What exactly does the ring of luck do?!

[____________Hannibal]

I just purchased a ring of luck 10 for an exorbitant price, but I can't figure out what it does. The description says it adds 10 to all defenses, but it doesn't modify either my AC's or my dodges. So what defenses is it talking about exactly?

[Mharc]

Answered here in a thread with an almost identical subject as this one

[hashy]

the answer given in the linked thread was somewhat vague.
i'll try to explain a little more in-depth what defensive and offensive stats actually mean.

weapon-based attacks, hostile nanos, lockpicking/disarming, sneaking, etc are all skills that have chance of failure. so what determines whether or not they succeed? ams and dms! ams means `attack modifed stat' (or something very similar...) and dms means (drumroll) `defense modified stat'. when using one of these skills, the ams is compared to the dms to determine chance of success. some clarification might be in order... a high ams vs a low dms doesn't necessarily guarantee that the attack will succeed, it just means that there is a very high chance of success. yes, it is entirely possible to miss a leet. let's look at a few examples.

let's create a simple scenario: you suspect that an agent is concealed near the grid point in 2ho. you, being the good little patriotic freedom-fighting (or rebellion-crushing) pvper that you are, have obtained advy and fixer buffs and have a damn high perception. let's use our powers of hypothetical situation creation to say that the hidden agent's conceal skill just so happens to be equal to your perception. when you hit the search key, your perception skill is used as ams, and the agent's conceal skill is dms. since they are equal, there is a 50% chance that you will succeed and detect the agent, in which case he will soil his pants and spam the grid terminal to escape.

locked chests and doors are also simple. they have a dms related to their level. when you attempt to pick the locks, your ams comes directly from your b&e skill. these are compared and since you were a good little ninja your ams vastly exceeded the lock's dms and thus your chance of success approaches 100%. take the goodies and flaunt your utter uniqueness in the regard that you as the fixer were the only member of the team with a high enough b&e to open said chest. until you realize everyone else has been looting chests the whole time with their equally high b&e. *sigh*

hostile nanos are slightly more complicated. direct damage and certain debuffs (and yes there are exceptions) use as their ams the skill values required by the nano formula. they also explicitly state what percentage of the target's nano res is used for dms. for example, ldi requires 871 matcrea and lists the defense skill as nano res 108%. let's say the unfortunate target of this nuke has 500 nano res. the nt executing this nuke has ams of 871 vs the target's dms of 540. we don't know exactly how the chance-to-succeed is calculated, but we do know that all things being equal, there is a 50% chance to succeed. in other words if the ams/dms differential is greater than 0, the nuke has a greater than 50% chance to succeed. about all we can say in this case is that since the differential here is 331, the target will more likely than not take 1294-2415 melee damage.*
roots, snares, calms, blinds, and related hostile nanos (yep, exceptions here too) are slightly different. instead of using the listed requirement as ams, they use your actual skill. for example halt flight is 56% psymod, 44% time/space. the requirements to learn it are 39 psymod, 30 time/space. if you have exactly those numbers, your ams when using this nano will be about 35. if, however you have 620 psymod and 580 time/space, your ams when using this ql 4 root will be about 602. this is why chaincasting baby roots works better than big, expensive roots in certain situations. it has the same chance to be successful as any other root you can cast, but it's cheaper and faster. so why not use it instead, especially when roots are more fragile than a 90-yr old calcium-deficient hip?*
* there is some debate as to whether or not this parity still exists. as i haven't yet personally tested whether or not a baby nuke fails more often than a big fat one, i will leave this as is with the knowledge that up until recently it was definitely the case. who knows if it still is.
as a side note, fumbling has nothing to do with ams/dms checks and thus has no relation to whether the nano would have been successfully executed or not.

now we have weapons, with the added concept of critical success. your attack skill with a weapon is your base ams, which is modified by any `add all off' type equipment (1k token board, jobe implants, etc). this, again, is directly compared to dms to determine whether or not the attack is successful. dms is kind of tricky in this case. we (the player community) don't know exactly where dms comes from or what the exact value is; all we know is that it is a derived stat that is influenced by the appropriate evade for the weapon. when you initiate an attack two things happen:
first, a comparison is made between your ams (attack skill plus modifiers) and the target's appropriate evade. the result of this comparison directly influences your already existing crit chance, so your chance for a critical success is equal to this modified crit chance. this is resolved, and if it succeeds, a critical hit is obtained and damage is assigned.
second, if a critical success is not obtained, your attack rating plus modifiers (which is why it's called `attack modified stat'. imagine that!) is compared to the target's defense rating plus modifiers. this behaves similarly to the other ams/dms checks.
what does it mean?
- a critical success has zero chance of missing. remember when 14.5 arrived and `follower/harbinger of the one' took nothing but crits? you didn't miss either. read the patch notes for october 2nd: `We fixed a problem that caused a few boss monsters to be hit too often by critical blows.' now you don't crit these mobs 100% of the time, and lo and behold, you start seeing misses.
- high dms-modifers on nano effects and equipment (rings of luck, jobe implants, etc) will decrease the number of total hits you take. they will not, however, decrease the number of critical hits you take. the reason grid armor is so effective is because it adds an obscene amount of dms, not because of the relatively little addition to evades. ask a fixer who pvps in grid armor. they take very few hits, but most of them are crits.
- high attack rating means you will hit more often. it has no effect on the number of crits you dole out. the evades of your target are the only non-equipment factors that can raise your critical success rate.

so to answer your question, a ring of luck defensive or a defensive mastery jobe implant or any similar item will help you avoid a non-critical attack. it has no effect on the number of crits you take.

one thing i forgot to mention...
equipment that adds to ams (add all off) and dms (add all def) only apply to your attack rating with a weapon, or your defense rating against a weapon. in other words, someone with a high dms item (such as grid armor) are just as easy to nuke/see/etc as any other character with equal nano res/concealment/etc.

[Mercatura]

- high attack rating means you will hit more often. it has no effect on the number of crits you dole out. the evades of your target are the only non-equipment factors that can raise your critical success rate.

Sorry, but high attack rating does have a large bearing on the chance of a critical hit. You already sort of stated this yourself, by increasing your attack, you increase the difference between the target's evades (part of DMS) and your AMS.

The frequency of crits goes way the hell up when I go from ~850 to ~1200 attack. Drains only boost my attack through skill increases, they have no effect on the target's evades or DMS.

Its easy to see this on long fights with tough mobs. Take Tarasque, pretty decent evades (though nothing like some boss mobs and new outdoors spawns) and immune to trader drains. I might spend 20 minutes at ~850 attack, and see few crits. (1 in 15 or even far less) I miss some but not much more than 1 in 8. If someone trains a lizard (usually its a ninja or counterninja) and I land both drians on it, my attack is over 1200. Thats when I start seeing at least 1 crit in 8 or more (sometimes bursts of crits, 3 on my chat window at once) somewhat fewer misses but I still do miss.

I also don't believe the part about critical hits have 0 chance of missing anymore. This was the case at once point, but it isn't anymore. MAs would have much less trouble with fixers if it were true. Granted, there is no way to tell whether a miss was "supposed" to be a crit, so its a moot point. It all happened when evades/NR were made more effective a few patches ago. (probably through some kind of change in the hidden DMS formula)

BTW, I really hate how certain mobs are immune to nanos that don't do anything to them. Lame.

[_____________Bugoluv]

I think Mercatura's right on the boost in attack rating giving a boost to the multiplier on crit chance or perhaps a direct boost to base crit chance--too many traders agree that they crit more once they've gotten the divest/plunders off. Of course, Hash may have been almost correct in saying that the target evades were all that mattered, just that it's actually the differential between attacker's attack rating and defender's evades, unless of course a higher attack rating flat out modifies your base crit chance.

From what I've seen from my (albeit limited) pvp experience, he's right on the crit check coming before the to hit check and a crit meaning a subsequent guaranteed hit though. If crit check comes after to-hit check, then a GA fixer should take almost the same ratio of crits to non-crits that another prof does from the same attacker. Yes, I know GA boosts evades, but 150 points is only a roughly 20% bonus for someone with decent evades, and that should mean that fewer of all landed shots are crits. When I've taken shots at GA fixers, a much more noticeable percentage of successful shots are crits than versus other targets.

If the to-hit check is done first, then, of all successful shots, slightly fewer should be crits versus a GA fixer than versus another target, but quite the opposite seems to be true (at least imho). Now, if the crit check is done first as Hash suggests, then of all total shots (successful or not), the same percentage should be crits as versus any other target (well, slightly fewer because of the evade bonus), but because of the fixer's greatly elevated DMS, a much greater percentage of all total shots are misses, resulting in a larger ratio of crits to successful non-crit hits. This really is pretty easy to check, but I admittedly haven't done it personally to any satisfactory degree--any GA fixers volunteer to let me take shots at them for awhile and note the results, both with and without the GA on?

[_____________Bugoluv]

Originally posted by Mercatura
Thats when I start seeing at least 1 crit in 8 or more (sometimes bursts of crits, 3 on my chat window at once)

Doh, forgot to comment on this in the last post. Three crits in a row was almost certainly not the result of three independent successful crit checks. It's been quite frequently observed that many "special results" happen in chains--fumbles, crits, counters, etc. This almost certainly results from a flaw in the random number system caused by a slowly refreshing seed. Meaning that all three of those crits checked versus the exact same number because the random number involved had not yet been changed by the system. So, yes, there was a check for each crit, but the number comparison on each was identical, naturally meaning that the results for all three checks were identical. Given the frequency of this observation, it is misleading to say that that 3 more crits have been scored than would have otherwise been scored, because it really was all the exact same crit check.

I can verify from extensive personal experience, when I get a crit off the gun, I hold on throwing the next nuke, and, roughly 50% of the time, I land another crit from the gun---this goes very much against simple probability given that I have a low crit chance (nt, no special modifiers except TIM or a 9% ellts, 800 attack rating vs level 170-200 human mobs). As a nt, I can also very much verify that, on fumbles, when it rains, it pours .

[Inocybe]

Originally posted by hashy
let's create a simple scenario: you suspect that an agent is concealed near the grid point in 2ho. you, being the good little patriotic freedom-fighting (or rebellion-crushing) pvper that you are, have obtained advy and fixer buffs and have a damn high perception. let's use our powers of hypothetical situation creation to say that the hidden agent's conceal skill just so happens to be equal to your perception. when you hit the search key, your perception skill is used as ams, and the agent's conceal skill is dms. since they are equal, there is a 50% chance that you will succeed and detect the agent, in which case he will soil his pants and spam the grid terminal to escape.

Hmm, not quite the picture of Perception vs Concealment as I understand it.

Firstly, the checks work differently for PvM and PvP situations.

PvM
-----
* Yes, there are the attacking versus the defensive checks which can simply be stated as -- NPCs and mobs have Perception Skills which check against your own Concealment Skill.

*There is also another factor at work - a roll-of-dice - every 10 seconds. This a roll-of-dice determines the chance of the mob detecting your presence. The actual percentage of chance has never been revealed by FC and I do not know anyone who has managed to figure it out to an accurate degree.

PvP
-----
* A player can hide (ie. become invisible) and other players have to do active spotting (ie. use Search function) to see a player who's trying to hide.

* When you hide, your concealment skill checks against perception skills of others around you - with a 75% chance of being hidden if the skill level is equal.

* When you actively search for a hidden player, your perception is now the attacking skill with a 75% chance of discovering a hidden person.

* There is no roll-of-dice feature for invisibility in player-to-player interaction but there is another code feature at work. We all have a base radius of 5 metres - ie. your radius of spotting. This increases to radius of 40 metres (or all viable characters with 100% character view distance) when you have 1000 in perception skill.


If anyone has a different picture from what I understand about this particular subject, I would like to know as I have been following up on this ever since the 'fix' of concealment code bugs several patches ago and the introduction of player invisibility.

[Mercatura]

What I was trying to get across, is there is a great difference with higher attack in the frequency of crits.

BTW, it wasn't 3 in a row, it was 3 on my screen at one time. With battle spam the screen can hold around 5-6 attacks at a time.

Even a plain old newbie-programmer 'random prerolled seed' generation cannot explain away the consistient increase in crits over time in long battles. I fight mobs that take over 10 minutes to kill all the time.

Attack Does Matter™

Fumbles are pointless grief for players...really need to chuck them out of the game. 3% my ***.

[Jayde]

Are there people who still think high AMS doesn't = more crits? That's totally not true! lol

The AMS vs. DMS obvious affects crit chances. Otherwise, why would get get crit less by a mob if you raise your evades? =)

Think about it for a sec... You don't get crit an absolute value based on your evades. When you encounter stronger mobs (higher AMS) and get hit, you need more evades not to get critted. Evades contribute to DMS (or maybe the other way around--who knows...doesn't really matter) and are checked whenever you get hit. If your oppenent has much higher AMS compared to your DMS, you will get critted far more often.

Even if you only had 50 Duck Exp., you probably wouldn't get critted much by a level 2 Trader. If you had that little, you would get critted constantly by a level 200 Trader. A level 200 Trader does not have any more crit chance (or, if they do, not much of one) than a level 2 Trader. The only difference is that a level 200 Trader has much higher AMS.

So, there are 3 ways to crit more:
1) Crit buffs
2) Raise your AMS higher than your opponent's DMS
3) Lower your opponent's DMS

-Jayde

[_____________Bugoluv]

I think we're all in agreement that it's the differential that matters on upping the crit chance, just some confusing wording in some posts.

The other possibility I wanted to highlight was that raising your attack rating may modify your base crit chance. When I first came into the game, I recall someone telling me that your base crit chance was = (modified weapon skill - required weapon skill)/100, and that was why an MA crit so much, because their required weap skill was 0 (for fists). Of course, silly me didn't know about the crit buffs at the time, so it made sense, and it wasn't until a little later that I heard the more commonly accepted "3% base crit chance." But I can't absolutely rule out that there aren't factors that directly modify the base crit chance as opposed to being applied to one's total modified crit chance, and yes, because it's not all multiplicative, the point where it's applied does matter, even if it's something a player can't really control.

Originally posted by JaydeStargunner
So, there are 3 ways to crit more:
1) Crit buffs
2) Raise your AMS higher than your opponent's DMS
3) Lower your opponent's DMS

I think this needs to be clarified a bit, because there's 2 DMS skill checks that are being discussed:
1) the crit check, which I think we all agree checks versus evades
2) the actual to-hit check, which checks against something different which we all typically know only as "DMS" (and which is the stat that grid armor or a ring of luck is adding to)

Lowering your opponents DMS (as in the stat I refer to in item 2) ) will then do nothing to alter the chance to crit, because that DMS does not affect the crit calculations, but lowering your opponent's appropriate evade would (and yes, this evade would then be acting as a DMS, I just wasn't exactly sure what Jayde was stating).

The relevant point of all this is that raising your DMS (the one listed on a ring of luck-def or GA) will do nothing to affect your chance of being critted, but it will reduce your chance of being hit at all. (This is assuming that the crit check comes before the actual to-hit check.)

But, it definitely seems that evades do have a "trickle down effect" on your DMS versus being hit at all, so something like an evade buff will both a) slightly raise that DMS, slightly reducing your chance to be hit at all, and; b) raise your evades (duh ), which is used as the DMS versus a crit check, and therefore lower your chance of being critted.

Originally posted by Mercatura
Fumbles are pointless grief for players...really need to chuck them out of the game. 3% my ***.

Amen on that --this is some kind of throwback to old pen and paper systems where one could "never have more than a 95% chance of succeeding," and a poorly applied one at that.

[hashy]

Originally posted by Inocybe
Hmm, not quite the picture of Perception vs Concealment as I understand it.
<insert information directly taken from 14.2 general discussions thread>

evidently you understood better than i.
i was specifically talking about the check made when one actively searches for a hidden player...
i said the searching player has a 50% chance to detect the hidden player, when in reality it is 75%. (assuming conceal and perception skills are equal)
thanks for correcting me and providing supplemental information ino!

Originally posted by hashy
- high attack rating means you will hit more often. it has no effect on the number of crits you dole out. the evades of your target are the only non-equipment factors that can raise your critical success rate.

evidently this statement has been questioned by more than a few people. i realize that clarification might be in order. the point i was trying to stress here was that the differential between your attack rating and the target's evades is what matters here. simply raising your attack rating doesn't in and of itself raise your crit chance. it raises the differential between your ams and the target's evades, which affects crit chance...a subtle difference that i probably should point out, as it has caused needless confusion.

Originally posted by JaydeStargunner
The AMS vs. DMS obvious affects crit chances. Otherwise, why would get get crit less by a mob if you raise your evades? =)

the check of attack rating plus modifiers (ams) against defense rating plus modifiers (dms) affects to-hit chance. a seperate check is made to determine crit chance. please realize that there is a distinction between dms and evades. as i stated originally, evades alone are not your defense rating; they modify your defense rating.
please clarify whether you mean `dms' or `evades'.

Originally posted by JaydeStargunner
Evades contribute to DMS (or maybe the other way around--who knows...doesn't really matter) and are checked whenever you get hit. If your oppenent has much higher AMS compared to your DMS, you will get critted far more often.

again, increasing the differential between your attack rating and your target's defense rating will make you hit more often. increasing the differential between your attack rating and your target's evades will make you crit more often.
i will assume that i had not made clear the distinction between the hidden defense rating of a player w/ regards to attacks hitting/missing and the more general`dms' which can apply to any success/failure check. if you are referring to the specific case of crit checks, then please say `evades', as `dms' in the sense of a player's hidden defensive rating stat is incorrect.

Originally posted by JaydeStargunner
So, there are 3 ways to crit more:
1) Crit buffs
2) Raise your AMS higher than your opponent's DMS
3) Lower your opponent's DMS

again, you seem to have either missed the distinction between dms and evades, or are using `dms' when you mean to say `evades acting as a defensive stat to determine critical chance of success', in which case 2 and 3 are indeed correct, as you are raising the differential between your attack rating and the target's evades either way.

Originally posted by Mercatura
Even a plain old newbie-programmer 'random prerolled seed' generation cannot explain away the consistient increase in crits over time in long battles. I fight mobs that take over 10 minutes to kill all the time.

perhaps you're correct here. perhaps shoddily-written pseudo-random number generation routines can't explain why you perceive a consistent increase in crit frequency over a long fight. but one very likely explanation is commonly referred to as the gettier effect. (expectation of experimental outcome influences perception of said outcome. in other words, things tend to stick out more when you start looking for them.)
divesting and plundering an enemy raises your attack rating, which widens the gap between your ams and the target's evades, thus increasing your chance of critical success when attacking. does your attack rating in and of itself affect your rate of critical hits? no. does it matter? yes.

Originally posted by Mercatura
Attack Does Matter™

who said it didn't?
if you are not just putting those words into my mouth, please show me where i made this statement or even led you to believe that i thought it was the case.


i am very much interested in seeing some solid, well-reasoned explanations on the topic of dms/evades/crits/etc. we won't get anywhere if everyone who disagrees says simply `no' without providing a foundation for their counter-hypothesis.

[Mercatura]

- high attack rating means you will hit more often. it has no effect on the number of crits you dole out. the evades of your target are the only non-equipment factors that can raise your critical success rate.

Right here.

Higher attack ---> more crits. Explain it away all you want.

20+ minute mobs are a good enough test. As well as players.

For example, on T:
No drains = may not see a single crit for 2 minutes +
Drains = 3 crits a minute at least.

Its not expectations, its fact.

Its consistient, its repeatable, and it fits in with the AMS/DMS check. When was the last time you spent half an hour on the same mob with 850 attack then 1200 attack? Did you ever watch trader vs someone outside healed by doc fights, etc? If you did, no idea how the hell you came up with the idea that higher attack is not a direct increase in crits on a target. Raise your attack, and you will crit more.

Everything you attack has a DMS, so attack matters on frequency of crits on everything you attack.

[Wobble]

Good thread..

I'm with merc on the drains boost crits (indirectly) line...

But I think we all are now..


And I accept that is because you have raised you attack and increased the difference between your AMS and the targets evades/evade modified dms/evade modified crit number that we dont know whether it exists or not..

I just wish drains reduced dms, or evades or something on mobs, they reduce AMS in PVP due to dribble down from the stats they remove, but they have no actual direct bearing on dms, which is a shame.

I'd be happy if they changed the plunder line to transfer DMS.. it might reduce the massive stat loss problem that people say imbalances pvp, and it would mean traders could actually debuff mobs and it would do something..

But anyway, this isn't a trader thread, i don't mean to try to hijack it..

[hashy]

Originally posted by Wobble
I'm with merc on the drains boost crits (indirectly) line...

But I think we all are now..

i always was! in case there was ever any doubt, i'll state yet again:
all things being equal, as your attack rating increases, you will see an indirect increase in the number of critical hits you obtain. the relevant operators here are `attack rating', `indirect' and `critical hits'.
will you crit more when you deprive? certainly. the differential increases, thus you get a higher modifier to your critical chance.
is it a `direct increase' to your critical rate? of course not. plunder skills is not the same thing as mark of risk.
ams directly affects chance to hit. it indirectly affects chance to crit. both of these assertions existed in the original post. it follows that attack rating does in fact matter. it is bleedingly obvious to me that this is a conclusion that may be reached by reading and understanding the original post in its entirety, rather than taking a single ambiguous sentence out of context as the basis for a perceived fallacy.

[Jayde]

Here would be a nice way to test...

1) Find a Fixer with Grid Armor Mk III or IV. Attack them. Track how many crits you get out of the hits you do land.

2) Have Fixer remove GA and cast an evade buff to match the GA evade buff so that evades are the same. Technically, the only difference now should be lower DMS. Evades are the same. Track how many crits you get out of the hit you land.

Compare results of #1 and #2. Try to get a large sample set (preferably 100 hits for a good test...) and make sure there are no buff changes to yourself or the Fixer the whole time.

It should be pretty obvious after this test is DMS is mearly an extrapolation that all are compared again, or if DMS and Evades are considered seperately.

I would be interested to see the results of this test, although getting a situation where you could hit a GA IV fixer 100 time would be rather annoying.

-Jayde