[Armando]

This is a work in progress, but I'd better start posting now because by the time I'm done, it'll be too much of a bother to write it all out in one go.

Disclaimer: The very nature of this thread requires the user to have at least some familiarity with the damage formulas. I'll take it easy on those of you that aren't game mechanic freaks like me, but if you don't even know that the damage equation consists of (DMG + fSTR) * PDIF, I suggest you mosey on over to VZX's FFXI Doc and skim over the section labelled "Normal and Physical WS Damage Calculation." No need to memorize any formulas or graphs, just get a basic understanding for it.

Preface: We all know player-side Defense is broken. There've been countless debates as to whether or not something should be done about it, and personally that's out of the scope of this thread. The point is, having absurd amounts of Defense just isn't nearly anywhere near as effective as when a mob has absurd amounts of Defense. This much is a fact, and any experienced player has witnessed these effects. A couple of explanations have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The most widely accepted one right now, and which I too found logical was that mob DMG was so high that even if we got the mob's PDIF very low, you'd still get hit for plenty. This theory fails to address why the hell you can have +86% Defense (Defense food + Cocoon) as well as Protect IV and still have Too Weak mobs hitting you every single time for more than 0, though. That implies that the PDIF ranges for when a mob attacks a player are different for the PDIF ranges for when a player attacks a mob.

Well, I had been suspecting that much for a while now. First, it was too freaking obvious that my super high PLD Defense doesn't work as awesomely as it should on easy things, but there was something else. A year or two back, while browsing Allakhazam's BST or SMN forums, I can't remember which, I read something that struck me as odd. Supposedly, when a high level pet attacks a low level mob, its PDIF was a constant 4.0, and critical hits did the same damage as normal hits. I had been wanting to check that out for a long time, but for some reason it never occurred to me that this might apply to when a high level mob attacks a low level player, too. Well, a very good friend of mine - used to go by Ashly/Ziggy (the very same Ashly that helped me with my Skillchain damage chart,) now playing his new character Zigirus - volunteered to do tests for me since I can't play during the week. Here's what we (well, he) found...


Part I: Is capped mob PDIF always 4.0?

So Zigirus heads out on my character Armando as a 1SMN/1WHM having a total of 7 VIT and 12 Defense with the intention of getting killed a couple of times by the same mob. We agreed on the Aht Urhgan Attercops right outside Bhaflau Thickets simply becuase they're high enough, really close, and not as killed as the Lesser Colibri in Wajaom's entrance. Zigirus got a friend to watch the spiders and make sure it was the same one killing him every time he went back. The outcome:
364 (Critical)
364
364
364
364 (Critical)

Right. So we have 2 critical hits, and 3 normal hits, all from the same spider, and all of them did 364. So far it looks like what I had read holds true. But, 364 is also divisible by 2, so, just in case, let's get some more numbers from random mobs. I can assure you, Zigirus enjoyed all this.
Lesser Colibri: 348
Wajaom Tiger: 380
Ameretat: 368
Treant Sapling: 384
Qiqirn Enterpriser: 364
Puktrap: 392
Fomor Bard: 344
Fomor's Bats: 336
Olden Treant: 404 (File not found?)

"Ok, ok, you proved your point. But what does this mean to us?" For starters, this is definitive proof that mob PDIF has different ranges than ours. The other thing, though, is that since we know the PDIF is 4.0, and Damage = (DMG + fSTR) * PDIF, if you divide the damage the mob did to me by 4, then you can know its (DMG + fSTR.) If we had a way of knowing the mob's fSTR, we could know its DMG.


Part II: fSTR = ???

Before we go on, a brief introduction to fSTR is needed. fSTR is basically a bonus to your weapon DMG based on the difference between your STR and the mob's VIT, and your weapon's "Rank." (A weapon's Rank is calculated as its DMG/9, and serves no purpose other than to determine fSTR.) In general, it takes about 4-5, sometimes 6 STR for fSTR to go up by 1. However, higher Rank weapons reach the same fSTR point "sooner." For example, when you have 10 more STR than the mob has VIT (an easy feat, as most mobs are WARs), and you're using a Rank 4 weapon (i.e. DMG 36 to 44), you have an fSTR of 4. A Rank 3 weapon would need 11 STR, and a Rank 2 weapon would need 12. Also, the higher the weapon Rank, the higher your fSTR cap (fSTR caps at 8 + Rank.) Now that that's out of the way...

We have a way to find the mob's (DMG + fSTR), but without knowing one of them, finding the other would be quite hard. We don't even know how mob fSTR works to begin with! The first thing to come to mind is that maybe mob fSTR works like ours, where their Rank = DMG/9 and fSTR caps at 8 + Rank. However, after doing some research on how fSTR works for H2H, I found that a weapon's "Rank" is a property of the weapon itself. No weapon = Rank 0, always. For example, when a MNK attacks barehanded, the game assigns the MNK's hands Rank = 0, regardless of how much DMG the MNK gets from his H2H skill. Pre-ToAU mobs don't even have weapons as far as I know. But then I remembered something.

When I was doing my PLD/BLU testing, I'd use the Blue Magic damage formula to solve backwards for fSTR. However, to my surprise, I had fSTR values that were way too high. After fiddling around a bit more, I found that the fSTR values used on Blue Magic were totally independent from whatever weapon I was holding or the DMG of the spell being used, and most importantly, it was completely uncapped. What if the fSTR values used in Blue Magic are the same fSTR values mobs use? Then, mob fSTR should be totally uncapped as well. Once again, Zigirus came to the rescue and performed a short test for me.
VIT = 8 | Damage taken: 380
VIT = 2 | Damage taken: 384

Both screenshots were against the same tiger. After a 6 VIT decrease, the damage increased by 4 (remember, PDIF is capped at 4,) which means fSTR went up by 1. However, these are Lv.67 to 69 mobs. For a player, it only takes 30-40 STR more than the mob has VIT to cap out your fSTR. This is achievable fairly comfortably at Lv.30 if you have a bit of STR+ gear. Using Studio Gobli's formulas for mob stats (many thanks to VZX for posting that in Allakhazam, by the way) we know that those tigers had at least 80 STR, most likely closer to 90. If mob fSTR could cap, those tigers should've hit the cap a long time ago. That said, there's a good chance that the fSTR values mob use are the same as the ones PCs use when casting Blue Magic.

Coming soon: Well, now I gotta find all the fSTR values for Blue Magic, turn them into a table, and see if mob fSTR matches that. If I can do that, then we can know how much DMG a certain mob has, and find out how much VIT it takes to hit the fSTR floor (in other words, how much VIT it takes to cap it out on a certain mob.) After I work that out, I'm going to try to see if I can sorta figure out mob PDIF ranges at different Attack/Defense values and find the point at which Defense starts to have little effect on the mob's damage output.

[Armando]

(Reserved for future update.)

[Armando]

(Reserved for future update.)

[Armando]

(Reserved for future update.)

Ok, you guys can post now ;3

[Sebastien]

So, pratically speaking, what would be the implications of this discovery that fSTR for mobs is uncapped? Bravo, btw, for testing conventional wisdom empirically like this. =)

[Armando]

The implications are that there's a very strong possibility that mob fSTR works the same as Blue Magic fSTR, and if I can prove that, then it would make my life a hell of a lot easier since capping my own PDIF for tests is far easier than capping the mob's (since I'll probably end up dead or need high level help.)

By the way sorry I haven't updated in a while, my tests have come to a screeching halt due to summer classes. Oh, but with the help from the people at BlueGartr and Allakhazam we did find out that there's a level correction in place both when the mob is higher level than the player than it's attacking, and when it's lower in level. It complicates testing a little bit, but it does explain why HNMs naturally hit so hard.

[Sebastien]

You know, a very common problem in most mmorpgs is the so-called dex-monkey.. but basically in many games there are ways to push the to-hit / evade mechanics harder than the Devs intended, the result being that a lot of content becomes trivialized.

When I first looked at the layout of Square's math for this game, it seemed to me they had this problem particularly in mind, and took clear steps to prevent it from happening in their game. For that reason, what you say about different PDIF ranges and now these adjusting factors does not surprise me at all.

[WishMaster3K]

Armando's posts always hurt my head, but since I've been trying(since lvl 40) to break out of the Turtle PLD mentality, reading this post and finding out the maximum NECESSARY VIT to have will help me a lot.

I find it odd that pieces of gear like the Rook Set (which is what I call Koeing) have copious amounts of VIT, but using the entire set is largely useless, and the fact that a PLD can easily achieve 800+ DEF during Endgame, but still get's hit like a train.

If PLDs were able to find out that minimum required VIT based on a mob, other gear slots could be alloted for other pieces of useful gear.

Thanks Armando!

[Armando]

No problem. Even though real life has gotten in the way and I haven't been able to update this thread in forever >_> Don't think I've forgotten though! It's definetely coming. Some day.

[Karinya]

The results for Too Weak mobs suggest to me that there's a floor on monster pDIF which is significantly different from 0. That may not have much bearing on the HNM situation though - for all we know, HNMs could routinely have extremely high Attack. 600? 800? 1000?

There *is* a difference between how hard they hit a tank, and how hard they hit a BLM or MNK or some other random person who pulled hate, even when a shield block or Sentinel isn't involved, so it seems likely that they aren't capping their pDIF, whatever the cap is. (At least not on a 500 DEF tank.) But there's no guarantee that tanks ordinarily even manage to reduce it to the floor, let alone what that floor is.

Further complicating the matter is that for *practical* HNM tanking, normal hit damage isn't really that big a factor (unless all your healers are OOM, dead or disabled) - it's the TP moves that kill you. Many of which aren't even physical in the first place, but even when they are, TP moves have more complicated formulae.

Defense works fine - on attacks that it works on at all. But very many of the most dangerous HNM attacks aren't affected by Defense whether you have 600, 800 or 999. Most HNM tanking really calls for major amounts of magic defense bonus or magic damage -% - which unfortunately doesn't exist, aside from Aegis and Defending Ring.