*Important* some skills get WORSE with higher skill!

[________mourningzero]

I'm collecting methodilogical data on this, nothing good enough to post yet but there is definitely evidence for this in my experience and I'd like to hear anyone elses data/opinions (data preferred heehee)

I have the great su****ion that the following skills have set numbers at which they become LESS effective than they were at lower levels (vs. the same Mobs of course!)
-Attack skills to crit ratio
-Conceal to being spotted
-Evades to being hit / crit

Likely some more, but these are the ones I have noticed.

What I mean by this is:
-Attack to Crit ratio
My trader (103 now) fights Borgs for say 20 levels, when first tackling the borgs she crits like a madwoman 3/5 hits crit (with VS and a 125 lowlight). By the end of her borg hunting career, she crits about 1/5 hits (still with VS and same lowlight). Even worse, she throws out some drains to buff her attack skill (shotgun) by about 275, and she crits even LESS. Counterintuitive? Yes!

Now awhile ago, about 12.6ish, we had that wacky couple of days where anyone fighting a red would crit the living hell out of it 9/10 crits per shots. Funcom took notice and fixed it. Now we are all led to believe (by each other and by official statements) that crit chance is some fuzzy calculation based on Attackers attack rating vs. Defenders evades + crit buffs. So if that's the case where did this whack 12.6 crazy-crit-fest come from, and what tweaking was done to prevent this?

-Conceal to being spotted
My 65 Agent sneaks Q200 missions *WELL*. Not flawlessly, but well. His sneak isn't that uber either, he does it with 870 conceal roughly, with a Q93 cloak. (In case you don't know how a 65 gets Q200 missions, a high level player gets the mission - copies the key - hands the 65 agent the key and the coords). Read the agent boards, or hell just read every other post on the boards and you'll hear agents complaining that they cannot sneak through a Q200 or a Yellow mission with their 1500-2000+ conceal. Counterintuitive? YES!

-Evades to getting hit
I've got a 53 atrox fixer with grid armor (yes I'm a twink, but AO is for twinks *at least for now*). I go up to lush fields and hunt at the Lush fields NW mutant camp (lvl 60-70 mutants roughly) at lvl 40. At lvl 40 I have about 308 Evade Clsc, and vs. *everything* in this mutant camp, I get hit maybe 1/20-40 swings from the local baddies (tough to get a good approximation, 1 swing animation rarely means 1 swing). So I make a pretty damned good tank out here, and I stay in the same hunting zone to level 53. Now at level 53, something terrible happens: I raise my evade clsc to 320+: the difference here is like night and day. The second I raise that evade over 320, I'm getting hit every 3/5 swings, I'm even getting crit now. Good sweet lord, from 1/30 to 3/5 all because I *RAISED* the skill? (or perhaps because I leveled - unexplored option)
Counterintuitive? Big NOD!


Anyways, it's going to take a LOT of trials to get good data out of this, and if it's based off of level and not skill, then these trials will be nearly impossible to produce. I'm going to try though, to figure out what the hell is going on here. Something smells FUBAR to me, could be that all these are instances of low skill working too well on high mobs (a la 12.6 patch infamy). Maybe some official can come onto the board and say he's looking into it or something.


Please post your thoughts/data - lets figure it out.
(And don't flame me for twinking please)

[______________Nianna]

I am a level 112 trader and I can state with absolute certainty that raising attack skill to very high levels greatly increases the critical hit chance. I get practically no critical hits at all without using my deprive and ransack spells now (not using scope), but with them I critical hit with reasonable frequency. I haven't noticed what you are saying in this regard.

I have a feeling that this conceal issue has more to do with one person understanding the bugs involved with conceal and the other not than the concealment levels. It also can have something to do with the missions, since sometimes they spawn really tough and sometimes very easy. The mission settings themselves have some effect on the layout and type of mobs, so it could be a matter of the settings used.

[________mourningzero]

Are you also fighting without any kind of crit buff as well? Wouldn't it be interesting if there was a limit to how much you could increase your crit chance with lowlight + crit buffs + high attack rating and if you somehow exceeded that limit it would drop your chances down, or they would rooll over the maximum range into the minimum. Blegh!

Good data though keep it coming.


As for conceal, I'm quite aware of individual mob differences and mission difficulty. But as I've said, my methodilogical trials are a work in progress and nothing substanital enough for posting yet.

[____________Sigfried]

As you go up in levels the level range for MOB Cons gets bigger. So a red at first level is just a few levels above you, as where a red when you are level 100 is many more levels higher than you. So unless you test on MOBs that are true yellow, or you know for certain their actual level its hard to judge the statistics properly.

Also its been noticed that MOBs get statisticly tougher as you go up in levels. So they have higher nubers as a percentage of their level that at lower levels. So a low level mob might have lvl * 3 at lower levels and lvl * 7 at higher levels, so that the ratio of your attack to their defense shifts as time goes on since characters have a mostly flat attack skill progression, (this is especialy the case with classes that overequip and then let their attack skills go back down for the actual fight)

So its not the skill that deminishes, but the skill fo the defender that goes way up as you get higher. Of course the effect is that it seems like the skill becomes weaker.

When doing testing its best to test agianst other players.

[Provisioner]

Actually, Sigfried, that's not what he was saying. I think he is fully aware that the color range gets wider as you increase in level. What he is saying:

His sneaking example
1) A level 130 agent cannot sneak a level 200 mission
2) His level 65 agent with less ability can sneak them fairly easily.
3) Therefore, less skill is *better* against a tougher mob.

If his theory is true (and it has nothing to do with the color range) than there are some screwy algorythms out there...

Provisioner

[Kinkstaah]

But it isn't.

[__________Lucid Flow]

Originally posted by Provisioner
Actually, Sigfried, that's not what he was saying. I think he is fully aware that the color range gets wider as you increase in level. What he is saying:

His sneaking example
1) A level 130 agent cannot sneak a level 200 mission
2) His level 65 agent with less ability can sneak them fairly easily.
3) Therefore, less skill is *better* against a tougher mob.

If his theory is true (and it has nothing to do with the color range) than there are some screwy algorythms out there...

Provisioner

Actually i've noticed this too, but in the opposite way. In 20 levels my NT has an easier time Bewildering mobs of the same level with the SAME SPELL (Project Calm).

I'm convinced there is a level modifier somewhere in calculations and it's screwing a lot of people out there. The closer in level I am to something, the less likely it will resist my spell even if it's Ice Flechette.