Titan Quest dps calculations

[StGeorge]

Does anyone else think the in-game dps calculator is a bit under the weather?

It seems to give unexpected results, eg I can swap out an item for something with the same stats or better AND it's faster, yet the dps often goes down!

Is there something else going on behind the scenes or is it just plain wrong?

 

[Zeus]

you cant trust it anyway.
eg, as a warrior, i get stuff that boosts my damage per swing by a fixed amount (+10 atm i think it is) when i'm hit. thus, that has a much greater effect on a fast weapon.
dual weilding is also a bit odd, not quite worked that one out yet. will post more tomorrow when not obscenely tired.

 

[Flight]

Combat Details

Face smashing, ancient Greek style

Ok so, how do weapons actually interact with armor?

Well first off, when you get hit by a monster, a location on your character is randomly chosen, weighted between the various spots on your body. 40% of hits go to your chest armor. Each other body spot has a 20% chance to be hit. Yes, this means that walking around with low armor in one body spot can occasionally result in hard hits.

Next, any physical damage taken up to the armor value of your armor is reduced. Mastery skills that add bonus armor add it to ALL locations (handy). Any damage in excess of the armor value in a given location is taken fully by your character.

Here's the part that isn't at all immediately apparent: Physical damage reduced by armor is reduced by 66%. That's right, armor does NOT fully soak damage. Also, Pierce damage completely ignores armor.

This property is known as 'Armor Absorption', and if you check the skill trees, you'll notice that several skills can boost this 66% Armor Absorption value, greatly increasing the power of equipped armor (Defense, of course, has a tier 1 skill that can raise this modifier).

Think of armor as 'physical resistance', in the same way that resists lower but do not fully eliminate non physical damage (indeed, all resists are capped at 80% in any case), armor can soften damage taken, but not eliminate it fully.

Stonewalling

However, there is one last line of defense against physical attacks, and that is a shield.

Shields are highly potent defensive tools, because a) they can block both melee and ranged attacks and b) they block their soak amount FULLY. This makes shields very powerful defensive tools.

All shields have a 'recast' block timer of 3 seconds, before other modifiers

Shields do have a cooldown time before they can block another attack, preventing you from sponging up every attack that comes your way (though Defense, again, has a modifier that can reduce this shield block time, and there is a Charm that can help here too).

Additionally, Shield damage reduction is done AFTER resists are taken into account (in other words, it's highly likely that if you have high armor/pierce resistance, the shield is going to stop the hit completely)

Couldn't hit a Cyclops in a barrel

The way OA and DA compare, with even values, you have a 100% chance of hitting your target. The scale is very soft, so missing is rarely an issue. Of greater interest is the critical calculations. Consider this information suspect, since I don't have direct verification

Going by the equations in the database, each 100 points of OA over your target's DA gives you a chance to hit the next 10% tier of critical hits. That is, if your OA is 150 and your targets is 50, you have a chance of scoring a 110% hit. 250/50, 120% hit, and so on.

You can't see these values in the game (though medierra indicated he was looking at adding a display that compared your OA to the last target's DA that you hit, which would make this much easier to calculate), so the only way to get a feel for how your OA is doing relative to your opponents DA is to watch the critical hits (make sure to turn on the critical hit display in the options menu).

If you are scoring frequent critical hits, your Dex + your OA bonuses are probably sufficient. Conversely, if you are seeing frequent red numbers, you should think about raising either your Dex, or getting gear with +DA modifiers. Note that some enemies (say, Zombies) have lower DA than normal - generally big slow targets do. On the other hand, fast vicious enemies (say, Mantids) often have comparatively high OA, resulting in more critical hits.

In any case, since you can't see the numbers directly, it's best to simply decide if you want to focus on OA or DA, and skew your gear (and possibly your attributes) in that direction. If it would be beneficial to your character based on your Mastery selections, focus on OA or DA, otherwise you may not need to worry about them (beyond enough DA to avoid constant crushing critical hits in the higher difficulty levels)

 

[Flight]

Dual Wielding


Dual wielding seems to be a cause of enormous confusion, so a few points

First, while yes, the Dual Wield ability itself only gives a small chance to trigger, this isn't quite the whole story. The Dual Wield ability is giving a chance for BOTH weapons to hit at the same time, dealing full damage, modified by your abilities, each with a chance to score a critical hit.

The rest of the time, your hands randomly attack, with a 50/50 chance of either hand swinging (they do not alternate, it's random - you can try it yourself, stand still with Onslaught on your rmb and hold it down, watching the swinging pattern - you can even see Dual Wield/Cross Cut/Tumult triggering).

Your attack speed is averaged between the two weapons you have equipped, so if you have a very fast sword in one hand and add a slow club in the other, your attack speed will drop (causing a resultant decrease in DPS).

Keep in mind that the visible average damage/DPS/attack speed display isn't entirely accurate when it comes to figuring Dual Wield damage, because of the element of chance involved.

Another important point to Dual Wielding - as you are giving up a shield, the return in offensive power is substantial. First, you can wield two weapons, and this gives you access to powerful offensive modifiers that affect BOTH weapons. Have a weapon in your offhand with +50% attack speed and +30% physical damage? Both weapons get those bonuses. Further, because you can modify both weapons with Charms and Relics that can only be applied to weapons, you are getting an even larger offensive bonus.

A Dervish of Fury

Your basic attack calculation for damage dealt is fairly simple. Take your weapon damage, find the average, add any modifiers to physical damage, pile up all the mods and add them together, then take the Piercing %, convert from Physical to Pierce damage, pile up all the Piercing mods, then take any Elemental or other damage type damage, and (yes, again), pile up on all the mods on it. Once this is done, your target is smashed with X Physical, Y Piercing, Z Elemental/Bleed/Poison/etc damage. They get their armor and resists to decrease the damage, and finally their health is reduced (and possibly, keeps reducing, if you had dot damage in there).

All of that is pretty straightforward, and raising those modifiers directly increases your average damage dealt. This is important, because rather than worrying about if you're dealing 500 damage per hit, or 550 damage per hit, what is often more important is the answer to a simple question: "How many hits does it take for me to kill a monster?"

And that's where attack speed comes in. Unless you can get your average damage to the point where all monsters are dying in a single hit, how fast you deal damage can sometimes be more important than how much damage you deal.

Think of attack speed as a global modifier to all of your damage dealt. At 200% attack speed, you are inflicting twice as much damage in the same period of time, and this is where the Damage Per Second display comes from.

All weapons have a certain basic attack speed (some variance from the baseline 100% value). This value is modified by any Attack Speed or Total Speed modifiers affecting your character.

Theis would be pretty straightforward, with attack speed having an important, but not overpowering influence on your damage, if it wasn't for two facts: First, your attack speed affects the actual animation time of your attacks, which influences how quickly you can deal damage and then disengage from melee (extremely important for ranged characters for one thing, since melee is usually a bad place for them to be). Second, and of greater importance; skills that have a % chance to trigger are NOT scaled to your attack speed.

That is, if you have a 10% chance to deal 50% more damage per hit, that chance is not on a sliding scale 'balanced' to your attack speed. It is ALWAYS 10%. And this means that attack speed can have a much greater impact on your overall damage output than it may first appear. Prize items that increase your attack speed if your character has many % based abilities that trigger when you attack!

Speed Caps

Player minimum speed is capped at 60%. Attack speed is capped at 300%, run speed is capped at 166% (at least, according to the database, I've capped it at 162% on the character display, not sure why)

Monster minimum speed is capped at 20%, boss monster minimum speed is capped at 50%

There are a few types of speed in the game. There are three separate speed attributes: Attack, Cast, and Run. Many items only modify one of the three. Items that modify them all tend to use the term 'Total Speed', as do a few skills that give full speed bonuses. I believe there are a few cases where this is inconsistent however, and the skill may say 'Speed' instead of 'Total Speed' explicitly, but I believe those are still modifying all three speed types.

Resistances

Player resists are capped at 80%, and penalized by 40/25% in Epic, 100/50% in Legendary (primary/secondary)

 

[Flight]

While I'm at it :

Attributes

In all cases, attributes that boost damage affect any source of that damage, weapon, staff, spell/skill, etc

Strength:
Increases Physical damage dealt. At lower levels, the absolute bonus generally gives you a larger boost, particularly with attack speed modifying items, later in the game, the percentage boost can become very substantial, especially in concert with other damage modifying items. Because of the absorption property of armor, some physical damage can always get through armor (more on this below)


Code:
(physicalDamageDV*((strengthDV/500)+1))+(strengthDV*0.04)Each 50 points of Strength adds 10% Physical damage and +2 flat Physical damage.

Dexterity:
Increases Piercing damage dealt. Dexterity gives a slightly smaller bonus per stat point than strength, but remember that Piercing damage completely ignores armor. Keep in mind that some enemies are Pierce resistant (particularly skeletons, who are very common Undead enemies)

Because most weapons deal a fairly small percentage of piercing damage, focusing heavily on Dexterity for damage is probably not wise unless you are using a Mastery that gives bonus Piercing damage - either Hunting or Rogue can add 50%+ Piercing damage easily. This means that Warfare/Rogue for dual wielding piercing swords, or Hunting/Warfare for Spears, or Hunting/Rogue are all 'obvious' natural combinations for heavy Pierce damage.

Dexterity also adds to OA/DA. If you are focusing specifically on offense or defense, items that directly increases OA/DA directly are going to give you more punch per point than Dexterity, but Dexterity gives both and boosts your Piercing damage. In any case, increased OA gives you a chance for critical hits and increases the potential severity of those critical hits. You need to have an OA much higher than your targets DA to score maximal (50% added) critical hits. Note that crits only seem to apply to melee hits, and afaik, only boost the physical damage dealt. DA works in reverse, decreasing the chance for opponents to hit you, damage you, and crit you.


Code:
(pierceDamageDV * ((dexterityDV/650)+1))+(dexterityDV*0.03)Each 65 points of Dexterity adds 10% Piercing damage and roughly +1.95 flat Piercing damage

Intelligence:
Increases Elemental damage dealt. Also increases Elemental damage over time. Elemental damage is Fire, Cold, Lightning, and Frostburn/Burn. Note that there is an entirely separate damage type (and resistance) known as 'Elemental' damage (literally, just flat Elemental damage). This damage type is very rare however, only a few items give it as a damage bonus. A few items do give explicit resistance to it, and in the case of resistance, it DOES add to normal Elemental resistances.

Armor has no effect on Elemental damage, only resistances help against it. To the best of my knowledge, there are no immune monsters to ANY basic damage type (Elemental/Physical/Pierce) anywhere in the game, though there ARE creatures with very high resists to specific damage types.

Intelligence also increases base Energy regen, and allows you to wear 'Mage' class armor, necessary if you're going to get a high Energy regen rate later in the game, as all Mage armor comes with built in +% Energy regen mods - note that this is only really necessary for characters that depend on Energy to deal damage. Most hybrid characters can get by with Energy potion usage.

Because increasing your Elemental damage output requires a fairly heavy investment in Intelligence, you need to consider if it is worth investing in for as a Hybrid character. You may get a better return on investment from Strength (flat physical) or Dex (flat Piercing PLUS OA/DA bonuses). However, it is worth noting that point for point, Piercing OR Elemental are likely to deal more damage to most creatures than Physical is (in most cases).

Code:
(elementalDamageDV * ((intelligenceDV / 650) + 1)) + (intelligenceDV*0.025)Each 65 points of Intelligence adds 10% Elemental damage, and roughly 1.625 flat Elemental damage (I'm not certain how far out TQ keeps the decimal)


PHP Code:
elementalDamageDV * ((intelligenceDV / 500) + 1)

Each 50 points of Intelligence adds 10% to Elemental duration damage, spread evenly over the duration (yes, you get a bigger bonus to Burn/Frostburn

 

[Flight]

A note for modders

I figured those of you working on Custom Quests might find this to be of interest: Check this record records\game\combatequations.dbr (just insert that directly into Import Record, no need to search for it manually), and you can then change all of the above formulas! There are also many other base game mechanic formulas that can be changed, including critical hit thresholds, hit location percentages, experience formulas, and others. Check records\game\gameengine.dbr and records\game\gamerules.dbr - and there are more besides



And for teh ubah PvP'ers amongst us.


Enabling PVP!

This cat is out of the bag from the lead designer, so in it goes
Add /pvp to your launch shortcut to enable PvP in multiplayer
eg, "C:\Program Files\THQ\Titan Quest\Titan Quest.exe" /pvp

Only PvP enabled servers will show up in the multiplayer list, and you need to have it enabled yourself to join. You can fight anyone not in your group.

 

[StGeorge]

A lot of good information there, thanks for that Flight!