I put together a table that shows how much damage mitigation I can get for my gold. I looked at items that increased armor and also items that gave a boost to dodge. They both do the same thing: reduce the amount of damage you take from auto-attacks (towers, creeps, demigod's standard attack).
I didn't include activated abilities like the Orb of Defiance's invulnerability or that Sludge item.
This table will show incremental mitigation which is how much more mitigation you're getting because of the armor. So if I move from 10% mitigation to 15% mitigation, my incremental mitigation is 5%. It also shows how much mitigation you receive per 100 gold you spend.
The formula for armor mitigation is 1-2500/(2500 + Armor). The amount of mitigation you get from armor will vary based on how much armor you already have. If I buy Scalemail and go from 200 armor to 600 armor, I'll move from 7% mitigation to 24% mitigation, a 17% increase. However, if I am at 2000 armor and buy scalemail, I only get a 7% increase in mitigation.
This table assumes you're at 200 armor to start with.
Most interesting item on this list is Assassin's Footguards which provides 10% dodge and 5% attackspeed. At 200 armor, it delivers good mitigation relative to the more expensive items but doesn't really compete with the only other item in it's price band (Nimoth). But as you stack more armor on, Nimoth gets less and less effective while the 10% dodge from Footguards continues to provide the same 10% damage mitigation. When you have 1400 armor, the damage you negate from Nimoth is equal to the damage you negate from Footguards. Mid to late game the two deliver equal mitigation and you just need to decide whether more attack or more health is appropriate.
I'd also like to point out that extra health is far more beneficial than extra armor in the early game. If you're Beast fighting Regulus, you've got 475 health and 1550 armor. Reggie is dealing 110 DPS from auto attack and maybe 56 DPS from spells. At that rate, it'll take 10 seconds of sustained pressure for Reggie to kill you. If you take Scalemail, you'll be mitigating 33 DPS, increasing your life expectancy by 1 second. But if you take Banded Armor instead, your life expectancy increases by 2.5 seconds.
Bulwark of the ages has a flat 20 or 25 percent damage reduction on top of the armor and health increases, was that taken into consideration for the mitigation?
One thing about these tables... in general, cheaper items give you a bigger boost for your money. But, you're stuck with 5-8 total items. It's really easy to buy up all the good 500-1500 items and max out your slots, then you're going to have to buy less efficent items to proceed.
Armor does not actually reduce in effect the more you have. Plot armor against health/(1-mitigation) and you'll see. At 2500 armor you will recieve 50% mitigation and thus 100% more effective health. At 5000 armor, mitigation is 66.6%, making you live three times longer - that's 200% more effective health.
Every 2500 armor is like adding your base health to your health bar.
When shopping for items, it's useful to know 100 armor equals a 4% increase in effective health (of course, not from spells).
I've heard this comment before but didn't understand it. Where do you get the health number? Is that your total health? I'm assuming the table would look like this but it doesn't make sense to me:
Armor | Health
100 | 1500
200 | 1500
300 | 1500
... | ...
Lieu the only way that would be effective at all is if you are vs machinegun regulus or beast. Fighting anyone else you will lose everytime. Having low attack damage and low hp = fb, pounce, bite, or any other spell will pwn your face.
fantastic
now i need you to take into account the +health
maybe a table that factors modified armor health per 100 gold?
*ahem*
Allow me to quote myself.
Now, if you are confused about the term "effective health", it is merely a name for health compounded with one or more modifiers depending on context. It does not mean in any way it's "effective" like a strategy might be effective.
Health is just your total health/hp/whatever you want to call it - what you see on your health bar. The data points would be something like this:
Armor | Health | Effective health (health/(1-mitigation)) 100 | 1500 | 1560 200 | 1500 | 1620 300 | 1500 | 1680
With 300 armor and 1500 health you would live exactly as long as if you had 0 armor and 1680 health. These values in the table also scale linearly. Naturally, this only works on damage that is affected by armor. The benefit being healing effects are "multiplied". Don't forget armor works multiplicatively with health. The more of one you have the more the other is worth.
The problem is that EVERYBODY relies on spells, so pratically nobody gets a good mitigation from armor compared to health. Only... well, UB and regulus actually have a problem with mitigated damage, and even UB built for HP and Ooze isn't losing that much considerin his Ooze is still dealing full damage.
It's more complicated then you make it out.
Characters have different base armor, life and health per second, and they change as they level up. Some items make more of a diffrence early on and less later on. eg: Take banded and hauberk 1st, swap them out later on for Nimoth and Groffling later on.
Minions and creeps take their toll during batle as well and for sure you will be hit by standard attacks from DGs, not just "magic".
Towers - Mitigated by armor
TB - Almost all spell damage
UB - Spit is spell, the rest auto attack
Rook - Almost all non-spell damage. Hammer slam is the notable exception.
Regulus - Non-spell damage sustained, until he pulls out mines, mark or snipe.
Oak - Large majority of damage is from melee, the rest mostly penitence.
Sedna - Pounce goes straight through armor, the rest is non-spell
Erebus - Bite is his spell damage, the rest is auto attack
QoT - When you get hit by them, ground spikes and spike wave are spell. In closed form everything is mitigated by armor.
There is a lot of spell damage out there, but there is also a huge quantity of mitigated damage that comes in all the time. I think you underestimate the proportion that actually is mitigated by armor.
Creeps deal all of 20 damage per attack. As an Ooze UB, where I take damage every single time I start farming creeps from my ability alone, my health regeneration at level 1 is enough to have ~10 damage taken between each creep wave. It's just not that much damage.
And yes, you get hit by attacks. But let's take TB; you take ~3800 damage from his full combo, and maybe 800 damage (without armor) from his attacks. Sedna, abusing pounce, probably does half pounce damage, half melee damage, which means that armor is half as useful as you calculate it to be. UB full Ooze does maybe 40% damage in Ooze, 60% damage in melee... so armor is only 60% as effective as you think. Even if you get hit with melee a good bit, a lot of the armor you rely on really isn't doing much (regulus and tower rooks excluded. If you are fighting those guys, go wild with your armor.)
UB: Ooze. Spit. Post Mortem. All of those are spell damage. Those are also his bread and butters (well, not post mortem.) If you are relying on autoattacks more than Ooze, Spit, or both, you are playing him wrong.
Regulus: I said that it's mostly non-spell damage.
Rook: If he isn't playing towers, he is going to be playing boulder roll + hammer smash... which does far more damage than his base attack (plus boulder roll isn't mitigated either.)
Sedna: Pounce has a quick cooldown ans is quite a bit stronger than melee.
Oak: Yes, he is one of the more melee reliant DGs.
Erebus: Bite negates your armor, and considering his weak autoattack, does a lot of damage (relative to his attack.) Mist and swarm are also armor-piercing.
QoT: Haven't played any QoT that does much besides bramble sheild allies.
Now, I'm not going to say it's 100% spell damage for anybody (besides TB on somebody who doesn't have more than 3000 health), but practically every armor calculation I've found has been assuming you take 100% reducible damage (because that's how they compare health to armor), when in reality even the most autoattack focused demigod (that isn't an Oak, Tower Rook, or Regulus without mines) is still probably dealing at least 40% of his/her damage through spells, unless they bought a lot of gloves.
meh its a strategy game. the fact that you guys disagree on the importance of armor just adds to the diversity of the game. Its not like anyones disagreeing on how the game mechanics work just the best way to win.
although personally i thought hammer slam was mitigated by armor as well as snipe.
You missed some spell damage I added it in for you.
TB full combo in fire mode, if all his skills are maxed, which is possible at level 15 earliest, is 3350 dmg, not 3800. Cof= 1500(if enemy stays in circle for the full 10 secs, which is very rare), + Fireball 1050 +Fire Nova 800 dmg. It is not possible to get the 1350 dmg fireball if you want to max the other fireskills which is needed for this dmg, also, by this level, opponents usually have around 6k health so TB full combo usually does about half life in dmg.
The main thing I see I missed was ooze. I didn't mention things like mist; I was trying to get the simplest description that covered the demigod's damage output well.
Who said you take 100% reducible damage? Nobody, that's who.
Is it so hard to understand the context of armor calculations might only include stuff that is actually affected by armor?
"Here's my armor calculation"
"But spells are not affected by armor!"
"Wow, thanks for the the insight. Boy, have I been a fool."
Ice combo + fireball is 3800, and doesn't rely on your opponent being shitty enough to stand in a giant circle of pain.
So what? Your effective armor calculations only deal with non skill damage. I get that. You get that. You just fail to see what it means. It means your calculations are worthless. You are never going to be killed entirely by reducible damage unless fighting a Tower Oak, a QoT focused on minions and bramble shield, or an autoattack, no snipe, no mark, no mines regulus (or you suicide on towers, which was another posters argument). Basically, you keep saying "effective HP" like it matters. Everybody does. It does not. Maybe if you figured, "OK, I have 6000 real HP and 7000 effective HP with this build, but 5000 real HP and 9000 effective HP with this one, am I fighting more spellcasters or autoattackers" it would be nice to have those calculations. You could do some mental math and figure it out. But everybody on the board has been figuring that effective HP matters for everything.
The thing is, effective HP doesn't get hit constantly by skill damage. The higher your effective HP is, the more damage skills do to that effective HP (because they do the same damage to your real HP no matter what). So just increasing effective HP to max is a bad, bad idea (well, sometimes. If it winds up focusing mostly on HP, it will work either way... but most of the time it focuses on massive armor and lower HP outputs.). You don't get that. All you spout off is more theory about how to get the most HP which is only useful against certain demigods or in certain situations.
So...
- We are interested in the whole
- The part is not the whole
- Therefore we are not interested in the part
Your logic when you say the calculations are "worthless". Oh, but then you go on to say "it would be nice to have those calculations" if they thought to themselves:
"OK, I have 6000 real HP and 7000 effective HP with this build, but 5000 real HP and 9000 effective HP with this one, am I fighting more spellcasters or autoattackers"
Hint: that is exactly the process that goes through everyone's minds. You state all anybody ever thinks about is effective hp. Where do you get this idea? Thin air doesn't suffice.
The notion that you need hp for spell damage is universal in every thread discussing armor/health/survivability. Everybody recognises armor doesn't do anything against abilities and that you favour hp for that type of damage. Where did you get the idea otherwise? It's everywhere. Is it because when entering a thread discussing how cost effective different armor items are it comes as a surprise to you that people aren't talking much about spell damage? People talking about the part means we have thrown away the whole? I really am curious what gave you the idea nobody cares about hp, especially considering the "HP builds", etc threads in plain view.
Most importantly, from the very guide in this topic. It totally ignores skills, and goes on to rank how efficient items are as if you have 100% autoattack damage. That alone makes this table worthless, because it seriously overestimates the mitigation you get from this (not to mention the fact it is only tested on one demigod at one level). Also, from you. And everybody else. When people talk, they always talk effective HP. If they are only talking effective HP... why would I assume you are somehow not thinking about effective HP in situations where it matters? I have never seen somebody mention anything besides effective HP besides one person who just said that the damage from burst abilities is a "threshold," IE get enough HP to survive the burst damage and then load up on the best way to get effective HP, IE more armor. It's pretty obvious that skills are on the backburner of your minds when all calculators give you effective HP, everybody talks about efficiency based on effective HP, people are praising guides that only tell them what armors give them the most effective HP and the most effective HP per cost, etc.
The thing is, effective HP is a nearly useless stat. It's useful in edge cases. That's really about it. It takes a lot of math to determine any kind of real use for it, and when you do you find that the effective armor value is anywhere from 100% right to 100% wrong. I don't know about you, but a stat with a huge standard deviation is worthless to me. (against most demigods[IE not TB] the standard deviation is around 30% from what I've seen, with the average accuracy being around 70%). The point is, anybody who actually talks about effective HP like its the end all of how survivable you are is incorrect (lots of people do. Even if they put in a casual "ignoring skills" line somewhere in there, it's still acting like skills won't hit you.)
Also, what you call my logic is a strawman. My logic is "we are interested in the whole. The part is not the entire whole and inaccurate when used to determine the whole. We do not solely focus on the part." Just caring about effective HP is a good way to die, as I have seen happen to many people (most notably a QoT build I've seen a lot focuses on bramble shield and high armor, with no HP... good luck living with a 2.2k demigod at level 7.)
My basic point is that effective HP is a bunch of useless theory-math for edge cases with a huge standard deviation in real play, so making all these guides for it and talking about how "scalemail is so much better because it gives you X amount more HP for a bit less" doesn't really matter when you factor in that anywhere from 60% to 0% (the optimal case and rarely occuring case for effective HP) of that HP is going to be blasted away by skills. Even if you say you know that you have to factor in skills, you are still doing the useless theory math and acting like it matters. It has no application in a real game because you have to change the math so dramatically that your table of efficiency is now completely wrong.
I agree - it is an edge case discussion. Maxing out effective HP should rarely be your primary avenue to survivability. Maxing out actual HP, speed, spells like Heal and items like HoL is the primary avenue to survivability.
However - just because effective HP is only of secondary (or tertiary) importance does not mean that it is of no importance. Understanding how effective HP works (thanks Lieu for your tip) and understanding how to maximize it will help with those edge cases, like fighting an Oak who primarily relies on minon/auto-attack damage.
Beyond being somewhat helpful in the game, it's fun to work through in the forums. So even if it only increases my win percentage by a meager 2%, I'll probably still have the discussion.
Milskidasith, if I read your replies with deliberation I read that you understand that there is some value to the discussion, albeit small. But that admission is hard to reconcile with vitriol like:
You've got a valid point to contribute but you've got an asshole tone to go along with it. Altough, I guess it's a little naive for me to expect a forum discussion to be steeped in mutual respect.
I don't think anyone has mentioned a big advantage of having damage mitigation, i.e. "effective" health versus actual health:
If you talk half as much damage then you will require half as much healing, i.e. your health per second regeneration will heal you twice as quick, or you'll require half as many healing spells - so you'll need less downtime out of combat.
In the typical match there is more incoming damage from non-spell sources but it's somehow an "edge case"? Right. Got it.
And all this math is useless and has no application (your words) because... it can't be directly applied to the game? If it has to be changed dramatically and that's reason why it's useless then any theorying is useless. Anything we can come up with is so far away from the mathematical solution to demigod (speaking in terms of game theory here). We have not solved chess, not close to it, not even close to knowing how to feasibly solve it, but the study of chess theory is vital to becoming a stronger player.
Finally, what's funny is you using the concept of standard deviation in a context that makes absolutely no sense. You are working with zero data and using a concept that describes the variability of a data set.
This is jibberish. A stat does not "have" a standard deviation. The mean accuracy being around 70%? Accuracy of what? You mean proportion of damage which is spell-based? Where is your data? A standard deviation of 30%? Again, where is your data? You can't "eyeball" statistics. What type of distribution is this data set supposed to have? A standard deviation is a very specific measurement. You think armor is useless? Let me direct you back to what you said there.
Actually, priests heal percentage-wise, so it really doesn't matter either way (health regen and DG healing skills are still flat values.)
To Lieu: Effective HP is an edge case. It assumes you have 100% non-spell damage coming your way. That's kind of like, to use your chess analogy, finding a perfect strategy to fight against somebody who only moves his pawns. Your chess theory argument is strawman; you make it sound like it's related to chess theory, and of course saying chess theory is useless would be dumb. But it's not related to chess theory, at least not that strongly. There are plenty of useful theories, and useless theories. For example, a good example of theory would be "I can get more "net" damage (% rate the opposing Demigod loses HP, IE 10%HP/Sec to %rate my Demigod takes damage) by stacking HP instead of attack." That's useful theory. Saying "I can have effectively X more HP if I buy these items and don't get hit by any spell damage at all" is a bad edge case because spell damage is such a huge exception to make that it's hard to find any real application for it.
The accuracy of effective HP is proportional to the % of damage taken that is not spell based. With a few games of testing with various different Demigods, most builds wind up getting around 70% nonspell damage and 30% spell damage [though it changes; an Ooze UB at level 12 gets roughly 50% spell damage and 50% attack damage, but once you hit level 18 where you have all 6 points in stats, it becomes 66.6...% AA to 33.3...% spell, again roughly.) Standard deviation was the wrong term, and I admit it. What I was trying to say is basically that the average build, from playing against other Demigods using various different builds (and with myself using different builds), about 70% of the damage was nonspell, with builds going from 40% to 100% attack damage being fairly common (only TB ever got close to 100% spell damage).
There are obviously exceptions; if UB spits on somebody and they run, 100% spell damage for that encounter, and if he has no mana it will be 100% AA damage. And obviously, my data-set was small (maybe... 20 different builds encountered over the course of a few games?) However, the stats are still important, because that allows you to make an educated guess as to how much armor is actually going to affect you, while effective HP isn't.
Also, since you seem to have misconceptions about what I am saying, I am not saying armor is useless. I am saying the calculation for effective HP, which assumes 100% armored damage, is fairly close to useless (its an edge case, and it does have some merit against AA regulus and strictly tower Rook [which I am finding uncommon these days; a lot more people are going towers until level 7, then switching over to boulder roll + hammer smash.] Armor is useful, obviously. But instead of figuring out effective HP, just figure out what % damage is probably going to be dealt to you from armor-reducing methods, and then calculate your HP.
I see what you are saying and it's not an edge case. The theory behind effective hp is not just useful in the one case where it's 100% pure non-spell damage. That particular case is on the edge. The usefulness of effective hp is not limited to that one case.
If the damage type split is 50/50 then the maths that x armor gives y ehp is still useful. You can make a decision on how valuable armor is compared to health in this situation, which in turn lets you make an informed decision on which item to buy next. It's easy enough to guage the benefit for a start, but to be precise if the damage is split then one way of representing a 50/50 split is, as an example:
"true" added effective hp = hp * added effective hp / (hp + effective hp)
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