SWTOR Diminishing Return Formulas

[noobas]

In general, the principal of diminishing returns means that the greatest benefit is recieved per unit of increase of an independant variable at the beginning (between 0 and 1 units), which, decreases as the independant variable gets larger say (9-10).

Here's an example in real life:

The amount of energy you need to go faster increases exponentially. Therefore, the benefit of arriving faster for more energy expended has a diminishing returns relationship. you could travel at 50km/hr and burn 1L of gas, or, you could travel at 150km/hour, burn 4 litres of gas, but only arrive in 1/3 the time. Therefore, the difference in energy spent and the time saved has a diminishing returns relationship.

In SWTOR, there are relationships between the stat magnitude and the REAL benefit. I noticed this the other day when my whole mishap went down with my main hand pistol going missing, and the GM not replacing it for a few days. I bought a cheap purple blaster from gTN that offered 50 defence rating. I noticed after I equipped the pistol that my deflect/parry chance went up to 6.4% (from 5%) or something. I was like whoa!

So I started investigating the magnitude increase for a change in a stat. It turns out, some people have already figured out the relationship. What they haven't figured out is what the ideal stat magnitudes are.

OK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


WTH does all this mean?

Basically, what it means is that if you (hypothetically) add 600 to one stat to get a 30% increase in damage mitigation, but, you could add 200 to one stat and 200 to another stat to get the SAME damage mitigation.

These numbers are an example. What I'm trying to do is find the minimum stat increase for the maximum gain to equal the maxed benefit of another single stat. The point of this, is that instead of TWINKING (for example) defence rating, you could, potentially increase defence rating, shield rating and absorption and get a larger increase to your mitigated % of damage instead of putting every defence rating on every item.

So, I made up this spreadsheet. None of this is verified so I'm not making any promises, but, check it out, it is worth a quick look.

Once I get more of the calcs in and set it up a bit better you'll see that patterns will emerge... we want to find those patterns and use their relationship to our advantage.

The general conclusion, so far, is that it's more beneficial to increase ALL defensive stats to produce the greatest benefit from the early max gains area... even 100 points in shielding and absorb rating provides 12% mitigation, and outperforms the benefit of 450 stat increase in def rating from 550 to 900...

So, check this out, and check the numbers, the relationships are not proven, but are instinctually right, I got them from sithwarrior.com website and they seem to know their stuff.

Cheers

Heres the spreadsheet, edit it if you think you can help me.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... VF2WHRWMWc

[Hyde]

This is a very good detail on why sites like SithWarrior.com (which is about all classes, bad domain name) tell tanks to try and keep all 3 tank stats balanced for PVE tanking. In theory 300 points of Defense is MUCH better for you than 300 points of Shield Rating and Absorbtion ... but ... 100 points of all 3 is that much better than 300 in any one of them and 0 in the others or 200 in 1 and 50 in the others.

Translation: yep.