it takes into account your attack rating, their defense, your lvl and their level
in a very simple formula
chance to hit =2*(AR/(AR+def))*(clvl/(clvl+mlvl))
where
AR= attack rating
Def = monster’s def
Clvl = character lvl
Mlvl = monster level
what all this means is… if you and the monster are the same level and your attack is equal to their def, your chance to hit is 50%.
now i have a extremely complicated fix that will take a ton programmer hours of coding and endless headaches***
we change the 2… to a 3…
this would make your chance to hit with everything equal be 75%.
attack rating will still be relevant, but not quite so abusive that every class need angelics.
it wont fix the melee cast gap… but it will help…
*** at least for blizzard
EDIT:
i have just now realized monsters attack you with the same formula.
to compensate for my oversight, monsters follow the old formula… i guess that’s quite a bit more complicated than i thought but, hopefully still doable
Haha.
I totally agree that this is a huge problem for melees. It is so big it makes them useless at the start of season.
I already created a post about it and some more: Will 2.7 finally fix melees? - #39 by RafiRzeźnik-2216
I guess that number 2 is because it take 2 formulas into one (AR-DEF + LVL-LVL).
In my opinion deleting “level” part so : chance to hit =(AR/(AR+def)) would be enough.
If you want a descent chance for hitting a moster you just need to care about attack rating. It is so obvious that monster with higher level will have more defense, so what is the point of level part in formula?
Also I would recommend to buff AR from Dexterity/Attack rating on superior weapons.
ok soo with my realization this affects monsters too… this went from a 5 second fix to extremely hard.
instead of just changing the AR function for chance to hit, you would need to make a new function entirely and edit every line that calls to the original function that the player uses to reference the new one.
god damnit
unless you can somehow change the AR function to call a new function and then check what was calling it if it was a ally or enemy and then make the new function run a copy of the old one or the new one under a different name.
then again this part of the code is entirely in assembly language, so nothing is as easy as it seems
Don’t forget the facts that you yourself pointed out: this formula is used for attacks by monsters against players.
A sorceress with really low armor can still have a chance to be hit that is really low when fighting much lower monsters (obviously not thought about whatsoever by those who made Terror Zones ). This is what made me look up the info back when I was in high school… my low life, high level sorc had much better survivability than a high defense, higher life, lower level barbarian
It doesnt really matter. Casters of course have weaker armor and they have to dodge and avoid things.
Melee characters have to tank hits. They expose themselves for danger so they obviously need an advantage in chance of not being hit.
because unlike the actual devs who are concerned with how to break as much as possible. I’m concerned about balancing the game.
its not like this isnt a “known issue”.
any moron can see how much better casters are than melee.
im trying to come up with a solution that can close the gap slightly without going to overboard
casters have less defense, this means they will get hit more.
but its not just them
while most melee chars get a def bonus (barb has shout,paladin has holy shield and druid werebear gets defense)
werewolf does not, im not trying to change too much balance… just trying to right a wrong so we don’t need to put 250 points into dex to hit something with reasonable accuracy
meanwhile casters still deal more damage per hit, and can hit entire groups at a time.
all this is doing is making is so angelic aren’t freaking MANDATORY on melee.
i mean the other option is to give melee a aoe splash effect.
i felt this would be a hell of a lot less drastic of a change
if you haven’t noticed, blizzard idea of “fixing the attack rating issue” is “lets make the skills work like smite and never miss” as seen in assassin kicks.
my idea is an actual FIX to the issue, not some bandaid.
Remove monster BLOCK CHANCES! Why you need attack rating to be 1 milion when Baal has 50% block chance so your chance to hit is you guessed it: 50-%. Many lesser monsters have 15-30±% block chances.
How to counter monster block chances? Maybe Smite doesnt get blocked and thats it? NO COUNTER!
You could simply offer workarounds rather than remove it entirely, so that players get to interact with the mechanic. For example, making a unique ring that reduces monster’s block chance by half, or craftable items that reduce monster’s block chance.
That being said, MA Assassin needs to gain charges when blocked. It’s important for the charging skills to be more reliable, as not having a reliable tempo is what makes them frustrating to play.
That doesnt makes sense for me to introduce new gear to reduce block chance. Will make the problem basically one-item reliant. Same like they did with Martial arts assassin - rely on Mosaic rw. Thats not good thinking at all.
And you dont need to take sentences literally. Just removing it on monsters without shield, and preserving it with shielded monsters is good enough. Or Halving the block chances across monsters will help too. Any such change is positive for melee to lower the gap to casters power
They could add a chance to defeat the block with higher AR. But I disagree that we don’t need to consider AR. If you only have a 60% chance to hit, the chance to block isn’t even considered as you didn’t even hit. Keeping the CTH at 80+% gets to be a pain for a lot of leveling, evening out after you hit lvl 85. We should easily be able to keep an 80% CTH and 90% should be normal after lvl 85.
Changing the formula is one option. Adding more AR per pt in Dex is another. Some builds don’t have many options of +to AR% like a the Zerker or WW druid - @800% to AR. Strafe Zon, Zealot can only get around 500% while blade fury is only getting @250%. We could just up the AR % on the other builds to make it so 800% is regular for a high level char.
I personally like the more AR per pt in Dex. This allows Zerkers and WW druids to keep the 800%, they won’t need the higher pts into Dex to get the hits thus allowing a higher life pool. Zon’s and Pallys will want the extra pts into dex as it helps the damage and block %. They will be ok with only 500% to AR as their Dex will naturally be higher. Blade Fury needs the AR from claw mastery to work…
oh right, the caster’s giant point and click AOE, at range, plus infinity and facets and - res on items to lower all thier resists… meanwhile… melee attacks range from 60-85% to hit a monster thge same level chance to hit unless u run angelics, which greatly limit build diversity
i have actaully done the math,
i made a spreadsheet
you take a multi hit attack like fury
lest say u deak 10k damage
thats 50k damage
if a single one misses thats 40k
thats like using 2k damage per swing
a 60% chance to hit is a 40% damage reduction
adding generally anglics adds more damage than fortitude for melee, because u wont miss as much
To be fair here I’ve never made a melee build that had that bad of a chance to hit a same level enemy, and you certainly don’t need to run angelics to get enough AR. Some charms and a bit of dex more than does the job, maybe toss in a ravens or metalgrid what have you depending on what you are going for. If you are REALLY struggling run with an Infinity on Merc, or run Blessed Aim. There really isn’t much of an excuse not to have 87-95% hit on everything but less than a dozen mobs in the game.
Dunno why people keep going Vita max on melee for PvE when it’s absolutely unnecessary to do so. You need around 3k hp with capped res to be effectively unkillable PvE wise (assuming you don’t play like a complete monkey.) You don’t need to vita max for that. 100 dex will do more for your clears than 100 vita ever will. HC can be a different story, but if you are playing melee for HC it’s not because you are trying to max clear speeds to begin with.
I feel like 95% of the complaining people do concerning melee comes from them running skillers on melee and wondering why they suck. 2 AR GC’s does more for melee than a full inventory stack of skillers. people just don’t seem to get that melee skills give bonus % AR… you need sources of base AR for them to multiply, then you have tons of AR. Base AR you get from Dex, charms, and gear.
Take whatever melee build you got, drop your charms for AR/damage/life charms, drop your vita 80-100 points and dump it into dex. problem solved. Dex is 5 base AR per point folks. 100 Dex is like 3k AR toward WW, or 4.5k AR toward Berserk. You can get over 10k bonus AR from 100dex and charms alone.
End of the day AR isn’t the issue. Mob block isn’t the issue because the main culpits of it still get wrecked by crushing blow. The issue is when an AoE spell can hit 20 targets. Giving melee 100% hit chance and 10,000,000 damage a hit still wouldn’t change anything lol. The only “real” solution is tone down aoe from casters.
And I’m not saying Melee can’t be effective farmers, hell barbs are still THE best farmers in the game when played well. But if the topic is clear speed, there is nothing you can do other than turning them into casters themselves, that is going to make them up to par in the current game without nerfs.
Don’t forget WW Barb is in the same camp, 500% or even less from mastery + skills. My budget GF Trav WW barb (admittedly not optimized for damage/ar) is at lvl 28 WW, only 180% AR! 256 from Sword Mastery puts it at 436.
I’ve long thought that adding some flat AR to some skills to give the %AR something better to multiply would be a nice way to handle it, but I like the more AR per Dex point as well. It introduces a more interesting trade off to get away from “equipment, rest vit” style builds that have become the norm.
A sword WW Barb will likely have decent dex anyway for PB or other swords, a Maul barb doesn’t have any dex requirements, but now will have to decide if more dex for AR is worth it over Vit for HP or STR for 1.1% Maul damage.
I don’t love the idea of introducing more items to try to counter block or improve chance to it for the simple reason that melee already has to make gearing sacrifices against damage for chance to hit and/or survivability more than caster classes, so adding yet another thing would make the problem worse.
The problem is that by the time you can equip Metalgrid at lvl 81, you likely are high enough level that the problem has gone away or gotten a lot less. Ravenfrost is good b/c of the dex/ar and CBF, so it makes sense to use as long as you don’t need corpses (Find Item), so I say it’s earned it’s slot regardless, however Angelic and Metalgrid really only bring AR to the party, so that damage gimp just to hit is a trade off casters don’t have to make. Same with blessed aim merc, you’re missing out on Might. Infinity again doesn’t really make sense, by the time you can build an Infinity, you’re high enough level that the issue isn’t as much of a concern.
So in my mind the two things are:
Progression challenges that don’t really exist on the caster side
Creating more harsh trade offs on already very item dependent classes that casters don’t have to deal with
Which leads to the overall situation of “build a caster first to twink out melee” being the norm. Yes there are people like me that just enjoy playing melee so we take the efficiency hit by playing a melee from the start, but IMO there’s no real good game design reason saying it MUST be that melee progression sucks.
This I do agree with. I main Barb and it’s not hard to get 3500-4k life with BO, even w/o cry weaps, so you do have some room to put more stat points into Dex if desired. That’s why I think Rondel’s idea of improving AR per Dex to make it more appealing makes sense, right now the trade off could be better.
I mean, you still have to hit to make CB work, and you still have to have enough damage to take the last sliver of life off, and for general enemies CB is lack luster vs. bosses, so it’s all a rich interwoven tapestry of overall chance to hit (including block). I do agree with your point though that even if you 1 hit everything, 1 hitting everything 20 times is still slower than a caster 1 hitting 20 things at once, and agree that toning down casters to get the power gap more reasonable would also be okay.
I personally think there’s a middle ground where melee keep the same attack mechanics they have now (single or few nearby enemies at a time) but do enough damage and connect often enough to actually deal it, that even if clear speed isn’t the same, the fact that you’re not having to spend 30 seconds per enemy in a P8 game closes the gap “enough”.
At the end of the day melee is obviously workable, especially with end game gear, it would just be nice if the gearing trade-offs were comparable between melee and casters so you weren’t bending over backwards just to hit things, losing out on potential damage that casters don’t have to lose out on.
Yes this should be buffed.
I think its another great topic tho. To make Strength, Dexterity more useful against Vitality maxing. Energy too I guess.
Strength giving also 3-5 AR/point or 2% Dmg/point. Along those lines. Dexterity 7-8 AR/point or so.
I think Str/Dex/Vita/Energy rebalancing in general would be a great way to go.
Start off by nerfing mana regeneration rates (by a LOT) and Redemption/Meditation aura, and Energy Shield. Make casters feel the need to invest in Energy or become pot chugging bots.
Then go through and Buff Str/Dex/Energy. Str 2-3%ED, Dex 7-10 AR, and swap Energy to mana values to closer in life with Vita returns.
I really like this, especially when it comes to Strength.
The damage boost from strength should be worth putting points into, rather than being simply a “Gear Enabler”.
You would see more build options, like max damage builds that see higher investment in strength, at the cost of vitality, but would be striking a lot harder.
This also has the added benefit of incentivizing the use of Sacred Armor and higher STR gear on melee builds, cause if you’re building up STR for damage anyways, you might as well use the better armor.
TBH I’d like to see Medium/Heavy armor come with Physical DR innately. 5/10% probably, nothing huge, just some reason to use them other than eth Sacred on a Merc with Fort. Some people might cry about wishing their Enigma was in a Heavy base for a while, but hell mines in a Mageplate too, they’ll get over it.
). This is what made me look up the info back when I was in high school… my low life, high level sorc had much better survivability than a high defense, higher life, lower level barbarian 