Magic resists and attunement etc

Amen brother, amen !

 

I haven't laughed this hard at something in quite a while. Thank you for that.

 

That is originally why I joined the seer team back in 1998, I was young and inexperienced but if you think about it the whole ultima series is about an adolescent nerd who becomes the stranger as the story progresses towards ascension. The avatar is... by definition a kind of caricature of the ultimate hero, and his moral choices help him understand its not always as easy as just doing good deeds, sometimes you have to dig deeper. In the last episodes, and in ultima online, he inherently becomes the anti-hero... which is still laughing stock to this day.

What made my character is that I knew how to laugh at myself, but also that I had this ability to make myself so vulnerable that the humor was awkward to the point it felt like magic.

And it does here as well, and it helps people laugh it out and release pent up emotions

I dunno if you guys know about the series The Office... but to me this masterpiece illustrates the persona I chose to roleplay so long ago.

And its in that Monthy Pythonesque fresco that the xorinite also operate, and that portalarium wish *I think* to operate, because we humans not only have ego to deal with, we also have collective and meta-sometimes-personified-ego... and well, at this critical juncture in our evolution it would serve us to understand how ethics are not only in actions but also thoughts our systems encourage.

Only then we have true liberty of the true ultimate sandbox, and those math issues vanish like a bad dream in the morning.

 

Totally agree, I have suggested more than once over the years the creation of a specific forum where a dedicated mod could direct concise questions at specific times to the devs behind the scenes to resolve all kind of perceptions about inequity and game balance.

We don't only need a place for those, they need to be constantly curated and quick references.

I think it should also feel part of the game, as in we're defending our builds, we're defending our ideals.

 

Its been that way since ward gems were introduced afaik

In general the way its worked is that if you have to struggle to see a deifference between so wildly different stat numbers, then it probably isnt working right

 

Me too. That was exactly what I was thinking!

 

Good post. Totally agree. Its a game interface issue. The game interface does not boil down the relevant game play info around this feature for a typical player to understand. This understanding needs to come from information presented from the game, not forum posts or blogs.

 

Exactly. I'm not trying to be a d**k about it, but it can really be exhausting constantly trying to figure this stuff out. The game is great but I shouldn't have to come to the forums, pour through pages of posts, figure out which posts are still relevant, just to make sure I am creating a character even remotely viable. For all the options available through the various skill trees, I feel that the constant nerfs and "balances" are slowly pigeonholing all of us to adopt the same type of build. It's frustrating!

 

So is it half attunement equals resist or not? XD

 

No, attunement does not give you resist. However, your attunement acts a lot like resist in modifying the attunement of an attacker's spell.

When a negative spell is cast on a target, the effective attunement is calculated as,

effective attunement = attackers attunement - (defender's attunement / 2) - defender's resistance

For example,

if caster has 200 attunement, target has 100 attunement and 50 resist:

effective attunement = 200 - (100/2) - 50 = 100

if caster has 200 attunement, target has -100 attunement and 50 resist:

effective attunement = 200 - (-100/2) - 50 = 200

By the way, how good is effective attunement?

If the effective attunement = 0 then spells will do base damage, i.e. the damage listed on their tool tip. If effective attunement = 200 then damage is roughly doubled.

This might also be a good place to plug my attunement optimizer. It will help you reach a target value of base attunement with the minimum amount of exp cost. Base attunement is that which you get solely from the average of your top ten skills in the tree, i.e. the attunement you spend exp for. Click the examples button at the bottom for instructions on how to use it.

https://sotacalc.com/pages/sota_attunement_optimizer.php

I hope this helps!

 

according to chris, this is also what Resist does. Just a 1 for 1 instead of a 1/2 for 1

 

This was on another thread too, but here are some sensitivity tables:

 

I'm 100% positive devs mentioned multiple times about litterally Att/2= Resistance (plain number, not %)

 

Sort of. Resistance and Attunement are separate stats. An enemy caster's effective attunement, when casting against you, subtracts both your resistance and half your attunement from their attunement. They (both devs and players) often say "you get half your attunement as resistance" as a shorthand, but it's incorrect and confusing for them to do so, as it makes it sound as though half your attunement gets added to your resistance, which is incorrect.

I was very confused about this myself until recently- it made no sense to level warding then, because if your resistance was half your attunement, the positive resistance from warding wouldn't offset the negative resistance from attunement. But that isn't how it works; half your attunement and your resistance are applied separately.

 

In terms of "Effectiveness" this is the truth. The thing is, the reality of it is that Attunement / 2 is EQUIVALENT to Resistance. Where people get confused with your statement is that if you tell people Half of your attunement = your resistance, then when we show them the formula, being :
Effective Attunement = Casters Attunement - (Defenders Attunement / 2) - Resistance

They will start to think (And I've seen some posts of people thinking this way) that the formula becomes this :

Effective Attunement = Casters Attunement - (Defenders Attunement / 2) - (Resistance Points + (Defenders Attunement / 2))

And that is why we are trying very hard to say that they are two seperate values, but Attunement / 2 grants the same benefits as Resistance.

 

Has anyone done the math to determine best bang for buck investment for resistance? I am all blades and very little magic, so what is the best path to build up resistance? GM warding or at 80 move to get 100 attainment?

I'm just a bit foggy on the best path forward

 

I don't think that there is a best path forward. It's all tradeoff and very expensive.

 

In the following, by 'base attunement' i mean simply the average of the top ten skills in the magic tree. This is what your attunement would be if you had 0 bonuses from gear, buffs, or specialization.

If you don't like math and just want a good rule of thumb, always level your base attunement to 10-20 points higher than your warding.

One can consider how much exp the two methods cost and compare to how much benefit. Note: I believe warding is a x20 skill. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Remember: effective attunement = attacker's attunement - (defender's attunement / 2) - defender's resistance.
So what we're interested in for defensive purposes is the quantity: attunement/2 + resistance.

So, with 100 warding and 0 base attunement one would spend 24.25 million exp. You're total attunement (base + effect from warding) is 0 - 100 = -100. The benefit one would get vs. hostile spells would be (-100/2) + 100 = 50.

On the other hand, lets say you level warding to 80 and base attunement to 100. Now the exp cost of 100 base attunement depends on two things: which magic tree we're talking about (moon being the cheapest, death the most expensive), and how you configure the top ten skills in that tree to get an average of 100. My attunement optimizer (sotacalc.com) can calculate the cheapest way to gain 100 attunement in a tree. Using it, the cheapest way to gain 100 moon attunement costs 15.34 million, while the cheapest way to get 100 death attunement costs 30.66 million. On top of that, the cost for 80 warding skill is 3.60 million. Thus, the exp cost for 80 warding and 100 attunement is minimally in the range of 18.64 and 34.26 million exp, depending on the magic tree.

If you had 80 warding and 100 base attunement, then your total attunement would be 100 - 80 = 20. The benefit one would receive vs. hostile spells would be (20/2) + 80 = 90.

You can see that 100 base attunement + 80 warding is much more effective than 100 warding by itself (almost twice as effective). You'll pay 24.25 million exp for 100 warding by itself. You'll pay at least between 18.64 and 34.26 million exp for 80 warding and 100 base attunement, depending on the magic tree.

Using https://sotacalc.com/pages/sota_attunement_optimizer.php can help you do calculations like these on your own!

 

I got fire warding to 80 and it cost more than 3 million experience, so I believe that this is correct.

 

@Mimner thank you. That is about as simple of an explanation as I needed. Now time to go burn 60 hours of attenment, but at least I have my direction. 80 warding, 100 attune then I will start to work the warding from 80 to 100.