Change DT calculations for hybrid damage types.

[hilf]

I took a plasma pistol, which seems to have hybrid damage type ( half fire, half energy ) and shoot someone with metal armor. Armor used it's full DT for fire and energy damage types. I think it should be using only half of it's DT. Here is a simple example that will hopefully explain my point of view:

We have two weapons, a longsword with 10 slashing damage and a morning star with 5 blunt and 5 piercing damage. Both weapons are equally strong.
If they attack unarmored target they will both deal 10 damage: longsword - 10 slashing, morning star - 5 blunt and 5 piercing.

What happens if a target has an armor with equal protection against all three damage types? Let's see.
Target has an armor with DT 4 vs slashing, blunt and piercing damage types. It gets attacked by longsword:
10 - 4 = 6 slashing damage.
Now it's attacked by morning star:
5 - 4 = 1 blunt damage, 5 - 4 = 1 piercing damage. Together it's 2 damage.

Something is not right here. Armor has equal protection vs slashing, piercing and blunt damage types so it should protect equally vs long sword and morning star. But it isn't.

Now, let's divide DT by number of damage types of a weapon.
Longsword damage = 10 - (4 / 1) = 6 slashing.
Morning star damage: 5 - (4 / 2) = 3 blunt, 5 - (4/2) = 3 piercing. 6 damage total.
This time it works as expected 

If we replace DT with % damage reduction then armor with equal protection against slashing/blunt/piercing will reduce damage of longsword and morning star by the same amount. No division is required if we use % damage reduction, but in case of absolute reduction, it is.

[hilf]

Hehe, now i realized that my last paragraph was very misleading, sorry guys.

If we replace DT with % damage reduction then armor with equal protection against slashing/blunt/piercing will reduce damage of longsword and morning star by the same amount. No division is required if we use % damage reduction, but in case of absolute reduction, it is.

What i meant is:
For damage calculation using DR no tweaking is necessary. It happens to work just fine with hybrid damage types.
But for damage calculation using DT vs hybrid damage type we need to divide it to get proper damage calculation.

DT would work just like it always worked for almost every weapon because single damage type will not be affected by this change.
DR would be left unchanged.

If plasma is half fire/half energy then why would full DT vs both types be used?

[UnLimiTeD]

I thought of that as a deliberate weakness of Plasma weapons to balance their insane damage.
They pack a serious punch.

[hilf]

They are also slow as hell, darn expensive to fire and need frequent reloading.
Energy weapons were supposed to be an option o deal with targets with high mechanical resist. But it happens that metal armor, that gives you this resist, also gives rather good protection from fire/energy (especially ti-chrome). My change would help plasma pistol serve it's purpose.


If plasma pistol had two barrels - one breathing fire, other blasting energy, then current calculation would be all right. There would be 2 separate projectiles - one fully fire, other fully energy.
But judging from item image there's one barrel that blasts plasma, which is half fire, half energy.

[UnLimiTeD]

Well, being slow means higher critchance with the right perk, and how often they need to be reload is a matter of crafting.
Still, yeah, they could do with a little bit more damage against heavy Armour.

[hilf]

Crafting can help but they still need reloads more often than anything else. Except crossbows but reloading them is free (:
And cost of firing energy guns goes up with gun quality unlike any standard weapon.
Wow, i just discovered that weapon enhancements increase cost of firing energy guns. Excellent ...


Anyway, i'm not really talking about balance here. I'm talking about mechanics that i feel don't work correctly.

[UnLimiTeD]

You mean with a high level attachment I can create a weapon that nearly always crits? Damn, I gotta try that.

[hilf]

@epeli you are right about cryokinesis being a hybrid damage type, i forgot about this. But if there are more hybrid attacks in the game it only makes this change more necessary.

It's important to notice a difference between hybrid damage type and multiple channels of damage (which can use different types or not).
Electroshock weapons would fall under multiple channels category. They have mechanical and zap damage types. Both channels would need to go through full DT. Just like burst or magic missile from D&D - multiple projectiles, each of which needs to go through DT separately.


I have 2 more cards i'm gonna use to convince You to my suggestion.

1.
There are energy shields in game. They are using DT mechanics to reduce damage. The difference is that any damage absorbed by shields is substracted from shield's capacity.

What happens if we shoot plasma at someone with his shield activated? believe it or not but damage from plasma (whole damage) needs to go through shield's DT only once. There is no separate substraction for fire and plasma. If plasma damage is 120 (60 fire, 60 energy) and shield has 80 DT vs very high speed attacks, damage that will bypass shield is 120 - 80 = 40 (20 fire + 20 energy). Not 0.

Game is inconsistent here.

2.
Say we have 25% fire DR and 75% energy DR. We get attacked by 100 dmg (half fire, half energy). What damage should we take? The answer comes easily - it's 50. And this is correct answer.

Why 50? Game takes average* of your fire DT and energy DT and uses it to reduce damage.

(25% + 75%) / 2 = 50%
100 - 100 * 50% = 50

You can try it with different DR values if you wish.

But if damage is reduced by DT it has to go through sum of fire and energy DTs. Why SUM and not average this time?
That's another inconsistency.


* This is actually weighted average but since damage is split exactly in half between fire and energy it gets reduced to normal average.

You mean with a high level attachment I can create a weapon that nearly always crits? Damn, I gotta try that.

No. I mean energy weapons get increased energy consumption (to already high consumption) by installing attachments.

Really, energy weapons, plasma in particular, suffer from problems other weapons didn't even heard about

[LuckyRX7]

tl;dr after the 4th post...

OP seems to be going way off topic and into responding to other players.


The point that the DT wouldn't be halved is for the case of say 8 slashing DT, 2 blunt 2 pierce
where the longsword does 10 - 8 = 2 damage and the morning star does 5 - (2 / 2) + 5 - (2 / 2) = 8 damage
it just would be so off balanace. In a sense if your plasma rifle is doing half Thermal half Energy, then your secondary weapon should be a full mechanical to counteract opponents that have equal Thermal and Energy DT scores... they would be slacking in the Mechanical DT.

What would REALLY be unfair is an endgame opponent to have over 40 DT in all scores (seeing as the highest crit I've done is 80 as a level 12)

[hilf]

he point that the DT wouldn't be halved is for the case of say 8 slashing DT, 2 blunt 2 pierce
where the longsword does 10 - 8 = 2 damage and the morning star does 5 - (2 / 2) + 5 - (2 / 2) = 8 damage
it just would be so off balanace.

Seems fair to me. Slashing DT is high so longsword does little damage, blunt and piercing DT are low so morning star does good damage.