Can somebody explain how Bad Luck Aura is supposed to work?
jdschw
Member Posts: 465 ★★★
I use Black Cat all the time (and love her), but I absolutely Do Not understand how bad luck aura is supposed to work. Specifically, I constantly see champs evade her when this ability, which is based on her combo meter, is well above their evade likelihood.
I can give some concrete examples that I just saw: I'm exploring act 6 in my spare time, and just fought both Wasp and Spider Gwen with her in 6.2.1. For science, I used the Domino synergy, which means Black Cat starts at 40 hits on her combo meter. As the bad luck aura ability reads, "for each hit in Black Cat's combo meter, the opponent's defensive ability accuracy is reduced by 2%, or twice that against science opponents." Since I'm starting at 40 combo, that means I immediately have the maximum 60% defensive AAR right from the start of the fight.
This path has the mesmerize node, which grants all defenders a 7% chance to evade. In addition, Wasp a total of (25%+8% = ) 33% chance to evade from her own abilities. 33% + 7% = 40% total chance, if these two abilities add together. (Not sure if they do.) Similarly, Spider Gwen has a 7% chance to evade per spider sense charge, maxing out at 5 charges, meaning 35%. Again, if you add the mesmerize evade chance, the total would be 42% here.
The evade chances of Wasp and Spider Gwen might be less than 40% and 42% respectively, but they should not be more in any case. (We don't need to worry about Spider Gwen's unblockable special evasion, because Black Cat doesn't have those.)
Now, I'm no math whiz, but I'm pretty sure 60% > 42%. And I think we can agree that evasion is a defensive ability.
If bad luck aura simply subtracts 60% from the evasion chance, then both of these defenders would have evasion chance < 0. This would mean they should *never* evade. And yet! In both fights, both of these defenders evaded! In Spider Gwen's case, the evade likelihood was kinda ridiculous, probably close to 40%, even though nothing about her kit or the node says she's immune to AAR.
So...what gives? Is evade somehow not considered a defensive ability? Is the 60% AAR *multiplied* against the defender's evasion chance instead of subtracted? Is something else going on that I've missed entirely?
I can give some concrete examples that I just saw: I'm exploring act 6 in my spare time, and just fought both Wasp and Spider Gwen with her in 6.2.1. For science, I used the Domino synergy, which means Black Cat starts at 40 hits on her combo meter. As the bad luck aura ability reads, "for each hit in Black Cat's combo meter, the opponent's defensive ability accuracy is reduced by 2%, or twice that against science opponents." Since I'm starting at 40 combo, that means I immediately have the maximum 60% defensive AAR right from the start of the fight.
This path has the mesmerize node, which grants all defenders a 7% chance to evade. In addition, Wasp a total of (25%+8% = ) 33% chance to evade from her own abilities. 33% + 7% = 40% total chance, if these two abilities add together. (Not sure if they do.) Similarly, Spider Gwen has a 7% chance to evade per spider sense charge, maxing out at 5 charges, meaning 35%. Again, if you add the mesmerize evade chance, the total would be 42% here.
The evade chances of Wasp and Spider Gwen might be less than 40% and 42% respectively, but they should not be more in any case. (We don't need to worry about Spider Gwen's unblockable special evasion, because Black Cat doesn't have those.)
Now, I'm no math whiz, but I'm pretty sure 60% > 42%. And I think we can agree that evasion is a defensive ability.
If bad luck aura simply subtracts 60% from the evasion chance, then both of these defenders would have evasion chance < 0. This would mean they should *never* evade. And yet! In both fights, both of these defenders evaded! In Spider Gwen's case, the evade likelihood was kinda ridiculous, probably close to 40%, even though nothing about her kit or the node says she's immune to AAR.
So...what gives? Is evade somehow not considered a defensive ability? Is the 60% AAR *multiplied* against the defender's evasion chance instead of subtracted? Is something else going on that I've missed entirely?
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Comments
To go over your Spider-Gwen example (ignoring mesmerize for now), she has a max chance of 35% to evade with 5 spider-sense charges. You’re reducing that chance by 60%, so you have a total of 35% * 40% = 14% chance to evade still. You can’t fully prevent it unless you have at least -100% (which Black Cat can achieve with her sabotage debuff).
And on a minor note, that calculation with mesmerize is not how that works. Spider-Gwen’s personal evade and mesmerize’s evade are separate abilities that work independently. You can’t just add their chances together for a total result in the same way that getting a heads on two coin flips isn’t guaranteed just because 50% + 50% = 100%. If you wanted an actual chance, it’d be something like 65% * 93% = 60.5% chance to NOT evade, or a 39.5% chance to evade. If you wanted the chance for Spider-Gwen to evade with mesmerize accounted for, you’d just multiply that new evade chance by 40%.
I just didn't think that's how it worked in this game, because in other games I've seen with similar mechanisms, they simplify the logic by just adding/subtracting all of the modifiers together to get a single final percentage likelihood, which they then "roll" against. It's not mathematically "correct" from a probabilistic perspective, as @Squidopus points out, but it's generally simpler to reason about the end result.
But what you folks are saying is that AAR is indeed multiplicative in this game. I'll accept that, but if it's true, it raises other questions.
For example, as other folks have pointed out, Onslaught takes bleed damage from Chee'ilth even though he reduces potency of bleeds by 150%. This is because Chee'ilth increases the potency of her bleeds by 15% for each spirit charge. If she has, say, 4 spirit charges, then her bleeds have 160%-150% = 10% potency using the additive modifier strategy I described above.
On the other hand, if we assume that potency increase/reduction works the same way as AAR, then the 150% potency reduction should be multiplicative, not additive. In this case, no matter how much Chee'ilth increases her bleed potency, multiplying that value by -1.5 should still bring it below zero. (And indeed, the extra -50% is totally unnecessary). But obviously, that's not the way it works, because Onslaught does take bleed damage.
So. If we take both of these data points into consideration, our theory here is that AAR reduction is multiplicative, but potency modifiers are additive. This is certainly confusing. And it makes me wonder whether the other types of modifiers in the game are multiplicative or additive.
You could think of this mechanic similarly to something like regen rate. All base healing values are multiplied by the regen rate multiplier to determine actual health gained. It’s a base value of 100% unless otherwise specified, so it has no effect normally, but once you start modifying regen rate (e.g. the despair and recovery masteries) it becomes relevant.
This is actually a relevant framing that comes up in practice; for example, Longshot has his base ability accuracy explicitly set to 300% instead of the usual 100%, which has certain implications with how ability triggers and AAR work on him. For example, this means that, barring any other factors, any nodes applied to him have 3x the chance to trigger. As a more specific example, if he had a hazard shift node applied (40% to trigger a damaging debuff when struck), the actual chance becomes 40% (base chance) * 300% (Longshot’s base ability accuracy multiplier) = 120%, so the debuffs are guaranteed to trigger when hitting Longshot. If you applied a -100% concussion debuff, this would only reduce his chance to trigger the debuffs to 80% instead of completely preventing it like it would for almost any other champ.
This tends to be a bit of nuance that’s complicated and unnecessary though, and it might not be the simplest way to explain it. Regardless, it does explain how AA works in a more fundamental manner.
• Poison effects multiply the potency of regen by a multiplicative 30%. This means that it can never invert the effects of regen and actually reduces the damage dealt by regen reversal.
• Weaknesses and other attack rating reductions are multiplicative as well, which I believe is purely a safeguard against reducing attack rating to 0. No matter how much weaknesses you stack from nodes like long distance relationship or combat deja vu- weakness, your attacks will always deal some damage to the opponent.
With ability accuracy, there are occasionally effects that give a ‘flat’ bonus to a specific ability chance - that means that it’s added directly to the listed chance (or subtracted from it if it’s a penalty). One example is Archangel’s purify reduction - it reduces the chance to purify his debuffs by 25% flat per bleed, so two bleeds means a champ with 50% chance to purify never does, or a champ with 60% chance normally would be reduced to 10%. (So ‘flat’ modifiers work like you initially thought all modifiers did).
Flat AA modifiers are fairly rare, and generally applied to specific abilities - most of them are either ‘this ability triggers more often if xyz condition is met’ or ‘synergy that makes this ability trigger slightly more often’.