How do you calculate Dispatched's effect on dps, and effect of other debuffs?

Kael Grace · 03-25-2008, 08:57 AM

I do not understand how Dispatched or other debuffs operate mathematically. Here's my quandry:

1. Does dispatched actually lower the mitigation of the mob? It seems like it should. Does that mean that (a)our dps parse actually goes up when dispatched is deployed (it seems to go up quite a bit in actual combat, but no so much when tested on the stone wall in KJ); or alternatively (b) that the mob actually realizes more of the damage on the parse but that the parse numbers do not change. I think the former is correct.

2. I'm pretty sure that the red damage numbers I see when a mob hits me are net of my mitigation reduction. In other words, the damage numbers are post mitigation. If I'm correct about that, and correct above, then my mitigation works quite differently then the mob's "mitigation."

3. If I'm right that dispatched and other debuffs really just add to players' dps rather than reduce the mob's mitigation, how do you calculate the amount of dps you gain from dispatched and other buffs?

Thanks very much. Always been curious about this.

Jehannum · 03-25-2008, 05:54 PM

What happens when you swing a sword, or spell, or whatever, at a mob for damage, is that first you roll to hit - but we're assuming that's happened already. So next, you roll your damage, and a percentage of that - based on the mob's mitigation and your level* - is effectively removed, as it's mitigated by your armor or buffs.

So when you decrease the mob's mitigation, you reduce the extent to which it reduces your hits. Dispatch is one of the nicer ones because it's a no-brainer; it boost all damage the mob sustains by the same amount, because it drops all mitigations. If you manage to drop a mob's mitigation for a specific type of damage all the way to 0 and beyond, you actually get a bonus to damage based on the extent of its negative mitigation, so the more debuffs you can stack on a mob, especially burning in a raid, the better.

Your parse output will increase, because the mitigation is calculated into the damage dealt (and displayed by the log). It becomes cumbersome to calculate the total effect because you really need the average dps figures for everyone in the raid, but generally it should be a percentage of 'normal' damage, derived from the amount of mitigation divided by your level (80?) and the factor the game uses (which as I say I can't quite recall). Where it gets tricky, of course, is that 'normal' is the damage you'd do if you weren't mitigated at all, and not the damage you deal normally. And it has to be calculated for every member of the raid. So usually I just estimate the effect because it's much, much easier. SMILEY

*I don't recall the precise formula, but if you divide your mitigation by your level you can compare it to the "percent mitigated" popup. I seem to to think it's 20 (8k@lvl80=50%) but I'm not sure.

Needagroup · 03-25-2008, 06:41 PM

This is quite interesting. I must be missing something however, because I don't think I've ever seen a "percent mitigated pop-up" while raiding. Maybe I need a custom UI, or maybe just the latest ACT download. i don't know. But this would indeed be a critical thing to know in the midst of a fight, to properly time a few debuffs.

But my more important question is this for the poster immediately above: when you do estimate the effect of say the 2 principal brig buffs on physical damage (approx 4300 for dispatched and 2500 for enfeeble), what type of bonus to damage to you normally get? 5%, 25%? Seems like it would be more like the 5% number, and it would apply for whatever time 17 dispatched is up -- 17-24 secs per level 80 brig if coordinated well.

Thanks. This is actually quite interesting.

Jehannum · 03-25-2008, 07:30 PM

I have a lot more involved in the typical estimate, but here's my general philosophy:

First, place the target mob in one of 3 categories - low resist, medium resist, or high resist. I assume thresholds of 25%, 50% and 75% just to keep it simple mostly, though sometimes I go a bit further (some mobs you can gauge their mitigation based on the damage changes, but that takes a LOT of parses to be worthwhile). We also have the extreme cases - zero, and complete.

For a completely immune mob, there's not much you can do except check your pockets for loose change.

For a zero mob, you'll get the minimum 'percentage boost' benefit. For dispatch I seem to recall it's about a 1700 point debuff or thereabouts (adjust numbers accordingly if I'm misremembering) so let's estimate it at 1600 because that makes things easier.

So 75% is 12k mitigation, and allows 25% of the initial hit through. Dispatch hits, and while it's active the now-10.4k mitigation is allowing 35% through - which is 10% of the non-mitigated damage as extra, but amounts to 40% extra dps

50% is 8k and allows 50% through, after dispatch is 60% for the same numerical increase in damage, but only a 20% boost to actual dps.

25% is 4k and allows 75%, and while the same 10% extra gets applied, relative to that 75 it's only a 13% increase in actual dps values

And given the shortcuts and assumptions made here for simplicity, an unresistant mob hit by dispatch will net a 10% boost to actual dps values.

So in short, the way to work it out is thus:

1. Know thine enemy. Specifically, have some notion of how much damage he's mitigating to begin with.

2. Don't be afraid of the maths. SMILEY

3. Check with other references to make sure I'm remembering these numbers fairly accurately and not just pulling them out of a dark, fragrant place. SMILEY

I'd recommend using your nominal dps and CA/spell damage numbers as a base, but I've never been entirely sure those could be trusted anyhow. SMILEY

Edit - sorry, missed that comment about percent mitigated... Go to your persona and mouse over your mitigation (either spell or melee, doesn't matter) and it'll tell you what % is mitigated vs an opponent your level

Needagroup · 03-26-2008, 05:30 PM

Thanks very much. Very helpful. So the higher the mob, the higher the potential DPS bonus by virtue of debuffs. Of course, many of your attacks may miss or be resisted, but at least dispatched etc give you a chance to do higher damage on those that hit.

Jehannum · 03-26-2008, 07:14 PM

Well, sort of - it's a higher percentage boost as the mobs' resists scale up, anyhow. Basically, if we look at a bloc of 100 dps it's a bit easier; again going with the approximations above, our 1600-point debuff on a 16000-point scale amounts to a 10% (of unmitigated damage) boost.

So if it mitigates 75%, you're gaining 10 dps but your base was only 35, so it's a large proportion of your actual damage. If it mitigates 50% you're still gaining the exact same 10 dps, but in relation to actual damage (50 dps) it appears less impressive - and so forth as its mitigation reduces toward 0.

When I make an estimate on a debuff's effectiveness, I usually offer a range - in this case I'd say our assumed - not real values for dispatch would indicate about a 10-20% average increase to dps, raidwide, but for some mobs - where our actual is a small fraction of our potential - it's greater, and for some it's less. Generally, it's not worth breaking down into individual damage types, unless your raid/group composition is skewed to particular types of damage - in which case those debuffs targeting that damage type are significantly more worthwhile. The bottom line though is that any overall boost of 5% or greater outweighs virtually any personal dps contribution and should be leveraged - which is also part of why I tend not to bother digging too deeply.

Edit - *&%&%$ typos.

JAFO74 · 03-28-2008, 06:15 AM

Mobs don't have mitigation, they have hitpoints. Have you ever seen a spell or a CA or an Autoattack hit below the minimum listed on the spell, or the /weaponstats of the weapon? I am guessing no. All mobs have 0 mitigation which is why all your stuff hits somewhere between the values listed on your hotbars or above based on debuffs.

If they want the mob to be 50% harder to kill, they don't give it 50% mitigation, they give it 50% more hitpoints. It makes the calculations easier. So in essence when you are debuffing the mobs you are taking their mitigation negative. Their spell resists work different than ours, it is more of an avoidance check than a mitigation check. I.E a mob highly resistant to a certain damage type will either fully resist it or it will fully land. My poisons always land for listed damage or above. If mobs had poison resist this would not be the case. My autoattacks and CA's work the same.

The only real way I can think of quantifying the effect of these buffs is look back through your logs, find when the debuffs land and compare damage done there to damage done when the debuff expires. Combine this data over the course of a zone and you should be able to get a rough estimate on how much dps dispatched/enfeeble adds. Though unless you are coordinating this other stacked mitigation debuffs are going to get in the way of an accurate estimate.

If mitigation works negative the same way it does positive, than -12k mit would give 75% more damage, -5k mit would give 55% or so more damage and based on my experiences, this seems pretty close. My snipers shot can crit for 25k on a debuffed raid mob with coverage(adds 20%) damage. Top end listed damage for that is about 11k, so 11k +20% is 13.3k+30%(crit) 17k, that leaves 8k added from debuffs, thats about 50% more. Seems plausible.

Iago

McBenzos · 03-29-2008, 02:54 AM

You are all idiots and should really ask this kind of stuff on eq2flames if you really want *factual* answers. But since I'm trolling, why not!First off Mobs indeed DO, yes wow! Do have mitigation, go play a coercer dipshit. If mobs didn't have any mitigation debuffs for mitigation would be null in effect, so why don't you stop spreading false information kthx.Jehannum is just making up [Removed for Content] math that has nothing to do with things work. No you do not get any bonus from having a mobs mitigation debuffed to 0 what the [Removed for Content]. As the mobs mitigation is debuffed further and further the appropriate skills and spell attacks act accordingly. If you aren't casting your debuffs, as any class, on a raid then you should stop raiding.Now for Kael, you asked about red numbers when they hit you.. yeah so.. that's the dmg they did after your mitigation took out the rest. The MOB can't realize more dmg on the parse [Removed for Content] are you smoking dude, if you're doing the dmg it says on the parse that's the damage you did, it's not some illusion. I haven't tested parses on the wall but my guess is, from what I have read from others using it to test DPS, that the wall has no mitigation and no avoidance so you can see optimal settings, but I may be wrong. However you should not base your dps on a training wall that doesn't fight back or do anything at all compared to actualy mobs. And no you are wrong debuffs really just debuff the mobs mitigation making it easier for spells and combat arts to land and hit for more damage.The answer to your question of how do you calculate it? You become a really geeky nerd with so much time on your hands that you actually sit through hours of logs of parses and calculate the average dmg of your spells without dispatch to the average with dispatch, but oh wait then you have to make sure oyu don't count crits because they're random. And oh wait there's a bunch of other [Removed for Content] you can't account for. Stop trying to put so much math into masking the fact you suck.

JAFO74 · 03-29-2008, 05:39 AM

Charming@Mistmoore wrote:

You are all idiots and should really ask this kind of stuff on eq2flames if you really want *factual* answers. But since I'm trolling, why not!First off Mobs indeed DO, yes wow! Do have mitigation, go play a coercer [I cannot control my vocabulary]. If mobs didn't have any mitigation debuffs for mitigation would be null in effect, so why don't you stop spreading false information kthx.Jehannum is just making up [I cannot control my vocabulary] math that has nothing to do with things work. No you do not get any bonus from having a mobs mitigation debuffed to 0 what the [I cannot control my vocabulary]. As the mobs mitigation is debuffed further and further the appropriate skills and spell attacks act accordingly. If you aren't casting your debuffs, as any class, on a raid then you should stop raiding.Now for Kael, you asked about red numbers when they hit you.. yeah so.. that's the dmg they did after your mitigation took out the rest. The MOB can't realize more dmg on the parse [I cannot control my vocabulary] are you smoking dude, if you're doing the dmg it says on the parse that's the damage you did, it's not some illusion. I haven't tested parses on the wall but my guess is, from what I have read from others using it to test DPS, that the wall has no mitigation and no avoidance so you can see optimal settings, but I may be wrong. However you should not base your dps on a training wall that doesn't fight back or do anything at all compared to actualy mobs. And no you are wrong debuffs really just debuff the mobs mitigation making it easier for spells and combat arts to land and hit for more damage.The answer to your question of how do you calculate it? You become a really geeky nerd with so much time on your hands that you actually sit through hours of logs of parses and calculate the average dmg of your spells without dispatch to the average with dispatch, but oh wait then you have to make sure oyu don't count crits because they're random. And oh wait there's a bunch of other [I cannot control my vocabulary] you can't account for. Stop trying to put so much math into masking the fact you suck.

Woah there tough guy, who is the big bad talker here? Your points don't make sense. The info i posted is based on direct observation. Mitigation implies that a mob is going to mitigate a certain percentage of the damage you roll on it. If i have a ca that does 50-100 damage, and it lands, it ALWAYS ALWAYS hits for >50 damage.... did i mention ALWAYS?. I look at parses i check my damage and those numbers are between the min/max of my listed damag in all cases. If a mob mitigated my damage then i would definitely see times when this is not the case, which I don't.

Poisons are the easiest thing to see this on. A poison hits for X damage, there is no range listed. Guess what it always hit for > or = X damage base on debuffs. This is a pretty clear indication to me that mobs do NOT mitigate. If you debuff mitigation you take it negative thus adding damage do your CA's after the roll is made. So if that 50-100 roll lands a 75, then that 75 is applied to the mob + the debuffed percentage, say 50%. Thus adding 37 damage for a hit that lands for 112. This number is the number that IS displayed above the mobs head and in the logs. The only way to account for your damage doing > than the amout listed either in weaponstats, or ca/spells is that the mob is taking extra damage due to mitigation going negative.

If I am wrong fine, but observation bears out this conclusion, run a parse look at your scouts poison damage. It will always be = or above the damage listed on their poison. You will never see an Experts caustic hit for 400 because the mob had high poison resist, it will either land for the full 900+ or be resisted. It is a pretty clear conclusion to make.

Now go back to flames and Ragepost about devs giving raid spoilers.

Iago

zorax15 · 03-29-2008, 05:49 AM

Charming@Mistmoore wrote:

You are all idiots and should really ask this kind of stuff on eq2flames if you really want *factual* answers. But since I'm trolling, why not!First off Mobs indeed DO, yes wow! Do have mitigation, go play a coercer [I cannot control my vocabulary]. If mobs didn't have any mitigation debuffs for mitigation would be null in effect, so why don't you stop spreading false information kthx.Jehannum is just making up [I cannot control my vocabulary] math that has nothing to do with things work. No you do not get any bonus from having a mobs mitigation debuffed to 0 what the [I cannot control my vocabulary]. As the mobs mitigation is debuffed further and further the appropriate skills and spell attacks act accordingly. If you aren't casting your debuffs, as any class, on a raid then you should stop raiding.Now for Kael, you asked about red numbers when they hit you.. yeah so.. that's the dmg they did after your mitigation took out the rest. The MOB can't realize more dmg on the parse [I cannot control my vocabulary] are you smoking dude, if you're doing the dmg it says on the parse that's the damage you did, it's not some illusion. I haven't tested parses on the wall but my guess is, from what I have read from others using it to test DPS, that the wall has no mitigation and no avoidance so you can see optimal settings, but I may be wrong. However you should not base your dps on a training wall that doesn't fight back or do anything at all compared to actualy mobs. And no you are wrong debuffs really just debuff the mobs mitigation making it easier for spells and combat arts to land and hit for more damage.The answer to your question of how do you calculate it? You become a really geeky nerd with so much time on your hands that you actually sit through hours of logs of parses and calculate the average dmg of your spells without dispatch to the average with dispatch, but oh wait then you have to make sure oyu don't count crits because they're random. And oh wait there's a bunch of other [I cannot control my vocabulary] you can't account for. Stop trying to put so much math into masking the fact you suck.

No offense but you are a nobody in a nobody guild nobody here is interested in and would get flamed to hell for such a lame BS on flames, sweety. You act like a 10 year old who knows some bad boys and because you think it's so cool to trash talk you come here and practice in "safe" area.EPIC FAIL, son!Get some balls and post [Removed for Content] like this on flames. But better get your facts straight before. But when people ask here questions about game mechanics in a polite way respond to them politely as well as everybody else does. You are an attention [Removed for Content]. Plz never post anywhere againEDIT: anywhere includes flames as well. thx

zorax15 · 03-29-2008, 06:14 AM

JAFO74 wrote:

Now go back to flames and Ragepost about devs giving raid spoilers.

Mobs in commonlands and antonica were not affected by dev spoilers. So no reason for him to post about this subject

Daghammerskold · 03-29-2008, 11:35 AM

Charming@Mistmoore wrote:

You are all idiots and should really ask this kind of stuff on eq2flames if you really want *factual* answers. But since I'm trolling, why not!First off Mobs indeed DO, yes wow! Do have mitigation, go play a coercer [I cannot control my vocabulary]. If mobs didn't have any mitigation debuffs for mitigation would be null in effect, so why don't you stop spreading false information kthx.

Compare that to what Blackguard said in the LU 13 update notes - NPCs no longer mitigate the damage done by spells and combat arts. When a damage spell or art lands on an opponent, its damage should fall within the range shown in its examine information.In eq2flames world *factual* apparently means uninformed but expressed with attitude.

Regholdain · 03-31-2008, 02:34 PM

Within this thread is a very interesting bit of information.

Let me get this straight: when you throw a debuff on a mob and it lowers mitigation vs a certain type of damage, all that means is that those types of attacks will now do more damage, as the mobs do not actually mitigate damage? In effect, this makes your CAs and spells do more damage than they normally would because the numbers are translated into a bonus on your damage range?

Do all of a mob's resists work like this? (physical, mental, poison, disease, etc.) Or are resist rates a more simplified concept for the NPCs?

JAFO74 · 04-02-2008, 02:16 PM

Regholdain wrote:

Within this thread is a very interesting bit of information.
Let me get this straight: when you throw a debuff on a mob and it lowers mitigation vs a certain type of damage, all that means is that those types of attacks will now do more damage, as the mobs do not actually mitigate damage? In effect, this makes your CAs and spells do more damage than they normally would because the numbers are translated into a bonus on your damage range?
Do all of a mob's resists work like this? (physical, mental, poison, disease, etc.) Or are resist rates a more simplified concept for the NPCs?

The answer to your questin is yes, any type of mitigation that is debuffed, be it physical or magical will cause damage of that type to hit harder. Have the potential to do more damage than is listed on your spell/ca/weaponstats. For magical mitigations(resists) it also lowers the resist rate. Physical mitigation debuffs have no effect on a mobs ability to avoid attacks, there are seperate debuffs for that, but they do allow melee damage to hit harder when it does land.

Iago

verydanger · 04-11-2008, 01:43 AM

Jehannum wrote:

I have a lot more involved in the typical estimate, but here's my general philosophy:
First, place the target mob in one of 3 categories - low resist, medium resist, or high resist. I assume thresholds of 25%, 50% and 75% just to keep it simple mostly, though sometimes I go a bit further (some mobs you can gauge their mitigation based on the damage changes, but that takes a LOT of parses to be worthwhile). We also have the extreme cases - zero, and complete.
For a completely immune mob, there's not much you can do except check your pockets for loose change.
For a zero mob, you'll get the minimum 'percentage boost' benefit. For dispatch I seem to recall it's about a 1700 point debuff or thereabouts (adjust numbers accordingly if I'm misremembering) so let's estimate it at 1600 because that makes things easier.
So 75% is 12k mitigation, and allows 25% of the initial hit through. Dispatch hits, and while it's active the now-10.4k mitigation is allowing 35% through - which is 10% of the non-mitigated damage as extra, but amounts to 40% extra dps
50% is 8k and allows 50% through, after dispatch is 60% for the same numerical increase in damage, but only a 20% boost to actual dps.
25% is 4k and allows 75%, and while the same 10% extra gets applied, relative to that 75 it's only a 13% increase in actual dps values
And given the shortcuts and assumptions made here for simplicity, an unresistant mob hit by dispatch will net a 10% boost to actual dps values.
So in short, the way to work it out is thus:
1. Know thine enemy. Specifically, have some notion of how much damage he's mitigating to begin with.
2. Don't be afraid of the maths. " />
3. Check with other references to make sure I'm remembering these numbers fairly accurately and not just pulling them out of a dark, fragrant place. " />
I'd recommend using your nominal dps and CA/spell damage numbers as a base, but I've never been entirely sure those could be trusted anyhow. " />
Edit - sorry, missed that comment about percent mitigated... Go to your persona and mouse over your mitigation (either spell or melee, doesn't matter) and it'll tell you what % is mitigated vs an opponent your level

This must be the single most disinformative post I have ever read on any board related to EQ2.I would guess that you either are trying to apply game mechanics from another game to EQ2, or you have actual inside knowledge about EQ2 mechanics but did a VERY poor job of explaining them. For anyone intrested in a "101" about mitigation debuffs, I have to advise COMPLETELY disregarding the post I just quoted. I can not make sense of it in any way.Here is my effort at explaining the same thing:As already has been established, mobs do not have mitigation - they can however be debuffed to what must be assumed is negative mitigation, that makes incoming attacks hit for larger amounts.So, if a mob isnt under the effect of any mitigation debuff, all your attacks will hit for the exact number that is listed on the art/spell/weapon itself. 500 cold damage in your spellbook becomes 500 cold damage on the mob (and on the parse).As mitigation debuffs get applied to the mob, the damage done to the mob begins to scale up. The maximum extra damage that can gained this way is 50%. If your 500 damage nuke hits the mob for 750, then it was fully debuffed - further mitigation debuffs would have had no effect.So, how much do you need to debuff a mob to reach the "50% cap"? This I do not know, and I have never read anyone even try to make an educated guess.What I do know is that this number increases with moblevel. A small debuff might be enough to make you hit 50% harder on a lvl 30 mob, but the same debuff might not accomplish that on a lvl 50 mob. Maybe it also increases with mob "tier", solo -> heroic -> epic. Maybe each mob has its own individual number.With that in mind, determining how much benefit a debuff like Dispatch gives is pretty much impossible. The answer is of course between 0 and 50%. The answer will of course be smaller (or non-existant) the more mitigation debuffs already were applied to the mob. My guess would be that Dispatch in a raiding situation will vary between 0 and around 10% more damage for the whole raid... but that could be way off of course.

Jehannum · 04-15-2008, 03:38 PM

verydanger wrote:

This must be the single most disinformative post I have ever read on any board related to EQ2.
Cool, guess I win then. Odd, considering some of the posts to and with which I've seen you respond, but let that pass.I would guess that you either are trying to apply game mechanics from another game to EQ2, or you have actual inside knowledge about EQ2 mechanics but did a VERY poor job of explaining them. For anyone intrested in a "101" about mitigation debuffs, I have to advise COMPLETELY disregarding the post I just quoted. I can not make sense of it in any way.
This is your problem as opposed to mine; the post I made was deliberately general because a) it'd been two years since I bothered looking into mitigation, and b) I didn't remember most of the precise numbers. I figured anyone truly interested could do the math.Here is my effort at explaining the same thing:As already has been established, mobs do not have mitigation - they can however be debuffed to what must be assumed is negative mitigation, that makes incoming attacks hit for larger amounts.So, if a mob isnt under the effect of any mitigation debuff, all your attacks will hit for the exact number that is listed on the art/spell/weapon itself. 500 cold damage in your spellbook becomes 500 cold damage on the mob (and on the parse).
This is one of the things I'd forgotten; for a while mobs did have mitigation and it did indeed apply (when positive) - I can't remember when it got removed but as soon as I'd seen the post afterward I was reminded that it'd happened.
As mitigation debuffs get applied to the mob, the damage done to the mob begins to scale up. The maximum extra damage that can gained this way is 50%. If your 500 damage nuke hits the mob for 750, then it was fully debuffed - further mitigation debuffs would have had no effect.
Are you positive of this? Not that I doubt it as such, but I specifically remember back in the day people used to load big debuffs on low-level mobs to crank up their big-hit numbers. If it's been limited to 50% since, that makes sense in terms of preventing that kind of cheese, but it must have happened while I was on hiatus.So, how much do you need to debuff a mob to reach the "50% cap"? This I do not know, and I have never read anyone even try to make an educated guess.What I do know is that this number increases with moblevel. A small debuff might be enough to make you hit 50% harder on a lvl 30 mob, but the same debuff might not accomplish that on a lvl 50 mob. Maybe it also increases with mob "tier", solo -> heroic -> epic. Maybe each mob has its own individual number.With that in mind, determining how much benefit a debuff like Dispatch gives is pretty much impossible. The answer is of course between 0 and 50%. The answer will of course be smaller (or non-existant) the more mitigation debuffs already were applied to the mob. My guess would be that Dispatch in a raiding situation will vary between 0 and around 10% more damage for the whole raid... but that could be way off of course.

Assuming that the devs haven't changed the way mitigation works in the background (which, admittedly, is always possible) it takes 6000 licks to get to the sweet, gooey center of a level 80 mob.

Having done the math I mentioned before, the numbers are as follows:

Level*1.5 = the mitigation required to reduce damage by 1%, for any given level character.

Level*1.5 = the mitigation debuff required to realise a 1% increase in damage against a given level opponent. NOTE - I haven't checked how well it holds up with respect to heroics* but this is the formula they used to use for mobs, and they still use it for us. So it stands to reason that this is still the way they calculate things for mobs too.

Just to make it even easier for those who hate math...

Against a level 80 mob, any 1200 point debuff will result in a 10% increase for that damage type.

Against a level 1 mob, any 150-point debuff used to result in a 100% increase for that damage type, hence the exploit (from high level toons with 1200+ point debuffs) and - from what you said - the apparent nerf to a 50% cap.

*Heroics have, in the past, seemed to mitigate as if they were 2 or more levels higher than their con, but I'm not certain enough of the mechanics to comment.

03-25-2008, 05:54 PM	#2
Jehannum Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 651	What happens when you swing a sword, or spell, or whatever, at a mob for damage, is that first you roll to hit - but we're assuming that's happened already. So next, you roll your damage, and a percentage of that - based on the mob's mitigation and your level* - is effectively removed, as it's mitigated by your armor or buffs. So when you decrease the mob's mitigation, you reduce the extent to which it reduces your hits. Dispatch is one of the nicer ones because it's a no-brainer; it boost all damage the mob sustains by the same amount, because it drops all mitigations. If you manage to drop a mob's mitigation for a specific type of damage all the way to 0 and beyond, you actually get a bonus to damage based on the extent of its negative mitigation, so the more debuffs you can stack on a mob, especially burning in a raid, the better. Your parse output will increase, because the mitigation is calculated into the damage dealt (and displayed by the log). It becomes cumbersome to calculate the total effect because you really need the average dps figures for everyone in the raid, but generally it should be a percentage of 'normal' damage, derived from the amount of mitigation divided by your level (80?) and the factor the game uses (which as I say I can't quite recall). Where it gets tricky, of course, is that 'normal' is the damage you'd do if you weren't mitigated at all, and not the damage you deal normally. And it has to be calculated for every member of the raid. So usually I just estimate the effect because it's much, much easier. *I don't recall the precise formula, but if you divide your mitigation by your level you can compare it to the "percent mitigated" popup. I seem to to think it's 20 (8k@lvl80=50%) but I'm not sure.

03-25-2008, 07:30 PM	#4
Jehannum Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 651	I have a lot more involved in the typical estimate, but here's my general philosophy: First, place the target mob in one of 3 categories - low resist, medium resist, or high resist. I assume thresholds of 25%, 50% and 75% just to keep it simple mostly, though sometimes I go a bit further (some mobs you can gauge their mitigation based on the damage changes, but that takes a LOT of parses to be worthwhile). We also have the extreme cases - zero, and complete. For a completely immune mob, there's not much you can do except check your pockets for loose change. For a zero mob, you'll get the minimum 'percentage boost' benefit. For dispatch I seem to recall it's about a 1700 point debuff or thereabouts (adjust numbers accordingly if I'm misremembering) so let's estimate it at 1600 because that makes things easier. So 75% is 12k mitigation, and allows 25% of the initial hit through. Dispatch hits, and while it's active the now-10.4k mitigation is allowing 35% through - which is 10% of the non-mitigated damage as extra, but amounts to 40% extra dps 50% is 8k and allows 50% through, after dispatch is 60% for the same numerical increase in damage, but only a 20% boost to actual dps. 25% is 4k and allows 75%, and while the same 10% extra gets applied, relative to that 75 it's only a 13% increase in actual dps values And given the shortcuts and assumptions made here for simplicity, an unresistant mob hit by dispatch will net a 10% boost to actual dps values. So in short, the way to work it out is thus: 1. Know thine enemy. Specifically, have some notion of how much damage he's mitigating to begin with. 2. Don't be afraid of the maths. 3. Check with other references to make sure I'm remembering these numbers fairly accurately and not just pulling them out of a dark, fragrant place. I'd recommend using your nominal dps and CA/spell damage numbers as a base, but I've never been entirely sure those could be trusted anyhow. Edit - sorry, missed that comment about percent mitigated... Go to your persona and mouse over your mitigation (either spell or melee, doesn't matter) and it'll tell you what % is mitigated vs an opponent your level

03-29-2008, 05:39 AM	#9
JAFO74 Loremaster Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 79	Charming@Mistmoore wrote: You are all idiots and should really ask this kind of stuff on eq2flames if you really want factual answers. But since I'm trolling, why not!First off Mobs indeed DO, yes wow! Do have mitigation, go play a coercer [I cannot control my vocabulary]. If mobs didn't have any mitigation debuffs for mitigation would be null in effect, so why don't you stop spreading false information kthx.Jehannum is just making up [I cannot control my vocabulary] math that has nothing to do with things work. No you do not get any bonus from having a mobs mitigation debuffed to 0 what the [I cannot control my vocabulary]. As the mobs mitigation is debuffed further and further the appropriate skills and spell attacks act accordingly. If you aren't casting your debuffs, as any class, on a raid then you should stop raiding.Now for Kael, you asked about red numbers when they hit you.. yeah so.. that's the dmg they did after your mitigation took out the rest. The MOB can't realize more dmg on the parse [I cannot control my vocabulary] are you smoking dude, if you're doing the dmg it says on the parse that's the damage you did, it's not some illusion. I haven't tested parses on the wall but my guess is, from what I have read from others using it to test DPS, that the wall has no mitigation and no avoidance so you can see optimal settings, but I may be wrong. However you should not base your dps on a training wall that doesn't fight back or do anything at all compared to actualy mobs. And no you are wrong debuffs really just debuff the mobs mitigation making it easier for spells and combat arts to land and hit for more damage.The answer to your question of how do you calculate it? You become a really geeky nerd with so much time on your hands that you actually sit through hours of logs of parses and calculate the average dmg of your spells without dispatch to the average with dispatch, but oh wait then you have to make sure oyu don't count crits because they're random. And oh wait there's a bunch of other [I cannot control my vocabulary] you can't account for. Stop trying to put so much math into masking the fact you suck. Woah there tough guy, who is the big bad talker here? Your points don't make sense. The info i posted is based on direct observation. Mitigation implies that a mob is going to mitigate a certain percentage of the damage you roll on it. If i have a ca that does 50-100 damage, and it lands, it ALWAYS ALWAYS hits for >50 damage.... did i mention ALWAYS?. I look at parses i check my damage and those numbers are between the min/max of my listed damag in all cases. If a mob mitigated my damage then i would definitely see times when this is not the case, which I don't. Poisons are the easiest thing to see this on. A poison hits for X damage, there is no range listed. Guess what it always hit for > or = X damage base on debuffs. This is a pretty clear indication to me that mobs do NOT mitigate. If you debuff mitigation you take it negative thus adding damage do your CA's after the roll is made. So if that 50-100 roll lands a 75, then that 75 is applied to the mob + the debuffed percentage, say 50%. Thus adding 37 damage for a hit that lands for 112. This number is the number that IS displayed above the mobs head and in the logs. The only way to account for your damage doing > than the amout listed either in weaponstats, or ca/spells is that the mob is taking extra damage due to mitigation going negative. If I am wrong fine, but observation bears out this conclusion, run a parse look at your scouts poison damage. It will always be = or above the damage listed on their poison. You will never see an Experts caustic hit for 400 because the mob had high poison resist, it will either land for the full 900+ or be resisted. It is a pretty clear conclusion to make. Now go back to flames and Ragepost about devs giving raid spoilers. Iago

03-29-2008, 05:49 AM	#10
zorax15 Loremaster Join Date: Mar 2005 Posts: 202	Charming@Mistmoore wrote: You are all idiots and should really ask this kind of stuff on eq2flames if you really want factual answers. But since I'm trolling, why not!First off Mobs indeed DO, yes wow! Do have mitigation, go play a coercer [I cannot control my vocabulary]. If mobs didn't have any mitigation debuffs for mitigation would be null in effect, so why don't you stop spreading false information kthx.Jehannum is just making up [I cannot control my vocabulary] math that has nothing to do with things work. No you do not get any bonus from having a mobs mitigation debuffed to 0 what the [I cannot control my vocabulary]. As the mobs mitigation is debuffed further and further the appropriate skills and spell attacks act accordingly. If you aren't casting your debuffs, as any class, on a raid then you should stop raiding.Now for Kael, you asked about red numbers when they hit you.. yeah so.. that's the dmg they did after your mitigation took out the rest. The MOB can't realize more dmg on the parse [I cannot control my vocabulary] are you smoking dude, if you're doing the dmg it says on the parse that's the damage you did, it's not some illusion. I haven't tested parses on the wall but my guess is, from what I have read from others using it to test DPS, that the wall has no mitigation and no avoidance so you can see optimal settings, but I may be wrong. However you should not base your dps on a training wall that doesn't fight back or do anything at all compared to actualy mobs. And no you are wrong debuffs really just debuff the mobs mitigation making it easier for spells and combat arts to land and hit for more damage.The answer to your question of how do you calculate it? You become a really geeky nerd with so much time on your hands that you actually sit through hours of logs of parses and calculate the average dmg of your spells without dispatch to the average with dispatch, but oh wait then you have to make sure oyu don't count crits because they're random. And oh wait there's a bunch of other [I cannot control my vocabulary] you can't account for. Stop trying to put so much math into masking the fact you suck. No offense but you are a nobody in a nobody guild nobody here is interested in and would get flamed to hell for such a lame BS on flames, sweety. You act like a 10 year old who knows some bad boys and because you think it's so cool to trash talk you come here and practice in "safe" area.EPIC FAIL, son!Get some balls and post [Removed for Content] like this on flames. But better get your facts straight before. But when people ask here questions about game mechanics in a polite way respond to them politely as well as everybody else does. You are an attention [Removed for Content]. Plz never post anywhere againEDIT: anywhere includes flames as well. thx

03-29-2008, 06:14 AM	#11
zorax15 Loremaster Join Date: Mar 2005 Posts: 202	JAFO74 wrote: Now go back to flames and Ragepost about devs giving raid spoilers. Mobs in commonlands and antonica were not affected by dev spoilers. So no reason for him to post about this subject

03-25-2008, 08:57 AM	#1
Kael Grace Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 97	I do not understand how Dispatched or other debuffs operate mathematically. Here's my quandry: 1. Does dispatched actually lower the mitigation of the mob? It seems like it should. Does that mean that (a)our dps parse actually goes up when dispatched is deployed (it seems to go up quite a bit in actual combat, but no so much when tested on the stone wall in KJ); or alternatively (b) that the mob actually realizes more of the damage on the parse but that the parse numbers do not change. I think the former is correct. 2. I'm pretty sure that the red damage numbers I see when a mob hits me are net of my mitigation reduction. In other words, the damage numbers are post mitigation. If I'm correct about that, and correct above, then my mitigation works quite differently then the mob's "mitigation." 3. If I'm right that dispatched and other debuffs really just add to players' dps rather than reduce the mob's mitigation, how do you calculate the amount of dps you gain from dispatched and other buffs? Thanks very much. Always been curious about this.

03-25-2008, 06:41 PM	#3
Needagroup Loremaster Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 63	This is quite interesting. I must be missing something however, because I don't think I've ever seen a "percent mitigated pop-up" while raiding. Maybe I need a custom UI, or maybe just the latest ACT download. i don't know. But this would indeed be a critical thing to know in the midst of a fight, to properly time a few debuffs. But my more important question is this for the poster immediately above: when you do estimate the effect of say the 2 principal brig buffs on physical damage (approx 4300 for dispatched and 2500 for enfeeble), what type of bonus to damage to you normally get? 5%, 25%? Seems like it would be more like the 5% number, and it would apply for whatever time 17 dispatched is up -- 17-24 secs per level 80 brig if coordinated well. Thanks. This is actually quite interesting.

03-26-2008, 05:30 PM	#5
Needagroup Loremaster Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 63	Thanks very much. Very helpful. So the higher the mob, the higher the potential DPS bonus by virtue of debuffs. Of course, many of your attacks may miss or be resisted, but at least dispatched etc give you a chance to do higher damage on those that hit.

03-26-2008, 07:14 PM	#6
Jehannum Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 651	Well, sort of - it's a higher percentage boost as the mobs' resists scale up, anyhow. Basically, if we look at a bloc of 100 dps it's a bit easier; again going with the approximations above, our 1600-point debuff on a 16000-point scale amounts to a 10% (of unmitigated damage) boost. So if it mitigates 75%, you're gaining 10 dps but your base was only 35, so it's a large proportion of your actual damage. If it mitigates 50% you're still gaining the exact same 10 dps, but in relation to actual damage (50 dps) it appears less impressive - and so forth as its mitigation reduces toward 0. When I make an estimate on a debuff's effectiveness, I usually offer a range - in this case I'd say our assumed - not real values for dispatch would indicate about a 10-20% average increase to dps, raidwide, but for some mobs - where our actual is a small fraction of our potential - it's greater, and for some it's less. Generally, it's not worth breaking down into individual damage types, unless your raid/group composition is skewed to particular types of damage - in which case those debuffs targeting that damage type are significantly more worthwhile. The bottom line though is that any overall boost of 5% or greater outweighs virtually any personal dps contribution and should be leveraged - which is also part of why I tend not to bother digging too deeply. Edit - *&%&%$ typos.

03-28-2008, 06:15 AM	#7
JAFO74 Loremaster Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 79	Mobs don't have mitigation, they have hitpoints. Have you ever seen a spell or a CA or an Autoattack hit below the minimum listed on the spell, or the /weaponstats of the weapon? I am guessing no. All mobs have 0 mitigation which is why all your stuff hits somewhere between the values listed on your hotbars or above based on debuffs. If they want the mob to be 50% harder to kill, they don't give it 50% mitigation, they give it 50% more hitpoints. It makes the calculations easier. So in essence when you are debuffing the mobs you are taking their mitigation negative. Their spell resists work different than ours, it is more of an avoidance check than a mitigation check. I.E a mob highly resistant to a certain damage type will either fully resist it or it will fully land. My poisons always land for listed damage or above. If mobs had poison resist this would not be the case. My autoattacks and CA's work the same. The only real way I can think of quantifying the effect of these buffs is look back through your logs, find when the debuffs land and compare damage done there to damage done when the debuff expires. Combine this data over the course of a zone and you should be able to get a rough estimate on how much dps dispatched/enfeeble adds. Though unless you are coordinating this other stacked mitigation debuffs are going to get in the way of an accurate estimate. If mitigation works negative the same way it does positive, than -12k mit would give 75% more damage, -5k mit would give 55% or so more damage and based on my experiences, this seems pretty close. My snipers shot can crit for 25k on a debuffed raid mob with coverage(adds 20%) damage. Top end listed damage for that is about 11k, so 11k +20% is 13.3k+30%(crit) 17k, that leaves 8k added from debuffs, thats about 50% more. Seems plausible. Iago

03-29-2008, 02:54 AM	#8
McBenzos Loremaster Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 39	You are all idiots and should really ask this kind of stuff on eq2flames if you really want factual answers. But since I'm trolling, why not!First off Mobs indeed DO, yes wow! Do have mitigation, go play a coercer dipshit. If mobs didn't have any mitigation debuffs for mitigation would be null in effect, so why don't you stop spreading false information kthx.Jehannum is just making up [Removed for Content] math that has nothing to do with things work. No you do not get any bonus from having a mobs mitigation debuffed to 0 what the [Removed for Content]. As the mobs mitigation is debuffed further and further the appropriate skills and spell attacks act accordingly. If you aren't casting your debuffs, as any class, on a raid then you should stop raiding.Now for Kael, you asked about red numbers when they hit you.. yeah so.. that's the dmg they did after your mitigation took out the rest. The MOB can't realize more dmg on the parse [Removed for Content] are you smoking dude, if you're doing the dmg it says on the parse that's the damage you did, it's not some illusion. I haven't tested parses on the wall but my guess is, from what I have read from others using it to test DPS, that the wall has no mitigation and no avoidance so you can see optimal settings, but I may be wrong. However you should not base your dps on a training wall that doesn't fight back or do anything at all compared to actualy mobs. And no you are wrong debuffs really just debuff the mobs mitigation making it easier for spells and combat arts to land and hit for more damage.The answer to your question of how do you calculate it? You become a really geeky nerd with so much time on your hands that you actually sit through hours of logs of parses and calculate the average dmg of your spells without dispatch to the average with dispatch, but oh wait then you have to make sure oyu don't count crits because they're random. And oh wait there's a bunch of other [Removed for Content] you can't account for. Stop trying to put so much math into masking the fact you suck.

03-29-2008, 11:35 AM	#12
Daghammerskold Loremaster Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 176	Charming@Mistmoore wrote: You are all idiots and should really ask this kind of stuff on eq2flames if you really want factual answers. But since I'm trolling, why not!First off Mobs indeed DO, yes wow! Do have mitigation, go play a coercer [I cannot control my vocabulary]. If mobs didn't have any mitigation debuffs for mitigation would be null in effect, so why don't you stop spreading false information kthx. Compare that to what Blackguard said in the LU 13 update notes - NPCs no longer mitigate the damage done by spells and combat arts. When a damage spell or art lands on an opponent, its damage should fall within the range shown in its examine information.In eq2flames world factual apparently means uninformed but expressed with attitude.

03-31-2008, 02:34 PM	#13
Regholdain Loremaster Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 56	Within this thread is a very interesting bit of information. Let me get this straight: when you throw a debuff on a mob and it lowers mitigation vs a certain type of damage, all that means is that those types of attacks will now do more damage, as the mobs do not actually mitigate damage? In effect, this makes your CAs and spells do more damage than they normally would because the numbers are translated into a bonus on your damage range? Do all of a mob's resists work like this? (physical, mental, poison, disease, etc.) Or are resist rates a more simplified concept for the NPCs?

04-02-2008, 02:16 PM	#14
JAFO74 Loremaster Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 79	Regholdain wrote: Within this thread is a very interesting bit of information. Let me get this straight: when you throw a debuff on a mob and it lowers mitigation vs a certain type of damage, all that means is that those types of attacks will now do more damage, as the mobs do not actually mitigate damage? In effect, this makes your CAs and spells do more damage than they normally would because the numbers are translated into a bonus on your damage range? Do all of a mob's resists work like this? (physical, mental, poison, disease, etc.) Or are resist rates a more simplified concept for the NPCs? The answer to your questin is yes, any type of mitigation that is debuffed, be it physical or magical will cause damage of that type to hit harder. Have the potential to do more damage than is listed on your spell/ca/weaponstats. For magical mitigations(resists) it also lowers the resist rate. Physical mitigation debuffs have no effect on a mobs ability to avoid attacks, there are seperate debuffs for that, but they do allow melee damage to hit harder when it does land. Iago

04-11-2008, 01:43 AM	#15
verydanger Loremaster Join Date: Mar 2005 Posts: 220	Jehannum wrote: I have a lot more involved in the typical estimate, but here's my general philosophy: First, place the target mob in one of 3 categories - low resist, medium resist, or high resist. I assume thresholds of 25%, 50% and 75% just to keep it simple mostly, though sometimes I go a bit further (some mobs you can gauge their mitigation based on the damage changes, but that takes a LOT of parses to be worthwhile). We also have the extreme cases - zero, and complete. For a completely immune mob, there's not much you can do except check your pockets for loose change. For a zero mob, you'll get the minimum 'percentage boost' benefit. For dispatch I seem to recall it's about a 1700 point debuff or thereabouts (adjust numbers accordingly if I'm misremembering) so let's estimate it at 1600 because that makes things easier. So 75% is 12k mitigation, and allows 25% of the initial hit through. Dispatch hits, and while it's active the now-10.4k mitigation is allowing 35% through - which is 10% of the non-mitigated damage as extra, but amounts to 40% extra dps 50% is 8k and allows 50% through, after dispatch is 60% for the same numerical increase in damage, but only a 20% boost to actual dps. 25% is 4k and allows 75%, and while the same 10% extra gets applied, relative to that 75 it's only a 13% increase in actual dps values And given the shortcuts and assumptions made here for simplicity, an unresistant mob hit by dispatch will net a 10% boost to actual dps values. So in short, the way to work it out is thus: 1. Know thine enemy. Specifically, have some notion of how much damage he's mitigating to begin with. 2. Don't be afraid of the maths. " /> 3. Check with other references to make sure I'm remembering these numbers fairly accurately and not just pulling them out of a dark, fragrant place. " /> I'd recommend using your nominal dps and CA/spell damage numbers as a base, but I've never been entirely sure those could be trusted anyhow. " /> Edit - sorry, missed that comment about percent mitigated... Go to your persona and mouse over your mitigation (either spell or melee, doesn't matter) and it'll tell you what % is mitigated vs an opponent your level This must be the single most disinformative post I have ever read on any board related to EQ2.I would guess that you either are trying to apply game mechanics from another game to EQ2, or you have actual inside knowledge about EQ2 mechanics but did a VERY poor job of explaining them. For anyone intrested in a "101" about mitigation debuffs, I have to advise COMPLETELY disregarding the post I just quoted. I can not make sense of it in any way.Here is my effort at explaining the same thing:As already has been established, mobs do not have mitigation - they can however be debuffed to what must be assumed is negative mitigation, that makes incoming attacks hit for larger amounts.So, if a mob isnt under the effect of any mitigation debuff, all your attacks will hit for the exact number that is listed on the art/spell/weapon itself. 500 cold damage in your spellbook becomes 500 cold damage on the mob (and on the parse).As mitigation debuffs get applied to the mob, the damage done to the mob begins to scale up. The maximum extra damage that can gained this way is 50%. If your 500 damage nuke hits the mob for 750, then it was fully debuffed - further mitigation debuffs would have had no effect.So, how much do you need to debuff a mob to reach the "50% cap"? This I do not know, and I have never read anyone even try to make an educated guess.What I do know is that this number increases with moblevel. A small debuff might be enough to make you hit 50% harder on a lvl 30 mob, but the same debuff might not accomplish that on a lvl 50 mob. Maybe it also increases with mob "tier", solo -> heroic -> epic. Maybe each mob has its own individual number.With that in mind, determining how much benefit a debuff like Dispatch gives is pretty much impossible. The answer is of course between 0 and 50%. The answer will of course be smaller (or non-existant) the more mitigation debuffs already were applied to the mob. My guess would be that Dispatch in a raiding situation will vary between 0 and around 10% more damage for the whole raid... but that could be way off of course. __________________ Chik, troubador of United Kingdoms (Splitpaw)

04-15-2008, 03:38 PM	#16
Jehannum Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 651	verydanger wrote: This must be the single most disinformative post I have ever read on any board related to EQ2. Cool, guess I win then. Odd, considering some of the posts to and with which I've seen you respond, but let that pass.I would guess that you either are trying to apply game mechanics from another game to EQ2, or you have actual inside knowledge about EQ2 mechanics but did a VERY poor job of explaining them. For anyone intrested in a "101" about mitigation debuffs, I have to advise COMPLETELY disregarding the post I just quoted. I can not make sense of it in any way. This is your problem as opposed to mine; the post I made was deliberately general because a) it'd been two years since I bothered looking into mitigation, and b) I didn't remember most of the precise numbers. I figured anyone truly interested could do the math.Here is my effort at explaining the same thing:As already has been established, mobs do not have mitigation - they can however be debuffed to what must be assumed is negative mitigation, that makes incoming attacks hit for larger amounts.So, if a mob isnt under the effect of any mitigation debuff, all your attacks will hit for the exact number that is listed on the art/spell/weapon itself. 500 cold damage in your spellbook becomes 500 cold damage on the mob (and on the parse). This is one of the things I'd forgotten; for a while mobs did have mitigation and it did indeed apply (when positive) - I can't remember when it got removed but as soon as I'd seen the post afterward I was reminded that it'd happened. As mitigation debuffs get applied to the mob, the damage done to the mob begins to scale up. The maximum extra damage that can gained this way is 50%. If your 500 damage nuke hits the mob for 750, then it was fully debuffed - further mitigation debuffs would have had no effect. Are you positive of this? Not that I doubt it as such, but I specifically remember back in the day people used to load big debuffs on low-level mobs to crank up their big-hit numbers. If it's been limited to 50% since, that makes sense in terms of preventing that kind of cheese, but it must have happened while I was on hiatus.So, how much do you need to debuff a mob to reach the "50% cap"? This I do not know, and I have never read anyone even try to make an educated guess.What I do know is that this number increases with moblevel. A small debuff might be enough to make you hit 50% harder on a lvl 30 mob, but the same debuff might not accomplish that on a lvl 50 mob. Maybe it also increases with mob "tier", solo -> heroic -> epic. Maybe each mob has its own individual number.With that in mind, determining how much benefit a debuff like Dispatch gives is pretty much impossible. The answer is of course between 0 and 50%. The answer will of course be smaller (or non-existant) the more mitigation debuffs already were applied to the mob. My guess would be that Dispatch in a raiding situation will vary between 0 and around 10% more damage for the whole raid... but that could be way off of course. Assuming that the devs haven't changed the way mitigation works in the background (which, admittedly, is always possible) it takes 6000 licks to get to the sweet, gooey center of a level 80 mob. Having done the math I mentioned before, the numbers are as follows: Level1.5 = the mitigation required to reduce damage by 1%, for any given level character. Level1.5 = the mitigation debuff required to realise a 1% increase in damage against a given level opponent. NOTE - I haven't checked how well it holds up with respect to heroics* but this is the formula they used to use for mobs, and they still use it for us. So it stands to reason that this is still the way they calculate things for mobs too. Just to make it even easier for those who hate math... Against a level 80 mob, any 1200 point debuff will result in a 10% increase for that damage type. Against a level 1 mob, any 150-point debuff used to result in a 100% increase for that damage type, hence the exploit (from high level toons with 1200+ point debuffs) and - from what you said - the apparent nerf to a 50% cap. *Heroics have, in the past, seemed to mitigate as if they were 2 or more levels higher than their con, but I'm not certain enough of the mechanics to comment.