Thread: Checking up on crit defense of yesteryear, hopefully with some more help from Graalx2

We had some good discussions on crit defense last year.
http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...-Working/page2
http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...of-the-Thunder

Including some valuable input from Graalx2 which bears quoting again:

Originally Posted by Graalx2

Critical Defence still works on the ratings. Critical Rating - Critical Defence = Rating to convert into percentages.

The base critical rating for a level 75 Arch-Nemesis is 7300. I don't know how much use that number is as the content designers are free to add or subtract to change the difficulty of an encounter.

I just want to explore this a little more in the current game environment, note a few concerns with how critical hit avoidance rating is applied vs. how it's tooltip is displayed, and ask some questions.


In-game data, taken from my guard with respect to level 75 PC and NPCs:
-----------------crit% / dev%
7307 crit rating: 18.3% / 6.8% (base for 75 arch nemsis)
5792 crit rating: 15.9% / 5.5% (result vs guard with least possible crit avoid = 1520)
4500 crit rating: 13.1% / 4.3%
4012 crit rating: 11.9% / 3.9% (result vs guard with heavy shield only)
3413 crit rating: 10.3% / 3.3% (result vs guard with heavy shield and 4 FoS)
2818 crit rating: 8.7% / 2.7% (result vs guard with heavy shield and 5 FoS+TtH)
2555 crit rating: 7.9% / 2.5% (result vs guard with heavy shield and 5 FoS+TtH and 1 rune of the crags)
2306 crit rating: 7.2% / 2.3% (result vs guard with heavy shield and 5 FoS+TtH and 2 runes of the crags)
2027 crit rating: 6.4% / 2.0% (result vs guard with heavy shield and 5 FoS+TtH and 3 crit defense relics)
1730 crit rating: 5.5% / 1.7% (result vs guard with heavy shield and 5 FoS+TtH and 4 crit defense relics)
1619 crit rating: 5.2% / 2.5% (imaginary, based on the tooltip for heavy shield and 5 FoS+TtH at 4500 crit avoidance)
392 crit rating: 1.3% / 0.4% (result vs guard with heavy shield and 5 FoS+TtH, with Lore Master SoP:SAE applied)

1520 crit avoid: 5.8% / 1.8% (lowest possible based on class passive trait)
3300 crit avoid: 10.0% / 3.2% (with good heavy shield)
3600 crit avoid: 10.8% / 3.5% (with heavy shield and 3 FoS)
3900 crit avoid: 11.6% / 3.8% (with heavy shield and 4 FoS)
4500 crit avoid: 13.1% / 4.3% (with heavy shield and 5 FoS+TtH)

Issue 1: The 3 and 4 set FoS bonuses are only shown in the tooltip. (Character panel shows 3300, tooltip shows 3600 or 3900). Since the tooltip indicates that these bonuses apply to melee, ranged and tactical, shouldn't these bonuses be shown in the character panel?

Issue 2: The bonus from Take to Heart is shown to the character panel. (Character panel shows 3900, tooltip shows 4500). I'm only pointing this out because it creates an inconsistency between how the set bonuses are shown, and seems to suggest that the bonuses can be shown in the character panel.

Issue 3: The tooltip % numbers for critical hit avoidance are not correct, (check the 1619 crit rating entry) and never CAN be correct. Since both critical hit and critical avoidance stats appear to be based on the same non-linear scale, the actual crit % reduction that we get from our crit avoidance is going to be different for each mob, and from the numbers above, we can easily see that the difference between ~7300 crit rating vs ~4000 crit rating is (18.3-11.1) = 7.2%, whereas the tooltip for 3300 crit avoidance rating tells me that I should be seeing a 10% benefit. At 4500 crit avoidance it's even worse, 9.6% real benefit vs. 13.1% tooltip. The only way that the tooltip's numbers are going to be true is if the enemy's crit rating is equal to your crit avoidance rating. This seems to me like a serious issue because of the magnitude of the errors.


I have a couple questions (which are probably redundant, but it'd be nice to hear the chisel and stone of a blue reply).

Question 1: Is Graalx2's quote above still accurate? (I'm assuming yes) If not, can you tell us how things work now?

Question 2: Is the crit rating data from my character panel congruous with NPCs? (I'm assuming yes)

Question 3: Have you considered modifying the tooltips and/or the way critical hit avoidance works so that the tooltips give more realistic indications of benefits? For example, calculating both percentages and subtracting one from the other, similar to how Finesse works currently? (A Dorf can dream, can't he?)

Question 4: Aside from raw crit rating, does one's own character level give any additional bonuses/penalties to crit chance? I'm thinking in terms of a raid boss being higher level than the tank; does a level 79 (or 'skull') raid boss with 7300 crit rating have more than an 11.9% crit chance vs. a level 75 tank with 3300 crit avoidance? (Based on this wiki page, the only character level that is involved in determining critical hit chance is the enemy's. This would indicate that Raid bosses don't get any extra benefits from being higher level when it comes to landing a crit on us; since we are the target, only our level is involved in the formula. The formulas are out of date, and obviously never confirmed by Turbine.)

Question 5: Are there minimum values for crit % chance and/or dev % chance that we cannot go below? For instance, if I have 4900 crit defense and am fighting any given ToO boss on tier 2, whom we'll assume has a 7300 crit rating, and the Lore Master applies a -2400 crit chance debuff on the boss, does the boss have a 0% chance to crit / devastate me?

Depending on the answers to these questions, we could have some relatively good news; specifically, it might be that we're able to reach 100% critical avoidance vs. the average 75 Arch-Nemesis using only two crit avoidance relics (plus FoS line and LM debuff).

Also, LMs are my new second-best friend. Traited to tank, SoP:SaE will decrease the frequency of incoming critical hits by 85%. Suddenly that wierdo in a bath robe looks much more useful. See what I did there?

Thanks for reading!