New attack cap system

Question2

I could have sworn i just made this thread, but i cant find any indication that it got posted. Weird.

Anyway, the new attack cap system uses one attack cap for all enemies in the battle, which is great because trash mobs die faster and you dont need to manually calculate it using an outdated wiki.

The downside is that the attack cap is only visible if you are creating a boat, and its not visible in your battle info window (with the N hotkey), so you cant check it if you are already on the boat.

The one issue that comes to mind is that the attack cap listed doesn't change at all in S1 when you select the difficulty, easy mode succubus and hero succubus both have the same attack caps. Does anyone know if that means that hero mode doesn't increase boss DEF anymore?

Edit : As far as I can tell, I think hero mode doesn't increase the boss DEF anymore. I still kill Hero succubus in the same amount of hits as before, but my damage vs the royal army soldier mobs hasn't changed at all, and the attack cap for them was about 15k, same as now. If hero succubus still had the very high amount of DEF she used to have and the attack cap was increased to account for that (but not visible at boat creation), then I would be dealing massive damage on the trash mobs, which I am not.

This is a pretty good change since some hero bosses had ridiculous amounts of DEF.

BloodAngel

I don't think any statistical changes were made this most recent update. I think only things done was just adding the att cap to the boat creation window. I still speed run through my succubus runs in the same amount of time as before, so I don't believe there was any changes either.

Question2

There is a change. Go do a s3 daily and llook at how much damage you deal to the trash mobs. It is much higher now because the attack cap for the entire battle is roughly 21k.

Blade shift with a +12 scythe does up to 2500 non-crit damage to wood elves. That is impossible if the attack cap for wood elves is 10k above monster DEF like before.

If you do story iset/havan, you will also notice that the damage you deal to iset is MUCH higher than havan because Iset has lower def than havan, and the attack cap for the whole battle is 10k above havan's DEF. You also deal more damage to kraken tentacles now because the attack cap is 10k above the head's DEF, while the tentacles themselves have much lower DEF.

Hero succubus is roughly the same because the attack cap is about 15k, which just happens to be roughly 10k above the trash mob's DEF. You won't see a difference uness you have low attack in which case you will actually be able to hurt the boss. IIRC, hero succubus used to have an attack cap of something like 22k? When we only had level 60 weapons, we used to need second trans to get our attack high enough to hurt her. Now, new players can start doing hero succubus much earlier since the attack cap is so low.

Hally

As far as I can tell, there is no change at all. It is simply listing the highest def monster found in the entire run, +10k. Trailhead lists 24k; but 21k and 24k does exactly the same damage to trash.

Maybe you are looking at differences caused by BAL rolls, and not actual changes.

Noburo

This change was actually ninja'd into the game a couple of weeks before the Abyssal Arena patch added the caps to boat launch info.

Also, the cap for sg is set around 2k lower than Monark and Willy's attack caps, so you do less damage there.

In case that's hard to understand: The bosses have the same defense values as before but the effective attack in the run is in the boat launch info, so your maximum effective attack against Willy would be 8k as opposed to 10k~. That number is what's applied to the multiplier for the attacks you use, so you'll do less in that instance.

vThat's the same source I'm using, mods pls don't kill it.

Delteros

Yes the changes took place silently with the update we got at the end of October.
Here is an explanation from Shippuu, in case anyone wants to know more:

On the simplest level, you already know by now that above a "certain" Att value in each battle, you stop dealing more damage when you raise your Att higher. This is the Att cap, and it is based upon the Def of the enemy you are hitting. This is regardless of whether it is a mob, a boss, or a raid boss.

Without going into detail on the formula itself, your Att is compared to the bosses Def, and an "Effective Att" value is generated. This caps at 10,000, plus the 900 base value (for in the event the original value is negative, such as with very low Att). So in the end of this, Effective Att has a ceiling of 10,900.

The cap is applied to the 10,000 result value itself, so when you hit an enemy with 14k Def, and an enemy with 8k Def at the same time, you deal exactly the same damage to both (ignoring Balance anyway). Due to how the formula itself works, this resulted in Att caps for higher Def bosses being slightly below the old "Def + 10k" rule. For example, the cap in Season 3 raids is 22,721 Att, and 23,647 at Kraken. The Def of those raid bosses is 13k and 14k, respectively.

However, as of Wednesday's update, this seems to no longer be the case. This cap on the 10,000 value itself seems to be entirely gone, for some reason, replaced with only a per battle cap on your raw Att value. This may sound entirely irrelevant, and that it would lead to the same results. There are actually three issues caused by this, and I'll explain each.

1: The Att ceiling they have set for each battle is actually incorrect, and this is the most noticeable bug from this update. For example, Kraken's raid on 80-90 has a 24,000 Att ceiling. On Kraken, your Effective Att will actually be calculating as 10,329 instead of the flat 10,000 max, resulting in increased damage dealt. The higher the Def of the boss, the bigger this gap will be, resulting in higher max effective damage. This is obviously not intended.

2: Remember that example of hitting a pair of enemies with 14k Def and 8k Def at the same time? Yeah, you are going to be dealing tremendously more damage to that 8k Def enemy now, since the Att ceiling is per battle. If you want an example of this, run Kraken on 80-90. You will be dishing out 15-20% more damage to the tents, since they have 3k less Def than Kraken's head itself.

3: There are also apparently instances where this manually defined Att ceiling is *too low*, meaning nomatter what your Att is, you will not be able to properly cap on the boss. Mad Flint Willy looks to be an example of this, Ship Graveyard 80-90 looks to have an improperly low cap.

Having covered all of that, to summarize, the Effective Att limit of 10,000 needs to be reinstated. Without it, these weird calculation errors are occurring. No other solution fixes these issues. Even fixing the per battle Att ceiling to the correct values will not work, as any enemy with less Def than the main boss will take increased damage.
Ideally, the Att ceiling needs to be removed entirely. It's a waste of declared values, and is inferior to the Effective Att limit. Remove Att Limit from Lv.90 weapons should apply directly to Effective Att instead. To display a cap per battle, just calculate it with the Att Formula and display the result of that. This wouldn't require manual declaration of each value, and would require only editing one place to change the displayed cap for all battle quests.

elcausa

This actually explains the variations i noticed with fireshock a while back

Question2

Hally said:

As far as I can tell, there is no change at all. It is simply listing the highest def monster found in the entire run, +10k. Trailhead lists 24k; but 21k and 24k does exactly the same damage to trash.

Maybe you are looking at differences caused by BAL rolls, and not actual changes.

Balance doesnt increase your max damage, it only increases your average damage. Tell me, if there is no change, how does blade shift with a 0.175 max multiplier do up to 2500 damage with a +12 weapon? The additional damage doesn't result in such a large increase. You are not seeing a difference between 21k and 24k in normal s3 maps because the attack cap of s3 maps is 21.6k...it's the raids that have an attack cap of 24k.

I don't know why people are saying that there was a damage nerf for SG. It's been known for a very long time that S2 large bosses (willy, monark, kielu, ikrium, alteron, etc) have 8k def which means a 18k attack cap in 80-90.

http://vindictus.gamepedia.com/Muckrot_Monark

Unless they were stealth buffed to 10k DEF at some point. I haven't noticed any kind of "damage nerf" in S2 maps though, on the contrary, since the smaller bosses (stoneshell, desert roc, maios, etc) all have 6k DEF, this actually results in a damage buff against the smaller bosses since the attack cap is now 12k above boss DEF for those.

My main concern was whether hero mode still increased boss DEF, but it doesn't (pretty easy to see if you run hero succubus with only 16k attack).

Edit : I did moonlight peak earlier today and amaranth kick was doing about 5k damage on Muspell with the level 80 event weapon (+9 impending/mael arma longsword), but I wasn't balance capped so there was quite a large variation. If Muspell had 10k DEF with an attack cap of 18k, I would have been doing roughly 4k instead. There is no "damage nerf" for S2 with the new attack cap system.

jjX

Preeeeety sure Hero mode never increased the def of S1 bosses. It was a flat health gain, 3x.

Att goes up of course, but not def.

Portals

jjX said:

Preeeeety sure Hero mode never increased the def of S1 bosses. It was a flat health gain, 3x.

Att goes up of course, but not def.

The original formula for the hero mode S1 non-raid battles at the release of hero mode several years ago was that they gained 3x HP, +5000 attack, and around 2.3x def. Then when S1 hero raids were released they deviated from it by having just the increased HP and attack. This info was from the shutdown VindictusDB, but can still be found on the current wiki where you can see the separate def values for each S1 non-raid boss. After trying a few battles, it appears that there is no increase in def for S1 non-raid battles anymore in the current patch.

Question2

jjX said:

Preeeeety sure Hero mode never increased the def of S1 bosses. It was a flat health gain, 3x.

Att goes up of course, but not def.

Yea there was, people used to need second trans to kill hero succubus because her DEF was insanely high in hero mode and most people only had +10 level 60 weapons which puts them at about 12k attack.