Armor and Damage and Hit Points....Oh My!

Alrighty all, it's time for yet another installment of Phaithful's Tips and Tricks. This time, I wanted to go over stat building. What you should and shouldn't be looking for when choosing gear and level up skills.

During the first 120 (or so), it's fairly easy to 1 hit the vast majority of the mobs that you come across. In fact, with some of the early Legendary sets (Plague & Fire Dragon), you can 1 hit champions and solo elites (with some amount of caution ) But as you reach the mid level 140s or so, 1 hitting becomes very difficult because of the amount of armor and hit points that a particular mob has. So we relegate ourselves to knowing that we cannot 1 hit for a few of those levels, and as such, start to succumbing to the idea that "the good ol' days are over". However, this is incorrect. 1 hitting is very possible from levels 150 - 173 (which is where I am currently at and still 1 hitting with no problem). There is one level in that set (level 162 if I remember right) where 1 hitting at the same level mobs becomes impossible simply because of the amount of armor/hp they have.

So once you hit the lower level 160s, because the mobs are really starting to pack a punch, most people start looking to get more armor so that they can survive a hit or two from the mob. The problem that this does is decreases your amount of damage that you are doing and thus creates 2 - 3 hitting again. This, my friends, is a complete waste of stamina and further breeds the doom and gloom of the end of the "good ol' days" when you could 1 hit and gain 1 level per day. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have gained at least 1 level per day minus 3 days, since I started FS on Nov 18, 2007. If I can do it, then you can do it too. Let's discover how together.

First off, I (like so many others out there) made a mistake in the early levels of putting skill points when I leveled into many varied things. Then a guild chat post from RagingT helped me to know that I needed to focus on putting points into Attack and Damage. So I started putting 1 into Attack and 1 into Damage with each level up I gained. But I started noticing something strange. I had WAY more attack with my skills and equipment stats than I needed. Like hundreds more. But then I also noticed that I was (at that time) barely 1 hitting mobs and would even end up 2 hitting from time to time.

So I sat down and started looking at things in this manner. If I have enough attack that I can hit the mob regardless of their defense, but I cannot kill them with 1 hit, then I am wasting stamina. So if I could get my damage up high enough that I could kill them with 1 hit, then I am saving LOTS of stamina and allowing me more kills per hunt. So I began to look at putting together equipment and buffs which would increase my damage to allow me to continue to 1 hit. The only problem was, if I did this, my attack was too low to be able to hit them. So I turned to math to solve my delima. If I could get Dark Curse from a guildie or purchase it (which I had to quite a few times), I could reduce the defense of the mobs which would allow me to be able to 1 hit the mobs again with my high damage.

The "standard" price that I saw for DC was around 15k. So I looked at it this way. Either I can have high enough attack to be able to hit the mobs, but not high enough damage to 1 hit. Or I can have high enough damage to kill the mobs with 1 hit, but purchase DC so that I CAN hit the mobs. Now enters Mr. Math

Again, 600 stamina to burn, 0 wasted on moving, using 4x doubler for these studies. We are not concerned about Lib or Merchant here, so they have been disregarded.

Without DC:

I could hit 100 mobs because I am 2 hitting due to low damage ((600 stamina / 4x doubler) / 2 hitting). So from our calculations, we would earn the following - 200,000xp and 100,000 gold roughly.

With DC:

Now I can 1 hit the mobs and thus I can hit 200 mobs now. So from our new calculations (600 stamina / 4x doubler), we get the following - 400,000xp and 200,000 gold. However, we do need to subtract the cost of DC (we had to pay for it if we could not get it from a guildie), so 200,000 - 15,000 takes us down to 185,000 gold overall. So that's not only DOUBLE the xp for the same amount of stamina but also an extra 85,000 gold profit above and beyond what DC cost us to begin with.

So at this point, I stopped putting skill up points into Attack and started dumping ALL my skill up points into Damage. With the standard gear upgrades that we get, attack moves up with the gear. If we run into a situation where our attack is not high enough, we can simply get a DC to bring the mobs defense down to a more manageable level (the same goes for PvP/Bounty Hunting as well)

Now by this time, I had made a boo-boo and put 8 points into Defense (bad Phaithful, bad!) and another 8 points into Hit Points (arrgggh!) So right there, I wasted 16 points but was not about to spend 100 FSP just to reset the things, so there they stay I had also put 93 points into attack. I don't necessarily regret putting skill points into attack, but I think that I could have stopped between 60 - 80 and would have been just fine. There have been some instances where I missed 1 hitting the mobs by a little as 1 point of damage So, if I had taken that extra 13 - 33 points and put them into damage instead of attack, I could have 1 hit even more and saved even more stamina. Oh well, live and learn

Something else to consider is by putting points into ONLY damage (or a small part into attack to help offset DC purchases) is using the buff Beserk. With Beserk, it gives you a .2% base damage per point buff. So, let's do the math:

Beserk buff level 140 x .2% buff = 28%
28% increase x base damage (243 currently) = 68.04

So now, with this buff we have added an extra 68 points of damage to ALL of our attacks while the buff is active. In fact, if we purchase the Beserk potion, our damage would increase to 85 damage (with 243 base). So the higher the base damage, the higher the damage output with this buff.

So to finish this up, let's consider basing equipment around armor to survive multiple hits or damage to continue to 1 hit. So just like basing equipment around attack, basing it around armor to survive does not give you enough damage to be able to 1 hit. So let's check out some more math here:

Armor based:

600 stamina / 4x doubler / 2 hitting = 100 mobs. This gives us roughly the same calculations as our high attack basis did, 200,000xp and 100,000 gold on average.

Damage based:

600 stamina / 4x doubler / 1 hitting = 200 mobs. This gives us the same as our damage based stats above, 400,000xp and 200,000 on average. Now, what we have to do is take out some xp and gold because we died a few times along the way with this build. For me, with a 900 stamina burn after buffs and including movement but all 1 hitting, I end up dying about 5 times (roughly). Each death costs me about 1k xp and about 15% of the gold that I am currenly carrying. Now I have a way to lessen the gold that I loose upon death without casting extra buffs to protect it. However, this post is already as long as the Earth is old, so I'll leave that tip and trick for another post all it's own So, on average, my 5 deaths cost me around 20-30k gold (again, on average). So let's reduce our totals by accounting for deaths.

400,000xp - 5,000xp = 395,000xp
200,000 gold - 30,000 gold = 170,000 gold

Again, this is all on average but you can see that even with 5 deaths (remember the 2% miss chance rule *sigh*), we are still almost double the xp and over 70,000 more gold vs the armor based build where we never died, but 2 hit every single time.

The key thing to do is know the area you are fighting in. Know the mobs. How much hp they have, how much armor, how much damage, how much defense. Not only know these things about the area that you are in, but also the area that is coming up next. In this way, you can know if your damage based build is going to be able to continue to 1 hit or not. If you can 1 hit in level x but you get to the next level, y, but the mobs have too much armor and/or hp, then go back to level x for another level. It's better to loose 20% xp/gold loss (what you loose per level difference between you and the mob) vs 50% xp/gold loss (what you loose when you hit mobs your level, but takes 2 hits to kill them)

So as you can see from the above examples, I highly recommend a damage build vs an armor or attack one. Low attack is easy enough to remedy with DC and/or Fury/Rage. Lower armor WILL result in deaths, but the benefits far outweigh the losses incurred.

May your crits be high and your deaths few

Peace.

Phaithful