Dodge Chance

[madcapbeatitude]

Lately I've been playing through with the goal of really dominting every stage of the game possible with a model built around dodging. The VERY early-agame (lower amateur league) requires enough strength to knock out bum opponents with bum attacks, but once you get high kick and high punch, you can get by with 2ish strength.

I've found that with a Tiger build, the best defense in early game actually requires very carefully calibrating not only strength (2-3, with 9 speed) but stamina (3-5, with the same, to taste and need) in order to fool around with accuracy. There were times when a badly timed stat decay caused me to go into a fight with worryingly low HP, but my kicks started landing easily and eventually whittled away my opponent's energy bar.

It is written in-game that agility "affects dodge chance," but this is only shown to be partially fixed and partially "agility-depenent." This leads me to think that block chance probably ends up linked to a ratio of stats, rather like accuracy. I figured there was also some fixed component, like with the accuracy formulas for individul attacks, and that this is what is increased by the "Reflexes" skill in the basic skill tree. The "Technician" one in Tiger probably beefs up the coefficient for agility dependence, allowing a properly skilled and skinny tiger to dodge with high reliability.

The thing is, do you amp that game by just training for a huge accuracy stat? I found "Slave to the Wind" to be not much of a burden, besides that it meant I couldn't access a lot of the best stuff on the Bear or Turtle trees, ever, with that character.

I've noticed that it's easier to dodge when strength and stamina are in the low single digits. Is the accuracy formula central to dodging? If this is about accuracy and not raw agility, how is it that if I accidentally fight a 15 agility tiger too early in the game I sometimes can't touch them? If we're both skinny, then tiger-on-tiger fights should be heavily decided by other means then dodging skill, like energy efficiency, kick strength and damage reflection.

So, how about it? Does anybody know more about how dodges actually work in this game?

[MuKen]

https://www.reddit.com/r/punchclub/comments/7p7wtg/block_and_dodge/

[madcapbeatitude]

This is really not a complete picture. So the opponent's chance of hitting in the first place is the accuracy of their attack, which has to do with each attack's formula. This can be got above 100%, though that doesn't prevent blocks and dodges.

Secondly is the defense's chance of failing automatically. With no defensive skills this is 100%, so a decently aggressive opponent using accurate attacks will go to town on you, unless you're using a bear build to make sure they go down first. With 1 defesnive skill, this plummets to 25%. (one ticket for automatic failure, 3 for "dodge" or "block.")

Your second defensive skill - dodges, in my case - will replace your first, since dodges and blocks fundamentally all work the same. Some just cost more or less than others; some can reflect damage to HP or energy; one dodge actually doubles as an attack, and one block has enhanced damage mitigation at any given level of stamina.

So it takes your THIRD block or dodges skill to reduce your chance of automatic failure to around 14%, which is pretty essential in late game - the blows will rain down on you, so even 1/7 of them hitting isn't nothing. With Fast Reaction or Fine Block, this can drop to 11%.

Getting three dodge skills requires making some decisions I don't like. You have to lock strength at 4 to pursue the bear tree, where one can gain Sidestep. This would lower the chance of automatic dodge filure to a slim 8%, but also made it VERY difficult to produce enough energy to sustain these dodges. Taking the shortest path to the three dodges would mean never unlocking essentials like Do Not Fall Down III, Mimic or Cobra Strike, which becomes very hard to afford or hit with 4 strength.

So let's say we accept 11% dodge failure as the cost of doing business, although 11% of your brother's punches are still enough to be a problem.

The ability to hit one's dodges the other 89% of the time, however, is quite mysterious. There is a fixed chance to succeed, which is also increased by Fast Reflexes, just like the first part of the accuracy formula for attacks. There is also the accuracy-depedent portion, which is improved by Technician. What I wonder is if getting THIS part of the formula to 100% is possible, and therefore if it is possible only to be hit when an occasional, automatic defensive failure occurs, and if so what kind of accuracy advantage is needed to get there with all of the dodge perks unlocked.

[MuKen]

It's been an extremely long time since I did my experiments, so I no longer have the exact numbers. However, I do remember that there is a fixed hard limit on the dodge chance bonus you can get from raising AGI, and even if you get that full amount and all of the dodge-related perks, it does not get you to 100%.

Block, however, CAN be gotten to 100% (although you are still subject to the automatic failure chance). This is likely to balance out the fact that blocks are just damage reduction, not damage avoidance. However, for a stamina-turtle focused build, the block-based damage reduction added to the innate damage reduction from stacking stamina, plus other bonuses like shining knight and bear hug, can get block hits pretty close to zero damage all the time, so way of the turtle can be very strong defensively.

[madcapbeatitude]

So, with Fine Block/Fast Reflexes and two dodge OR block skills - the number of unique defensive skills that can be found in either tree. Bear allows for a third of either, but requires locking strength above 4, making this great for Turtle (acquiring hard block) but terrible for Tiger, who gains counterattack, but loses 0.1 or 0.2 accuracy forever by keeping 4 strength.

More realistically, this means 4 chances each for TWO blocks/dodges and ONE for an automatic failure; this soft-caps dodge/block chance around 89%, which is enough to bring the endgame opponents to heel but hardly enough to pursue do-damage wins on tough opponents.

From what you can say, a Turtle can achieve this full 89% or even go up to 92% or so if the learn Hard Block and use three blocks. a tiger will never reach even 89%, and it sounds like they also have a lower hard cap that prevents them from even fully reaching 89/92% in either case. So the Tiger will absorb total damage and probably mitigate more immediate damage, but only a Turtle will never take full damage (owing to stamina-based defenses) or get the best success percentages at defending.

What I wish I could figure out is what max dodge requires, so I could try to couple it with as much damage, defense avoidance, etc as possible. I usually prefer a searingly fast build wth 2.2-2.3 accuracy, but in endgame this requires getting by with like 5-6 stamina and minimum strength, only going that high so there's enough energy to use kicks. Giving up attack skills would reduce energy needs severely, but I find it helps to be aggressive enough to maintain an HP lead and avoid an embarrassing loss by taking more damage than you're dealing.

By the endgame, even the occasional scratch from the likes of Kulk Kogan or your brother can be cause for concern given the massive HP and energy damage at stake. Still, it would be nice to know how fast is fast enough. I don't suppose anybody plays Tiger and knows where one should stop?