Feldon Here is a fantastic article written by Victer (guild: Perdition, Server: Oasis) . I’ve shamelessly borrowed it from here.
Diminishing Returns means that when you reach certain level of any skill, (mitigation, slashing, defense, etc…) you will start to get minimal benefits from raising its value.
Soft Cap: referred to as the Break Even Point, is not an actual cap, but the value at which you start seeing less return from adding more points to a given stat.
Hard Cap: The definite value at which you will no longer see a benefit from adding more points to a stat.
Stats (str/agi/sta/int/wis)
Hard Cap : [ 15 * level + 20 ] = 1220 at level 80.
Soft Cap: approx 800
Mitigation (same as resists)
Hard Cap: [ Level * 150 ] = 12000 at level 80 or 75%.
Soft Cap: approx 4400
Skills (slash/peirce/def/parry/focus/ministration and so on)
Hard Cap : [ 6.5 * Level ] = 520
Soft Cap: unknown
Hate
Hard Cap: -50% to +50% each (no soft cap)
+Spell Damage / +Combat Art Damage / +Heals
Hard Cap: 50% of damage/heal of the skill
Critical Mitigation
This has a base % dependent on your AGI.
Hard Cap: 100%.
Critical Mitigation applies to only TSO mobs.
100% Crit Mit will absorb all additional damage done from the mob criting an attack.
Armor/Shields
The level of your armor and shield compared to you makes a difference in how much mitigation% and block% you recieve from your items.
For example when you are level 80 and you wear a level 80 item with 100 mitigation, it will give you more absorbing% then a level 10 item with 100 mitigation. Same goes with the protection on shield, a level 80 shield with 1000 protection will give more block% then a lvl 20 shield with 1000.
Weapons
Double Attack and Crits Hard Cap = 100% (no soft cap)
Weapon Crit Calculation: [ Crit% * 1.09 [ max – min ] + max + min ] / delay
Use /weaponstats to get the real numbers depending on your gear/current buffs.
Haste/DPS mod Hard Cap: 200 points. The 200 points equates to 125%.
Haste/DPS mod Soft Cap: approx 80 points.
Generally speaking, 40% of the hard cap is roughly the break even point on most the diminishing returns graphs for resists, stats, and skills.
Contested vs Uncontested (for skills/stats… not mobs)
Contested means that your level is compared to the mobs level to calculate the outcome of the action.
Uncontested means that it doesn’t matter what your level is compared to the mobs level. The action will take place the same % of times regardless of level.
There are only a few things that are Uncontested. These are a few that I know of.
- Block% (+% Shield Effectivness works as a addition to Block% depending on the base protection of your shield)
- Riposte% on items or Parry% on items (NOT +parry)
- Generally if your item or AA has plus to a percentage of something then it is considered uncontested.
For example: A chestpeice with +1% parry is MUCH better then a chestpeice with +10 parry.
Pretty much everything else is contested against the mobs level. Thats why an orange mob is more dangerous then a yellow mob.
Like written in the original thread Critical Mitigation does not work like it is described here:
10% Critical Mitigation reduce the Critical Multiplier by 0.1. PCs normally have an Critical Multiplier of 1.3. So 30% Critical Mitigation should be enough to completely mitigate a critical hit made by a player. (But there are some AA that increase the Multiplier in the Shadow tree so it is only partially right.)
But we don’t know how high the Crit Multiplier of raidmobs will be. It might be that 2.0 is the highest we will encounter. Then 100% will remove all criticals, but it can also be that 1.5 or even 3.0 is the highest we ill encounter. With the first 50% would be enough. For the second you would even need 200% Critical Mitigation.
Soon we will see how much we really need. 😉