Status Question.

[Amrehlu]

So, seeing that this game, from what I could find looking around has had a long love affair with not giving proper information and having poor explanations and details in-game I am left wondering something about Status Effects that I haven't been able to find information on.

Does Status Effect Duration increase the amount of damage a Status Effect does or does it just make it take longer for the effect to deal the same amount of damage?

Does, as an example, +50% duration make a DoT that does 100 damage per second over 10 seconds (1000 damage over 10 seconds) now do 100dps over 15 seconds (1500 damage over 15).
OR
Does it make the new dps into 66.6 (or I'd imagine rounded up to 67)dps over 15 seconds.

Now, to be fair, both of those suuuuuuuuuck. Nothing lives that long, so having Status Effects that last more than 3-4 seconds is already pointless, and Duration has zero value in this game. But I prefer to actually know how things work, for better or worse.

Thanks to little-to-no information being shown or explained in-game (no, the end of game dps-peaks don't matter almost ever, knowing peak information has pretty minimal value), most things turn into a situation where you have to just test it. But I can't really see any way to test this one in a way where I could ever approach an answer.

I've played a few games where the Devs where lunatics and simply made the DoT last longer, but deal the same total damage, which is an active dps loss if you take duration increase; so I was just wondering if that kind of lunacy happens here or not.

DoTs already suck thanks to not stacking from multiple players and the elemental interactions causing a DoT to be replaced after only 1 or 2 ticks of damage (which is made less terrible due to how enemies only live for 3-4 seconds at most after being hit, but it's still only ever going to cause a dps loss). The only decent exception is wet+shock being good, but if you are using basically any other Status other than shock, you need to avoid wet at all costs because it messes with a lot of other damage DoTs. Freeze is a thing, sure, but freeze borders on useless outside of early game when CC is important. Freeze+Explosion exists but... what's the point when the most important targets are mostly immune to freeze. And if your ally also brings DoTs then you're competing for who is DoT'ing what, or worse they brought wet to the party and it kills your dps by removing a bunch of stuff. Again, another "to-be-fair" here is that in games like this, with multiplayer, the players are always competing for dps, and one player doing super high damage usually means the others are suffering low dps, but with DoTs it feels worse.

The game actively punishes the players for separating, which is a different issue entirely so I'll avoid that small novel worth of complaints/criticisms (plus I'm sure you're plenty aware of all those issues). But separating is the best way to not interfere with each other's damage output and maximize kills-per-second, so it would be nice if pets worked better or exp didn't despawn. I have to imagine there must be something that stops the exp being handled how Vampire Survivors does it where it begins "filling" other exp gems rather than generating new ones. Performance issues maybe? Idk, that's an aside from my question about Status Effects and Status Duration.

Also... a bonus less important but "what the ♥♥♥♥?" question. Why do you explain the damage of Status in the way that you do in the game. Saying it does "x damage" but then AFTER that saying, "It does 2x that to enemies." We don't know our own HP total... players knowing how much damage a DoT does to them is meaningless when we aren't even given the numbers for our own HP to know how harmful that DoT is. If we have 100base hp, then acid is kinda scary... but if we have 300 base hp it isn't bad. Also... why tell us the base stats of enemies, but then NOT tell us their scaling and WHAT scales them (Time or Player Level? or both? If player level, highest player level or the average player level?).
And what is up with enemies doing physical or magical damage? We can't build magic defense, the assumption is that Damage Absorption is just ALL damage, physical, magical and DoTs... so why do some enemies do a different type. The Status types make sense, they apple THAT status, but physical vs magical?

I need to stop typing cause I keep remembering more and this may never stop.

[Princemousey]

Status effects can slow the enemies, and if the time is lengthened, it can help to slow the enemies for longer. The DPS remains the same.

[Amrehlu]

Originally posted by Princemousey:

Status effects can slow the enemies, and if the time is lengthened, it can help to slow the enemies for longer. The DPS remains the same.

I suppose. Though there is never a need or reason to slow enemies. Slowing them make it take longer for them to get in range to die more quickly, slower enemies = lower KPS, you want them fast to keep killing them and having new ones spawning in as quickly as possible. Also, you reapply the status so often that would never need more than 3-4 seconds to keep them perma slowed.

You don't have a dev tag, so I can't really take what you said as true cause you have no way of knowing if that is the case or not. I hope, at the very least, that you are right, cause it is the thing that makes most sense and at least isn't an accidental (I would hope) nerf. Unless you went into the files themselves, I suppose. Which I probably will need to do if I don't get a reply.

[Princemousey]

Have you fought Grim Reapers or Guardians? You need slow there, or a feather.

[Amrehlu]

Originally posted by Princemousey:

Have you fought Grim Reapers or Guardians? You need slow there, or a feather.

Yeah. Haven't put much time into Grim Reapers, but you only need the feather for Guardians. Hell, even without the feather you only need Wet+Shock for all of them, without needing any speed increase. And you can keep them permanently locked into Shock and Electrocute (Electrocute only on 3rd, obviously) without any increase. Like I said, you could halve the base duration of the status effects and you could keep them slowed.

I'm not sure what works for slowing Reapers, but again, you can just reapply it quickly enough to never need to worry about duration.

I'm mostly wondering how they do it, cause this is a small indie game and small indie games occasionally do insane nonsense like Status Duration = a DPS loss because they're usually inexperienced and it didn't cross their minds to check how duration effected the DoT and just assumed it would scale/work as common sense makes you think it would. Making games is tough and filled with "Couldn't see the forest for the trees." situations.

Now... Status sucks at the moment so it's honestly a moot point either way. I've done a couple variations on builds that put the maximum amount of DoTs simultaneously possible without overwriting one another, with and without duration increase and Afflicted bonus, Boss damage bonus, ect... as the assumption is that IF anything can increase Status Damage other than the final aura slot's Status Damage Increase, it would be both "neutral" damage increases (And those probably don't work, NOT that we would know, because they don't actually make it a point to give us that explicit information on tooltips or anything). And just like most builds in the game, it IS viable... on normal difficulty on maps with less than 75% increases. But beyond that point, it gets rough. Still plenty doable, but you're playing gimped to hell compared.

[Abmis]

We tried to make a fun game, not a numbers game. I can see you've experimented a lot so if you are unable to figure out a mechanic, please post a bulleted list of questions and I'll dig into the code to get you the answers. I've helped Sneakz put together some guides so if you need anything for a guide, just let me know.

[Lyzrac]

Loving the game so far, but you made a numbers game. It's a lot of fun, but it definitely is a numbers game, even if there's a lot of numbers we can't see. More in-game info would go a long way for the people that are interested in the details of how things work and for putting together builds for higher difficulty levels.

[Amrehlu]

Originally posted by Abmis:

We tried to make a fun game, not a numbers game. I can see you've experimented a lot so if you are unable to figure out a mechanic, please post a bulleted list of questions and I'll dig into the code to get you the answers. I've helped Sneakz put together some guides so if you need anything for a guide, just let me know.

Adding this after I finished typing... I'm sorry for the looooong post. If you just want to ignore anything else I had to say and go straight to the main question, it's at the bottom. Thanks for taking the time to read any of this at all. The game is great, I wouldn't be here spending time even asking questions if it weren't. I'd just move on without a second thought if I didn't think it was a worthwhile game.

I know I'm not a dev here. I know I'm just a player. So my take on this and point-of-view probably doesn't hold much weight from a legit dev's perspective. But that isn't a great attitude to have about it.

It only serves to hurt the game if you intentionally obfuscate or limit access to that kind of information. It doesn't make the game less fun if that information is there, it makes it less frustrating for people who care and the people who don't care won't be affected by it at all. The results are the same but you're making people stumble blindly, annoyingly, through the dark to figure out what should be simply shown to them. The lack of information make you wonder IF that thing you think it common sense, actually applies here or not? IS there a reason to continue to use the basic Recurve Bow? (No, there isn't as far as we can tell, it is terrible) Most conversations about what to use between me and my friends came down to, "These are the 9 usable weapons, everything else is worthless trash, also the only armor in the entire game worth using, prior to the final map's armor sets, is the Knight Set. There is absolutely no reason to use anything that isn't heavy armor and if you do, you're playing the game wrong and throwing the runs away for no reason." Whether the information was there or not, we came to the obvious conclusions, but we had sit there in confusion and uncertainty as we tested different things. And even as we find/found stuff that was "good" we can never really be sure it is actually worth using or if we're just gimping ourselves because we don't have the eldritch knowledge that you hide from us.

You could also make it so that "Advanced" tooltips and stats is a toggle that is off by default. That way only the people who care will go looking for it.

Hell, it would be weird and if it was like this I would have a "Why the hell would someone do this?" reaction, but you could even make Advanced Tooltips a meta-progression unlock after you successfully clear the final map on normal.

Games are tough to make and even with how simple this one is, I can't imagine it's a walk in the park. I'm aware it isn't as simple as, "Spend an afternoon and add more info to the game.", it's gonna take quite a bit of effort, but I really think some more detailed tooltips with proper example of how the math would work or at least an explanation of what does and does affect this or that would be nice. Lots of games use "tags" to tell the players simply what will interact with what.

Like, "Thorns - Physical, Boss Damage, Area of Effect, Lifesteal, Reflect (Physical)" that tells me it will scale with Physical and Boss damage increases and is affected by Area of Effect buffs and I benefit from lifesteal from it's damage and that is only works on physical damage. All of that basic info at a glance. That is just an example, I don't think it scales with Area of Effect... hell it might not scale with boss damage, but there is no way I would actually know and there is literally no way to possibly test it. We know what the enemy's base damage is, but we don't know what/how their damage scales, so we can't even theorycraft using those numbers for Thorn's expected damage output, and Thorn's isn't represented anywhere in-game other than maybe the current and peak dps numbers, but we can't possibly know how much is being contributed by it.

Which on yet another side note, making Thorns hit in a small AoE around you would go a long way toward making it not just a bad joke. I did read you mentioned at some point you guys were looking into reworking it or something to make it better elsewhere. You could also make Thorns scale with Damage Absorption, because having heavy armor and taking less damage means dealing less thorns damage... so something would have to be done about that anti-synergy. Or more closely tie the theme of Thorns with Lifesteal in ways that would encourage you to take weaker armor so that you deal more thorns damage with the balance being that you make up for the increased damage intake via lifesteal and/or maximum HP increase. Idk, just throwing off-the-top of my head thoughts at a wall to see if any might stick.

Then in the tooltip (or a "grimoire of knowledge" or whatever-the-heck menu tab where you would put all of the advanced and detailed information, doesn't even have to be commonly accessible mid run) something like, "Damage = (((Thorns% x Received Physical Damage) x Physical Damage %)) x Boss Damage %)))"
Example: (((50% x 20) + 20%) + 20%))) = 12 Physical Damage/15 Physical to Bosses

That is a disgusting, poorly, formatted eyesore of an example, but you get what I mean and you could probably clean it up fine.

I'm babbling again and I doubt you have time to be reading this much nonsense so I'm gonna force myself to end it here with; rather than some list you'd have to spend time on going through I will just hope that eventually more detailed info will be added. I expect that to take quite some time, it might be simple, but it still would take awhile to properly get all the information collected and then presented sensibly in the game. My only topic in question will remain the original point of this post...

How does Status Damage work?
How does it scale with Duration, specifically. Does the increase to duration proportionally increase the total damage done by the end of the effect or does it always do the listed damage, but now it just takes a longer time to do that damage?
How do other damage increase sources interact with Status, like Boss Damage %? Does it interact at all even?
Where in the math and how do additional sources of damage increase interact with duration increases, if they interact?
Status Damage is separate, I think, from Physical and Magical, but the damage source that is used to apply the Status has a type so does that scale as would be expected with any Physical or Magical damage source?
WHY do enemies do Physical and Magical damage when there isn't a mechanic that makes that MEAN anything to the player at all? Damage Absorption is just DA, it works on both Physical and Magical, so why have them split at all for monsters?
And any other information on it you think is relevant or interesting, at this point.

[Abmis]

Status effect damage is tick based. The status duration attribute does cause more status effect damage if the duration will indeed increase. If the mob dies or another status effect cancels the effect, there will be no more damage ticks.

[Amrehlu]

Alrighty. That's good enough I guess.

The update to show what artifacts effect which weapons is a great step too for QoL.
Will still cause minor confusion for people who are going to think fang increases damage of DoT weapons, but it's only increasing the worthless physical hit from the container. And doesn't tell me if the DoT itself is being increased by the boss damage item or just the on-hit, but it's a big improvement all the same for player clarity.