Marvel Heroes Damage and Defense Calculations Guide

Marvel Heroes Damage and Defense Calculations Guide by Trickshaw

In here we discuss all the things that Meta-Gamers want to know; exactly how to make your Heroes ever more awesome day by day. Feel free to discuss, nitpick and/or improve upon what is found in these pages. Any information gleaned from other sources will be notated; credit will be given where credit be due.

This is intended to be a communal work so feel free to suggest and/or contribute!

Enjoy!!

TIME TO LIVE (TTL)

Time to Live, or TTL, is basically the amount of time it’s going to take any given source(s) of damage to bring you to your knees. In Marvel Heroes TTL is pretty easy to figure out because there are only two sources of mitigation: Damage Resistance (or Defense) and Dodge.

H = Health
A = Attackers DPS
R = Defense (Decimal Format)
D = Dodge (Decimal Format)

• H/[A*((1-R)(1-D))]=TTL

TTL is measured in seconds. Decimal format means if you have a 60% Defense then it would be inserted as 0.6. So, for example if I had a Health Pool of 10k, a Defense of 45% and a Dodge rating of 10% the problem would look like this:

• 10000/[1000*((1-.45)(1-.1))]=20.2

Or 20.2 seconds until I’m on my knees beggin’ for a rez. Now, the first thing a clever someone is going to ask is, “What about TEH HEALZ YOOO!?!?” to which I say…

• H/[A*((1-R)(1-D))-L]=TTL

Thanks to @Leloric for his insight!

Where “L” equals the sum of heals you gain per second. I want to stress that I don’t like using this. A.) Self heals are very erratic and (usually) not guaranteed and B.) typically dependent on your DPS since the bulk of MH’s self healing stems from On-Hit effects. Everyone knows healing will increase your lifespan. YA DOY!!  But the point behind TTL is to let you know exactly how long you have to live without heals. This way you can make gearing choices around increasing survival.

Heroes fortunate enough to have continuous passive skill regen (i.e. Wolverine, Deadpool and to an extent Hulk) can feel free to use this version to help formulate TTL given these are integral parts of how these characters function in conjunction with the fact that they get absurd sums of it anyway. However, I cannot stress enough that I do not like the idea of people using On-Hit effects to calculate TTL.

Also, if any mathletes want to make a more precise version… by all means feel free. This is pretty quick and dirty and can be compounded infinitely with complexity to account for all manner of “what if’s”. I simply don’t care that much to bother with it.

But there you go.

TIME TO KILL (TTK)

Another way of looking at TTL is by using it’s sister premise of TTK or Time to Kill. TTK and TTL are interchangeable ideals. TTK is basically how long will it take for me to kill ‘X’ enemy. Unlike TTL, TTK takes more data mining to figure out (because of mob values) although the formula is essentially the same as TTK.

To find TTK simply insert your target’s Defense (R), Dodge (D) and Health (H) into the previous equation(s) and insert your own DPS (A) to find out the TTK value of any given enemy. You can use the section below to figure out your own DPS value.

DAMAGE PER SECOND (DPS)

AKA the “Deeps”.

DPS is exactly what it says; how much damage am I pumping out per second? What I like to use as a gauge is what I refer to as “Potential Average DPS”. Or, in optimal circumstances what would my average DPS be? Again, the simplicity of MH makes this pretty straight forward and easy to figure out.

First we find out the average damage per second of your chosen attack:

A = Max Damage
B = Minimum Damage
S = Attack Speed

• ((A+B)/2)*S=Average Damage (or Avg)

Now that we have that, we need to figure out how critical damage weights our DPS:

Avg = Average Damage (See Above)
C = Crit% (Decimal Format)
D = Crit Damage Bonus
X = Coefficient

• (Avg(1-C))+(C((Avg *1.5)+(X *D)))= Average DPS

What this is doing is calculating your average DPS in a given time frame large enough for averages to expound. The “Coefficient” in question is the factor in which bonus damage is multiplied (See Coefficient section below). Due to my testing we know that nearly every Hulk attack has a coefficient of 1. I cannot say the same for any other heroes. @Doomsaw stated that Gaz will be including dmg coefficients into tooltips. When? I cannot say.

This calculation isn’t going to be 100% accurate (given that certain Crit%’s will yield a fraction of an attack) so, again, any mathletes out there want to make this more precise then please feel free. This will, however, get you within a percentage point margin of error.

Edit:
This section has essentially been gutting since Penetration has been removed per patch 1.2. As per before, once Damage Coefficients are added to tooltips I will update this section for accuracy.

COEFFICIENTS

Coefficient(s) as far as this work is concerned refers to the factor in which bonus dmg and crit dmg is applied to any given ability.

There are two ways to work out any given ability’s coefficient. They are…

Singlular:

A = Highest/Lowest number observed w/ bonus
B = Highest/Lowest number observed w/o bonus
C = Bonus
D = Coeficient

• (A-B)/C = D

And Average:

A = Low Dmg after Bonus
B = High Dmg after Bonus
C = Low Dmg before Bonus
D = High Dmg before Bonus
E = Bonus
F = Coefficient

• (((A+B)/2)-((C+D)/2))/E = F

Example:

Bonuses:

+Dmg = 77 (HAMMER Ordnance)
+Phys = 36 (Bannertech Accelerator)

Furious Punch: 57-85 (57-86)
+Dmg 153-182 (154-183) ~ Coefficient (High): 1.259, Coefficient (Low): 1.259, Average: 1.259
+Phys 102-130 (112-140) ~ Coefficient (High): 1.222 , Coefficient (Low): 1.25, Average: 1.236

The parenthetical values listed are the high/low damage numbers provided in the ability’s tooltip. The non-parenthetical values are actual observed high/low numbers off of a test dummy. Now, this doesn’t account for stat bonuses (i.e. fighting, strength etc.) so it’s important to bear that in mind.

At the time of testing my Hulk had a +25% dmg bonus from stats so when you see a coefficient like 1.259 (example above) it’s safe to presume the actual coefficient in this case is 1. As stated before, actual coefficients will be added to Tooltips per @Doomsaw sometime in the future. Once that’s done testing like this will be superfluous other than to bug check. In the meantime this allows you to take a look and figure out roughly how bonuses are affecting your chosen attacks.

DEFENSE

Damage Resistance (DR), or simply Defense, is a measure of how much damage is negated from any given attack. Now that Penetration has been removed from Marvel Heroes we don’t have to worry (yet) as to how this stat reacts.

Thanks to @idrinkdrpepper, @Kotli and @Phrink compiling data points we now have the following to give us a guide to Defense Total and DR%:

0% = 0
5% = 382.3529412
10% = 812.5
15% = 1300
20% = 1857.142857
25% = 2500
30% = 3250
35% = 4136.363636
40% = 5200
45% = 6500
50% = 8125
55% = 10214.28571
60% = 13000
65% = 16900
70% = 22750
75% = 32500
80% = 52000
85% = 110500
90% = Inf

MEAN MITIGATION

In SWTOR I wrote a source of information called “Tanking: A Primer” for the tanking community; which became a cornerstone for tanking information. One of the calculations I used was based on the idea of “Mean Mitigation” or average mitigation. That is to say, on average, how much damage are you mitigating in any period of time.

Eventually I abandoned the project and game, for several reasons, however the idea can be translated to Marvel Heroes which is, again, much more simplistic. It would look something like this:

A = Defense% (Decimal Format)
B = Dodge% (Decimal Format)

• 1-(1-A)(1-B)=Mean Mitigation

For example:

• 1-(1-.5)(1-.3)=0.65

A Hero with a Defense of 50% and a Dodge of 30% will have a Mean Mitigation of 65%. So in a given period of time the amount of damage that can be reasonably expected to be mitigated would be 65%.

Again, in SWTOR this was much more complicated due to the amount of factors involved. Here in MH we basically only have 2 sources of mitigation ergo the calculation is infinitely simpler. Just like TTL this is only a tool to give you an idea of where it is your Hero stands. The more tools the merrier.