Explain SS please :( (in General)

I understand that pre-changelog SS would function at maximum armor bonus at base with a 20 hp minion. Now that it is an ED, I'm a bit confused. If the minion that is training SS has only 20 hp, do I only need a base SS to give bonus to all my minions? OR does it need to be as large as my largest HP minion (1/8 of my largest hp minion) to function as it should?

And does AS affect the amount of SS I would need?

The effect applies as if you would have the old SS trained to the casting level on all minions.
If you want SS effect to be at full, you need to cast it (after enemy DM) at a high enough level for the minion with most HP in your list.

If all your minions are 20 base HP minions, and the enemy has no DM casting, then yes, all you need is a base SS.

Hmm... AS didn't use to count for SS when it was a skill, but I'm not sure about the current version... I tend to believe it's still just base HP that matters, but I'm not certain because I didn't get to test it.

my team has 4 minions and a jiggy. the minions all have 20 hp and i use ablative shield as well as a base steel skin.

the post battle stats show an innate armor effect of 1 on the 4 minions if no dm is present. the jig shows no effect. when dm is present, all minions show no effect for innate armor.

dudemus - when I fight you it says it casts for 121

i lied - 116

hmm, i was going by the post battle stats table, i never thought to look for it in the battle log. i will check that out though.

it does indeed say 116 in the play-by-play. i have no clue what that number means?

AS does not count for casting SS. However when you consider DM rules at the moment, you probably need more.

The number that is casted is easy (116), this number is the level of your SS and Effect number.

example, you would need an effect 125 to cast a successful SS of 1.0 on a 1000 hp minion.

I would also like to point out to my own thread about this:
http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002dgq

As it seems no one gets SS as an ED.

"Inate armor" is supposedly the added armor from the SS effect.
At least, on my single tournament minion, when I had SS trained (not to full effect, but noticeably high), that's what it represented.
Apparently, AS *does* matter in the current SS implementation... if it wouldn't matter, you should see wildly different "inate armor" values on your 20 HP minions, depending on their AC.

More Henk 119 1 20
AS Henks 0 1 20
AMF Henks 0 1 20
GA Henks AS 206 1 1,384,969

numbers after the name are Armor Class, Innate Armor, base HP


More Henk AS cast Ablative Shield on all friendly Minions (601455)
Henks AMF found no valid targets on which to cast Antimagic Field
Henks AMF cast Steel Skin on all friendly Minions (150)
Henks GA cast Guardian Angel on all friendly Minions (?)

Wrong sickone, you wouldn't see any different lvls of innate armor on your minions with different AC lvls as you can clearly see...

Like I said in my thread. This is how SS works in relation with AC.

You need 1/8th of the level in SS in correlation with your hp.

So a 20hp minion would only need a small amount of SS.
As you can see above the first 3 minions have 20 HP. As you can clearly see, 600k of AS boosted those minions, yet innate armor has not changed. Even on the minion with more AC

This is what I think/found out about SS:
Currently all AC works like the following 100 AC without SS acts like 80 AC or 80% efficiency

As soon as SS is cast to 1 innate armor) the AC is back to 100% efficiency.

the same reason why walls suck now.

400 AC cost about 40mil to get
with 80% efficiency
320 which is roughly 23mil.

without SS your wall is nerfed by roughly 17mil

And to get to 400 without SS you need about 500 AC. Which cost about the same amount of all the liquid assets in CB

More Henk 119 1 20
AS Henks 0 1 20
AMF Henks 0 1 20
GA Henks AS 206 0 1,384,969

Thats better, the big HP AC minion gets no innate armor with an effect of 150

the many times henks is flagged is just stupid, please install an adaptive spell checker, or remove this function

"Wrong sickone, you wouldn't see any different lvls of innate armor on your minions with different AC lvls as you can clearly see"

Then explain to me why I was seing "Inate armor 28" or similar on my ~230 AC single minion T35 character back when I had SS trained at a below-optimal level whenever the enemy wasn't casting DM on me ?

" "Wrong sickone, you wouldn't see any different lvls of innate armor on your minions with different AC lvls as you can clearly see"

Then explain to me why I was seing "Inate armor 28" or similar on my ~230 AC single minion T35 character back when I had SS trained at a below-optimal level whenever the enemy wasn't casting DM on me ? "


I didn't see those numbers, so I can't.
And have you tested the same amount of SS on a 20 HP minion? Was this higher then 1? How much SS did you have? How much HP did the minion have? Please post these number before you post a statement like the above...

And besides you answered my question with a question which isn't an answer, so you still need to answer my first question...
Please explain my results?

And I would like to say that this only adds to the confusion, no one seem to really know how SS works. Can an admin (Jon, NS) give us a clear explanation since the wiki is so clearly wrong and the changelog does not give a clear enough answer..

Current stats on retired T35 minion...

Firepower
Hit Points: 1,059,985
Armor: 248
Strength: 11,178
Dexterity: 10,286
Armor Proficiency, Cone of Cold, Antimagic Field, Guardian Angel

At the time when I tried out SS, if I remember correctly (although quite vaguely since I switched crazy strategy after crazy strategy), I was at somewhere around 500k HP (give or take 100k), with a base AC in the vicinity of 230 (might have been 220, might have been 235).
I just started allocating XP into SS, and at most I got up SS to was smewhere around 50k raw levels (slightly less effective due to armor penalties) before I untrained it and got GA instead.

The "inate armor" figure was growing steadily as I was pumping more XP into SS (when enemy didn't cast DM, that is), it started at "inate armor : 1" with a very small SS level, and the highest I remember it getting to was 28.

Bottom line, "Inate armor : 1" can not possibly mean "100%" but instead simply "+1 AC from SS effect", since otherwise a number higher than one would not make sense.
And the only reasonable explanation for you getting 1 on your 20 HP minions but 0 on your natural HP minion is the fact you have double the AS-granted HP trained as natural HP on that large minion, so only the AC on the 20 HP minions is rounded up - that can only mean AS-granted HP matter too.
It's a simple chain of logical deductions.

As for proof ?
Well, in your case, it should be pretty simple.
If you train your SS a bit more, you should soon notice that at least one one of the minions that 1 will turn into 2, and maybe eventually the one on your large minion will also display a 1.
I suppose a 20k into SS or so will guarantee you get a noticeable difference from "inate armor : 1".

Train it to 1/8 of the casted AS level, and I am willing to bet you will see an inate armor of 25% base AC on the 20HP minions (but only about 8% AC on the large one).
That is, if you would take the bet.

As for why the two 0 base AC minions still display an inate armor of 1 for you, I can only chalk it to a display bug.

Bottom line, the easiest way to do it is train some more SS on that minion, see what happens. Worst case scenario, you lose 2% of 20k-ish levels, which is quite trivial for certainty on how SS works nowadays.

when jon first changed it, i saw an innate armor number different than 1, since that time though i have only seen the 1.

anyone else seen or is seeing more than 1? screenshot that if possible please.

If we all ignore the fact that SS exists then nobody would have a problem : )

where did you get the idea that AS has anything to do with SS?

The wiki says:
(Train to 1/8th of the minion's trained Hit Points (HP) for full effect (Effect: 1.00); excluding any HP gained from Ablative Shield (AS). Example: A 20 HP minion boosted by one million HP from AS would only need 2.5 levels (20HP/8=2.5) of Steel Skin to gain full effect.) not sure if this is still true we'll see. :)

The changelog says Added "Steel Skin" skill; at a level of 1/5 your HP, it will boost AC effectiveness by 25% (that is, back to the old AC effectiveness, since 1.25 * 0.8 = 1)
Decreased Steel Skin requirements to 1/8 of HP to max.

No where is mentioned that AS influences SS in anyway, so where did you get this notion?

Secondly I'm also running very similar stats on one minion,
you said that even with a small SS on your T35 minion you got an innate armor of 1. I however with a very small amount of AC don't get anything on that minion.

"As for why the two 0 base AC minions still display an inate armor of 1 for you, I can only chalk it to a display bug."

Not really, because this is the way I think it works, SS based on HP gives those 0 AC guys 1 innate armor.

And here is proof about my claims. Next time test it before you make claims. Bloody costs me 20k mpr thanks...


Even with AS the effect lvl of SS is clearly higher, yet the number of innate armor DOES NOT RISE!!!!
its stay at 1!

RESTORING 100% efficiency!!!!

http://img413.imageshack.us/my.php?image=naamloosxl6.png

with a base SS:
http://img255.imageshack.us/my.php?image=naamloos2uy5.png

The big HP minion get nothing this time...

But if its a real "display bug" I would be surprised.

But its still inadequate

sometimes display only applies for the last minion in your order. Like when displaying the AS effect, if the last minion has an AoF, it'll show the greater amount.

Ok, I wasted some BA in order to test this on a regular character myself, tried to recreate at a miniature scale the same conditions as on the tournament character.
Had the single minion at 70 base armor, 22 HP and a base (casting at 85) SS.

Henk Bres, you are right, on a REGULAR character, it only displays as "Inate Armor 1" and that's it.
However, I am quite certain that on the TOURNAMENT character, when I had him with SS, it *did* display also higher numbers for "Inate armor", up to 28 or so.

This can only mean that the Inate Armor display is bugged (in which case the previous conclusion, that AS matters, made while assuming the Inate Armor display is working fine could very well be false).
Which only raises a different problem : how the heck are we supposed to test the actual AC granted if the end-battle display is bugged, and all blows in battle are randomized ? It would take a LOT of effort and wasted BA...

quite certain = not sure at all. M

My test results clearly show an innate armor of 1 and nothing higher.
My tests also show AS has 0 effect on SS.
My test also shows AC has 0 effect on SS.

And im quite certain the effect of innate armor can't be higher then 1, because it does give armor its like protection (you know that spell that got deleted) and only restores the armor back to 100% efficiency (you know it got nerfed to 80% efficiency http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002Srj )

And nothing got changed to SS except for the 1/8th thingie of natural HP and of course it got an ED.

What is so hard to believe about these facts and you still think SS on a tourney character got a higher number? And all of a sudden SS only shows 1 all the time? Come on a bug like this just doesn't happen overnight...

You've tested it yourself...

"still think SS on a tourney character got a higher number?"

There's a fine difference between "think" and "remember".
And no, "quite certain" means exactly what it says.
Also, what kind of indicator only displays either "1" or "0" on something with variable effectiveness ? If nothing else, that alone should throw up some warning signals.

Henk, I think whoever said they got two either miss looked or more likely they were joking.

I'm getting Innate Armor +19 from my tattoo of endurance, which as you all know, gives SS to the wearer. So I'm not so sure Innate Armor 1 equals 100%. I can't really explain it. Maybe the casted SS works differently? But it doesn't occur for all forms of SS, that much is for certain.

See ?
Finally, somebody ELSE except just me saw an "Inate armor" higher than 1.
And this time on a regular character, not a tourney char.

Can we get a screen shot about your claims? Not just words here?

Why isn't casted SS higher then 1? which clearly showed in my screen shots?

If innate armor is higher then 1, why would there be a hp requirement for it before it gets even cast?
Why should SS, if innate gets casted higher then 1, behave the same way like protection did? (you know that spell that got deleted?)

What is this post then all about?: http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002Srj

How does SS improve AC efficiency if it gets casted higher then 1? (or restoring back to 100%?)

Why would SS give a higher number then 1 if all it does is to restore efficiency?

And please please please do not answers these question with unproven claims or questions

"Also, what kind of indicator only displays either "1" or "0" on something with variable effectiveness ? If nothing else, that alone should throw up some warning signals."

Because dear Sickone, if you even read my explanations on how SS works you would see that this make more sense then a higher number casted by SS.

if something is restored to 100% efficiency (which is clearly stated by the changelog) and needs a minimal of 1/8th of hp to work

Everything below the requirements should indeed cast 0 because you can't restore it back to 90%.

Its either 100% or 80% nothing in between.

Or the whole SS is bugged in such a way that all of my assumptions about SS or wrong and SS is bugged in such a way that it doesn't work at all and of course the other possibility is that SS is just away to reduce your AC efficiency by 0.8 or a nice 13mil nerf if you got read that example about the 400 AC thingie.

I would also like to add that you, sickone, have yet to make one claim about how SS works... You only said SS could give a higher number but you didn't explain how this higher number helps AC in anyway.

and no SS is not the deleted spell called protection because it simply does not add armor, it only restores it as you can clearly see in the changelog...

"Can we get a screen shot about your claims? Not just words here?"

I'd love to be able to go back in time and make screenshots of that tournament character, because that was the only one I had which displayed it like that. Like I've said, the attempt to recreate a similar scenario on a normal character resulted in nothing.
I guess we'll have to wait for Solare to post a screenshot.


"What is this post then all about?: (changelog)"

It simply states that the AC damage reduction was kicked down to 80% of previous level, and that SS can raise AC *up to* +25% from the current value (with 0.8*1.25 equaling 1, in other words an equivalent effectiveness to the old one).
Wasn't the adjusted AC being displayed back when you had SS trained ? As in, if you had a base 400 AC and SS to max effect, it would display as 500 AC ?


"How does SS improve AC efficiency if it gets casted higher then 1? (or restoring back to 100%?)"

I don't know where you get the "restore back to 100%" idea, since it was quite clear from the SS-as-skill days that "getting same effectiveness as before the change" simply meant having +25% AC.

You are probably referring to http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002cTv ?
Or, more precisely, where you asked
"Henks AMF cast Steel Skin on all friendly Minions (100),
I get 1 innate armor on the first 3 of my minions, however none on the last one. Last minion has more base HP then the other 3.
Is this correct?"
and Jon answered a laconic "yes".
He most likely simply meant that yes, at such low SS levels, you should get a noticeable effect only on the minions with very little HP, he probably didn't look to see your first three minions are 20 HP each, nor did he check their base AC.


"Because dear Sickone, if you even read my explanations on how SS works you would see that this make more sense then a higher number casted by SS."

Your explanation on how you THINK SS works, you mean, based on a hasty reply Jon gave you. After that "yes", he didn't say a word in the entire thread afterwards.


"I would also like to add that you, sickone, have yet to make one claim about how SS works"

My claim is that it ***should*** display the ADDED AC on that particular minion. I already said something to that extent in this thread.
It makes sense, because:
* it's not an all-or-nothing effect, but gradual
* AC + inate armor = old SS-as-skill AC

[URL=http://img105.imageshack.us/my.php?image=innatearmorba5.gif][IMG]http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/7790/innatearmorba5.th.gif[/IMG][/URL]
I hope this turns out as a link. Sickone tried to give me instructions as how to post it. Dunno if this is going to work.

Nope...
I give up...

Maybe this?
http://img105.imageshack.us/my.php?image=innatearmorba5.gif
Testing...

It did, though the screenshot showed a bit more than just Carnage Blender.

hehe finally a picture! wow ive been proven wrong here. This means SS now really sucks! If this is correct (and not a bug of some sorts, which could explain the ltoe bug) then SS is useless...

But it still doesn't explain my questions. If this is true then protection is back with an HP requirement, which sucks. And AC is nerfed down to 80% which also sucks. Just great

is his only +19 because of the ToE's innate SS bonus?

if the only ones seeing a number other than 1 are toe users, then it is likely a display issue. i think it is probably that regardless, as jon stated in the changelog thread that it showing the 1 was correct.

"But it still doesn't explain my questions. If this is true then protection is back with an HP requirement, which sucks. And AC is nerfed down to 80% which also sucks. Just great."

Well, that's how SS used to work as a skill too.
And it's not exactly like Protection per se, it's highly dependant on your existing AC.
All SS does (when trained to full effectiveness) is to bring back the AC effect to the effect it used to have prior to the AC effectiveness nerf.
current AC + max SS effect Inate Armor = old AC

Now, the main question is, does the Inate Armor equivalent AC count as base AC or enchanted AC ? Or a bit of both (same proportion as pre-SS AC) ?
The second question is when will we see the Inate Armor display bug fixed.
And the third question is why does a base 36 AC character (with a ToE on) get 19 Inate Armor, when theoretically the max he should get is only 9 ? But I guess that's more of the same display bug problem.

"jon stated in the changelog thread that it showing the 1 was correct"

That's highly interpretable.
Like I've mentioned above, the question to which he answered "yes" could have been interpreted by him in a hurry to mean "is it normal to have some inate armor on a low HP minion with a base SS but no inate armor on a minion with a lot of HP when AS is involved?"
We need him to re-clarify.

well i guess that since we are still having this discussion, we do need clarification.

my interpretation is that the steel skin effect is either on or off. a 1 represents that the effect is on. when no number is present, it is a zero and is off.

the toe display issue is just a bug and since it is more than 1, it can be assumed to be on. it grants no more of an effect, it is still just on.

it would be great to get some clarification though as well as an indication of what the number means in the play by play. that is where i am at a loss.

Does anyone actually remember how exactly the SS effect was displayed back when SS was a skill ?
Here's a hint, it *WASN'T* an "all or nothing" effect, it simply ramped up AC linearly and smoothly from 100% (at next to nothing trained compared to HP) to 125% (at 1/5 HP trained).
Does nobody else remember seing a ~500 AC on any of the top characters ? Not sure which one, but somebody else must remember that too !

The only changes made to SS were to transfer it from the skills slot to the ED slot, and lessen the needed amount for full effect from 1/5 to 1/8.

At no time did Jon say it was turned into an on/off effect. Heck, even the phrasing regarding the ToE ("This can stack with the spell up to the normal max effect."), emphasis on "max effect", indicates it's a gradual thing.

The next line in the changelog (SS effect is now shown in post-battle stats as "Innate Armor") can therefore be interpreted in one single possible way, the one I keep repeating - that it will display the added AC (from 0% to max 25% of AC on the minion, rounded as integer) for each minion individually. The reason to do it in post-battle stats is because SS can be DMed, nothing else - it would have made no sense to keep it as an "inspect" visible AC change.

Hmm, ok, one error I must admit already - not sure it was ever 1/5 needed instead of 1/8, no idea where I got that from (must be pretty tired, it's almost morning here).

i am basing most of my assumption on the post by jon in that thread. in one lord bob asks:

"So does it have the same effect, but to the whole team?

So now I can train a base Steel Skin on one minion and it effects three other 20 HP minions for max? "

jon quotes the top question and answers yes to it and while he doesn't also quote the second question, if it was erroneous i would assume that he would have corrected him as he was obviously reading the posts.

base affecting three other 20 hp minions for max, and showing a 1 for innate armor certainly seems to me to mean and on or off effect.

i thin what some of the confusion may be is how the toe works with it. i think what is going on is that the toe gives the percentage of its xp to ss. if that is enough to make it be on, then it is on. if not, then that will stack with trained ss to bring it up to the threshold to turn the effect on.

it is truly all conjecture though until clarification is given...so consider this a bump for clarification! ; )

Ok, now consider this too (even if nobody seemed to believe me so far)

On my tournament character (T35), one of the final types of crazy strategies I played with was a high-AC mage (out of crummy shop-available armor types), the only clear things on it were AP as skill and a lot of HP with some moderate amount of a random DD spell.
At one time, among the things I used on it was SS as an ED.
WHEN I used SS as an ED, the more I trained it, the HIGHER the Inate Armor number grew. It did start as Inate Armor 0 (actually, it's didn't say 0, it said "Inate Armor : ", just an empty space), then it became Inate Armor 1 very soon, then increasingly higher numbers as I trained more SS (in battles where I had no enemy DM, of course - where enemy DM cancelled my SS, the whole Inate Armor section simply dissapeared).

The highest number I saw under "Inate Armor" was 28, IIRC, and at the moment I had somewhere a bit under half of the needed "max effect" SS (after armor penalties and for the amount of HP I had at the time), with a base AC of around 230 - which sounds just about right.
I untrained SS and retrained GA afterwards.
Trying to reproduce the setup on a non-tournament character yielded no results, with only "Inate Armor 1" ever displayed even if it should have listed a 17 or 18 at the time.

even if that could be reproduced, it would still not prove whether it was a display bug and the effect was still either on or off or if the spell has a range of effect. so once again we await clarification from higher ups.

I've chatmailed Jon about it but I have a feeling I'll only be seeing a "message undelivered" thingy :(

nightstrike seems to be the more communicative one at the present time, ya might want to shoot him a cm as well.

Done.

any word?

Both received the chatmail, but I have no idea if they actually read it, as there was no response and no post in here.
Then again, they could be looking into it some time later and have no time to post anything right now :(

display bug is fixed. effect should range from 0 to 1.

effect applies proportionally to base and bonus AC.

effect is calculated bast on [real, maximum] HP of the minions it is cast on, not the caster. So 5 minions could have 5 different effects.

so if I have 20 hp, 100 AC, and a big enough SS to maximize the effect, I should have an innate armour of 1 and just assume I have 125 AC?

no, you still have 100 AC but when you train SS it actually works like 100 AC and not like 80 AC

oooooo dang ok thanks!

119 AC after SS, in equip it also shows as 119, assuming this is correct.

But does the AC I got equipped also display as 95/96 AC if SS isn't trained? good question...

I changed the Innate Armor line to show how much (total) AC it is providing.

sweet, thanks Jon!

wonderful :)

just to be 100% clear, you only need to train SS relative to trained hp, not AS granted HP right?

"effect is calculated bast on [real, maximum] HP of the minions it is cast on"

best quote I can find :)

ok nice changes. Time to edit the wiki.