Hard skin E6 or Fortitude E7?

[applenta]

I'm playing Marignon and on the fence between Hard skin and Fortitude blessing. I heard that there's W3 spell Wave warrior that can substitute for Fortitude but i think i wouldn't rely on the chance of getting Water mage. On the other hand, if i do get Water mage, Hard skin would come out on top because there's no substitute for Hardskin, it would simply stack with other protection bonus, would it?

[dyslexicfaser]

Originally posted by applenta:

I think the 7/7/7 super HP would make interesting reference 7 x (Resilence+Strong Vitae+ Undying), might not be the most survivable but we can optimize from there.

Might work okay against AI, but a human player would just roll out Soul Slay or meteors or something on you.

[franktrollman]

Originally posted by dyslexicfaser:

I wonder, is Hard Skin even that good for Agarthan statues? Yes, you get that bonus to earth blesses as Agartha, but Statues aren't very good at actually killing their enemies... I think there's a good argument to be made for giving them some kind of aura (heat, chill, fire shield) instead of piling 5 Prot on top of something that can already hit 25 with a buff.

Getting a +5 bonus to natural protection when your natural protection is already 22 is a big deal. It's an even bigger deal when you never fatigue out. If you're playing against humans you are going to need Shock resistance, but you're pretty well protected from most other forms of attack.

But the bottom line is that when you have 22 natural protection, most attacks do 5 damage or less, so with hard skin most attacks just bounce.

[applenta]

Your information regarding the relationship between Natural Protection and Armor is helpful, i would never know without you telling, according to the formula Natural Protection + Armor Protection - (Natural Protection x Armor Protection)/40 , one value at 20 will diminish other by 1/2, and one value at 40 will completely negate the other's value. That means you only get half of what you paid for Hardskin if apply to units armored around 20, while with Fortitude, due to the diminishing return and difficulty of getting higher Protection value, it is generally easier to reach protection value that deflect off non elemental attack with Fortitude.

[Telos]

In comparing these, one key issue is how much damage your sacreds will typically take per hit (by which I mean each hit that makes it past whatever other defenses they have, like defense skill, parrying, awe, ethereality, luck, and innate armor and protection).

If the answer is that your sacreds already have such good protection that they typically take less than 5 damage per hit, then hard skin will likely be better, as it will reduce damage from those hits to very near 0, which is a drastic improvement in survivability, especially if you also have regeneration to counteract the occasional hits that do make it through, which is much more than you would get from fortitude. (Note this is true even if the unit has no innate natural protection, like a LA Agartha blind fighter -- hard skin still is great at turning scratches into nothing. Yes, it stacks better with basic protection than it does with armor protection, but anything that has enough armor to significantly diminish the stacking will be something that has so much armor that most hits won't do much to it, so it'll be more useful to subtract a constant from each of those hits, making many of them zero, than it is to just cut them each in half.)

If the answer is instead that your sacreds very often take more than 8 damage per hit, then fortitude will likely be better as it will subtract off more from such hits than hard skin would. So, e.g., EA Kailasa depends on awe and defense skill to avoid hits, but when hits get through they hurt a lot, and it's better to cut that heavy damage in half than it is to just subtract 5 from it.

For many sacreds the answer will be somewhere in between those thresholds (i.e., in the 5-8 range), where hard skin and fortitude both amount to roughly the same thing.

[franktrollman]

Originally posted by Telos:

For many sacreds the answer will be somewhere in between those thresholds (i.e., in the 5-8 range), where hard skin and fortitude both amount to roughly the same thing.

The cutoff is actually 10 damage. If Fortitude halves 10 damage, it's only stopping 5 damage, which means it isn't better than Tough Skin. Fortitude is only superior when it stops 6 or more damage, which means you have to be getting clocked for 12 damage - which is a pretty rare event for most units.

While I agree that Kailasa Apsaras and Flagellants who have no protection at all and routinely get shanked for 15 damage and more when they are struck at all are good targets for Fortitude, creatures who have decent protections already are almost always going to want the Hard Skin. Even if a considerable amount of their protection comes from armor. At Armor-based protection 16, Tough Skin provides 3 points of net protection. And that would fall behind Fortitude at 8 damage (which is to say 24+ pre-protection damage). And that's only really coming up while fighting Giants. If that 16 protection was coming from natural protection instead, you'd get a full 5 points of net protection and Fortitude would only pull ahead with 12 net damage - which would come from a 33 point attack that is unlikely to come even from a Jotun's ax.

The times Fortitude is better are actually a bit rare. You have to have very large armor-based protection (example: Sacred Knights), an assumption that you're going to be replacing your natural protection with a set value (example: Sacred commanders with Earth magic), or virtually no protection so that all attacks that hit are very large (example: Apsaras).

[applenta]

So, Fortitude's damage reduction come before or after Armor (Protection)'s reduction? If it comes before, would be great but if it comes after, would be less useful. I thought Fortitude halves damage before armor penetration, it's too good to be true, right?

Guess i'll go for Hard Skin and Stygian Flesh, helps my Mages much better against massed arrow, no? And would Barkskin add further to the protection value?

[Uncle Al]

Originally posted by applenta:

Guess i'll go for Hard Skin and Stygian Flesh, helps my Mages much better against massed arrow, no? And would Barkskin add further to the protection value?

They don't stack so it's a bit of a waste to take both blessings. If you do you'll end up with 10 natural protection against mundane weapons and 5 against magic (assuming 0 natural prot on your sacreds).

Barkskin will do very little apart from give you protection against magic weapons if you already have stygian flesh, as it'll overwrite the hard skin bonus.

Invulnerability isn't the same as natural protection so you won't even get the +1 from barkskin which it gives if your natural prot is already 10 or higher.

[sum1won]

Originally posted by Alias:

Last 48 hours in MP alone: crushed three guys who thought Blood Surge is good, and one guy who thought Fortitude is better than Hard Skin. That I beat Impossible AIs with Independents at 9 goes without saying.

Where do you usually play multiplayer?

[franktrollman]

Originally posted by applenta:

So, Fortitude's damage reduction come before or after Armor (Protection)'s reduction? If it comes before, would be great but if it comes after, would be less useful. I thought Fortitude halves damage before armor penetration, it's too good to be true, right?

Fortitude is applied after protection. Think of it as a scaling protection boost. 1 point of protection if you were going to take 2 damage; 2 points of protection if you were going to take 4, and so on.

Guess i'll go for Hard Skin and Stygian Flesh, helps my Mages much better against massed arrow, no? And would Barkskin add further to the protection value?

Hard Skin boosts protection and does not play nicely with other effects that set protection to specific values. So if you Hard Skin + Barkskin or Stygian Flesh, you get +5 Protection and then your Protection is set to 10, thus rendering the Hard Skin useless.

For Marignon specifically, I would say that Fortitude is a better pick than Hard Skin. All those naked sacreds who will take 10+ damage every time they get hit by weapons.

[Telos]

Originally posted by franktrollman:

The cutoff is actually 10 damage. If Fortitude halves 10 damage, it's only stopping 5 damage, which means it isn't better than Tough Skin.

The reason I suggested 8, rather than 10, for the rule of thumb is that most sacreds have some sort of armor protection, so suffer some diminishing returns with the natural protection from hard skin, making hard skin more often prevent 4 damage, rather than 5. Also, piercing and armor-piercing damage are quite common and ignore a portion of protection, so that too makes it fairly unusual to get the optimal -5 damage from hard skin. Of course you're right that naked sacreds can prevent 5 damage with hard skin, so for them the break-even point, versus non-piercing damage would indeed be 10 (though even that gets a bit messy when you consider bonus damage from slash and from blunt-to-head). Conversely sacreds with decent armor/helmet will prevent less than 4 damage with hard skin, especially when facing (armor-)piercing damage, so for them the break-even point would be lower than 8. 8 struck me as a good compromise to mention in a rule of thumb.

(There are actually a whole lot more complexities lurking here. E.g., incoming damage isn't always equal to the average amount, instead it comes in a lopsided distribution around that amount. Fortitude is much better versus abnormally strong hits; hard skin is better versus weakish hits. Computing the actual performance of these would require an expected value computation over all of these possible outcomes, and would probably also require taking into account other features about the survivability of the sacreds. E.g., if the sacred has low enough HP that an unlucky hit might kill it, and strong enough defenses and regeneration to come back after any minor hit, that might weigh in favor of fortitude to prevent disastrously fatal hits, even if the expected total damage taken under hard skin is lower. I didn't try to go into any of those details, and instead just suggested a rule of thumb which will be close to right in most scenarios.)

[Phyvo]

I don't know the mathematics for computing the EV of a recursively exploding function like DRNs, but writing a python script to simulate the results and which bless is better in which situations is actually pretty easy. I haven't done it, but I think that's mainly because I don't see the value in a fortitude bless in general. The main purpose I've found for hard skin is to make awake expanders mostly invincible with no research required. As far as unit blesses go I think that hard skin is meh/ok and fortitude is pretty bad. If I'm investing 6-7 bless points I want something with more punch, like awe or regeneration, and minor blesses like +4 def or HP + undying can actually be more consistently effective.

[Telos]

Both blesses are pretty good at filling the role of turning slowly-dying regenerating sacreds into near-invincible regenerating-faster-than-they-take-damage sacreds. This can be especially relevant if you're trying to make national priest-mages work as solo-thugs versus PD. E.g., fortitude is a pretty plausible choice for Sidhe Lords or Melias, who can already self-cast a protection spell better than hard skin, but need some sort of survivability boost to keep up with incoming damage. And hard skin is great for highly survivable regenerating sacreds who tend to take just minor scratches which hard skin can reduce to nothing, e.g.,Niefel giants, Lemurian consul thugs, blind fighters, MA Agarthan statues, or MA Marignon knights. Unfortunately, most of these would also really like reinvigoration, so it's a tough choice which to pick up in your bless.

For the task of making sacred units more protected in lots of circumstances, Stygian Flesh is often better than both of these, because it's cheaper, provides more damage mitigation than hard skin (for any sacred with less than 5 natural protection, against non-magic damage) and also often more than fortitude (except for really strong hits). Sure, Stygian Flesh can easily be countered by magic weapons, but it's nice and cheap and you'll probably find more than enough places you can use it (e.g., fighting indies or PD) to justify its cost. But I definitely wouldn't want to rely on this to keep thugs alive, as its so easy to counter.