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Critical hits, armour and physical/energy resistance
Pacifista
Member Posts: 2
I need some help to understand how the mechanics of critical hits, armour and physical/energy resistance interact with each other. Also what's the difference between armour and physical/energy resistance?
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Honestly, I'm not 100% certain. They've changed over time, and the mechanics implementation does things I find completely weird. The simple answer is that both armor and resistances reduce damage. Critical hits ignore a certain amount of armor when they deal damage. There is some math involved in terms of the specifics, but everyone agrees on the basics.
The weird thing has to do with armor and resistances. I would have sworn pre-12 that they stacked independently. After 12.0 there was some weirdness in the conversion to flat stats, and then last I saw anyone delve into the implementation armor and resistances were stacking additively as flat stats (for the appropriate damage type). My source for that is pretty impeccable when it comes to implementation details and combat mechanics testing, but I still find it almost unbelievable. I haven't had a chance to test this in detail since then, and it is possible it works in a different way now.
Of all the mathy game mechanics in MCOC, this is probably one of the thorniest briar patches a player could find themselves trying to traverse. It seems simple on the surface, but once you start factoring in armor break, negative armor, armor and resistance interactions, critical hit mechanics, flat stats, DR, critical resistance, pure skill and other masteries, you're deep in the weeds. It is ironically one of the easiest things for players to test (just go hit something and record it), except for the fact that all the special cases make it hard to tell just exactly what your test is actually saying.
I have one more doubt. I understand that crits ignore certain amount of armour, so how does physical/energy resistance affect crits? Does it reduce the crit damage or do crits ignore resistance as well?
Neither, and both. Referencing my post above, the last I heard resistances were being used by the game as essentially "armor modifiers." In other words, for the purpose of calculating damage, your armor rating was increased by your physical resistance rating (before being put through the DR calculations) for the purposes of physical damage, and ditto for energy resistance.
To put it another way, "Armor" is a "real thing" but physical and energy resistance are actually just armor buffs that affect when you take that kind of damage. So when critical hits are said to ignore armor, what they are really doing is ignoring some of the damage mitigating effects of armor, which itself incorporates any resistances you might have.
I know this sounds crazy, and I'm pretty sure it did not work this way pre-12.0, but my primary source for this is here: Hidden Mechanics BS . And I have never known any of DickSlug's game mechanics statements to be mistaken, at least at the time they were written. With the important caveat that Kabam has changed how game mechanics have worked silently in the past, and could have done so again without players noticing in this case because the change could be subtle when it comes to these mechanics.