Stagger / Stagger Cleave

[VisionofFire]

Since there's some mechanics posts going on in Reddit right now, I figured I'd mention a few things that are probably common knowledge, but were not obvious to me as I don't think there are many stagger mechanics posts. Or they're not included in the Everything you wish FatShark told you post. Other people are welcome to chip in, and correct if any of the points below are wrong. (I only dabble in reading scripts, haven't fully tested everything)

* Strength potion doubles stagger power of attacks
* Strength potion doubles stagger cleave only, does not affect damage cleave
* Attacking an enemy that is already staggered adds to the stagger strength of attack, up to a cap of double of the new attack
* Threshold to cause a heavy stagger on push is doubled, if the enemy is not already staggered
* Enemies have stagger resistance, and stagger reduction. Stagger reduction is ignored on critical hits / headshots, but not all enemies have stagger reduction. So crits effectively seem to increase stagger power as most elites have stagger reduction, and most trash without it is easy to stagger anyways. Technically impact multiplier vs armor type could be different for the crit armor table as well, but haven't dug around to find examples.
* Piston Power doubles stagger power.
* Piston Power does not always seem to work as advertised. Something like Dual Hammers Heavy 1 will seemingly occasionally fail to stagger Chaos Warrior Overhead. Not 100% sure why this is the case, but might have to do with order of code. Technically, the ignore staggers check to see if the stagger type is ignored happens before the stagger type is converted to explosive by Piston power. If the stagger is very weak and gets calculated to be NONE, the ignore check is not satisfied and the stagger is then converted to explosive by piston power buff. However, if the stagger is strong enough to calculate to light/medium (add +10% chaos), then ignore stagger check for Chaos warrior Overhead (ignores light / medium stagger) causes the stagger function to return before Piston Power explosive check. Which is probably why Piston Power always works on monsters (monsters have very high stagger resist, and thus always evaluate base stagger effect to none). So this is amusingly one of the few times having "less" stagger power is required to guarantee the effect triggers.
* Amusingly, if the above is true, that means Piston Power is going to be bad at interrupting stuff that mostly only explosives can. (Chaos Warrior uppercut, Berzerker jump). Because of doubled stagger power from Piston Power, it's very likely base stagger will be count as at least light stagger, which means that adding more stagger power can at most upgrade the base stagger to a heavy stagger, which would still be ignored.
* Since THP on stagger heals by stagger type, Piston Power converting type to explosion makes it restore 6 HP per enemy hit, rather than 1/2/3 HP.
* Stagger THP talent: Pushes restore 0.6 THP per enemy hit.

[Bock]

There are a lot of verified documents and videos on hero power, stagger, cleave, move tech and so on. Look up J_sat and Royal w/ cheese. After that try to find the 26 page document on how to optimize a billhook on whc. A lot of five head stuff out there

Damage calculator
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QDUkx25SNYLLCcnoqwQ4W5c2nsj6KPKb2Reb8C-_h0Q/edit#gid=62597031

Video on damage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LGhg6SztCQ

Deep mechanics
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1816101198

Move tech
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y7CSzMPlliMTsTjSoxdg4UhOQtu3lRd_E2ju8Tn7zqQ/edit#gid=1772327800

[VisionofFire]

@Bock

Thanks for posting those. I do think the bullet points I listed in my original post are not covered by the linked guides. Are they in some other in depth videos? Would love to check them out.

[VernonKun]

- Stagger THP would round off to 0.5 per enemy in the final step.
- Stagger power also increases the stagger distance (how far the enemy flies away) even it doesn't reach breakpoint to the next stagger type.

I am planning to make the stagger breakpoint spreadsheet now that I can edit the damage breakpoint spreadsheet.

[VisionofFire]

@VernonKun
Thanks for the corrections and additions, as it would probably take me a lot more digging and testing to figure it out myself. Now that you mentioned it, I revisited that block, and besides distance, additional stagger power that doesn't hit the next breakpoint can also increase stagger duration. Good to know.

Stagger breakpoint spreadsheet would be pretty useful! The one downside of the Opportunist guide currently available on steam, is it doesn't provide +% breakpoints for non-Opportunist weapons. Out of curiosity, are the values in the Armor / Crit Armor tables and stuff in the Breakpoints spreadsheet manually entered? Or auto extracted from game files. And would you be porting those values to your stagger spreadsheet, or doing your own data extraction?

I believe the breakpoints spreadsheet had some values that were incorrect. (i.e. targets_axe_linesman_H is listed as 0.3 impact, when it's actually 0.5, or it's crit armor impact values are missing), so I'd guess those are being manually kept up to date.

[VernonKun]

I asked the original author and me both just enter values manually. The database is not that big and as a non-programmer I don't think I can make a program to read text files automatically. I do heard that jsat's mates are now using something like that for Darktide.

[VernonKun]

Stagger duration itself is questionable as for some if not most enemies it waits for the stagger animation to complete anyway.

[VernonKun]

In case you want to help double checking you can check this
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gkre74KONJzkTTF5EP6utTZAphv2iJcgrMKwU9mC3n4/edit?usp=drivesdk

[VisionofFire]

@Vernonkun:
Thanks for the links.
Haven't touched lua much outside of reading V2 and Invisible inc stuff, but I guess I should probably take a crack at seeing if they can be parsed.