Spiral Knights - Armor & Resistance Clarification

Armor & Resistance Clarification

8 replies [Last post]

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 06:49

Mikalator

I've been reviewing the wiki, but am still unclear on how this works. My understanding is that Status Resists give you the damage protection from the Status Damage, but how does a Elemental Defense (for example) fit in to that damage resistance? Is it the initial attack that is resisted by the Elemental Defense, but when I catch on fire, then it's all about Status Resist? So, does Elemental Defense do anything to reduce damage from say, a retrodes beam attack, or just their swipes?

Finally, and more to the point, what's "better" a better UV on Helmet/Armor, Status or Defense?

Thanks in advance!

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 07:08

Bopp

damage vs. status

It's important to keep damage and status separate, even though they often arrive at the same time. I'm not an expert, but here are some examples:

* Suppose that you walk over a grate that is spewing ice. Two things happen: You get some elemental damage, and you get the freeze status, which locks your feet to the floor.

* Let's say a gun puppy fires a fireball at you. Two things happen: you get some elemental damage, and you get the fire status. The fire status then inflicts some damage to you every few seconds. This damage appears to be normal, but normal armor doesn't lessen it --- only fire armor does --- so it's best to think of damage from fire as its own special kind of damage.

* Hail Driver does elemental damage and freeze status. Magma Driver does the same amount of elemental damage, but with the fire status. Nova Driver does elemental damage, but no status at all.

* A fire retrode (hotrode) has two attacks. The swipe does normal damage and fire status. The beam does elemental damage and fire status.

* A fire zombie (slag walker) has four attacks, that do a mixture of normal, shadow, and fire.

As you can see, the fire issue is pretty separate from the elemental issue. Whether you want lots of fire protection, or lots of elemental protection, or both, depends on your situation. You have to read the wiki, to determine what the monsters you'll be facing can do to you. I don't know of any general principles saying that damage protection is better than status, or vice-versa. But maybe another poster will.

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 08:06

Kalaina-Elderfall

Every attack in the game has

Every attack in the game has a certain type or mixture of types to it. In T3, a Retrode's swipe does pure Normal, and a Retrode's beam does pure Elemental. So when hit by a Retrode swipe, only your Normal defense matters when determining how many bars of damage you take directly. When hit by a beam, only your Elemental defense matters when determining how many bars of damage you take directly.

When hit by things such as, for example, a Zombie swipe, you're taking split Normal/Shadow, so both your Normal and Shadow defense matter when determining how many bars of damage you take directly.

Many attacks can inflict status as well. When subject to one of these attacks, your status resistance determines the likelihood and intensity of the status effect you receive. Your status resistance has no effect on the amount of bars of damage you take directly. However, in the case of, say, Fire, a higher-intensity Fire status will cause you to burn for a longer period of time and take more damage per second as well, so Fire resistance saves you health. Poison resistance, on the other hand, won't save you any health so long as you can avoid getting hit for the entire length of the Poison effect (if you do, your reduced defense as part of the Poison effect will cause you to sustain more damage).

For UVs, I've found that if you don't have any resistance to a status effect, status resist UVs make a huge difference. And status effects themselves are a big deal, so reducing their effects can be incredibly important. But if it's not the status effect that you care about so much, then defense UVs provide defense that is more universal. With defense UVs, you'll find that they are most effective if you already have defense of the type in question. So on, say Azure Guardian, a Shock Max UV will seriously reduce how bad shock is, but a Shadow Max UV won't really make a huge difference in your Shadow resist, while a Pierce Max UV will make a noticeable difference in your Pierce resist.

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 11:15

Antistone

To summarize:

Defense and status resistance operate independently. If you're hit by a fire-retrode's beam attack, elemental defense will determine the initial damage, and fire resistance will determine the burn damage.
As a general rule, status UVs have bigger effects than defense UVs on a relevant attack...but defense UVs are relevant more often.
Defense and status resistance seem to follow different progressions, where an incremental bonus to defense is more noticeable when you already have a lot, but an incremental bonus to resistance is at least as noticeable when you previously had none. (Though things are more complicated than that for a variety of reasons.)

If you only have one set of armor, the UV you most prefer will usually be normal defense, because that helps you in a lot of different areas (the majority of enemies deal at least partially normal damage, even on tier 3)...though at some point (which has not yet been accurately determined), you start resisting all the normal damage from split-normal attacks, and at that point more normal defense doesn't help you as much.

It is more useful (though also more expensive) to have several different armors that are suitable for different locations, in which case each armor should ideally have UVs that are good for the area you use it in. Whether defense or resistance UVs are better depends on the area, and how many different armors you plan to have.

Also, many people just focus on FSC, since it's the premiere tier 3 farming location--which means fire UVs are especially popular, of course. If you plan on doing shadow lairs, you also might want to choose armors specifically tailored to them (that's what the developers say they assumed you'd do when they were balancing them).

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 13:18

Mikalator

Thanks!

Great answers, thank you all.

I do run with multiple armor sets specifically tailored to expected damage. In this case though, I'm looking at crafting a divine veil for general use, and am not sure which UVs would be worthy of the investment. Elemental Defense seemed to make sense initially, but then I started thinking that most initial monster attacks are either dodged or shielded, and what usually gets me is some type of splash or trap damage. So, it seems, Status is usually more of an issue for me. Plenty to ponder...

Thanks again for the detailed responses.

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 13:45

Bopp

Divine Veil

Divine Veil has no normal protection. Either you're pairing it with a purely normal armor (e.g. Ancient Plate Mail), in which case you have enough normal protection, or you're pairing it with some partially-normal armor (e.g. Skolver Coat), in which case your normal protection may be a bit low. In the latter case, my inexpert advice is to seek normal protection on that thing. Normal protection is important everywhere in the Clockworks.

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 15:18

Otaia

I don't quite understand how

I don't quite understand how mixed type attacks work. Would having pure special defense be preferable to having pure Normal defense? For example, I currently run FSC with my Nameless set (with Shadow UVs, but let's pretend they don't exist). I have no Shadow defense, but I have an average amount of Normal Defense. Would switching to Divine Veil reduce, increase, or not affect the amount of damage I take from Zombie swipes (not counting Fire damage)?

If it would reduce the damage taken, then it might not be such a bad idea to wear the whole Divine set for general purpose use. Pure normal attacks seem to be limited to coming from Trojans - rare outside of FSC, Gremlin Thwackers, Lichens with their easily avoidable tackle, and a handful of other monsters in their base non-elemental form. You would have more balanced defenses for elemental and shadow damage, if lower defenses overall. And Divine comes with some nice resists.

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 15:22

Trying

We do not know the exact

We do not know the exact ratio mixed type attacks are. From Antistone's tests it is better to cover both damages at a lower defense than to cover only one type at a higher defense.

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 16:34

Antistone

Thank you for citing me, but that advice is outdated. Kalaina-Elderfall's tests indicate that defense is flat, rather than exponential as I suspected.

No one has yet done systematic tests against mixed-damage attacks, as far as I know.

It is commonly speculated that the damage is calculated basically the same as if you had been hit by two separate pure-damage attacks (this would be simple, and seems to be how it works when knights use mixed-damage weapons against monsters). If that's true, then full Nameless, full Divine, and mixed Nameless/Divine should all provide exactly the same defense against zombie swipes (unless either the normal or shadow component of the damage is so small that one of the sets is overkill against it, which I doubt). Even if the ratio of normal to shadow in the attack isn't 1:1, that just means normal and shadow defense would have different maximums, not that they'd provide different levels of protection for the same amount of defense.

But one can also imagine other ways that split-damage might work; for example, it might take some sort of weighted average of your relevant defense values, in which case either Nameless or Divine might provide better protection than the other.

If anyone would like to help gather data for mixed-damage attacks, let me know. It would be especially helpful if I could get someone who has either a full Divine set or a full Dragon Scale set (so that you can do a test where you have no defense against either of the relevant damage types).

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Armor & Resistance Clarification