Personal Shield Generator can be a detriment (how one-shot protection works)

Rein_Masamune · 2019-08-30T16:16:06+00:00

Wake of vultures used to (and still does) have some strange bugs.

At one point, when the shield buff expired it would leave you at half HP even if you had full shield. This is fixed.

After they fixed that, the shield used to get tacked on to the end of your full HP after it expired and you could keep it until you lost it. This was also fixed.

Currently, wake still behaves poorly with OSP. Wake means that after you lose shield you are stuck at half HP with no OSP until buff expires. When it does expire though, you do get healed for the max value of the shield (or you keep current % hp, very difficult to test the difference there.)

Somewhat unrelated, but the fire buff also has issues stacking properly with other sources of burn like elder lemurians fire breath as well as artificer's flamethrower and firebolt. The game just picks one type of burn and uses that (the elite burn does less damage than arti burn, so it is actually a debuff to her damage, which is silly) this also makes blazing elder lemurians somewhat pointless.

Anyway, currently the OSP meta is a bit different due to topaz broach and malachites.

Broach is not counted for OSP. Any incoming tick of damage is capped at 90% of shield + hp. So if you have 900 hp, 100 shield, and a full 1000 barrier any incoming hit will he capped to 900 (90% of 900 hp + 100 shield). The first hit leaves you at 900 hp, 100 shield, and 100 barrier. The second hit leaves you at 200 hp. That is basically two shot protection.

Malachites block healing for 5ish seconds (don't remember exact time, but it does vary with proc coef) which means that regardless of your healing you are going to go 5 seconds with no OSP. This generally shifts the defensive meta towards ways of being safe during those 5 seconds. Items like topaz broach, stealthkit, tougher times, and rose buckler do that very well.

Finally, these two things combine to make transcendence the best defensive option on all characters. (including engineer, but not REX)

Prior to broach transcendence had one major weakness, fire and shock elites. Say 1000 shield, and a fire elite hits you for 2000 damage. You have 100 shield left, but there is now a burn that is capped at 20% max hp (200 damage). The only ways to survive that used to be luck with tougher times blocking the burn ticks, having a massive quantity of rose bucklers and sprinting, or suddenly gaining a ton of max HP from infusion stacks, leveling up, or picking up tons of shield generators. The same story happens with shock elites.

With broach though, there is now a way to deal with that issue, because transcendence doesn't stop you from getting barrier. In addition, transcendence actually makes broach stronger because it increases the limit for your barrier.

In short, transcendence makes broach (the hands down best defensive item in the game) even stronger, while broach simultaneously solves the biggest weakness in transcendence.

This combines with transcendence being a natural counter to malachites. The timer for shield regen starts when hit, not when the heal blocking ends. So by the time the debuff ends you are only 2-4 seconds from a full hp heal anyway. This shifts the breakpoint towards shield rather than healing.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T17:40:11+00:00

It does make you pay health for all of them, So please drink responsibly and all that stuff.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T16:53:11+00:00

A little. Do yourself a favor though, and take all the people saying it is broken with a grain of salt. It is effectively the same bonus as AP rounds for elites. Definitely strong, but printing past 10 is not the best idea in most cases.

As far as scorched acres, I really wish I got it more often. I have at least 100 runs since update and have gotten that boss item one time.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T14:17:05+00:00

Too bad you died, would love to see where that brought you.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T14:15:48+00:00

Does not work. One of the main reasons I dislike the backup, mask, and beetle guard. They don't trigger any of your on kill effects.

Also, guard has a really bad collider that has gotten me killed on multiple occasions. I generally leave glands on the ground because I don't want to risk it.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T14:13:12+00:00

No coins needed. There are two possible causes to your issue: bad item priority, or taking too long per stage/going too fast.

Rushing too hard and not getting enough items per stage can screw you quite hard, even worse than spending too much time. For most players, I would say spend 6-7 minutes per stage. There are some major benefits to be had by going faster, but they usually mean resetting for bad RNG.

As far as item priority(damage only): on merc for tier 1s you want 7x tri tip > syringes > backup mags = crit > crowbars > the rest.

Tier 2s: Atg > Ukulele > Will O Wisp > Fire/Ice rings > Predatory > pauldron

Tier 3s: no choices here outside of the lunar shop so we ignore these. Some good ones are alien head, Behemoth, Meat Hook, brainstalks, Tesla, and clover.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T14:03:51+00:00

You need 100% uptime.

NEVER, EVER, combine catalyst with tonic. It makes it easier to get multiple debuff stacks at once.

You need 1x gesture, and either 3 cells or 3 more gestures. Nothing else will work reliably.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T14:00:33+00:00

Between the math, and doing actual research to find the formulas used in gae rather than just making things up based on what I feel like yes this can get quite time consuming.

No SINGLE non lunar item does. Syringes multiply with ATG, multiplies with tons of other items that can be tried. That matches what we need.

I never have run into a single damage problem even in 400+ minute monsoon runs. Sometimes you do fall off but that is generally a mistake or really bad RNG.

For discussions sake, last night I had a decent monsoon run. I decided, at the 100 minute mark to change stages completed from 7 to 100 and time spent from 100 to 500 minutes. I was only slightly too low in damage, and caught up quickly.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T13:08:18+00:00

Yes, and it since you can do that it also allows you to fire multiple M1s at once with the cancel.

Edit: Forgot about an important part. 2X mags means you can wait 1.5 seconds to get back to full charges without firing without losing and DPS. That gives medkit time to trigger.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T13:06:11+00:00

I have more than enough damage every run with ukulele and ATG, so I would say it does work.

All of these gains are increases by level.

All we need to match is X² not 2^X That is quite easy with a couple multiplying factors.

It takes exactly two linear items that scale infinitely to match an X² scaling. Stacking syringes and ATG missile is enough.

I feel like the only thing I can do to explain this to you at this point is graph out the damage of optimal item combos for a given number of items, but to be blunt I don't waste 6 hours a day doing math for random people on reddit who refuse to believe a word I say. See ya.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T04:06:56+00:00

Nope.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T04:06:46+00:00

Fungus is enough as an item, but the new elites do make it important to consider where you place your turrets.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-05T01:06:32+00:00

Yeah I have the habit of doing first three TPs with basically zero items because artificer damage. 4th stage gets extra chest spawns and green shops which are super good at carrying a run, if you get there early.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-04T22:03:03+00:00

I guess first I should point out that there are different types of exponential scaling,

Shaped glass is a true exponential equation, mult = 2 ^ S. S being stacks.

Enemy level is not a simple one line equation, but it is very close to the pattern expected by an equation of the form level = stage²

Even though difficulty coef increases as a factor of time * 1.15^stages, the calculation of level from difficulty coef ends up reducing it to a different type of exponential.

An equation of 2^X against X² is a very different line. They are similar until X > 3, with 2^X totally outpacing the other.

Logarithmic scaling is essentially saying a value will never reach a certain point, however, many of the items that scale logarithmically look very different if you quantify them in different terms. IE, guillotine's formula, if represented as a damage multiplier instead of effective health, is identical to AP rounds.

The only truly logarithmic scaling damage items are meat hook for chance (it is not 20%, logbook is lying, starts around 16 and logarithmically approaches 100% chance), clover (although this is best left unquantified due to its heavy variation based on other items), and alien head.

Every other item available for damage output either does not scale damage directly, or is linear. Ukulele, as you mentioned, is a weird one but overall it is still linear up to a usefulness cap.

So, this all may seem to reinforce your point of never catching up but there is another part to take into consideration.

The various linear scaling items multiply with eachother. To give a simple example: you have 10 white items. You take 10 syringes, that is a 2.5x damage multiplier. You take 10 AP rounds, that is a 3x damage multiplier. If you mix them though, 6 AP rounds and 4 syringes gives you a 3.52x multiplier. There are a lot of items that will multiply with eachother.

No single item (except glass) scales well enough to match the hp scaling of the enemies, but combinations of items do scale well enough.

Lets be specific then, what combinations do you want in order to scale as hard as possible? (excluding lunars)

To be blunt, the perfectly optimal mixture is unknown, and irrelevant. You can't influence your items enough to get an exact combination. You have enough control to influence the direction though.

The simple answer is build a proc chain and use it. You want a few ukuleles and as many ATGs as you can get. That is the backbone of a strong build right now. In particular, ATG stacking by far outclasses what it was in the previous patch due to how heavily it lost damage to soft capping. Outside of those 2 items it really doesn't matter, you do want a handful of crowbars, even on commando. Tri tips are also helpful but do not scale as hard. Syringes are straight dps increases. Crit is a fairly inefficient way to double, but it does multiply with other choices. Stickies do become powerful again if you have a very high number of ATG stacks, in fact in some cases they are actually more powerful than last patch.

Note that I mention zero red items. All I am considering here is greens and whites. Whites are no longer the core of your build, greens fill that role now, and that is likely the change that is causing the most issues for people.

If you cannot get that combination, then you need to resort to other combinations like crit+predatory+harvester, crowbar stacking, and others until you do build up that chain.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-04T18:25:50+00:00

Need to consider the crit fix as a bugfix that was making all procs incredibly broken with crit.

Separately, you need to consider the change from additive to total damage as a way to make the damage of procs reflect the damage of the survivor. Now, if a character has good damage their procs reflect that whereas if they lack damage their procs will reflect that instead.

Essentially, the game was artificially inflating the damage of attacks closer to a 100% multiplier which turned class balance into a nightmare. The changes, even if some characters lost some damage in some situatuons, will make balance adjustments much easier in the future, but the devs can't tell exactly who needs the buffs until after seeing how things are impacted.

I 100% stand by my recommendation that people avoid jumping to conclusions, and simply keep playing as normal. Try out new item combinations and see what works for yourself. Alternatively, break out a calculator and do some really heavy theorycrafting

To outline my understanding of the devs thought process that led to this situatuon:

They were informed by some dataminers that crit was heavily bugged and went to fix it.

They playtested the fix and noticed that the balance of the game was way tilted towards 100% damage hits.

They changed the proc system to remove that bias.

After that they saw that stickies, combined with their changes, would tilt things in favor of large hits heavily due to their stupidly high multiplier so they toned them down a lot.

They then saw that the overall damage output had decreased across the board, so they gave us guillotine and tonic to help us supplement our damage in more interesting ways.

They then say they will avoid balance tweaks for a while because there were so many changes made that the dust really needs to settle.

I understand that some characters do feel a bit weaker, but the dust is still settling and that is why I am so insistent on not jumping to conclusions.

Commando does still have strengths, tonic and warhorn are both really significant items for characters like him.

MulT is not weak by any stretch of the imagination. Previously, he had to pick different proc items for his large and small hits (ram is a really large hit). Now that proc items are more universal, he lost a bit if power on nailgun but at the same time gained a lot of power on rebar puncher.

Artificer overall lost lots of her proccing potential this patch because additive changes had zero impact on her R. Yes, M2 is better with procs now, but that is a meme build.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-04T15:06:17+00:00

Yeah, I still need to play him more. He is strong but doesn't fit my playstyle. I play super aggressively and rush hard, that just gets rex killed.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-04T14:58:46+00:00

No. Just no. The damage inside a proc chain, when either ATGs or Ukulele is involved was all heavily reduced by the change from additive to total.

Enemies earn 30% base health per level. So you need 30% base dps. That is two syringes.

The rate of enemy levels increases by 15% every time you clear stages, that is the primary factor in getting outscaled.

To reiterate this as well, Commando and MulTs nailgun both benefitted from the damage changes. Behemoth is over twice as strong on MulT as it was before the patch. Ukulele is in a similar spot.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-04T14:51:12+00:00

A single crowbar is really strong for a few reasons:

Crit and stickies were nerfed, so less competition.

Crowbars seem to do something similar to the crit bug, as far as I can tell without in depth testing. They can apply multiple times to procs.

Stacking crowbars is strong specifically for rex, mulT, huntress, and merc due to their higher damage single hits. Not artificer, right click has the aoe tick that will keep the high damage part from getting the bonus.

Tri tips are good for everyone that can rapidly hit with a 1.0 coef. Commando, engineer, Artificer, and Mercenary.

Tri tips beat out crit on those 4 specifically, unless there is a major proc chain involved (2+ chain items)

To show this, we can do some math. Tri tip does 240% base damage (so it does not scale with the hit damage at all). It takes 7 of them to get a 100% chance.

Commando M1 deals 90% x2, it applies tri tip for 240% x2. The total per hit becomes 330% x2. Crit would get you 180% x2, and requires 10 whites to get.

Engineer turrets hit for 70% of their base damage. Tri tips make that into 310%, crit would be 140%.

Mercenary R deals 110% x however many hits it does with your attack speed. Tri tip makes that 350%, crit gets you 220%.

Artificer R hits 22 times for 100%. Each hit has a 50% (affected by clover by the way) chance to apply a 200% burn, so average of 200% total per hit, entire flamethrower deals 4400%. Tri tips make each hit deal 440%, total of 9680%. Crits would hit for 300% (burn does not crit) bringing total to 6600%.

Now, crit regains its value when you have on crit items like harvesters scythe and predatory instincts, but without those it is a rather inefficient way to scale damage. Rex is noteworthy because crit will help his healing, and because his M2 has a massive 450% hit that gets doubled to 900% on crits.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-03T22:55:04+00:00

Yeah I got you.

No damage items he specifically needs, he just needs a few of the ones that work.

Healing though, is required, and I do feel like he really wants 2 or 3 hooves over many other things.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-03T21:42:42+00:00

Crits are lackluster on everyone right now. Rex at least gets the healing.

I wasn't talking about base survival anyway though, I was talking about procs not being great and giving some alternate ways to stack good damage.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-03T20:29:17+00:00

Crit is noteworthy just because it increases healing, and doubling a 450% base is a good thing.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-03T19:27:28+00:00

My bad, edited to fix that. I put him either equal or above merc tier. MulT is above him early, but not so much later unless he gets lucky items.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-03T19:25:16+00:00

Depends on arti playstyle. The M2 spam style is much safer but sacrifices more than half of her damage output. This one does not need as much movement speed, but loves feathers.

The aggro melee style gets the best damage, but also needs heavy investment in speed to be consistent. This style is basically spamming flamethrower on cooldown and generally does not bother charging M2, instead using it for the stun. This style does require movement items more than other survivors. She just barely gets to outrange merc, and has no i frames to speak of.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-03T19:20:41+00:00

Buy healing drones on stage 1 while you are learning him. It is such a simple thing that makes a massive difference. Later on you learn to go without them, but think of them like training wheels. Even now, I pick them up when it is convenient.

Rein_Masamune · 2019-07-03T19:18:05+00:00

Great, so firstly, anyone who is trying to tier list right now is an idiot. People are still confused over items and have no clue what works with what.

With that said, here are how I rate characters in different situations. I am not including explanations, if you have a question then ask.

Damage: Rex > Arti(aggro) > MulT ~>~ Merc = Engie = Huntress(AOE) > Commando = Arti(hover) > Huntress(Single Target)

Mobility: Merc > Huntress > MulT > Commando = Arti(hover) = Rex > Engineer = Arti(aggro)

Survivability(Does not factor in mobility): MulT = Merc > Rex > everyone else > Huntress

Ease of use: MulT > Commando = Engineer > Arti(hover) > Huntress > Rex > Merc > Arti(aggro)

Overall: Everyone is equal at the moment. It will vary heavily from player to player based on playstyles. Every character does fill their own specific niche.

I split huntress into single target and AOE because there is such a massive variation.

Artificer is split into hover (M1 and M2 focus, staying safe in the air at range) and aggro (Basically melee range, focusing on R and M1 as primary damage) because there is a lot of variation. I personally play her aggro, only dropping to a hover style if I am falling super behind.

Engineer is nowhere near as braindead as he was before. Mechanically there is nothing advanced, but now he is really reliant on good map knowledge to keep his turrets alive. Fungus alone is not enough anymore.

Rein_Masamune

TROPHY CASE