Damage Mitigation And Vulnerability Changes
by JR Cook - 7 years ago show comments
Community Manager Trikslyr took to the forums to share some thoughts from Lead Live Designer Matt Cooper on recent changes to damage mitigation and vulnerability effects.
The TLDR version is that various buffs and debuffs pertaining to damage mitigation and vulnerability will now stack, as opposed to the previous mechanic where only the largest of each buff and debuff was taken into account. They are also considering giving certain Heroes, mostly Warriors, a certain amount of baseline damage mitigation. The additional protection might then allow them to tweak healing numbers without making tanks any less survivable.
The article itself is very interesting and does a great job of explaining how these buffs and debuffs work. It also provides a sneak peek into potential future changes. The post itself is fairly short and is well worth a few minutes of your time.
As of the Varian patch, we have changed how the Vulnerable and Damage Mitigation system in our game works. This system and it’s overarching goal, is to determine how much damage a unit should take based off of buffs and debuffs applied.
Previously on live:
When looking at how much damage a target is going to take, we look to see if there are any buffs or debuffs that would modify that damage. With this, the single biggest damage mitigation buff (Hardened Shield) and the single biggest damage mitigation debuff (Vulnerable) are compared, and the difference is the result.**
- Example: Hardened Shield grants +75% damage mitigation, and Vulnerable amplifies damage you take by +25%, so the net result is 50% damage mitigation. In this system, it didn’t matter if you had Safeguard from Lt. Morales (+25%), Spell Shield (+50%) and Hardened Shield (+75%). Since Hardened Shield is the largest, that is the buff we used.
Since multiple buffs and debuffs don’t stack, there was no need to implement a cap. The maximum in either direction was simply the biggest buff and debuff available to players.
Now on live:
When looking at how much damage a target is going to take, we sum all of the damage mitigation buffs against the sum of all the damage mitigation debuffs.
- Looking at an example with one buff and one debuff, the system plays out exactly the same.
- However, if we look at an example where you had multiple buffs or debuffs active, such as Hardened Shield and two sources of Vulnerable (Sylvanas & Jaina for example), now the system will essentially take the 75% buff and subtract both of the 25% Vulnerable effects for a total damage mitigation of +25%.
Now that multiple buffs and debuffs stack additively, we have implemented a cap. The current cap is set to +75% on the damage reduction side, and +25% on the damage amplification side.
Why are we exploring this?
In the future, we are looking at giving some damage mitigation baseline to a handful of heroes —mostly Warriors. When we were exploring this, one challenge with the old system was that any baseline damage mitigation your character started with would have no impact whenever you received a temporary damage mitigation.
- For example, an Arthas who has +15% damage mitigation all the time would only receive an additional 10% when buffed from Lt. Morales’ Safe Guard ability. It felt weird that these buffs were essentially less impactful on tanks than other characters. In this new system, Arthas would get the benefit of both the 15% and the 25%, putting him temporarily at 40%.
Once Warriors have some sort of damage mitigation baseline, we’d also like to look at the amount of healing Support characters can dish out. We don’t want to reduce healing drastically, but giving Warriors some damage mitigation baseline allows us to essentially reduce healing without making Warriors any less survivable. However, healing would be slightly less impactful on a target with no baseline damage mitigation.
Previously we had very few effects that adjusted damage, so we felt the need to represent them in consistent bunches. Our debuffs are all currently set at 25%, and we have buffs at 25%, 50%, and 75%. With this system, we feel like we will have the freedom to perform more precise tuning. Instead of removing a Vulnerable talent that is too strong, maybe we can simply reduce the amount slightly.
Note:
This new system also fixes a bug we were having issues with. Long story short, the old system calculated buffs first, and then multiplied the debuff later giving a less than desired result.
