Let's talk stun avoidance

The current formula for stun avoidance is:
2x(damage received)/(maximum health+stun avoidance).
edit: that’s the formula listed in game. the wiki says the denominator also includes current ward, in which case the ward stackers are also fine.

The game seems to encourage a couple different ways of defending your character, either maxing out health or protections. Health is already far easier as it’s just one stat to focus on. Maximize your health, get your glancing blow capped and you’re in a pretty good spot.

Getting protections is harder, and you have to keep your health pool down. This makes you much more vulnerable to stun. From the endgame arenas I’ve watched people are running around with 2.5k health or so.

You would need t5 stun avoidance rolls on most of your equipment to get that kind of defense against stuns via stun avoidance which would leave very little room for getting the protections you need. And even if you got that much stun avoidance, the health maximizers got it passively just by boosting their primary defense.

I think the formula needs a bit of adjustment in favor of people actually putting points into stun avoidance, something more along the lines of:
2x(damage dealt)/((0.5xhealth)+3x(stun avoidance)).

No promises that those numbers work out, I’ll leave the exact math to someone with the actual numbers to work with. But in general, reduce the effectiveness of health and greatly increase that of stun avoidance for the purpose of avoiding stuns.

I think you are focused on the wrong end of the equation; with assuming having a high flat hp solves all issues. There are several ways to help avoid stun.

Reducing the initial hit by either stacking flat armor/resistance; glancing blow; block protection; damage to mana. All of these modifiers increase your eHP; while you cant have them all focusing on one or two should improve play.

I am nowhere near good enough or done enough testing to really argue the math; however anecdotally in my current characters I am getting stunned less by reducing the incoming damage more than out scaling my HP pool

1 Like

I liked the change with dodge rating where it is now scaled by level.

I think a similar change for stuns would be beneficial on both sides of the equation, for stunning and getting stunned.

Rather than area level, I think character level would be more appropriate.

Character level could take the place of (max health + Ward) in the formula. Max health + ward is supposed to serve as an approximation of a character’s effective health/defensiveness/vitality, however I think that a character’s level does a decent enough job of approximating this. The exception would be glass cannon characters, however as Buffinita points out, they’re already more likely to be stunned due to taking more damage.

Rare mobs + Bosses could be given added/multiplicative bonus to effectiveness in character level for this equation to make them stronger vs CC without become overscaled to the point of being virtually impossible to CC.

Adding on to what Buffinita said, I’d assume that with elemental protection and armor stacking you’d be taking less damage, right? So after mitigation and everything is calculated, even though you have less raw health, you should be taking a similar amount of damage as far as stun threshold is concerned. I’d love to see some examples using realistic values when stacking health compared to stacking protection and armor. Unfortunately I’m not yet familiar enough to know what values are realistic. I’ve mostly been playing a Warpath Sentinel so I don’t even have to worry about getting stunned lol

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.