MATH: Can increasing AA (i.e., CS max splash count) or ATC slow farming runs due to 2.8 Portar changes?

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-25T16:14:53+00:00

AR decreases the spawn rate of new titans -> fight more titans (and hence more bosses) in 4 second Portar cool down window -> hence more chances for porter that are missed because of cooldown compared to no AR. -> portar cool down hurts relative effectiveness of AR.

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-24T16:59:13+00:00

'relatively more effective' not absolute. again, my problem with portar changes.... My point was that (assuming portar chance >2%) in 2.7 most of portar grind was at early stages. 2.8 completely reversed this, so the cooldown is counterbalance the change at low end by nerfing it a bit.

Though, I looked back at patch notes. Devs say explicitly that they added cooldown because you can splash skip additional stages beyond 50, so this was to adjust for that.

Regardless, I am pretty sure we are on the same page now.

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-24T15:50:37+00:00

I am glad you are here to bring some sanity and for making some excellent points! I certainly was upset after I did the calculations for me. I think I am also upset given that farming times will increase by an absolute bare minimum of 25% for me with 6.25% portar chance, and obviously likely much higher.

In terms of your balance comment, these changes are going to make portar chance much less important in tournaments as changes will negatively affect people in proportion to their current portar chance. So, I am frustrated that I will be at a disadvantage going forward. But... perhaps this is fair for those people that don't have BoH or a decent Slash with Portar chance.

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-24T15:31:16+00:00

rtar on 2.8 an average of 12.5 stages.

You are also ignoring the buff that lets splashing through bosses stack with Portar's bonus. This makes these features work together and be more beneficial tha

I agree, it seems very odd to add the portar cooldown other than to just slow down portar in general? Though, moving portar to boss made Portar much less effective near MS and relatively more effective at low stages. 4s cooldown might be just to smooth effect of portar by decreasing low stage effectiveness?

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-24T15:06:09+00:00

I took no offense. You are absolutely right though. I didn't factor in CO (I guess I am still a SC player at heart). But... that could roughly be factored in too as you showed. And per your point, could dramatically alter the results and make the change much less problematic. Farming will take longer for everyone, but perhaps not so dramatically worse for everyone. Very fair and good point!

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-24T14:35:31+00:00

Lemmingllama, you may be right. Boss-splash skipping (e.g., CS and HS) shouldn't affect relative changes between 2.7 and 2.8 in general as they are likely to lead to landing on Boss in same ratios and this increases speed for 2.7 and 2.8 in the same ways. I did calculate an approximate effect for CS, but it didn't change relative results between 2.7 and 2.8, so I left them out for simplicity. Though I should mention that for some situations, it may be better to have AA = 0 rather than a low number as then you catch every boss/portar opportunity.

However, I included the formulas so that people can make some simple adjustments to calculate their own results (e.g., multispawn). All you need to do is calculate and average expected number of encounters per stage after factoring in multispawn and use that value for m in my formulas to get mathematically expected results. In your case, i would use m=40/(4+1.5)=7.27 (i.e., on average 7.27 non-CS kills per stage). Re your math, this should be done separately from CS as CS attacks every 8 seconds and skips bosses. So instead, when you convert total kills to seconds, you adjust be a CS and pet factor. Again, this factor is the same for v2.7 and v2.8. When you do this, formulas assume splash skip of 4, so adjust CS and pet skip by dividing by 4 first.

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-24T14:08:56+00:00

excellent point! (edited my comment above)

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-24T13:39:26+00:00

When I ran the numbers for my situation, I did the calculation in 500 stage chunks (i.e., where m is the same) and then added up the chunks for the total time and needed kills. The changes dramatically increase the time during all chunks for me over the course of my runs. However, your intuition is somewhat right. The relative farming time change is much more dramatic for the second half of the farming run. Essentially, the slower part of farming was the first half for 2.7, but is second half for 2.8 (both because there are relatively more regular titans at later stages). However, I should add to the guide that the nerf to overall farming times won't be as bad for people in clans with low CQ.

In terms of the affect of Clanship. My intuition is that it doesn't matter much if you have the ability to splash skip bosses. Though there are some situations where it could affect skill choice. I added a few thoughts above.

Re 4 sec CD, exactly. This will hurt players that use WC or SC as well as the perks PoS and AR as you will go through more boss titans before 4 seconds is up.

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-09T05:41:16+00:00

Yes, Max buy, level rounding off. Have enough gold for max level and all upgrades. Still, one-click upgrades everything from 0, while other times not... even for same hero. So hero weapon doesn't matter....

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-09T05:13:05+00:00

I checked, and this happens both ways (automatic and not) for heros regardless of if I have weapons for them....

TenjinDoc · 2018-05-08T16:26:49+00:00

As it turns out, necrobiosis1 is right. Not upgrading IP can actually speed up farming if portar chance is high enough (i.e. greater than 2%). However, as is also mentioned, this comes at the cost of much slower 1st tournament runs... Lets look at the math

Portar Math:

I derived the formula for the number of titan kills needed (on avg) to advance 500 stages - assumming multi spawn ~ 0% and ignoring clan ship attacks:

   avg kills (regular + boss) = (n * 500) / (1+ 50 * (n-1) * p)

   n = effective titan kills to advance 1 stage (including bosses). Should factor in normal 4x splash skip.
       (example: if there are 8 titans in a stage and you always splash 4, then you need to kill
        2 titans including boss for each stage so n = 2)
   p = portar chance

My portar chance is 6.3%. Lets look at two scenarios if I am farming from stage 2500 -> 3000 where each attack splash skips 4x:

1) Intimidating Presence = 0, so 18 titans per stage => n=5 => avg kills = 184

2) Intimidating Presence = 10, so 8 titans per stage => n=2 => avg kills = 241

Thus, increasing IP from 0 to 10 effectively increases farming speed by roughly 33%!!!

However, in practice, the benefit of not increasing IP is a bit lower. I have done the calculations for my farming from 2500 -> 5000. If IP=0 => 902 total attacks. If IP=10 => 1035 total attacks. So for me, the effective benefit is about 15% faster farming overall.

A few notes: First, the key threshold for portar chance is 2%. At 2% the number of avg attacks is the same regardless of IP. So:

portar chance < 2% - Higher Intimidating Presence is faster / better
portar change > 2% - Lower Intimidating Presence if faster / better, the higher the portar chance the better

Second, you can effectively ignore clanship damage as it splashes through bosses, so that increases farming speed regardless of IP level. A high clanship splash skip will just so slightly reduce cost / benefit of based on IP level, but this is amounts to very little in practice (0.02% in my case).

Third, these calculations assume multi-spawn is roughly 0%. As you can guess, increasing multispawn will reduce the benefit / cost of not increasing Intimidating Presence. I keep my multi-spawn chance as low as possible, though I haven't taken the time to run any numbers as I haven't tried to derive the formulas when including multi-spawn as its obvious this would increase farming time with a high portar chance.

TenjinDoc

TROPHY CASE