ff charts and calculations

[RingsOfReznor]

I'm looking to write a guide of sorts for the steam page that includes power synergies and game mechanics. For instance, testing the damage range of powers has shown that the distribution is heavily skewed, rather than being a centered bell curve. Or that there is a boosted knockback minuteman can endow upon the ant sufficient to shove timemaster's twins, radically extend the energizing buffs and cause stuns to put enemies to sleep for a very, very long time.

This testing process is pretty slow and I don't have great amounts of time. I've seen references here to charts detailing how damage is calculated, but only on the yahoo group. If anyone has a copy I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks

[RingsOfReznor]

Alright fellas I think I've worked out FF1 damage, rally and why the distribution looked funny.

Overpowering an ability 2 stages doubles the base damage.

All damage dealt is subject to a variation of 50% to 150% of the base damage. This includes 300-Percenter and Rally the Troops.

Rally and 300 are the same damage type. The only difference is that due to being a special, 300 percenter is unaffected by overpowering.

After testing, I believe the formula for damage multiplication is:
mult = (rally damage / 20) + 1

300-Percenter therefore applies a base 40 Rally damage to the user, resulting in a nominal (40/20)+1 = 3x multiplier to the next damage dealt. Due to the fluctuation that base value can vary from 20 to 60, so the multiplier can really be anywhere from 2x to 4x

Minuteman's Rally base damage clocks in at 15 and peaks at 30 with 5/5 points. With overpowering that's 60 points applied to closeby allies, so a nominal multiplier of 4x that can swing from a low of 2.5x to a peak of 5.5x

So when Minuteman uses 300-Percenter and follows up with overpowered Rally the Troops, he will boost allied damage from 5x to 22x with a most likely of 12x damage, provided you're close enough to avoid area damage falloff.

Consider storm bolt which comes with man o' war at 1/5 = 10 damage. When overpowered, the damage spread is 10-20-30 damage. With Minuteman's boost that's 50-240-660 before resistances. Those are some good odds of one-shotting Mr Mechanical without any investment beyond recruiting the hero, even on Very Hard.

This kind of boost applies to most power types. Although it won't increase the odds of applying a state (only base damage, overpowering and resistances influence that), it will absolutely boost the effect duration, stun duration and knockback strength. Irradiate and Acid Burn are capped at 5 damage by an internal variable so they don't appear to benefit at all.

Final note for custom characters: although blasting yourself with a rally rocket will apply the buff to you, you cannot snowball the effect alone. This is because only one instance of the effect can be on your character at once, and the initial rally is 'consumed' immediately after the updated rally is applied, so you get nothing. If you use a second hero with rally however, you absolutely can stack the multiplier exponentially. This is how I established the damage formula

[WyldFyre]

Very interesting. Thanks for doing this.

[Epimethee]

Nice work, RingsOfReznor! (And nice avatar!)

[RingsOfReznor]

Thanks all for your kind words.

This writeup has been published as a guide on the steam community page: How to slap real good

Nice work, RingsOfReznor! (And nice avatar!)

I had fun making that picture! Here's the full version...

[DoctorRuina]

It's interesting to learn about the mechanics of the game. Thanks for your research.