Warding, Resistances & Attunement - The How To

Discussion in 'Skills and Combat' started by Violet Ronso, Jun 28, 2019.

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  1. Violet Ronso

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    Welcome to my guide on How To make Warding, Resistances and Attunement work together! This guide aims to answer the many questions surrounding the new warding skills, along with the pre-existing Resistance passives, attunement and warding gems that can be infused into gear. I will try to be as simplified as possible in my explanations, and acting as if the person who read this guide knew nothing about these features. To start things off, here is a list of *MOST* sources of these three terms.

    • Attunement : Attunement is the number that shows on your Skills Tab (Default:K) when you click on the little meditating emote top left of the fire magic tree. This number is the average level of your 10 highest spells or passives in the specific tree.

    • Resistance : This is the term used to reference you defensive capabilities against a school of magic. In other words, Fire Resistance is how much defense you have against fire magic.

    • Warding : This is the term used to reference the new passive skills which grants Resistance in exchange for attunement.

    • Attunement Gems : Gems can be crafted and infused into some gear pieces to increase attunement. (1 Gem usually offers +10 Attunement, jewels +5)

    • Warding Gems : Gems can be crafted and infused into some gear pieces to increase resistances. These will exchange Resistance for Attunement. (1 Gem usually offers +15 Resistance, -5 Attunement).

    • Resistance (passives) : ("Blue Blooded", "Well Grounded", "Fire Proof") These passives will raise your resistance against a certain school of magic by 0.25 per level in the passive.

    These are the things we will be interested in for this thread.

    Now where do all these things come together and make 1 big pile of confusion? First thing I will ask of you if you are confused about these skills and passives is to COMPLETELY FORGET everything else. Forget the formulas you might have seen, forget the examples people have given you, focus on this right here. The combat formula which uses these things is the following :

    Code:
    (1)Effective Attunement = (2)Casters Attunement - ((3)Targets Attunement / 2) - (4)Targets Resistance
    So what does this all mean? Here is a breakdown of each step :

    1. This is the result of the combat formula. This value will be converted into a multiplier to determine how hard a casters spells will hit. No matter how low this number gets, you will not hit 0, and this number offers diminishing returns, meaning the difference between 0-100 is WAY bigger than the difference between 100-200.
    2. This is how much attunement the caster has in the school of magic he is currently casting. Having 200 Attunement in Fire Magic has 0 impact on his Death Magic spells. This value will count attunement from all the different sources he has : Gear, Food, Buffs, Top 10 Spells & Passives.
    3. This is how much attunement the Target has in the school of magic he is currently the target of. Having 200 Attunement in Fire Magic has 0 impact on Death Magic spells directed at him. This value will count attunement from all the different sources he has : Gear, Food, Buffs, Top 10 Spells & Passives.
    4. This is the targets resistance value in the school of magic he is currently the target of. Having 100 Fire Resistance has 0 impact on Death Magic spells directed at him. This value will count resistance from all the different sources he has : Gear, Buffs, Passives.
    So lets start things off with Attunement.

    Attunement is one of the variables that is VERY IMPORTANT to determine how hard your spells will hit. If you plan on playing a spell caster, you will want to get this number as high as possible. Like previously mentionned, You can get Attunement from the average of your top 10 passives and spells in a school of magic. You can also get attunement from gems and jewels infused into your weapons, chest pieces and jewelry.

    And now for Resistances,

    Resistance is the variable which will determine how hard spells being cast AGAINST you will hit, this is a defensive number only, and has no impact on how hard your spells will hit. The higher the number, the less a spell will hurt you, pretty straight forward.

    Now we already know how to get Attunement up, but how can we get resistances up? Lets break the sources down here :

    Buffs (Douse, Celestial Blessing) : These active spells will grant you resistance for a set duration of time. These have no drawbacks and simply give you the resistance points as long as you keep the spell up.

    Passives : These passive skills in some magic trees offer Resistance on a golden platter, raise the skill, and your resistance goes up. Simple. These have no negative drawbacks at all.

    Warding gems & jewels : These crafted gems and jewels, once infused into your gear, will grant you resistance in exchange for attunement. On a weapon, a warding gem will grant you 15 points of resistance in exchange for 5 points of attunement, so your spells will hit slightly lower, but you will get a nice bit of resistance in exchange.

    Warding Passives. For all 8 magic trees except for Chaos, there is a Warding Passive for the opposite school, meaning Life Magic has Death Warding as a passive. These passives will offer 1 point of resistance but remove 1 point of attunement PER LEVEL for the school it is warding you from, (So the passive in the Life Tree gives you 1 point of Death Resistance but removes 1 point of DEATH attunement).
    The impact of this passive skill is that it will make your spells in the resisted school weaker. If you plan on being a mage who uses Death Magic, taking up the Death Warding passive would generally be a bad Idea, as it reduces Death Attunement.

    and Finally, "Magic Warding" from the Tactics tree. This passive will grant you 1 resistance and remove 1 attunement for ALL 8 Magic schools except for Chaos per level. The drawback of this passive is that it makes ALL your spells in ALL the magic schools weaker, and thus is a bad idea if you plan to be a mage.
    *IMPORTANT THING TO NOTE* If you raise "Magic Warding", you will reduce all your schools attunements. what this means is that your life magic will be weaker, making your heals heal less. It also means your buffs will be weaker, such as Strength of Earth, Air's Embrace, Enlightenment, but also the shields such as Death Shield, Shield of Ice, Crystal Shield, and others. This is very important to note if you decide to train this passive.

    Here is now a few examples to show how these things all interact with each other. Since we now know that warding will reduce your attunement, I will use 2 terms for attunement :

    • Base Attunement, which is the Attunement you have before any warding passive, gem or jewel comes into play
    • Real Attunement, which is the attunement you have once warding is taken into account.
    1 : You have a base attunement of 100 in the fire magic school. You have decided to increase your Fire Warding passive to 50. Your real attunement is now 50, but you also have 50 points of resistance.

    2. following step #1, you now decide to raise "Magic Warding" to 50. All your magic schools lose 50 points of attunement, so your Fire Magics Real Attunement is now at 0, but you have 100 resistance.

    3. You now want to use your Fire spells, but realise that with 0 attunement, you arent hitting much, so you decide to forget completely your warding passives, so you bring them down to 0. Your Real Attunement is now 100, but your resistance is now 0.

    4. By doing all of this, you never trained Death Magic, so your death magics "Base Attunement" is 0. You had already trained your Death warding to 50, and during step 2 you had raised Magic Warding to 50, so your Real Attunement for death magic was -100, but you had +100 Resistance.

    Now lets use these 4 steps, and reproduce them into the combat formula I mentionned earlier, using a Casters attunement of 200.

    Code:
    (1)Effective Attunement = (2)Casters (REAL) Attunement - ((3)Targets (REAL) Attunement / 2) - (4)Targets Resistance
    *I added the term real for our attunements so that it stays in line with everything else.

    So,
    1.
    Effective Attunement = 200 (Casters real attunement) - (50 / 2 (your real attunement)) - 50 (your resistance).
    Effective Attunement = 200 - 25 - 50
    Effective Attunement = 125

    So during step 1, the casters attunement dropped by 75 points, while you had 50 attunement and 50 resistance.

    2.
    Effective Attunement = 200 (casters real attunement) - (0 / 2 (your real attunement)) - 100 (your resistance)
    Effective Attunement = 200 - 0 - 100
    Effective Attunement = 100

    So during step 2, the casters attunement dropped by 100 points while you had 0 real attunement and 100 resistance.

    3.
    Effective Attunement = 200 (Casters real attunement) - (100 / 2 (your real attunement)) - 0 (your resistance)
    Effective Attunement = 200 - 50 - 0
    Effective Attunement = 150

    So during step 3, even though you had 100 attunement, the casters attunement only dropped by 50 points.

    4.
    Effective Attunement = 200 (Casters real attunement) - (-100 / 2 (your real death attunement)) - 100 (your resistance)
    Effective Attunement = 200 + 50 (two negatives become a positive ;) ) - 100
    Effective Attunement = 150

    So during step 4, even though you were at -100 attunement, the casters attunement still dropped by 50 because you had 100 points of resistance. Step 4 had the same impact as step 3.


    What this all means is that these 2 variables, Attunement and Resistance, will work together to help you defend yourself against a spell cast against you, but only Attunement is counted for the damage YOU do with your spells.

    Now many of you might wonder "But what is the best option then? What should I do that maximise my efficiency?" And the answer to this will highly depend on your playstyle. Do you cast spells? Do you have buffs you really want to get the most out of? Are you willing to train tons of different skills to get resistances? Simply consider the impact of lowering attunement so that you can take a good descision. If you use that school of magic, then maybe using warding is not that great of idea, but if you dont use the school of magic at all, why not raise warding a bit?

    If you have any more questions, feel free to post below, or private message me. You can always hit me up ingame, My IGN is the same as on the forums!

    Post #2 here will be me attempting to give a review of each warding skill, and the impacts on the important features of each tree.

    I will be formating the thread in a little bit, I wanted to get the information out first.
     
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2019
  2. Violet Ronso

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    <RESERVED>
     
  3. Mimner

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    Great guide! Thank you so much for laying all this out.

    I'd like to add some detail on just how much diminishing returns there is with attunement. The source for my information is from this spreadsheet linked from Chris' daily blog: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...wVMW1RNKB8ZeUT_Vf-QKu4aa44/edit#gid=323719449

    I believe we are currently using the negative attunement proposed for R55. The equation for attunement can be read from the spreadsheet:

    let d = 110 (this is called dilution)
    let p = 0.67 (this is called power curve)
    let e = effective attunement, as discussed in OP

    then,

    attunement multiplier = ((e + d) / d) ^ p

    Here's a plot of this curve from 0 to 300 effective attunement:

    [​IMG]

    As you can see, there is some diminishing returns to this curve. However, it remains highly linear even up to 300 effective attunement. So the diminishing returns on attunement are really quite small.

    As a matter of fact, if you plug in e = 200 into the above equation the attunement multiplier is 2.00, which would be a damage increase of 100%. So you can roughly think of attunement as every 10 points gives 5% damage bonus, and this is a very good approximation for effective attunement in the range of 0 to 200. After 200 the diminishing returns start to kick in and, although small, they are noticeable.

    Note: the attunement multiplier discussed here is applied to the attackers spell. When defending against a spell, your attunement and resistance for that school combine as discussed in the OP to lower the attacker's attunement value, forming the effective attunement used in the above plot.
     
  4. Xkhan

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    This is a great guide - thank you!!

    One question - how does an Avatar's level impact their attunement/resistance/combat?
     
  5. Violet Ronso

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    So many thanks! I knew this data existed somewhere, just couldn't find it, this was honestly the last piece of the puzzle I was trying to solve for people!

    Adventurer level will not have an impact in attunement and resistance. Fields that have been determined to be affected by AL were HP and Focus pools, and hit chance to a degree.
     
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  6. Bedawyn

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    Thank you! Simple practical question -- I have no interest at all in practicing sun magic, but the basic Light spell is too useful to give up. I've already tried not training it in the hope that would avoid raising my sun attunement, and found the spell simply expires too quickly without training. Until they make night vision not-green, what's the best way to keep the Light spell "on" for a practical length of time without ending up with my Sun attunement higher than my Moon attunement? Or is this difference one that will only really matter to my roleplaying and not to the game itself? (i.e., if I keep casting Light all night long, will the Sun attunement interfere with my Moon attunement or not really matter to anything except my sense of aesthetics?)
     
  7. Violet Ronso

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    Attunements do not interfere with one another, the warding skill will, so you can do two things : A. If for Roleplay you want your sun attunement to a minimum, raise your Sun Warding Passive in the moon tree to counteract the attunement points gained.
    B. If you don't mind the attunement points showing up in your sun tree, just raise Light to a reasonable level, it will not in ANY way affect moon spells and attunement.
     
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  8. Bedawyn

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    Thank you!
     
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  9. Cinder Sear

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    Hmm... so if I keep my attunements at OR near 0, and my resistances as high as possible, that would be best for defence against magic?

    edit: or train magic attunement to higher than 0? BTW, I'm making a character that uses no magic at all... which makes this tricky to me!
     
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2020
  10. Violet Ronso

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    Basically, the higher you train everything, the better. Fire warding at 80 is the same thing as 10 skills in fire at 80, as is Tactics Warding at 80, all 3 of those things give you the same end result : 40 points of Fire resistance. Now if you get both wardings to 80, and 10 fire skills at 80 as well, you now have 120 points of resistance in fire.

    Apply the same rules to all schools of magic and you get it going. Obviously some schools are far more important : Fire, Death, Air and water are the 4 schools I've seen mobs use, so you might want to invest on those more. Life resistance is pointless, so ignore that, haven't seen any mobs use Sun or Moon, so those arent really important, and then you hot earth, which "might" reduce damage from earth elementals?

    So yeah, Fire, Death, Air, Water +++
    Earth, Moon and sun +
    Life, I would just train attunement IF you play with others, but I wouldnt invest any points for life resistance other than tactics warding otherwise
     
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  11. Cinder Sear

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    Ok, so I tried stuff in a spreadsheet.. and as far as I can tell, a negative attunement to a magic tree also gives a negative to resistance, which also seems to make the attacker's attunement higher??? Is that right?

    I've attached the spreadsheet for reference to my formulas...

    The GREEN fields can be edited, do not modify the other fields, unless I'm wrong in my calcs! Plus.. I can probably organize the sheet a little better, but I want to make sure things are right before I bother.
    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z7nrVOIufMDV3AOqM4imKIkpy7DpsVNvRYp9j_UPcYw/edit?usp=sharing
     
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2020
  12. Violet Ronso

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    Ok so I have looked at your spreadsheet, but I am on mobile so it is a bit hard to understand. I'll try to go into detail here so you can make sure it works, and otherwise in 30 minutes from now I can hop on discord to help you.

    So let's start things off easy

    Attunement from skills : 0 (no magic trained at all)
    Tactics Warding : 50
    (This gives you 50 fire resistance, and reduces your fire attunement by 50)
    Magic school warding (let's say fire) : 50
    (This gives you 50 fire resistance and reduces your fire attunement by 50)

    This means your attunement is now -100 (0 -50 -50)
    And your resistance is at 100 ( +50 +50)

    So when you run the formula, your real resistance is your resistance + (Your attunement /2) : 100 + (-100/2) = 50

    So even though the wardings are giving you negative attunement, you are still gaining resistance at the end, because attunement is only worth half of what resistance is.

    One place that I noticed your math seems wrong is column F, where your Targets attunement is at -260, which is impossible unless ALL your skills are unlearned AND you would have 130 in both warding skills, and even then, you would still have 260 points of resistance to counteract the attunement drop. The only way to actually take more damage than you are supposed to is by wielding -artunement items like Vex wands that give -100 water attunement each or Tap Soul/Chaotoc Feedback that both drop your life resistance, but skill your skill tree only, that is impossible.
     
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  13. Nick

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    Strange I never made a book out of this.... @Violet Ronso, mind if I publish a book using the text from your post?
     
  14. Violet Ronso

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    Ohh of course go right ahead! Feel free to use this!
     
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  15. Morgathys

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    I've heard that attunement give 0.5 of resistance, is it true?
    I checked with /stats and I don't see it on paper, someone can confirm?

    (life resistance can help an undead person ;) )
     
  16. Violet Ronso

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    (1)Effective Attunement = (2)Casters Attunement - ((3)Targets Attunement / 2) - (4)Targets Resistance

    This is the damage formula for a spell cast on someone else. Note that mobs have an built in attunement for their spells (so an Aether Warlock might have 250 fire attunement let's say. This is a random number I made up btw).

    So as you can see, resistance is deducted from the casters attunement, and then your attunement is deducted from their attunement but only at half the rate.

    This "resistance" you get from attunement is hidden, and does not show up in your resistances because it is already showing up as attunement.
     
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  17. Morgathys

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    Make sense and pretty well explained.
    In big picture, that worth to skill up 10 skills of you entire tree to get this "resistance"

    and.. is it affect also PVE or maybe a different formula?
    I skilled up 100 in Magic Resistance & Fire Warding. I had 330 in fire resistance and I didn't see any significant damage reduction to worth the malus in attunment.

    EDIT: was 330 not 372. I rectified
     
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2020
  18. Violet Ronso

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    Not quite sure how you got that number, but I can garantee you that I notice the difference when I fight mobs when I have 40 attunement vs when I fight the same mob with 115 attunement, the Satyr Mages in Tartarus are much harder when I respec and forget to get 100+ attunement.

    The formula is the same in PvE, but the mobs attunements are hidden, also, if you look at mimners post, he goes into detail how your resistance actually affects the magical damage you receive, it is more of a damage multiplier that you are reducing rather than flat damage reduction.
     
  19. Morgathys

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    That was 330 not 372 but not that far if I add a resistance potion + food/3days buff

    [​IMG]

    I tested it myself and the investment in attunment + XP do not worth the final damage reduction.
    I'm also very interested on how this resistance mechanism will scale over time as the monster become more stronger over the episodes. (now zone 18 with Ep2)
     
  20. devilronin

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    all of mine -30 to -70(fire being the lowest), good thing negative attunement has no effect?
     
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