Hello there!
I would like to suggest some improvements to late game damage penetration against enemies as, currently, it feels very unimpactful even with a massive investment against the health pools of many mobs!
The core part of my idea involves having monster health be the culmination of two different values: Base Monster Health and Increased Monster Health [With Protections also having two similar stats]. A monster’s total health would then just be Base x (100% + Increased%) as expected. Base Monster Health would scale slowly, and as an example, let’s say we have a mob with 500 base health that scales up 20 a level. The increases to their health would scale up as well, so we’ll theorize that their health ends up being made 1000% by this secondary stat by a level 50 monolith.
Let’s look at how penetration currently works with these values in mind. My example monster’s health in a level 50 monolith would be (500 + (20 x 50)) x 10 [for 1000%] = 15000. Next, assume a player has heavily invested into penetration, achieving an amount of 750 or so. With the enemy’s health, the player would only penetrate 750 of the 15000, meaning the monster would have an effective 14250 health. Despite a heavy investment into penetration, this equates to about 5% more damage against the target.
Getting back to how I would like to change penetration, my idea is simple. Using the two new values I’ve introduced, Base and Increased Monster Health, make penetration only scale against the Base value. Let’s look back at the prior calculation so I can explain myself. On the current system, damage is something akin to (Total M Health + Protection) - Penetration = Effective Health. With my new system, the calculation would be ((Base M Health + Protection) - Penetration) x Increased M Health = Effective Health. Going with our previous monster example, rather than the monster ending up with hardly any effective health lost, the E.Health calculation would be ((500 + (20 x 50) - 750) x 10 = 7500. Now, our heavy investment is slicing away half of a mob’s effective health [assuming they have no resistances]. This time, the investment is properly rewarded for the other stats that were forsaken to build so much penetration. Of course, larger mobs and bosses would have bigger base health values, but still to the point where penetration feels effective. Even if a boss had quintuple the base health amount, penetration would still feel miles more effective than it is now.
These are just examples, but I hope they get my base idea across. The tl;dr is… have a smaller Base Health value that Penetration pierces through, then have Base Health and Penetration both be boosted by a larger Increased Health stat.
Altogether, I think this idea would help penetration become much better while sticking to the flat values it has now, rather than switching to strict % penetration like in most other games [which I think is an unhealthy system].