When did the hard cap on pDIF get removed?Follow

Hi guys, I just have a curious question/observation. When I was growing up during the old melee formulas I was always taught that pDIF caps at 2.0 with a +/- 0.4 variance, but there was a hard cap of 2.0 no matter what. In other words, if you had a pDIF of 1.6 your range was 1.2-2.0, and if your pDIF was 2.0 your range was 1.6-2.0. This led to a diminishing return on attack the closer you got to the cap because no matter what the hard cap was 2.0 and on crits 3.0 respectively. This is no longer the case I see and I had to think about it to realize what was happening.

I went to behemoths dominion today to augment a viking shield and when I was building tp off the bats I noticed some numbers that were way out of line. Curious I decided to parse it afterwards with just my x's/viking and no offhand. Now the fun part

X's is weapon rank 3 so it has a max fSTR of 11 (I'll be capped) giving it a base damage of 45

45 x 2.0 x 1.25 == 112.5

Under the old formulas that would have been my maximum damage and my average would have been closer to 45 x 1.8 x 1.25 == 101.25 (because half of the +/- 0.4 would be lost, the ones in the positive).

However with no hard cap

45 x 2.4 x 1.25 == 135

Now check out the parse results

Due to lag the maximum hit range got interfered with by a critical, but the average damage was 113... right on the 2.0 mark. There was no hard cap..

And these normal melee hits agree

Honestly I never knew this. This gives attack a much greater prevalence than it did before if you can push it near the cap. Granted in a majority of situations that's not very realistic, but it does make /war a bit more fun to toy with if you're just playing around.

Edited, Nov 5th 2009 6:30pm by Melphina

When they buffed 2H weapons.

Hmmmph. I guess my memory is off then. I swore I used to be told that attack had diminishing returns because the hard cap was 2.0 not 2.4. Odd, that's weird. Well in that case I guess I'm wrong and nothings changed. Thanks for the clarification on that MDenham. You would know better than I. I didn't begin learning the ins and outs till around the time the 2H update occurred. Much appreciated .

Edited, Nov 7th 2009 6:31pm by Melphina

yeah, as far as I knew the hard cap was higher than that. you don't see a low ceiling for normal hits at capped ratio. ah, now I know what the confusion was Melph

The cap on melee cRatio was 2.0.
cRatio, as you know, being (atk/def +/- level correction)

And then of course you take cRatio and apply another formula to get your pDif min/max.


However, there are indications that cRatio has been adjusted (I know there was evidence of it in regards to 2h weapons, but I didn't know if it was investigated for 1h weapons. Nor do I remember much going on in regards to this after the 2nd 2h update; 1st one being in September of that year, 2nd in November.)

If numbers in practice are higher than predicted by what we think we know, it could be either that cRatio has been buffed higher, or pDif min/max. Or both. I'm not sure how one could investigate which of the two it is and by how much, easily.


Here's something that will be a good read,
pDif caps testing by Masamunai
I highly recommend at least taking a cursory glance. This guy is pretty dedicated and iirc the samples were fairly large. This went fairly overlooked at BG, but it is blatant counter-evidence we've wanted, that the pDif caps (at least) have been adjusted. I hadn't thought until now that it could be cRatio that was adjusted, not the formulas for max/min at the pDif cap. But I dk which is more likely :/

Lastly, attack will still have diminishing marginal gains. But not because of design; simply because of something akin to the law of diminishing marginal utility.

For example.
0%->1% d.a., no t.a. traits = 101hits/100 = 1% increase
25%->26% d.a., no t.a. traits = 126hits/125 = 0.8% increase

Even though pDif is more complex, stacking attack will in some way have diminishing returns in the sense that double attack does in the above example.

Ah, that blog. The title of the blog is "TTaru Diary," though I can't read most of the contents. There's some current crit testing going on, and this blog came up. It's felt that their test/analysis of crit rate was definitely off, but still very good compared to what we had before. So there ought to be some amount of credibility w/ this as well, and pDif is easier to test than crit rate. I find it interesting when stuff comes up from the JP community that our wiki's don't have; I'd always felt in the past that westerners knew more about the game, but not always so.

Reading some more and it looks like the cRatio cap got adjusted again after 11/2007 so maybe ignore that 2.5 from above. Looks to be either 2.25 or 2.3, not sure which though, still reading.

When 2H was adjusted for the first time, I believe that pDif was broken, this is why you could go "cap" at 2.0 and get the same damage over and over again. When they fixed the 2H fix, they reinstated the pDif for 1H, but now testing has shown an extra 1.00 - 1.05 multiplier for damage. This is why you can get 3.15 damage from crits.

Unless they actually changed the cRatio cap from 2.0 though, the max damage you should be able to get should be 2.52 x damage.

45 x 2.4 x 1.05 x 1.25 = 141.75 = 141

Didn't SE say that were going to make 2H weapons more effective against high level targets?

Edited, Nov 6th 2009 8:10pm by Lobivopis

Could be that the extent of their improvements was just the increased STR/atk, DEX/acc ratios for 2H, lol.

Definitely not the lvl adjustment thing, found some more testing done on lvl 80 goblin anglers in bibiki with same weapon dmg, same atk but 1H vs 2H weapons and the results were pretty much the same. And the other testing to actually find the ranges shows that the cRatio is pretty much matched correctly so no flat bonus either.

Unfortunately haven't seen any testing on the low-end formula so can't say much about that, all the testing seems to be above the 1 or 1.5 range.