 So guys I am back with another Outriders video and today we cover the latest post by PCF regarding damage control within the game which also includes some hidden mechanics. How's it going guys, my name is DPJ and if you enjoyed the video leaving a like really helps out and if you like what you see and want to see more Outriders be sure to subscribe so let's get straight into their post. Hey everyone, welcome to a new entry in our Outriders Developer Insights blog. These posts specifically focus on a specific aspect of Outriders and are intended to be a goal to resource for players with questions around their respective topic. As mentioned a little while ago we wanted to provide a community with a clearer view on some of the game's mechanics that influence the damage taken by the player character. The developer insight posts includes a look at the core mechanics that interact with incoming damage but it also goes into systems that are intentionally hidden and working in the background and they start with resistance guys. So what does resistance protect from? Resistance is a mechanic that serves to protect the player from incoming anomaly damage. In practice this means all nine physical attacks by enemies or enemy non melee abilities and elemental attacks are counted as anomaly. The perfect example of such an attack are fire grenades from shotgunners. What does resistance not protect from? Physical damage completely ignores resistance therefore all physical attacks will bypass this stat. How does resistance scale? Resistance reduces the incoming anomaly damage by the given percentage so 30 percent resistance is 30 percent damage reduction. And in-game example a brood mother uses anomaly eruption. It is an area of denial ability that forces the character to move. A heat deal is 35,941 anomaly damage on a challenge tier 15 expedition. If the player has 50% resistance it will take 17,970 damage from the hit. If the player has 30% resistance they will take 25,158 damage from the hit. Does resistance have any cap above which it will have no further effect? Resistance is capped at 85% incoming damage. Okay so moving on to armor. What does armor protect from? Armor is a status served to protect the player character from incoming physical damage. In general this means all melee and ranged weapon attacks in the game. What does armor not protect from? Anomaly damage completely ignores armor therefore all anomaly attacks will bypass this stat. How does armor scale? Armor value is used to determine how much physical damage should be reduced. It is compared and scales accordingly to the armor reference value during calculation. Reference value is the expected armor value on a certain level, world tier or challenge tier. At a challenge tier 15 expedition a brood mother deals around 50k damage with a melee attack. If the player armor is on par with the reference value they will have roughly 30% damage reduction. If the player armor is lower the damage reduction will be lower vice versa for higher armor and damage reduction. Physical damage displayed in your stats screen shows the physical damage reduction against the highest unlocked level enemies. This means that if you progress from one challenge tier to the next without adjusting your armor value no physical damage reduction may display lower. That actually makes sense to me. After looking at these numbers and thinking they don't work right while they aren't calculating right, seeing this actually makes sense now. Does armor have any cap? Above which it will have no further effect. Armor does not have an upper cap but physical damage reduction derived from armor is capped at 85%. So the shield. What does shield protect from? Both types of damage are blocked by the shield. If the damage is normally based the damage the shield takes will be based on the resistance stat calculation explained above. If their damage is physical based it will use the armor value. That makes sense now. How does the shield work? The best way to describe how a shield works would be to treat it as an additional health bar which absorbs all damage first until it depletes and only then damages reduced from the actual health points. Shields should behave exactly like the HP bar except that they will deteriorate over time. It will also deteriorate faster when out of combat. The max amount of shield is equal to your max amount of HP. Increasing your HP will also help increase the max amount of available shield. Important as shield gains are always based on percentages boosting your HP can have a significant impact on your shield values. The shield offer any additional protection. Shield prevents characters from being affected by knockbacks and interrupts. The tuxes shield has an additional 5% extra damage reduction that reduces final damage taken. This is a unique effect to the class and note of the class benefits from it. Nice to know. Damage reduction nods and muds. Some skill tree nods and gear muds provide an effect that reduces incoming damage from enemy type by a certain percent. Enemy type means a certain enemy class here for example elites. The final damage calculation step is multiplying damage through modifiers and one of them is damage reduction. For example let's say reduces incoming damage from brood mothers by 30% reduce final damage taken by brood mothers by 30%. So the Phoenix mechanics. These are optional mechanics that allow the player to ignore death the first time it happens. They are tied to the pyromancer devastating ability tree. Status effects versus resistance, armor and shield. Damaging status effects are anomaly damage based. Therefore they are moderated by resistance and not by armor. Damage status affects the or normal damage to the shield moderated by resistance. How does healing and health regen interact with other mechanics? The moment a character's HP reaches zero that character dies. The chronological order of incoming damage slash healing determines if the character will be able to benefit from certain protection effects before hitting 0 HP. If there is healing, shield regen incoming for the next damage instance it will be taken into account. Once the HP reaches zero even if a burst of healing immediately follows no healing will help the player. And that makes sense to have had that instance happen to me so many times and being confused about it. Effects applied by the enemies how do they work? So weakness. Status effects which reduces the outgoing enemy damage by 33% can be applied to player characters by enemy attacks. These effects are used by enemies on higher world level above 9 and a high challenge tier above 4. Runability. Status effect that increases damage taken by 15% can be applied to the player character by enemy attacks. These effects are used by enemies on high world level above 9 and high challenge tiers above 4. Oversurvivability mechanics. Primary death prevention. This prevents players from dropping below 30% of health due to incoming damage. When triggered it will block all damage for 1.2 seconds and prevent hit reactions. The mechanic has a 120 second cooldown. The mechanic will only trigger and go into cooldown when a character reaches 30% HP for the first time while the mechanic is not on cooldown. If an attack will take a character below 30% HP, this mechanic's effect will only take the character to 30% HP and the remaining damage will be disregarded. Secondo death protection. This prevents players from dropping below 10% of health due to incoming damage. When triggered it will block all damage and hit reactions for 2.1 seconds. This mechanic has a 60 second cooldown. The mechanic will only trigger and go into cooldown when a character reaches 10% HP for the first time while the mechanic is not on cooldown. If an attack will take a character below 10 HP, this mechanic's effect will only take the character to 10 HP and the remaining damage will be also disregarded. Spike damage protection. If a single hit takes more than 60% of a player's max HP, its value is limited to just that 65%. The spike protection value increases on high world levels and challenged tiers. It is 65% until ATN 9 and then scales to 84 or 85% by a tier 15. This means that enemies on a higher tiers will be able to deal a higher max damage per individual hit to players before a spike damage protection applies. Don't forget that the initial damage output of enemies also scales up with each tier that you progress through. This is intentional as higher tiers are designed to challenge players to assemble a complete build that includes adequate protection from damaged spikes, who resistance armor or even both. Master enemy behaviour and attack patterns in order to bear dodge their abilities and migrate damage from them. Spike damage protection has no cooldown so it counts for every hit. However, certain boss attacks can be very deadly regardless of the additional protection mechanic and should therefore be avoided or dodged whenever possible. In game examples, the Chrysalis Bruever attack deal multiple hits per swipe. The Bruever's anomaly surge deals damage in quick succession. So they go on to state these final three mechanics are intentionally hidden in our orders, as with many other such secret mechanics in games. The original version behind the designs is for them to help the player while also ensuring that players become reliant on these mechanics when playing the game. Making them too obvious would lead to an overreliance on these features and an unreliance on the game's focal survivability mechanics. Resistance armor shields, health regen, skill tree nodes, gear mods, CC abilities and especially at higher difficulties learning and understanding enemy spawn waves, behaviours and abilities. Rather these mechanics were envisioned as subtool ways of preventing players from feeling like they are unfairly killed but also giving those players a feeling of almost but not quite being killed in extremely dangerous close cool battles. Of course these mechanics need to be balanced in a certain way, trigger them too generously and players end up being effectively immortal, trigger them not often enough and the overall design may feel unfair. Given our issues around damage mitigation, we thought they need to talk about these mechanics more openly as everyone having a better understanding of them may help explain why some enemies may appear to deal inconsistent damage. Example individual attacks appearing to deal more or less damage while the death prevention are either active or uncooled at. We feel that a clearer look on these effects of all the discuss mechanics so far may help to differentiate any issues caused by damage mitigation bugs from the intended difficulty of the game or interactions of effects on the certain builds. We hope that you enjoyed the first peek under the hood of the Outriders system, we'll be back with another one soon, the Outriders team. And guys that is the end of the post, that is the end of the blog and there's actually a lot of things explained here which make clear a lot of the things I've been experiencing and been seriously confused about. So yes if you do want to read through the entire post again I will link it down below for you to check out guys but yes that was the Outriders damage control the developer insights and I hope you enjoyed the video, if you did leave me a like really helps out, if you're new around here and want to see more Outriders be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video upload a can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully I will see you on that next one.