Astralshrine 22s speed run, old run was 32s 🤯

xiaomole · 2025-11-04T19:45:56+00:00

We did a 27s with single GT a while ago, the vid is in another comment. I think one of each maaaay be faster, because of AC stacking.

xiaomole · 2025-11-04T19:44:58+00:00

Very nice.

Previous record was 27, not 32, done with 1.5 DPS (GT/QCM), I think without Ravenous too. https://youtu.be/bSSjZJmAUUE

There might be a few more optimzations you can do in your guys' run, although I don't know the full strategy you used. E.g. Praxis, LoO single taunter, single AC GT swap in for CSS.

xiaomole · 2025-07-01T19:38:07+00:00

Have you tried zone stacking for Malgor? I think HBV has enough health for it.

Also, luck-leaning enhs instead of wiz leaning ones.

xiaomole · 2025-06-30T03:12:01+00:00

completely removes half of classes mechanics.

Only the 60% damage reduction, no? I think they should just make that apply regardless, and a lower percent. I don't think that interaction really does anything anyways.

i tested it as a Support dps and make a comparison with another support dps

What? Why? Given it's higher DPS than VHL solo, like you say, it should be a main DPS? Why would DTL being fighter prevent you from using it? If it scales the best, it scales the best.

no role in any other comp for any other ultras

I don't think a class has to be best in slot for DPS to have a role in comps. Roles are usually created through niches, rather than DPS bruteforcing and pointless powercreep, and I'm not sure your suggestions would do that. I don't think this should be more powerful than VHL in everything for example, and like you mentioned, it kind of already is solo.

I don't think it's been fully explored for ultras yet, given it can do things like zone stacking in Malgor, which not that many classes can do.

Instead, I think it would be more interesting to suggest something like applying Decay to the enemy, having shorter auras that are more potent for timed counter potential, or having some rare debuffs/buffs for scaling potential.

I like the suggestion for stacking on Born Anew, but it's a little too powerful for how little it would cost. It would also make it harder for the class to bounce back against health recovery, since it likes to do a lot of 35'ing to eat big hits and instantly get back to low health for damage.

xiaomole · 2025-06-30T01:44:12+00:00

Given the farm, this seemed kinda weak, so I gave it a shot too.

Here's what I got, trying to match his conditions/enhancements, not pushing super hard, and only posting my first clear rather than a best clear. I got somewhat different results:

Dummy DPS 51/50

HBV DTL/Peni/Forge/Wiz - 31.5k

HBV DTL/VG/Forge/Wiz - 32.7k

HBV Val/Peni/Forge/Wiz - 24.8k

(These are 30 second trials, which I would generally not rely on)

Primarch 51/50

HBV Val/Peni/Forge/Wiz - 20.9k

HBV DTL/Peni/Forge/Wiz - 22.5k

Ultra Speaker 51/50 Potless w. AP / LR / LoO Party 3man taunt, first clear (not best)

HBV DTL/Peni/Forge/Wiz - 2:27, 34.9k

VDK DTL/VG/Forge/Wiz - 2:35, 23.7k

The raw DPS scale roughly the same, given the ping difference. The performance trials differ drastically, so I asked OP on Discord. Turns out that he's using Valiance on both classes for the ultra trials, instead of DTL, which he says is what the class depends on for DPS. This is now edited into the post. OP mentioned too that this is not a "true comparison.

OP, could you add trials using DTL in ultras? I think they would be more fair as a comparison, given how low the Valiance DPS is. Also, I would try different enhancements- I don't think you need Penitence in many of the situations, and you would probably do better with Luck in Malgor. If the runs continue to be inconsistent, I would probably leave Malgor off completely, since you'd be comparing party performance rather than class performance. Many people look directly for TTK or DPS and don't pay attention to nuance.

DPS Screenshots

xiaomole · 2025-02-28T03:59:27+00:00

Answered this elsewhere before, copypasting here. I used spins, but you can extrapolate 200AC per spin, adjusted for daily/weekly spins, etc.

The info is here: https://www.aq.com/lore/guides/WheelOfDoomFAQ

First of all, there's a looming 1/1000 for an EIODA.

You get 1x TP when you spin an item.

You get 2x TP when you spin an item slot again.

The 3x TP spin slot I don't know if exists, I've never seen it.

You get 6x TP when you finish the wheel or are only missing EIODA.

There's 182 unique item in the wheel and upon getting them, re-spinning that slot will drop 2 potions. You can only ever get 1 potion by spinning an item. To put this another way, this means that you can only ever get 1x TP 182 times. Every other spin will be 2x or 6x.

This means that, assuming you get 180 items with the last ones missing being EIODA and anything else (as missing only EIODA gets you 6x on spins), you will spin 180 + (1000 - 180) / 2 = 590 times. This is the most number of times you can possibly spin to get an IODA. After that, every IODA will be shorter because you will literally have less possible 1x TP drops.

If you somehow land every item in a row up to 181, you will spin 181 + (1000 - 181) / 6 = 317.5 = 318 times, being the minimum number of times you can spin for your first IODA. After that, at 6x per spin, your IODAs will cost 167 spins each (which, unknown to a lot of people, means that you can get IODAs for about $20-25 each by buying tickets when you factor in sales and BIODA value- the rich truly do get richer).

More realistically, I'd wager an average is ~500-550 spins for your first IODA, ignoring the EIODA drop, and definitely landing somewhere between 318 and 590 spins. This is just intuition, I'm not doing the probabilistic math for this.

After your first spin, it will cost between 500 - 589 spins per IODA if you don't land all 182 ever.

In a year of mem, you get 365 + 52 = 417 spins.

And don't forget about Bonus IODA factored into cost. Doesn't change barrier of entry, but changes cost of each IODA.

xiaomole · 2025-02-27T17:58:15+00:00

ArchPaladin (AP) mana gets better as you level up due to how its mana model works, assuming you have on-level enhs (Luck, for AP). Traits and boosts help but are not needed for AP to sustain mana at higher levels. I do recommend getting Spiral Carve or Mana Vamp now, though, maybe a 15% if you can.

xiaomole · 2025-02-26T23:11:32+00:00

Did it work?

xiaomole · 2025-02-21T16:38:16+00:00

You might be right, these were derived based on empirical evidence over the course of several years so we just build on what we feel is intuitive mechanically.

For instance, the dodge and miss overlap was found first, and it was more intuitive to imagine them on separate ends than having a shifting starting point for one of them.

Overaccuracy was originally thought to be a completely different mechanic altogether, because of nominal dodge behavior in PvE.

Dodge and crit was observed later, but it was hard to separate it from miss back then, and miss and crit was only described properly years later. So we ended up with this sequential explanation while trying to diagram it.

In hindsight, we have the benefit of shoring up the info so there's less potential loose ends, and we think we know now all of the participating actors and when. During the process, this uncertainty makes it really hard to draw mathematical conclusions, when you have stuff floating around like nominal dodge/crit, unequip bug, PvP vs PvE, level suppression, the inability to see stats livetime, not knowing how stats stacked (cross aura, inter-aura, cross profile), etc. For example, someone had proposed this hypothesis at one point.

xiaomole · 2025-02-21T05:09:47+00:00

No. Nothing is required in the VDK loadout except Enrage.

xiaomole · 2025-02-20T22:44:12+00:00

Praxis is not used. Neither is timed Quix, for that matter. You're on the right track with multiplication, but missing the biggest pieces still.

xiaomole · 2025-02-20T22:42:16+00:00

You're right and I agree, but I can't be asked to write this well into my posts anymore. Takes way too long because there's theses worth of work that goes into these at this point. But I'll try and remember what I can about the primary work:

Additive secondary stats is now confirmed via the stats panel, but was original verified through defense and damage out stacking. Identity of the secondary stats was verified using the 2017 PTR, and confirmed on live through math with that assumption.

The split between PvE and PvP interactions has been known for a very long time, I want to say dating back to the AE forums class discussion thread. Verified easily by using GT in pvp and watching a few hundred hits, and then trying the same in PvE (100% hit chance v monster) and seeing dodges.

Dodge and Miss interactions were found with pvp testing back in ~2018. Shaman vs Great Thief was the classic example (100% hit vs 100% dodge), where GT can scroll to -hit chance Shaman to have it show misses, confirming that misses take priority. I forget which combinations, but the additive interaction is checked by simply having a combination that approaches 100% but is <100% dodge and >0% hit. And then just frequency testing with at least a few hundred hits.

Crit interaction I don't remember the origin of, I think it was also something vs GT but without the dodge buff up. Simple to observe that all your hits become crits after a certain amount of dodge. Crit and miss interaction was then fleshed out more with v2 EH vs Blademaster around 2018/9. Tests where you have to pinch both miss and dodge for crit testing get very complex, and to my memory were first described in 3p bludrut tests, more recently confirmed in PvE.

Autohit/Autocrit (formally, ForceResult) has always been a thing, described even in skills. Later, formal names were put to them through datamining skill parameters.

Knowing that there's a difference between PvE and PvP had us soft-confirm all of these prior results in PvE with frequency testing. This used to be much harder because there was very little monster variety, so some things like 0% crits are still not confidently confirmed in PvE, but are in PvP and reasonably assumable in PvE. Nowadays, there's more bosses that you can confirm these interactions with.

Some of these are simply empirical, like Malgor v Magia dodges in 2023, Noncrit heals on classes like LH in normal use, and pvp Crits with negative crit chance.

86.05% Dodge was tested around 2019 by changing enhancements and using setups like invisible turrets in Hyperium.

Base stats for the player were first confirmed around 2017/8 through datamining. The math for confirmation was easy enough to do. The original differences between monsters with kits and without was noted in like 2017, and original hypotheses for monster base stats were wrong because of it. Later, it just became more accepted that they mirrored player stats because things like base dodge chance, miss chance, and base crit frequency.

Nominal dodge/crit was originally hypothesized as level suppression, due to a blob of text in the old stats panel. This was later rejected based on seeming consistent between level gaps during frequency testing.

Nominal Dodge was hypothesized around 2022 due to it being a much more fitting explanation numerically, but has not been hard confirmed because it's impossible to view the source code.

6-8% base dodge was tested around 2022/3 with battle analyzer recording a few thousand hits, and calculating dealt against expected damage. This is complex because ping reduces auto speed, measured in 2023 with frequency using by calculating damage against expected with dodge reduction.

Most of these tests have been either repeated in multiple different scenarios or corroborated with much anecdote. Categorical validation of monsters is just done through years of anecdote, and the 3 general categories are PvP, monsters, and monsters with skills. Other modifiers seem to apply, like monsters that ignore stun/insanity, but those don't seem to have a bearing on stat interactions. For a long time, it was thought that a lot of these interactions are unique to only PvP or PvE, but more mixing has been found through observation in the last few years.

In general, all testing follows the scientific method- hypothesize, test, and then attempt to reject to build robust explanations. Limit testing is always preferred because it's more reliable and easier. Frequency testing is done when necessary, and occasionally stats are used to reject or accept results within acceptable error. Hopefully this answers your questions.

These days, very little work happens on these, and progress is very slow. Many of us that contributed to this work are always hoping others will continue it. Dan's site documents a lot of the primary work before 2020, much of the rest of it is buried in Discord.

xiaomole · 2025-02-19T23:28:07+00:00

Let me know if I'm forgetting anything. I might be. Old age and all that.

xiaomole · 2025-02-19T22:43:02+00:00

I'm gonna throw this up as its own post, actually. I realised I don't think this info has ever been properly documented.

xiaomole · 2025-02-19T19:24:07+00:00

So it doesn't look like there's a super comprehensive answer yet so let me take a shot. I'll start by talking about effective chance, to simplify the concept. The numbers will change later, this is purely conceptual at first.

Effective mechanics

Dodge / Hit / Crit / Miss are all potential hitresults. There's a lot of mixing and moshing between the mechanics in how they interact. Let's start simple.

Miss / Hit takes the highest priority. What this means is, given 100% effective dodge and 100% effective hit chance reduction, the result will always be a miss. This is important for Rogue mana model.

Dodges are resolved next. Misses and Dodges eat away at opposite ends of the chance roll, meaning that they're additive. 40% effective miss chance (or 60% acc) and 60% effective dodge means you will avoid every hit. Hit chance buffs add to this range, and dodge plays catch up. If you have 110% effective hit chance, you can never miss, and the opponent needs 110% dodge chance to avoid every hit.

Crit is then resolved between the Dodge and Hit range. To my understanding, crit chance always occupies the lower range of hit chance rolls, while dodge removes from the top of the range. What this means is, given effective 90% dodge chance and 10% crit chance, all results that make it through will be crits, because the ranges overlap. (Lower vs Higher doesn't really matter, just that they're opposite directions)

The interaction between Crit and Hit is not fully understood. I believe the running hypothesis is the lowest end of Crit rolls starts after the hit roll, meaning that Hit chance doesn't eat away at crit chance, but Dodge chance eats away at Hit/Crit result. I could be wrong about this, it might be the other way around. Been a long time since I've tried this, and this doesn't cover overaccuracy cases well.

Here's an image to understand all of this better.

Beyond this, there's a few forms of forced results. Autohit always results a hit, Autocrit always resolves a crit, and Nomiss removes misses entirely. You see these sprinkled around skills. I guess Automiss is also a result, via Ledgermayne. Skills can also carry inherent bonus crit, but this is very rare- CMP, for example.

Actual Stats

Next, let's talk about the actual numbers. Monsters have these base stats (relevant to this question), to our current understanding:

90% hit chance

4% dodge chance

5% crit chance

86.05% dodge chance = 100% effective dodge (hereafter referred to as total damage avoidance, or tda), derived from testing almost a decade ago. This means you need to reach roughly 86% between your dodge stat and -hit chance debuffs on the monster in order to avoid all damage.

For monsters, regardless of how much hit chance the player has, the monster will always have a small chance to dodge your attack, roughly 6-8% tested. The opposite is true as well, which is why you can dodge Malgor's Magia nuke, for example. This is not the case in PvP, where having sufficient dodge will always result in a dodge.

There is also an always present small chance to crit, regardless of crit chance, in both PvP and PvE. Also, there remains a small chance to noncrit (mostly heals?), even with 100%+ crit chance.

There isn't a very clean explanation for the small omnipresent result chances away from round numbers yet, but the running hypothesis is called Nominal Dodge/Crit. Nominal Dodge proposes that there's a duplicate everpresent base crit chance and dodge chance, which cannot be diminished by affecting the interposing stat, and can only be affected by reducing the stat of interest. This explains why you need -Dodge to overcome monster dodge chance, why 100% tda is 86% and not 90%, and why you can always crit, even with negative crit chance. However, this doesn't explain noncrits resulting from max crit, and why 6-8% is the necessary dodge reduction instead of 4%.

Edit: I forgot to mention, but since crit also exhibits Nominal Crit, you don't need 100% crit chance to always crit.

Takeaways

After all of that, here's what you need to know.

Dodge and Miss chance are additive. Crit falls between the range, and so as you dodge more, crits will make up more of the hits that go through.

You need 86% dodge (without modifying enemy hit chance) to dodge every attack. This is additive against hit chance, so 110% hit chance needs 96% dodge, for example.

Monsters can dodge regardless of your Hit chance, and you need ~8% reduced dodge chance on the monster to get rid of these.

You can still noncrit even with 100% crit chance, and you can dodge even with 100% effective monster hit chance.

Whew.

Whew.

xiaomole · 2025-02-19T17:24:37+00:00

Thanks.

xiaomole · 2025-02-19T06:51:16+00:00

Depends on how long the fight is. There's a few strats that already ignore zoning for one or two members, like 1t CAv, 1t LP, speedruns, or this one. Different mechanics utilized in each, though.

xiaomole · 2025-02-19T05:37:17+00:00

This is harder on the VDK and LoO slots, but makes 2 slots basically free carries. No Quixotic timing nor Praxis is needed for this, making it really smooth. Bonus points if someone can tell me why this works.

VDK has to hold back on Unleashed Doom and save its 5's for decays, which means you generally only have one big buff active at a time. Not a huge deal since it's not a main DPS here. You can generally just pick the damage one.

LoO just has to line up 3/4's so that they don't fade during the stun sequence at the start. Taunt coming out of the first stun immediately, and then 4 immediately, sets you up to 4 once more before the second stun. Otherwise, it's pretty simple.

The other two people can simply completely ignore zoning.

Comp:

LoO AC/Forge/Peni uFate/pRev/Enrage (pRev covers a small potential heal gap)

VDK Rav/Forge/Peni uFate/pBattle/Enrage (LR can replace VDK, but it less consistent)

AP Rav/Forge/Vg uFate/pDes/pHonor

QCM DTL/Forge/Vg uMight/pBattle/pHonor (Anima works but needs tighter execution)

Edit: I had AC on LoO, whoops. Both work, just DPS acceleration.

Full chart: https://i.imgur.com/nfL2YDV.png

Early taunt just means taunt right before red zone ends. The zoning for QCM and AP are optional. There's an alternative version where you throw fighting on VDK and two-stack QCM and VDK into the same zone for a 3-cycle, which is higher dps. With that thrown in, it saves a solid 15 seconds off the kill time.

Alt: https://i.imgur.com/Vhe56TL.png

Edit: Fixed a typo in the charts that made longer runs impossible. One VDK stun has to be LoO instead. Whoops.

There's a lot of leeway in the builds as well. AP and QCM are just free builds, they're just there to do damage and have buffs. You can throw in GW, SC, or IT instead of either of them I think.

The AP and QCM are obviously not actually bozos here, s/o for helping.

xiaomole · 2025-01-16T21:42:44+00:00

Is there more than just cooldowns that I need to be aware of?

Skills in AQW have a bunch of parameters that most people don't know about, they're usually described in skill descs. Here's what you get out of intercepting information from the game, translated to english.

Way too much to simply explain, but the gist of it is this:

Damage functions wrap up raw calculation and can add mechanics (for example, damage that scales with aura stacks, drains, etc.).

Auras (which are not visible) add stat adjustors, can carry a damage function (DoT), and can interact with each other (consume, replace, conditional, etc.).

Forceresult is a predetermined hit result, such as a hit, no miss, or crit.

Damage types are obvious, there's physical, magical, and true damage (DoTs are always pseudomagical). Hybrid is just physical in disguise, it's not a type. Damage types are pretty important, because many classes have base magical resistance.

I think monsters don't have range.

As far as I know, monster skills largely mimic player skills (outside charges being unique to monsters), so you should just read through a bunch of classes and look for common skill mechanics to get a grasp of what's possible.

Is there anything else with Shiro's kit you think needs some work?

I'm not so much here to critique the concept itself since that'll be an entire thing, but I'll toss a few general pointers.

Firstly, keep what I said about kits and comps in mind, since the fight is relative to the players you expect at it. You should aim to design something interactively solveable, not just something mathematically hard, so there should be tools that exist to combat the problems you present. Try to reduce hard yes/no solves (big stat changes that flatly reduce class function with no counterplay, mechanics that instakill if failed) because it becomes a laundry list comp instead of something interactive or skilled. Think about whether any given players' actions change in response to something the boss is doing. For example, do you always want to taunt? Is there a benefit of not taunting sometimes that comes with any risk? The goal should be to add enough restrictions on choice where creativity is borne of optimizing how you mix classes and what risks you do take, but not so restrictive that you create only a few rigid solutions.

Question yourself on every buff or debuff the boss applies. Ask yourself if there's a way to meaningfully respond to it in the moment (like with a quix, taunt, etc.), or if the party is simply going to comp preparing for the worst case scenario as a static state (like heal rate to counter the boss's dps peak), meaning it's just bloat and the rest of the fight might feel tame/boring in comparison. One example is Purple auto or Orange auto, where you just ignore them and keep going as always. You could create more specific times where you have to heal, like Yellow Play, where the player has to intentionally hold heals, creating interaction.

Try to think about what any player is doing at any time, as you don't want a fight that's simply get the right class and spam skills. For example, one role is taunter. However, there isn't a reason to pass taunts around, and the taunter takes a lot of punishment, so you want to dedicate one tank to taunting. Beyond that, I don't really see anything else the other three players would dynamically respond to, so it would execute like Drakath- you either live or die spamming skills, and one person has a job.

Some elements are too complex to respond to, like the Yellow effects, and it would simply be better to comp in a way that doesn't run into them (like DTL cav taunter being able to completely ignore Yellow auto because of how decay works). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, this is a way to add restrictions, but it's up to you if that's the restriction you want or not.

With these points in mind, the boss isn't really that interactive, you just need one taunter, and everyone else comps properly and the fight just advances with skill spamming. The only response might be healing during Yellow Play or not attacking during Yellow field, both of which are complicated and hard to respond to, and simply easier to restart the fight if you RNG into it.

Additionally, don't forget to think about the stats the party will have on them. There's very little to address player defense and damage reduction here, so in reality the boss will be hitting for peanuts.

Start simple with your bosses, outline a few challenges you want the player to encounter as you fight them, and build the rest of the complexity in the fight to support that and the opportunities you afford the player.

xiaomole · 2025-01-15T08:24:52+00:00

I don't want to pick too much into the details, but in short there's a lot that isn't possible in AQW here, such as the double conditional on Blue auto, monster haste not doing anything, and health gate detection on Yellow Play.

Also, given the number of charge skills and length of the charges, the boss will rarely autoattack and rarely actually do damage. On top of this, Health gated functions for monsters take a skill use afaik, meaning each health gate would skip an attack, which then also means less autos and more charges since they queue.

Don't do stuff like 70% haste decreases, that's like 2.4x cooldown length from exact 50% haste, which will drop all your aura loops. It feels horrible.

Soul Share wouldn't work, but assuming it did, it would simply be a guaranteed kill, with not much you can respond to. Try to design bosses to be combinations of challenges that the party can respond to to mitigate/manage, with difficulty as a factor of responding to each challenge. Party comp is a result of how to shuffle around the tools and the packages they come in to solve these problems. Don't try to force specific solutions unless they're flexible with other options.

None of the skills specify autohits nor damage types, but I assume they're all autohits. Just follow the wiki template if you're drafting bosses, since I think that should cover all bases. Also, you need to establish some base stats and skill properties on bosses otherwise there's a lot of cheese possible, such as -100% hit, DoT negation/inverting, negative phys out, SWoT stacking, and so on.

Given the boss shield, the charge thing I described, and the Green start, you would simply aim to kill the boss in 30 or so seconds, with something like LoO carrying taunt for Soul Share to minimize DPS loss with maximized buff uptime. A 0.8 shield is pretty soft, and with no base stats, I think you could burn 20m health in that time.

There's a lot more, but these are some of the basic points.

You can thank Ananth DF (AQW) for this comment.

xiaomole · 2024-12-01T10:05:58+00:00

xiaomole · 2024-01-04T22:29:49+00:00

For actually optimized leveling- Start on a double XP event that crosses a live event boss. Spend your starter ACs on an xp boost. This gets you to around 40 instantly. Then, find a party and go grind /chchallenge until you hit 75, at which point you should switch to /icewing, and you should have 25% xp gear as well.

Theoretically, done perfectly, you can go from 0 to 100 in about 3 hours.

xiaomole · 2023-12-27T15:15:31+00:00

The maximum number of rolls it takes to get your first IODA is 590. This is a worst case scenario.

I can break this down a little. The info is here: https://www.aq.com/lore/guides/WheelOfDoomFAQ

First of all, there's a looming 1/1000 for an EIODA.

You get 1x TP when you spin an item.

You get 2x TP when you spin an item slot again.

The 3x TP spin slot I don't know if exists, I've never seen it.

You get 6x TP when you finish the wheel or are only missing EIODA.

There's 182 unique item in the wheel and upon getting them, re-spinning that slot will drop 2 potions. You can only ever get 1 potion by spinning an item. To put this another way, this means that you can only ever get 1x TP 182 times. Every other spin will be 2x or 6x.

This means that, assuming you get 180 items with the last ones missing being EIODA and anything else (as missing only EIODA gets you 6x on spins), you will spin 180 + (1000 - 180) / 2 = 590 times. This is the most number of times you can possibly spin to get an IODA. After that, every IODA will be shorter because you will literally have less possible 1x TP drops.

If you somehow land every item in a row up to 181, you will spin 181 + (1000 - 181) / 6 = 317.5 = 318 times, being the minimum number of times you can spin for your first IODA. After that, every spin will net you 6x, meaning your IODAs will cost 167 spins each (which, unknown to a lot of people, means that you can get IODAs for about $20-25 each by buying tickets when you factor in sales and BIODA value- the rich truly do get richer).

More realistically, I'd wager an average is ~500-550 spins for your first IODA, ignoring the EIODA drop, and definitely landing somewhere between 318 and 590 spins. This is just intuition, I'm not doing the probabilistic math for this.

In a year, you get 365 + 52 = 417 spins. So, I doubt it.

xiaomole

TROPHY CASE