felis
Terrarian
Celestial Shell and Stone are some of the best defensive accessories in the game, since each one actually grants 120 HP of regen per minute
The health regeneration effect seems not stack with each other.
Celestial Shell and Stone are some of the best defensive accessories in the game, since each one actually grants 120 HP of regen per minute
I understand your point, but you left out a big factor in order to skew the numbers in your favor. The fact is that in that specific scenario, full Warding only adds on 20% damage reduction to the reduction you're already getting. Armor by itself is plenty sufficient to enable you to take a decent number of hits.
Also, while defense might be "exponentially effective" as you increase it, it's also exponentially ineffective as monsters get stronger. And the trend in late hardmode is for enemies to get stronger at a much faster rate than you can increase your defense.
If you're talking about dodging skill, then if you can't win a DPS race against a boss with pure damage, you won't be able to win against it with pure defense.
This is because, as I said, damage shortens the time the boss is alive, such that you take less damage overall than if you'd converted those damage boosts into an equivalent amount of defense.
While both would have the same result, however, if you were to take away the factor of death and just look at the amount of damage a player with infinite HP would take from a boss in each scenario, you'd find that the player with the higher damage would take less damage in total than the player with the higher defense.
And as the player becomes more competent at dodging, this gap increases, since dodging by its very nature reduces the effectiveness of defense.
But those situations happen so rarely, there really isn't much point in planning for them.
And if you're killing enemies before they hit you anyway, then it doesn't matter whether you've got damage or defensive bonuses.
Common enemies shouldn't even be a factor in how you build your character at endgame. Their threat is minimal compared to bosses and events.
Alright, since you seem to be repeating yourself, I'm going to have to explain how 20% extra reduction bonus is not all that it seems to be.
When you resist 25% of enemy damage, you survive 50% the amount of hits (100 damage split into 75/75)
When you resist 50% of enemy damage, you survive double the amount of hits. (100 damage split into 50/50)
When you resist 75% of enemy damage, you survive quadruple the the amount of hits. (100 damage split into 25/25/25/25)
When you resist 100% of enemy damage, you survive 'infinite' amount of hits (In Terraria's case, all of the 1s)
Each time, the damage reduction goes up by 25%, however the effect it has is exponential. With the case of bringing up the 42% difference, I keep referring it to a comparison. To take another example from above, 50% resistance - 75% resistance is only 25% more resistance, but is doubly more effective in comparison.
When you do this for damage, it's all just simple additive bonuses.
For the former, you're right, but you're also somewhat wrong that every enemy does eventually 100-200 damage. 100 damage, sure, but defence subtracts that immensely in Expert Mode due to the 3:4 ratio. The majority of projectiles in the Martian Invasion do ~120 damage, the point of which you have access to high defence equipment. Even if you use Shroomite armour (which has a base of 54), 24 defence from Warding and let's say 8 from a random assortment of Celestial accessories and shields and the figure becomes 62 for damage and 86 for defence. Somewhat similar figures to what I presented earlier; the comparison figure'll probably be floating at around 27%.
The kind of attacks that are in excess of 200 are those of which you should be learning to avoid or prevent altogether, such as the Tortoise charges, Saucer Death beams as well as Crawltepede attacks. Failure to do so will result in quick death regardless of defence or damage boosts with appropriately tiered gear.
I also need to clarify that I'm not trying to prove Warding as the obvious winner, rather that the usefulness varies on situation and experience. As opposed to yourself, which I believe you still think of Menacing/Lucky as the obvious winner.
Why not? You seem to be presenting this as if your health always just whittles down to 0, which is certainly not the case. Alas, I will have to explain again what I mean by the 'infinite survivability' threshold, which is a similar situation to the defence reduction topic above.
Regeneration is considered an innate part of boss fights, so I'll be assuming that someone is using a camplantern with a regen pot. That's accessible right from the start of the game. I can't get precise figures, so I'll assume it will be in the region of 5hp/s. Additionally, if we were to throw in a standard healing potion consumed every 60 seconds, this figure gets raised to 6hp/s (It's a little more than that, but I'm adding a little tolerance for moments when you don't need to have a healing potion).
So, let's say you get hit once every 4 seconds (that's a period of 3.33 seconds without getting hit each time, or 2.66 with Cross Necklace because of invincibility frames). That means theoretically, you can consistently survive as long as the damage dealt to you is no more than 24 because you'll regenerate it over that period of time. To take the Destroyer Probe laser example, with 60 defence (43 damage) you'll be losing 19 health every 4 seconds, which will result in death (with 400 max health) in just over 84 seconds. However, with that beefy 84 defence figure (24 damage), you'll be losing no health overall as it evens out with the regeneration. Bam, infinite survivability. In comparison to having 84 seconds to kill the Destroyer, instead you'll have all night.
You can't really take regeneration out of the question, particularly for boss fights, because, likewise to armour, it is something you'll always have regardless of whether you have Warding or not. I mean, you can do without, but it's a serious handicap to the majority of players. One of the key things in every boss fight for pieces of advice is the Camplantern and Regen pot.
This only further proves my point that whether defence is useful or not relies on the player, rather than one factor being blatantly better than the other in nearly all cases.
Firstly, again, it depends on the player, especially newbies that have little to no experience or encounters with what is considered a new mob to them. Secondly, HM Dungeon and Jungle is chock full of those situations. You need decent reaction times to counter a Ragged Caster/Necromancer when they teleport real close before they strike you (the former being more potent than the latter). Moss Hornets spawn en masse and their projectiles are hard to see, especially from the dark corners of unlit jungle space. Same goes with Tortoises.
No, it doesn't. However, when you do get hit (we're all not perfect'), the punishment you take will be less.
We're not discussing end-game, we're discussing the game as a whole. Quite frankly, I don't like discussing end-game balance as it is, because it is pretty volatile. Furthermore, end-game isn't the only important part, I'd argue to say that it is the least.
The health regeneration effect seems not stack with each other.
Okay, but I'm talking about overall performance. The goal is not to die and to kill the boss, so if I can do that, then it doesn't matter how low my health is when I put the nail in its coffin. If I can do this with both pure damage and with lots of defense and regen, then great. But then, if both achieve the same result, the question of which one is more effective becomes one of how long it takes for them to do so. In which case, the damage build is the clear winner.
So basically, while lots of defense might allow you to survive indefinitely, an equivalent amount of damage will not only allow you to survive the same encounter but help you end it faster. This means that damage still has the greater overall performance.
Regeneration doesn't matter for our purposes because any player can use it, not just ones who also stack defense. Therefore the advantage it provides to a defensive player is canceled out by the exact same advantage it provides to an offensive player.
So, let's say you get hit once every 4 seconds (that's a period of 3.33 seconds without getting hit each time, or 2.66 with Cross Necklace because of invincibility frames). That means theoretically, you can consistently survive as long as the damage dealt to you is no more than 24 because you'll regenerate it over that period of time. To take the Destroyer Probe laser example, with 60 defence (43 damage) you'll be losing 19 health every 4 seconds, which will result in death (with 400 max health) in just over 84 seconds. However, with that beefy 84 defence figure (24 damage), you'll be losing no health overall as it evens out with the regeneration. Bam, infinite survivability. In comparison to having 84 seconds to kill the Destroyer, instead you'll have all night.
Unless we're talking about a really, really incompetent player here, as in one so incompetent there's no way they should have even made it to mid-hardmode, those enemies shouldn't be hitting you in such rapid succession that they'll put you in danger of dying.
and meanwhile the damage loss you suffered probably allowed the bulkier enemies to survive longer so they could hit you at least two more times than they would've otherwise.
And in cases where a bunch of enemies happen to gang up on you, just like with bosses, you'll be better off taking them out more quickly than trying to reduce their damage (assuming their damage isn't reduced to 1, in which case I don't know why we're even talking about them).
I tested again and found the mechanism of the celestial shell/stone is strange. If let the health regenerate to a certain degree, like firstly get hurt to 100 health, then let the health regenerate to 250, next, test the time for it restore to 500, it makes no deference.I actually went and tested how long it took me to regenerate a certain amount of health with the Celestial Shell and Celestial Stone, then with just one of them, and then with none of them, and I found that... it actually didn't make much of a difference. Huh. In all three cases I recovered 250 HP in about 45 seconds. It was on a normal mode world, and when I tested the same thing near a campfire and heart lantern I recovered the same amount in around 30 seconds.
Just want to point out, this doesn't seems true, at leat when I test the Flintlock Pistol with Musket Ball on Mimics, there is no difference in normal and expert world.In expert mode, mobs have effectively 50% more defense (the flat damage reduction jumps from defense*0.5 to defense*0.75)