Protection - No, really. (in General)

Is it worth training this skill? It seems, at least from my perspective, to be entirely worthless. Why? Because any seasoned CB vet will tell you, you need a good deal of AC in order to make any significant difference in the damage done to you. So my question is: why does protection give so little actual 'protection'?

I understand that protection in many cases is the crowning "I'm invulnerable" achievement to many high-power characters, as adding a simple "20" ac is unfathomably expensive. The problem with this, is that this skill does very little for anyone else.

I think protection should be expanded in complexity to provide significant protection to those who use it without any other protection, and be limited to provide only limited "extra" AC to those that already have near-invulnerable status already.

Here's an example:

Heres the hypothetical set of minions I'm working with - Heavy Tank 350AC - Mage 110 AC - Enchanter 100 AC - Enchanter 50 AC

Then I train protection up to some ungodly level on the last enchanter (27 in this case). Protection gives all my characters an extra boost of AC on all my characters. However, the boost on heavy tank is extra special as I just added many millions of dollars of AC for free.

All my other characters now have a little more AC, but nothing to write home about. Now what would happen if protection were changed to give a "variable" amount of AC depending on the minion? Here is what I'm proposing:

Protection (according to level) adds a base level of AC that has a much higher maximum then the current protection.. something like a max that caps out around 100 or 80 or something. This number is then reduced according to the armor AC already present on the minion. So a minion with no armor would get the full amount, while a minion with huge amounts of AC would only get a percentage of that AC.

The (x) on protection is a flat %age reduction of the damage taken.

So at level 27 I believe its the equivalent of having ~128 AC on every minion. Protection would actually reduce less damage the more AC you put on a minion, since I believe AC reduction is applied first.

So, the "effect' that I see mentioned everywhere on protection is actually just a magic number equating to some level of damage reduction?

http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001OXG

Heres what I was looking for :D Give that a read, i think it will explain it with more success.

Every time I add 1% protection on my char, I start winning some of the fights fights that were ending up as draws when people attack me. It lasts for about 24 to 48 hours then I have to train another % to keep up.

Coupled with a ToE and AMF, Protection is very useful to my single minion character. I can't wear a lot of armor because of the tattoo and the armor I do wear is mostly elven, so it provides little or no AC.

Also, I am sure that those using familiars really like the effect of protection.

It already somewhat works in the way you've described above.

Say you have a protection level of 20, right now we assume that this reduces damage by about 20% after reduction from AC.

If you have a heavy tank with 300 AC, which reduces damage by 60% lets say. You also have a enchanter with 100 AC, which reduces damage by 20% lets say.

If each gets hit with a blow of 100k, your protection on the tank only reduces the damage that he takes by 8k. However your protection on the mage reduces the damage he takes by 16k.

Well I feel a little silly writing this all up, if protection already does what I described wanting protection to do. haha!

The damage reduction order is:

Mage Shield (MgS)
Elven Hauberk (EH) (only magical reduction at this phase)
AC
Endurance
Protection


So Protection has more impact when there's less of other types of damage reduction. However, the total damage reduced at the end of the calculation will be less when it's not combined with other types.

The biggest weakness to Protection is really its biggest gain. You can train to 27, as per your example, with a paltry amount of XP. You can also dispel it quite easily. You can't go above 33, and everything trained over that is merely to deal with Dispel.

As others have said, the Protection effect is no longer just a flat AC amount as it was in previous versions of Carnage Blender. It is instead, to the best of anyone's knowledge, just a straight percentage. An effect of 27 will reduce 27% of the remaining damage after everything else takes place.

Where does AMF end up in the order? Is it applied first (when it is cast) or at a certain point of each round?

AMF reduces the damage potential for the spell before any other forms of reduction are involved.

MiniMem (Trillion) 24.243.158.195 QBVerifex (Hot Pants) $20 -- $20 word 4:54 PM EDT

Just to add onto what Mian said, you can see that AMF is an enchantment, now you know that enchantments are cast pre-battle, so after all enchantments are cast the battle begins. So any questions similar to that that do involve ED/EO can be answered easily enough.

Sorry for the semi-pointless post. :)