Wow, determination.

I'm pretty sure this is too powerful now, and eventually some kind of counter-tuning will take place. It could take a while, but once this becomes popular some aspect of it will get tuned down. If only by way of deleting armour passives from the skilldrasil.

Determination has always been unpopular, but Axebane pointed out one very prominent reason: 40% mana. 36% increased armour rating is worth 4 skillpoints; against IF that's 48% (5 skillpoints). No, determination has never been underpowered, only expensive.

Don't get me wrong, I love the buff. Now I'll overcap DR, all the time, against everything. I've been using determination a while, and I'll keep using it.

1) Armour becomes more valuable as you stack it further.

I've made that statement before, but many people will argue against it. It only holds true if you're running endurance. Here is a graph of effective health versus armour, to the cap, in a high endurance build against a hard-hitting boss:



This can mean one of two things, depending how you look at it. From one side, having a higher armour rating and a higher %IAR makes your granite flask worth considerably more. From the other side, when you have higher %IAR drinking a granite flask makes your worn armour worth many times more.

Both statements are true, and actually both are true at the same time: endurance, worn armour, %IAR, and the granite flask all scale against each other. Endurance and %IAR have the most profound effect, because they multiply the entire graph (endurance vertically, %IAR horizontally).

In my build, good gear would provide about 300% of base EHP from base armour alone, inside a granite flask. Even though my granite is worth 13k base armour and my gear can only possibly be worth as much as 4.8k. Obviously I haven't gotten *quite* that far. My worn armour provides almost as much EHP as my granite, during the granite effect.


2) h values

If I take my staff templar build and make it more armour focused than before, giving up life, I would arrive here. I probably wouldn't ever build exactly like this, but it'll make a good example.

The h-value for this build suddenly drops to 4.1, with the determination buff and the new body/soul cluster. That means I only need 4.1 base armour (not character screen armour: armour directly from gear and buffs) per point of incoming damage to cap my DR at 90%.

I've linked an explanation for h, but the paragraph above is sufficient. It's just a ratio of armour per damage at the reduction cap. Before the change, best I could pull off was about a 6.5 with 5 endurance and determination. Before the patch, if your build didn't carry much %IAR, your h-value was probably greater than 12.

Here's what that means. I don't use molten shell in my build, and I want life on every slot. With that, the highest my base armour will ever go with amazing gear is about 3.8k. With the best gear in the game, I could have these limits on my DR cap:
- Without a granite, 90% DR up to 930 physi damage (= 3800/4.08). That's nuts! capping DR against 930 damage outside a granite?
- Naked and with a granite, 90% DR up to 3.2k damage (= 13000/4.08)
- Equipped and with a granite, 90% DR up to 4.1k damage (= 16800/4.08)
- Equipped and with a granite, against an enfeebled mob, 90% DR up to 6.1k damage (= 4100/0.68).
Someone wearing a shield, equipping differently, using grace+IR, running different buffs, could do much, much more.


math (screenshot of mathematica maxima this time, easier on the eyes):


Basically, you don't even need to spend all those points on %IAR, anymore. It's overkill because of the soft cap. You should be able to completely bypass the 90% reduction cap in every imaginable situation, if you go overboard on defense.

3) Soft cap

The soft cap should be pretty easy to reach, now.

Basically, if drinking a granite puts you over the 90% reduction cap, your armour is "soft capped". That means you could move some passive points out of defense and still cap your reduction against those same hits. Defense is cheaper.

And you get to be more offensive now, or get other kinds of defenses that you didn't have before.

The only issue - that soft cap moves. When you do a higher level map, the soft cap goes up. When you're in lower level content, the soft cap goes down. Hard to pin down.

But you can know how much the most difficult bosses hit for, and build to defeat that number. Make sure you build against a defensive switch - say, a kaom's sign? Then you can take that defensive switch off whenever you're overleveling.

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It's been a long one, and I'm sure this won't be received that enthusiastically, so that about does it for now!

Received very enthusiastically here. Good job!

I may be an exception here, but I find myself neglecting endurance charges more often than not. I take it this pushes the soft cap way off, right?

Also I wonder just how much life you can give up comfortably when some elemental attacks in this game could (potentially?) kill you. Some sort of shotgun from multiple projectile mob, or perhaps a map which takes your resistances below cap, or hell even maze vaal overseer.

I believe this says more about Granite Flasks than Determination.
But yeah, from 20 increased to 32 more? Ridiculous.

"

pneuma wrote:

I believe this says more about Granite Flasks than Determination.

edit: I might have straw-manned pneuma, sorry! edited this a bit.
I am not entirely sure, pneuma, if you're thinking what I believe you're thinking. But just in case, let me address where I *think* you're coming from. This is a common belief: that granite flasks invalidate worn armour, and need to be nerfed.

The second half may be true, but I'm not sure yet. 10,000 base rating might be a bit excessive. Maybe that'll be the counter-tuning that comes out on the other end, but it's a different issue. However, the first half, "granite flasks invalidate worn armour," is a big misconception.

I don't know if I can convince you, but let me go about it the same way I did with axebane.

Armour gets more valuable, the more you have. So, before your granite flask can even reach half of its potential, you need high %IAR/endurance/base armour.

Without the other elements, the granite flask falls flat on its face, too. The difference between 70% reduction and 90% reduction, in terms of EHP:
70% reduction: 1/(1-.7) = 333% EHP.
80% reduction: 1/(1-.8) = 500% EHP.
90% reduction: 1/(1-.9) = 1000% EHP.
They're worlds apart. You can't cap reduction with a granite, against large hits, without those other things. 80% reduction is worth half as much as 90% reduction. Your worn armour is worth more than you think.

"

NotThat wrote:

Received very enthusiastically here. Good job!

I may be an exception here, but I find myself neglecting endurance charges more often than not. I take it this pushes the soft cap way off, right?

Also I wonder just how much life you can give up comfortably when some elemental attacks in this game could (potentially?) kill you. Some sort of shotgun from multiple projectile mob, or perhaps a map which takes your resistances below cap, or hell even maze vaal overseer.

Thank you, panda. I appreciate your work too.

Yes, endurance charges and %IAR have the biggest effect on where that soft cap lands. If you're willing to install the CAS I used for this (it's open source), I'll send you all the formulas so you can tinker with the maths yourself.

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/download.html

As to life and elemental attacks, I found that sacrificing some life was fine because it's easy from templar/mara to hit an 80% resist cap. Low-life tanking pretty much requires crit reduction and a raised resist cap. But if you've got em, it's not uncomfortable at all. My templar has 2500 life.

I mean hell, I can stand in (level 62) brutus' slam on my templar, and watch a sliver of life go away. So what if he also has 80% cold damage? I have 80% reduction on that, too. If he's got frenzy? Just toss up enfeeble, give up the offensive curse for a few seconds. Vulnerability and %incr damage are a little more problematic, but just account for one of them in your soft-cap calculation.

Chaos damage is the scariest thing. How low you can go with life under high mitigation is all about having enough to survive chaos damage.

I'd love to have the formulas you've used.

sent you a pm, tell me what you'd like to find out and I'll simplify the worksheet for you. The template kind of turned into a monster.

Did I miss a buff recently? I was running over 10000 armor recently on my duelist and was not impressed.

And you shouldn't be. This is part of why Iron Reflexes is misleading. 10,000 armour on your character screen might not be enough, unless you have the other conditions set. If you do have the right conditions set, 5,000 character screen armour could be overkill. There are four elements that go into it:

Your base worn armour rating (different from character screen armour rating),
Your percent increased armour rating,
Number of endurance charges,
Granite flask.

Your character screen doesn't tell the story very well. Armour as a rating system is complex in this game. Other games usually have linear-EH rating systems (like, D3); you just want to get your character's armour rating as high as possible. Here the scaling is hyperbolic, and the "steepness" of that hyperbola is determined by a number of other factors. Just having high armour rating will often miss the mark, and typical duelist/ranger IR builds will be the worst offenders. In having tons of armour rating, but a poor setup for armour scaling.

See this is just another reason why PoE is awesome. Here have practically a thesis on how armour rating works getting peer reviewed :)

I agree that determination should have been made cheaper, not stronger. The fact alone that you can improve your armor so much is quite big. However, you also have to consider that you can have determination, vitality and purity always on in a 3-tank party. That means you can walk together and simply never die.

Determination seemed slightly underpowered. Its effect got more than doubled. At the same time stacking armor is very effective and life regeneration effect also gets more effective with more damage reduction.