World Change The Way Elemental Damage Is Calculated

Hello guys, I thought the elemental defense system in this game could be improved so here's my suggestion

Currently the elemental defense calculation formula is something like this:

(Elemental damage - elemental defense)*multipliers


That’s a bad formula, because it favours super slow weapons with high damage over super fast ones. Lower base damage weapons and rainbow weapons with a bit of damage in every element have trouble penetrating defenses.

In addition, it also means that if one were to have -600 earth defense, something that deals 1 earth damage will now deal 601 damage to them.

So, here’s what I think is a better formula to calculate damage taken:

If positive defense
Elemental damage/(1+elemental defense/200)

If negative defense
Elemental damage*(1+|elemental defense|/200)

(200 may or may not be the best number, can be adjusted if necessary)


With this formula, it’s always a portion of damage reduced. Every 200 positive elemental defense will increase effective health by 100%, therefore reducing damage taken each time by an additional 1x multiplier (so 2x or 50% reduction at 200, 3x or 66.7% reduction at 400, etc.), with the opposite happening for negative defense.

This is better because:

1. Damage is multiplied instead of added, meaning the effectiveness of a weapon scales properly against elemental resistances/weaknesses. Super low damage will have a negligible effect instead of suddenly dealing tons of damage.
2. All attack speeds are equal in terms of effectiveness against elemental resistances.
3. Enemies can’t as easily be immune to something.
4. Rainbow weapons will finally serve their intended purpose: To be effective against a wider variety of enemies. They won’t be hindered as much by resistances as only a partial amount of their damage will be affected, but isn’t as effective against weaknesses due to the same reason.
5. Negative defenses may not be as bad to have, while positive defenses will not be as overpowered.
6. Overall, this will make the game more balanced and consistent and make a lot of things more viable in more situations.

Of course, this would need some adjusting of values of items and mobs, but no other major changes are needed and it’s worth it to make the game more balanced.

 

I used a piecewise function in Desmos to graph your suggestion. My graph looked like this:

This was calculated with 200 Elemental Damage, with my input for the function being y=\left\{x>0:\frac{200}{\left(\frac{\left(1+x\right)}{200}\right)},x<0:200\cdot\left(\frac{\left(1+\left|x\right|\right)}{200}\right)\right\} (<-- copied directly from Desmos)

Immediately, there are problems. Logically, this function should have a y-intercept of 200(200 elemental damage vs. 0 elemental defense), but it's not. Next, negative elemental defense seems to scale linearly, but positive elemental defense does not.

So there is clearly something wrong with the formulas used. Let's try 50 Elemental Damage vs. 49 Elemental Defense.

50/((1+49)/200
50/(50/200)
50/(1/4)
50*4
=200

So a rework of the formulas is needed here.

(did I do something wrong?)

 

you did something wrong, you added before dividing.

Lemme use the exact same numbers you used. 50 elemental damage, 49 defense

50/(1+49/200)
=50/(1+0.245)
=50/1.245
=~40.16dmg

The negative defenses scaling linearly is normal. Every time you increase by 200 elemental defenses, the amt of dmg increases by a 1x multiplier, so a table of values would look like this, assuming 100 damage

def | dmg
0 | 100
-200 | 200 (2x original)
-400 | 300 (3x original)
-600 | 400 (4x original)

and so on

 

Ah, thanks for that. I'm pretty sure that's how order of operations works(how I was taught), so it should look something like this:

Elemental Damage/1+(Elemental Defense/200)

 

Weird Nerd talk.... my idols