by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Game balancing is a subtle art. Small oversights often lead to some skill, character or item being absurdly overpowered and chosen by most players in spite of the rest of the content the devs worked so hard to produce. In this series, we will look at Balance in Diablo 3 and see how fair things are right now.

Welcome back to BlizzPro. I’m Dannie “IAmDiR23” Ray, and this is your weekly state of balance.

Today we are going to look at All Resist vs Armor, which one is better, and why I think Wizards and Witch Doctors are getting a better part of the deal here.

First, we need to know how the Damage Reduction from Armor and Resistances are calculated. The formulas are easy enough.

Damage Reduction from Armor = Armor / (Armor +3500)

Damage Reduction from Resists = Resist/ (Resists +350)

So a 1 resist = 10 armor. Since you get 1 Strength = 1 Armor and  1  Intelligence = 0.1 All Resist, things would seem to be balanced. Of course, there’s more to it than that.

Start by looking at armor pieces. You can get +100 All Res on many legendary pieces, while armor fluctuates from 400 to 600 depending on the item slot. Since we established that 1 resist = 10 armor,  then one could conclude that +Armor affixes would then be hardly worth having. Right?

There’s another factor that we have to consider before ruling +Armor out, and that is how we are affected by Diminishing Returns.

Diminishing Returns and Effective Health/Toughness

As you start to stack up Armor and Resist, you’ll notice that you need more and more of them to rise another 1%. That is something we will call diminishing returns. But contrary to what you would think Armor and All Res aren’t really worth less if you have more of it.

Think of it this way, lets say that you have 100 HP and an enemy is attacking you for 10 damage a hit. Normally, you would last 10 hits. But if you have 50% damage reduction, you would only recieve 5 damage a hit and be able to withstand 20 hits. Our Effective Health or Toughness would’ve been doubled to 200.

Now with 75% damage reduction, you only get 2.5 damage a hit. You last for 40 hits and your effective Health is 400.

The Math in the game is so that the “Armor vs Effective Health” graph is actually a linear function. Each point of Armor gives you the same amount of Toughness as the last. The Same applies for Resistances.

So what is the problem?

What I just said only applies when you consider either Armor or Resistances by themselves. The problem lays on how these two interact with each other.

A simplified Toughness formula would look like this:

Toughness = Health * (1/(1-Armor Reduction))* (1/(1-Resistance Reduction))

Or:

Toughness/Health = (1/(1-Armor Reduction))* (1/(1-Resistance Reduction))

The formula might not say nothing to you, but lets go right to an example:

The Average character has 5000 armor just from the base amount on items, lets say you also have 5000 Str or Int and no amount of All Resist on your gear.

5000 armor translates to 58.52% reduction, on our simplified toughness formula that’s 2.43 Toughness/Health.

Now, if we are a Strength class we jump to 10000 Armor.  That’s a 74.07% reduction, or 3.86 Toughness/Health. If we factor in our innate 30% Damage Reduction we end up at 5.51 Toughness/Health

If we are a Intelligence class instead, we stay at 5000 armor but gain 500 all resist. That’s two different 58.82% reductions, and inputing into the formula will result in a whoopìng 5.9 Toughness/Health.

Of course, those values start to change when you start adding all resist on gear. But the point stands, since all pieces of armor come with a natural amount of Armor, +Armor is initially less valuable than all resist and will only gain value as you start spending item affixes to get all resist.

When using a 100% DPS sets, Wizards and Witch Doctors are actually more resilient than all the other classes.

How to Balance it

Jewelry has no base armor, so why don’t we give it All Resist instead.

If the average character has 5000 armor just from the base armor on items, it would make sense that the same character has around 500 All Resist aswell. Getting the same amout of Resistance Reduction and Armor Reduction would ensure that all clases benefit equally from their Main Stat, instead of Casters getting a better deal. Around 500 All Resist should do the trick, but if you want a more accurate number just take the average armor from all item slots, add them up, and divide by 10.

The second step is to increase the +Armor rolls on items. If all resist can roll 90-100, armor should be able to roll much closer to 900-1000 than it is now. You could say that they should outright roll 900-1000, but you have to consider that you can get a bit of resistances on secondary stats and using Diamonds on sockets.

Considering that, armor rolls would be much better balanced in the 700-900 range.

You might also propose that base All Resist on Jewelry isn’t needed because of those Secondary resistance stats and Diamond bonuses. If you would follow that patch, then +armor rolls should definately be 900-1000.

These changes would not only balance up the classes, but would be a small help to high difficulty survability. Something that is direly needed by some of the classes.

That is it for today, but on this week’s Basic Theorycrafting we will take a more indepth look to Toughness overall and all the formulas involved. But tomorrow, we will take a look at Dodge and see if Dexterity to Dodge is something worth preserving.