do with 45% of my experience pumped into a single form of damage (and if someone brings up UC tanks again, i'm going to cry).


The real reason Big melee Tanks are disadvantaged at the moment is quite simple: Cloak of the Balrog Flame.

Stupid Cloak of the Balrog Flame

Most Powerful Blow: 98,456

Thats Gnu, he doesn't worry much about ranged damage, so i have to assume that blow is coming from the 8 million NW Morg he's currently borrowing. He doesn't even have a ToA. He certainly doesn't pump 45% of his experience into Strength and GS.

Wow! That's some big damage with only 56K Strength!! :) His weapon is the largest MH in the game though, [84x80].

Gnu, if you don't mind, how much is your MH's NW?

Gives me hope for melee damage!

CT, The spell I was talking about was EC, as I'm sure you were originally talking about AMF and not protection! ;)

Archery and BL are comparable, both modify damage (although I think arch gives +40% and BL +20% - at max levels) but belegs are different to tulks (belegs increase damage like arch/BL while tulks add to str) and both types of tank could use a BoM to up strength.

But physical damage is easier to counter. With Gnu's tank hitting a double versus a 200K damage DD spell (about 400K level) if we look at xp counters, a 400K level AMF reduces the DD spell by around 40%. An EC around a quater of that size will reuce 100% of Gnu's damage. Damage reduction from AC is also larger for physical damage and as they hit more, but for less, ToE's work better (can be of a lower level) against them than magical attacks.

The trade off? VA. That's about it. And you need to heavily invest in you melee weapon.

And I didn't mention CBFs once!

A 100k EC would only lower STR and DEX by about 36k each, which would not reduce melee damage to 0.

In my experiences with EC it is probably the most useless of the Enchant Offense Spells, I had 100% of all experience trained into EC at one point and still there were some TOA tanks my PR or less that still had positive strength, and believe me Tanks can still inflict pretty good damage even with only a small amount of ST.

In my opinion AMF is a better "anti-mage" spell than EC is an "anti-tank" spell - not only does it negate more damage than EC but it also returns some of it.

I think the main reason that mages seem to do much better score wise is the CBF - it doesn't effect CoC or MM at all but decimates Tanks - look at the character Magus, he has a +90 and +71 CBF on his minions - how is a tank meant to compete against that without either a CBF itself or a disproportionally high NW?

Sorry, the character Magnus not Magus :P

Doh!

I'm full of mistakes today....

Make that an EC 1/2 the size of the AMF.

Sacredpeanut, I think that like AMF against mages is not meant to obliterate completely magic damage, so EC against tanks is not meant to negate completely physical damage.
This does not mean that the opposite would not be nice (we could see for instance chars where all experience goes into AMF, in the same spirit as your Melon worked with EC), but that is not the case.
On the other hand, a moderate amount of EXP trained in a OE can be very useful.
In the current environment, where mages are (much?) more common than tanks, AMF is more powerful than EC.
However, with the recent changes, namely the nerfing of single ToE mages and the boost of melee damage, I expect that tanks will become more common in the near future, and consequently EC more useful.
The damage backslash of AMF is good against a mage minion in a multi-minion char,
(for instance, my mage regularly dies of AMF), but against a single mage is not that much (at least, in my opinion).
Similarly, a sizeable EC can obliterate a tank in a 4-minion char, but could be insufficient against a single tank: I do not see this as a weakness of EC compared with AMF.
Of course, a nerf of the cloak is also desiderable, (we are already in the 5th day of May, and no nerfing of our beloved cloak in sight) otherwise tanks will continue to die too easily against caped opponents, and no tanks could hope to get among the top chars (or at least to stay there for long).
By the way, what do you mean by "pretty good damage"? If I am not mistaken, your HP where around 1K, so ANY amount of damage would have been fatal for your char.