World The Defense Vs Agility Situation

Considering rather recent realizations and findings about defense's and agility's behaviours in PvE and PvP, I feel like this comparison is important to make, so people can really understand the gap in between each of the abilities' effectiveness.
Clarification - I am not comparing agility and defense's behavior when applied together, only separately.

PvP
Let's discuss how each ability works in PvP first, since PvE is a more simplified version of PvP.
First of all, we have to get the absurdities out of the way - Defense does not affect Poison, Raw melee and Raw spell, which automatically makes Agility much better than defense in those regards, and this should definitely be fixed as soon as possible.
How do each of the abilities work?

Agility - agility is extremely simple. Depending on the amount of Agility Skill Points you have assigned, you are granted a certain chance to dodge attacks. Dodging attacks reduces the damage that is dealt to from that said attack to 0.

Defense - Defense acts as sort of a negative identification boost to the attacker's damage. you can compare it to negative melee damage % or negative spell damage %.

Now, let's first review the case of having no additional damage boosting identifications. In this case, they behave in almost the same way - the average damage you will take with a certain amount of Agility will theoretically be equal to the amount of damage you'll take with the same amount of Defense.
Why almost? because if we involve elemental defenses, they are slightly different.

When considering elemental defenses, an Agility activation does cancel the damage taken and the damage blocked by elemental defenses (depending on whether they are positive or negative), while defense does not affect them at all. This means that with negative Elemental defenses, agility is much more favorable, while with positive elemental defenses, defense is the winner. The reason I would argue agility is more effective than defense in that regard is because usually negative elemental defenses hurt a lot more compared to the benefits positive elemental defenses give. It is true that this is much more noticeable in PvE, because players do tend to use weapons with high elemental damages and low to non existing neutral damages, while mobs tend to have high neutral damages which render the positive elemental defenses next to useless (not in all cases). This is not necessarily a flawed mechanic, but since my opinion is that negative elemental defenses pose more problems compared to the fixes positive provides, agility reigns supreme.

The biggest difference is when considering players having damage boosting identifications. When dealing with agility by itself, we can treat it as a scaler to the damage - it's simply another multiplier in the formula, because statistically it behaves as tho it was scaling the damage. Defense however, is simply added as an identification boost, and because of that we can look at how each of them affect the ID damage bonuses. you can very clearly see that scaling the bonuses has a much larger effect compared to subtracting the Defense % from them as the damage bonuses get larger, and it's to quite a ridiculous extent. This makes defense highly ineffective. You can see it here, where a is the damage boosting identifications and b is defense / agility. the first equation represents damage average taken while having agility, while the second represents damage taken with defense. It can be seen that if you have an ID boost larger than 0, as the defense grows, agility's effect becomes much bigger than defense's.

Another factor here is that Defense skill points aren't the only way to increase defense, there are also special abilities (war scream, saviour's sacrifice etc.) and class base defense. The highest damage reduction value that's possible to achieve in game (without tomes) is with a warrior with max defense and saviour's sacrifice, which grants you 92.32% damage reduction. that hardly makes a difference, because that effect is still too small for it to matter in PvP.
(Defenses are multiplicative in relation to one another, but as said before, function as an ID boost when applied to the damage).

So summery of Defense vs. Agility in PvP - absurdities aside, agility is still much more effective just because of the existence of Damage boosting identifications, to the point where it's more than worth it to gamble with the RNG of agility. In my opinion defense needs to be a multiplier rather than an additive ID boost.

PvE
PvE's defense and agility behavior is the same, only you neglect all the special damage boosts and ID boosts that players have. that makes defense behave like a straight up multiplier, making it roughly the same as agility. This makes a lot of players prefer defense because it is not RNG based, which is understandable. The only differences between the two in PvE are the elemental defenses, and I've explained about those in the PvP section.

What Should Be Done, In My Opinion
In my opinion, Defense should simply be changed to be a multiplier rather than an additive ID boost. if you move defense's place in the formulas so that it comes after elemental defenses and raw damages, you already fix most of the problems mentioned above.
And please, for the love of god, do something about Poison and Defense.

Make sure to prove that I made some mistakes somewhere along the way because I have proven to not be very smart.

 

Did you mean: Automagically

It's not clear to me why this is the case, unless you're talking about raw ehp increases - I would almost argue defense is most effective on mage due to heal existing, and also in shaman due to it being very nice to just not be one shot, and heal existing

 

I am in fact talking about the damage taken ignoring the playstyle mechanics of the classes, mostly because getting into playstyle makes things more situational and rather subjective at times (ofcourse let's put tcc aside for now because of.. well... I don't think I need to explain why).

 

So basically The Nothing is really good for pvp, since defense does absolutely nothing against it's damage? And agility is much better than defense for the most part, except for the rng that can just destroy you. This explains a lot about a recent duel I did.

 

agility fun

 

If you're talking strictly pvp, yes.

 

Wynncraft wasn't originally made for PvP but for PvE

In reality defense should work generally the same way it does for mobs. More health, addition of elemental def Based on your other stats.

I mean it should be telling of how stupid pvp is when a Dex mage is clicking people and giggling all hail Atlas
Or how agility archers normally go for a KDR of 2

Fairly sure there is/was a thread by Nova that made about pvp and ways to try and fix it, and this might help as well while also make defense just a better choice anyway in PvE as well, considering high dodge builds just don't take damage.

 

I think you misinterpreted the thread (and the quote) - this thread is here to show imbalances that exist between defense and agility, sometimes to the extreme case. This has nothing to do with the overall state of PvP, and as I am not a PvP player I don't have the right or the experience to talk about it.

The quote is not about gameplay, but about defense behavior, and it is a fact - the formulas for defense in PvE are the same as defense in PvP but with certain parts having no effectiveness over the damage (ID boosts, strength and resistance potion effect abilities etc.)

 

Ok. The imbalances, as you said, are in pvp. So yeah it kinda is a pvp thread.

So, not to sound rude, any "misunderstanding" probably came from your own words and you believing they mean something different then what they do. You're claiming that in PvE it's differences are basically unneeded to be changed, etc. Also all mechanics are always gameplay. If it be combat gameplay, trading, or professions. So....

Considering your Main concern is how they DIFFER, which as you've noted is in PvP... you've made a pvp thread.

So yeah, I'll just leave Jaydon to tear the rest of it down because I refuse to fight numbers with that massively wrinkled brain on that person's shoulders

 

yeet my feet

 

It might just be another early/mid-game problem, but Defense really sucks in comparison to Agility. my Mage wearing Silverfish Set (~1100 HP) is somehow better at surviving than it wearing my tanking build (~2500 HP), even with Heal. (The power of ~40% Dodge chance...)

I honestly just think that Defense should be buffed, because right now it's pretty much unusable outside of Warrior stuff (at least early/mid-game).