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[Floozy]

Hi Guys and Gals

I decided to try to defeat some nasty cold-spell casters by increasing my cold protection to a realistic level so I was battling on even ground.  I equipped with everything I had (including the ring of Hierro with good cold protection of 35%) so it showed 54% cold protection total - still not enough protection against those powerful mobs!  I ransacked my hoard and found an ammy of cold protection 22% which looked as though it would raise the total to 76% - that would even the battle!!! ...

Huh? Applying the ammy raised the total protection to only 63% - I was being cheated - there is a protection racket in operation !!!!  Time for a Floozy investigation.

Experimenting with items of protection quickly revealed that the item condition had to be taken into account - unless the item condition is 100 the protection is lower than what the description says.  In my opinion it would be far more user-friendly if the description told you what the actual protection would be - so 25% protection but condition 80(%) should show 20(-5)% protection, for example.

Next I worked out that the (adjusted) percentages aren't added together - that would obviously be too simple!  In fact the total protection is calculated from the product (i.e. multiplying together) of all the damage sustained (e.g. 25% protection converts to 75% damage sustained).

So if you are wearing two perfect (con=100) items which each say they give 50% protection, you actually only get 75% protection in total.  Therefore you can never be immune to an attack however many items of protection (< 100%) you wear.  This is outrageous!

I now calculate the improvement from casting a 25% protection spell to my current maximum cold damage:
37% damage reduced by 25% is about 28% damage - a net total reduction of a massive 9% - wow!  That is hardly worth the bother of lifting a finger to cast the spell.  Note that it would also mean I was still not on even ground with those nasties.

Yah Boo! It sucks!!!!!

Love Floozy

[Cleo]

That is the second reason of such spells being difficult to balance I mentioned in the other topic; either too weak or too strong. Obviously a spell giving +25% to all elemental protection is very nice if you have 0% protection - but it becomes less useful the more protection you already have. But then if the spell gives something like +70% (for example) it becomes too powerful if you have 0% protection to start with. Spell effects probably shouldn't be a subject to this multiplication, but it's fine with armour.

Quoting a friend of mine:

no one in this game is perfect, and no one can attain godhood and if you had ever played a game in god mode or 100% invulnarability you would know how boring that woud become

(By the way, the Temple of Loki casters now do 'normal' damage, so that imbalance is fixed)

[Floozy]

Hi Cleo

Yes, I appreciate your point that "its fine with armour". I now realise that adding the percentages would make me virtually immune to some physical attacks especially when wearing an ammy of protection - so changing the calculation of physical protection would almost certainly make high levels (and others with lots of good armour) too powerful against fighters.

As for your friend's clever comment please note that I happen to have a mithril coat of lesser cold protection (25%), coupled with the Boots of the Cold North and Hierro's ring - both of which have a higher than normal protection.  Wearing that combination means I have zero protection against some other common forms of attack like fire, as well as reduced damage &/or stats compared to my normal "battle gear". So I would only wear that combo in specific circumstances (probably only in the "cold" part of ToL in fact - and afaik those mobs inflict other damage (not just cold!!). And the next best protection I can muster is less than half the maximum vs cold.

Your suggestion that spell effects shouldn't be subject to the multiplication sounds interesting please please would it be possible to add that to your "TODO" list (I hope that protections are recalculated "properly" by the way otherwise any change like that could cause a problem, e.g. unapplying an item reducing a protection below zero!)

Thank you for fixing those mobs Maybe I won't "quake in my High Boots" when they are around now (I got killed once again last night by accidentally waking of them - the fix was too late to prevent that )

Love Floozy

[Gramlath]

Uh.  Hi.  Cleo went out for a minute and he wanted me to post a reply so here it is.  Not much to add here.

[Floozy]

Hi Gramlath

[Cleo]

Yes, spell effects working like that would make sense; I think it would also affect the protection from fire/cold/etc balms, which might make them more usable. Of course it would be recalculated properly -- spell effect is, in a way, just another piece of armour that is invisible and handled slightly differently.

[And hi Gramlath, that was a very long reply ]

[Floozy]

Oh - balms say, for example "balm of protection from fire (lvl 73)" as opposed to potions: "potion of minor fire resistance (lvl 78) ... (Protections: fire 25%)" - I thought from the description that if you can "afford" to use a balm it gave total protection for the duration, whereas the potion acted the same as temporary extra armour!!! Silly me - I got confused again! Its a good job I haven't used a balm "in anger"!!

[idicus]

Multi protections spells dont work together that well its all those individual enchanctment affecting each other, the lessen each others affects. IE: armor with 25% cold resist, ring with 15%, boots with..ect ect ect....DONT add up all those protections and think thats what ya got, they interferre with each other on the protection happens

*shrug* thought everyone knew that.....its the same in 2nd Ad&D *shrug* more items that affect the same resistances the lower the over all protections it can give.

Idicus, The Black Market Expert!

[Lippy]

Protection bonuses are multiplicative, not additive. A common thought is that applying an amulet of protect cold +20% when you already have cold protection is not going to be as effective as when you have no protection to cold at all to begin with. This is actually not true.

Let's say you have 50% protection to cold, and then apply the amulet. Sure, it won't go to 70% and instead will put you at 60% protection. However, the amulet actually does everything it says on the tin. It does grant you 20% more protection to cold on top of what you already have. Confused? Ok, let's use a battle scenario with this example.

An ice golem hits you for 100 cold damage. With no protection to cold, you are obviously going to be hit for the full 100 damage. Add on the amulet and it's down to 80 (-20) damage. That is 20% less damage than what you got hit for without the amulet.

Now, consider the same situation when you already have 50% protection to cold. The ice golem would of course only hit you for 50 (-50) damage. Now you add on your amulet. The damage drops to 40 (-60) damage. Notice that 40 is 20% lower than 50. This shows that the amulet is clearly working and is still giving you its full bonus. Also notice that you are resisting 60% of the damage there, and not 70% if the protection bonus was additive.

The protection table can be a bit confusing this way and gives the illusion that the more protection you have to something, the less effective items can be that give more protection. But this shows that items still have their full effectiveness however much your protection to that attack is.

It might possibly be less confusing if you think of it by using vulnerability instead of protection. All vulnerability represents is the proportion of damage you receive rather then how much damage you resist. It is simply 1 - your protection value. At 0% protection, you are at 100% vulnerability to that attack. At 20% protection, you are at 80% vulnerability, which means you receive 80% of the damage. If we use the example taken above where you are already at 50% protection and then apply the amulet, you might be able to see how it works better by watching your vulnerability drop from 50% to 40% instead of your protection rising from 50% to 60%.

Hope this helps you to understand how the protection system works.