[InsainArcaneBirdbrain]

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Important Game Concepts

Dramatic Acrobatics through Systematic Mathematics

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Alright, so as you may have discovered thus far, there's a ton of stats and variables at play in SL2. How they interact however is just as important, and I'll be going over the key ones now.

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Types of Stats and Stat Limitations

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Base: Also known as your racial base. You remember the numbers displayed back when you were choosing a race in Professor Pink's room? These are the stats associated with the race of your choosing. They are important as they play into at what point stats begin softcapping on your character. Through Legend Extending (LE), you can spend Inks on getting +1 added to your racial bases, and this can be done exactly once per stat for every stat excluding Apt. Other than Inks though, there is no way to increase your racial bases.

Softcap: Each and every stat reaches a point where each invested point begins suffering from diminishing returns, which is known as softcap. The way to calculate a softcap for a stat is to use the formula (40 + Base Stat = Stat Softcap). An Imperial Human who has 4 base in every stat would softcap at 44 in every stat for example. While the diminishing returns start off small, with the first three points past softcap only providing .9 investment rather than the normal 1 per point, which is why we differentiate the displayed stat with a...

Scaled Stat: The stat menu by default displays total stats, which account for (Base + Invested + Bonus), but if you click on the little man above Fire Atk, the game will switch to displaying scaled stats. Scaled refers to actual total of stat after softcap diminishing returns are applied. Most things which use stats as a variable will use scaled stats if it isn't explicitly stated to be base.

Invested Stat: These are the stats you allocate manually, and you get 4 per level up to a total of 240 points at lv60.

Bonus Stat: Stats derived from any source outside Base and Invested stats. These include but are not limited to-

• Mage enchant core stat mods
  
• Weapon/Armor core stat mods
  
• Skill/Status based stat buffs
  
• Class Passive Stat Buffs (The ones you invest skill points into)
  
• Passive Class Buffs (The passive stats you gain from the MC, listed on wiki class pages)
  

An important thing to note which I see A LOT of new players make a mistake on is that bonus stats DO NOT count toward reaching stat requirement thresholds for Traits. Only Base + Invested count for those! If you hover over a stat, the leftmost number is the racial base while the rightmost is invested points. Ink base stat is applied to the right side here for whatever reason as a heads up. These two numbers when added together needs to match the req of the trait, and for Cel specifically, also tells you your exact Ini.

Hardcap: Hardcap refers to the hard investment limit of a stat, and is not actually really directly related to softcap. The base + invested stat amount cannot go above 80 (again, refer to the above hover trick to determine this). Bonus stats do not actually contribute towards hardcap. With how hard stats would scale at this point, how would this even matter you might ask? Well, there's exactly one situation with a trait called "Luminary Element" which will remove the universal 1 Ele Atk per 4 Will in exchange of granting +1 Ele Atk of a chosen Starsign element per Unscaled Will. It's not uncommon for a Luminary build to push Will to hardcap in order to maximize the Element Attack gain (Even though the scaled stat will end up around 65).

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Weapon Scaling & Attack Scaling

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If you examine the stat page of a weapon, you will notice at the bottom that several tags are assigned to the weapon alongside % values next to stats. This represents weapon scaling, or rather, what stats the weapon utilizes to calculate weapon power. The way these are determined, one must understand that each weapon type has a base scaling which starts at 100%. This base stat is GUI for Guns/Bows, WIL for tomes/Gem Staves, and STR for every other weapon type. The other tags take away from the main stat, and gives it to another. Flamelit for example takes away 30% scaling from the main stat, but adds 40% to STR scaling. It's in your best interest to select a weapon that not only matches skill requirements for your class, but also have a scaling that matches well into what you are investing stats into. 

The total power derived from the stat scaling, weapon base stats, and possible other weapon power mods results in a value listed in both the stat screen and bottom of the weapon known as Scaled Weapon Attack (Often referred to as SWA). SWA is the value used when determining basic attack damage and the scaled damage factor in non-basic attack skills. (A 150% weapon scaling attack performed with 120 SWA would have a base damage value of 180 damage as an  example)

Elemental attack is quite similar, in which you increase the damage of the skill by the Elemental Atk scaled by the listed value. Magic is special in this case as it will list an Ele Atk alongside (a usually) 100% SWAswa mod. In order to utilize the spell SWA mod however, the weapon used to perform the spell must either be a tome, have the "spelledge" trait, or (only with nature/lightning magic) a metal weapon made of conduiz.

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The Evade Factor

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Now it's time to go over the most recent major overhaul the system's gone through. Remember how I mentioned before that Hit and Eva were just flat checks against each other? Well, sorry to break it to you, but I lied. Only a little bit though.

In the current version of the game, every attack that rolls a hit check actually rolls twice sometimes. Depending on what passes/fails, one of several things happen. They are as follows-

First Hit checks pass: The attack lands normally, and does full damage.

First Hit check fails, but the other succeeds: The attack triggers Glancing, which will negate most additional and on-hit effects, and reduce the total damage of the attack by 60%. Glancing also negates momentum gain from landing a critical.

Both checks fail: The attack completely misses, and no damage/effects are dealt.

Since most attacks in this game require a hit check now, building enough Hit in order to reliably get decent hit on evasive foes is important. Another important aspect one must consider is the Hit/Eva buff cap.

While Hit and Eva gained from stats, the base stats of gear (does not include bonuses listed in the text, only the numbers at top), and flanking do not cap, every other source does at +50. If I were to activate Disengage (+30 Eva buff) and Swaying (+40 Eva buff) together, I wouldn't have +70 Eva as it would be capped at +50.

The important thing to note here however is that only the final result is capped, so if the enemy applied a lv30 glowing (-30 Eva debuff) on top of the aforementioned buffs, I'd be at +40 Eva. (30+40-30=40)

 

  

Still with me? Now that I got all of the important wordy stuff out of the way, my next post shall begin to cover the actual application of these concepts.