What's the math behind failing 90% chance to hit attacks 6+ times in a row?

[Yukeh]

How does this work? I thought the visual circle is an indication of % chance to hit... So how does a 10% chance to miss get applied 6+ times in a row, consistently, across playthroughs with different stats and gear?

[Sertorius]

Hello, what kind of action is failing and what is the exact outcome? I admit I have never stumbled upon a sequence like that in many hundreds of hours of playtesting. I could understand if you had been very unlucky and it happened once, but you say it's happening consistently, which makes me think the problem lies in the way the indicators are interpreted.
Are they feints or "shield" attacks? Usually, when there are two indicators, you have to pass both checks for a complete success, otherwise the attack will be "resisted" (this is explained in the tooltip of each action). So if the first indicator shows about 90% and the second shows about 50%, your overall chance of a complete success is actually less than 50%.

[Yukeh]

Originally posted by Sertorius:

Hello, what kind of action is failing and what is the exact outcome? I admit I have never stumbled upon a sequence like that in many hundreds of hours of playtesting. I could understand if you had been very unlucky and it happened once, but you say it's happening consistently, which makes me think the problem lies in the way the indicators are interpreted.
Are they feints or "shield" attacks? Usually, when there are two indicators, you have to pass both checks for a complete success, otherwise the attack will be "resisted" (this is explained in the tooltip of each action). So if the first indicator shows about 90% and the second shows about 50%, your overall chance of a complete success is actually less than 50%.

It's usually regular attacks (e.g torso or groin) against enemies i've successfully stance broken. The most frustrating case is on the excursion where you are caught in an ambush (in africa?) where you gain the high ground for the first and as far as i know only time in the game. Indicator shows 90+ chance to hit, and yet i can miss multiple attacks IN A ROW. And we're not talking "partial hit" where the damage they take is reduce - we're talking full-on miss, drain the player's stance meter kind of miss.

I'm not having a problem with the game (just finished it for the second time yesterday with my strongest playthrough ever) but at one point i had a battle that lasted over 150 turns because none of my attacks would connect. This seems consistent with two other characters where i would die because this happened - chance to hit is so high its almost a full blue circle (i know it can't actually fill out completely, since there is ALWAYS a chance to miss) and yet it keeps missing, again and again and again, usually multiple times in a row once i already miss once, despite recovering after my miss.

This is regardless of the armor pierce chance / resistance! I tried to record it but the game is not compatible with geforce share / nvidia shadowplay, so my hotkey did nothing...

I am very bad with math, so i simply don't understand the logic here.

[Sertorius]

Originally posted by Yukeh:

It's usually regular attacks (e.g torso or groin) against enemies i've successfully stance broken. The most frustrating case is on the excursion where you are caught in an ambush (in africa?) where you gain the high ground for the first and as far as i know only time in the game. Indicator shows 90+ chance to hit, and yet i can miss multiple attacks IN A ROW. And we're not talking "partial hit" where the damage they take is reduce - we're talking full-on miss, drain the player's stance meter kind of miss.

I'm not having a problem with the game (just finished it for the second time yesterday with my strongest playthrough ever) but at one point i had a battle that lasted over 150 turns because none of my attacks would connect. This seems consistent with two other characters where i would die because this happened - chance to hit is so high its almost a full blue circle (i know it can't actually fill out completely, since there is ALWAYS a chance to miss) and yet it keeps missing, again and again and again, usually multiple times in a row once i already miss once, despite recovering after my miss.

Ok, thank you for the detailed feedback. I'll try to offer an explanation, though it might end up being a little long and boring.

I understand it can be frustrating when you miss and your chances were high. But if they are regular attacks, those failures can't be in a row with the same probability, because as you say you lose Stance when they happen, and your chances get worse. After that, you'll have to recover successfully, then you'll have to break the enemy's Stance once or, more probably, several times, and only then you will attack again. That's quite a long sequence of rolls. If you just pick the failures that happened within the sequence, the probabilies involved are quite different from two simple back-to-back failures. That said, the chances of your next roll are completely unaffected by what happened before. If you just failed an action and your chance of success was 90%, your next roll with an identical chance can still fail with a probability of 10%. I know it sounds counterintuitive, especially after what I said a few sentences before, but this is how probability works.

I'll try to explain the concept more clearly with a practical example: if you toss a coin 10 times, the chance of getting all tails is 1/2^10, less than 0.1%. But if you have just thrown it 9 times and had 9 tails, the chance of getting another tail on the next throw is still 50%. The outcome of the previous throws has no influence on the next one.

You can find some more information on how the RNG works in the FAQ.

Originally posted by Yukeh:

I tried to record it but the game is not compatible with geforce share / nvidia shadowplay, so my hotkey did nothing...

You can open Xbox Game Bar with WINDOWS+G (it works on Windows 10). It can be used to record your game.

Hope it helped.