An Analysis of Puncture Damage

[Holonomic88]

With Khora coming soon, the disparities between the physical damage types (in terms of their status effects) will soon be more glaring then ever.  While slash is currently favored for dps, impact's CC also has a lot going for it, leaving puncture damage as the odd man out.  

As it stands, puncture's status effect is a 30% reduction in the targets damage for 6 seconds.  Even if the effect stacks, there is a major problem with this mechanic.  Unless you can reach 100% damage reduction, it is strictly worse than CC such as impact or blast procs, since these decrease the damage output of enemies by 100% for the duration of the effect.  

In my opinion, puncture should be changed to a debuff that increases damage dealt to the affected unit.  This would make it fit in nicely with the other physical damage types and each would be useful and unique.  My thoughts on implementing this would be to let the debuff stack, but use something like a convergent series to calculate the effect of the initial and subsequent procs.  The reason for this would be to keep from penalizing weapons on different ends of the fire rate spectrum, and generate a curve that makes the first few procs the most significant, while allowing faster firing weapons to continue scaling the debuff (with diminishing returns).

Here is a quick example:  

Let's say we use the convergent series: sum(0.3(0.98^20x)) where x is the number of puncture procs on the target.  The initial proc means all damage to the target is then increased by 30%.  The second hit would be ~50%, the third ~63%, the fourth ~72%, the fifth ~78% and so on.  This particular series converges on ~90%.  This would allow slow firing weapons to get most of the benefits of this status effect in a few procs, while offering some further scaling to fast firing weapons.

There are many ways to make the math work, this is just a quick example I chose.  If you want to check out the math, see http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=series+sum+of+0.3(0.98^(20x)) or try your own for that matter.  Please let me know in the comments what you think of puncture damage now, and what you think should be (or not be) done.

Edited December 13, 2017 by Holonomic88

[Zeyez]

they pretend to change the actual's proc interaction of impact (from pushback to ragdoll), puncture (until 90% damage reduction) and slash, and probably the others too

they said on the devstream 101, if i remember well

[Dhrekr]

15 minutes ago, Holonomic88 said:

With Khora coming soon, the disparities between the physical damage types (in terms of their status effects) will soon be more glaring then ever.  While slash is currently favored for dps, impact's CC also has a lot going for it, leaving puncture damage as the odd man out.  

And that is why Scott has already announced they are going to completely review the status effect, with a particular emphasis on physical damage.

I don't know if it's too late for them to look at this thread, but who knows. Maybe they're still out there hunting for inspiration.

[Holonomic88]

12 minutes ago, Dhrekr said:

And that is why Scott has already announced they are going to completely review the status effect, with a particular emphasis on physical damage.

I don't know if it's too late for them to look at this thread, but who knows. Maybe they're still out there hunting for inspiration.

Good to know, I'll have to actually pay attention to the devstream this week.

[Dhrekr]

Just now, Holonomic88 said:

Good to know, I'll have to actually pay attention to the devstream this week.

Not sure that they'll discuss it this week.

I found no better strategy than paying attention to all devstreams.