Author Topic: Absorption?  (Read 2332 times)

Hagis

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Absorption?
« on: December 15, 2017, 10:16:28 PM »
Hello, all.
I'm running a homebrew pen and paper RPG City of Heroes game and we've had enough evaluation time to throw out a few rules that were too clunky and started adding in things that weren't developed enough for the first go-round.

One of the PCs is playing a modified Street Justice/ Bio Armor scrapper. I'm drawing heavily on the numbers and power descriptions in Red Tomax's City of Data. Never having actually played a Bio Armor toon, I'm struggling a little with figuring out the mechanics of Absorption. Under Ablative Carapace for Scrappers, the formula in Red Tomax looks to me like Absorption is functionally equivalent to bonus hit points; ie the character has a pool of hit points that is some fraction of his/her max hit points.

A) Is that a correct understanding?
B) On the test server, did this pool have a similar damage resistance to your character, or did it take 100% of the incoming damage until failure?

Apologies if this was addressed already. I checked paragonwiki and did a keyword search of these forums with no luck. Thanks for any help provided.

Codewalker

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Re: Absorption?
« Reply #1 on: December 16, 2017, 02:39:36 AM »
You're on the right track. Absorb is mechanically identical to hit points, but it doesn't regenerate. The logic flow goes something like this:

1. Does the attack pass the tohit check (after factoring in Defense, +ToHit, etc)? If not, the attack misses.

2. The damage effect is resisted by damage resistance and its magnitude reduced accordingly.

(damage for each type is actually accumulated here, HP isn't touched until all damaging effects that tick have been processed*)

3. Does the target have any Absorb? If so, subtract the calculated damage from that.

4. Once all Absorb is depleted, subtract any remaining damage from Hit Points.

I believe most powers that granted Absorb typically used your MaxHP as a base to calculate how much to give you, but that's not a firm requirement.

Don't overanalyze Tomax calling it 'Max Absorb'. Absorb uses the Max aspect rather than Cur for fairly esoteric and ultimately irrelevant mechanical reasons, but it functions as a set pool just like HP or Endurance.

Codewalker

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Re: Absorption?
« Reply #2 on: December 16, 2017, 02:45:10 AM »
The step I marked with a * actually caused a bug that never got fixed.

Effects that were supposed to deal negative typed damage could cause this accumulation to go positive rather than negative. It was supposed to be added to HP, but when they added in the Absorb mechanic they didn't take this into account, and it would get added to Absorb instead.

The end result is that Illusion Control and Phantom Army in particular was doing more damage than it should have. Illusory damage was supposed to partially "heal" after a set amount of time; this was accomplished with negative psionic damage so that psi resistance would apply. But after the Absorb mechanic was added to the engine (Issue... 20 I think?), what would happen is that instead of healing the damage, the target would get some absorb. The absorb would then disappear the next tick because it wasn't actually backed up by an applied Absorb effect. If you watched very closely you could sometimes see the brief flicker of white on the target HP bar.

I was hoping to maybe get Bug Hunter for reporting either that or the Long Range Teleport exploit, but alas, neither was fixed before the studio got the pink slip. :(

Hagis

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Re: Absorption?
« Reply #3 on: December 16, 2017, 09:32:37 PM »
Yep, that was exactly what I needed. Thanks, Codewalker. Have a good rest of the day.