Curse

Wielder Of Magic · Apr 18, 2012, 07:55 AM // 07:55

I rarely bring it.
My MM functions fine without it, and I dislike the saccing.
energy is fine without the soul reaping boost, and 9-10 minions is more then enough for me to succeed anywhere with it when I decide to bring the MM ( not always the case).

Relyk · May 18, 2012, 09:23 AM // 09:23

Masochism is optimal for any build speccing into Death Magic or IV. You're not doing yourself any favors avoiding it on an MM.

Kunder · May 18, 2012, 09:40 PM // 21:40

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My MM functions fine without it, and I dislike the saccing.

The sac is the most ridiculously miniscule thing imaginable. Even spamming skills nonstop it's less damage than your necromancer would take if they were suffering from bleeding. MMs also have 75 armor and can stay far away from danger. If you want to be invincible take blood bond which is effectively +80 armor that also works against armor ignoring damage. You'll be begging enemies to come after you instead of your allies because you tank almost as well as a dedicated tank build.

The benefits of Masochism are huge. With the exponential gains you get from each additional point not running 18/19 death magic is just gimping yourself.

Xenomortis · May 19, 2012, 12:19 PM // 12:19

Exponential? The gains of any increase in attributes are usually, at best, linear. The skill is still worth it.

Wielder Of Magic · May 19, 2012, 12:27 PM // 12:27

I usually prefer another utility from a secondary profession in that slot.
I could care less about 1 more minion of ~10 more damage from a death nova.
If 10 damage is the key to succes or fail I should just redesign my entire team.
And since the MM already has godly e-managment I don't need the + 2 soul reaping either.

Daesu · May 19, 2012, 08:07 PM // 20:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wielder Of Magic

I usually prefer another utility from a secondary profession in that slot.

That is fine. Your MM is not going to fail just because you don't bring Masochism.

Masochism is usually a good choice and there are not many better alternatives in most MM builds. But I wouldn't say that all possible MM builds under the sun must bring along Masochism to be optimal.

Kunder · May 19, 2012, 11:30 PM // 23:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xenomortis

Exponential? The gains of any increase in attributes are usually, at best, linear. The skill is still worth it.

Health + Armor = exponential, as they multiply together to find the total durability (technically quadratic at n^2 if you want to be mathematically precise). Damage per hit increase is supralinear as well (technically quadratic again but the quadratic factor is very small). Total damage dealt before death in a battle is therefore approximately cubic (n^3).

Example: A Bone Horror @ Death Magic 0 vs 10 vs 20. To calculate damage before death lets just presume that our average minion is suffering 40 DPS in battle with no healing (just made this number up for demonstration purposes). Note that I don't know the actual average damage a minion deals out since there is an unknown random crit rate involved and the wiki just gives the total damage range. I'll go test and update these numbers later, though I doubt I'm off by much.

100 health and 9 armor = 41 effective health, 1 damage per hit. Damage before death = .33

320 health and 50 armor = 269 effective health, ~16 damage per hit. Damage before death = 33.9

520 health and 88 armor = 844 effective health, ~ 37 damage per hit. Damage before death = 246.3

Compare to Flare which offers a mere 20/50/80 at the same attributes. Pretty much every skill in the game increases linearly except for those skills that have multiple linearly increasing factors that multiply each other. Besides Minion skills, Splinter Weapon (20/560/1560 potential damage), Protective Bond (6/4/2 energy per hit), and spirits (health/armor increases + defensive spirits health loss per activation decreases as well) are good examples.

EDIT: My tests (N=57) show that r10 bone horrors deal 15.5 damage per hit and r20 bone horrors deals 37.1 damage per hit. Wow, I was close in my prior estimate.

Kunder · May 20, 2012, 10:33 AM // 10:33

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Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Health has a linear effect on durability, armor a logarithmic. The product is far from exponential.

Sorry, I was mistaken before. Linear increases in armor give exponential effects. Certainly not logarithmic, which is even worse than linear. Damage taken is the log of the armor, which means the inverse (damage before death) is exponential.

+40 armor = 100% more durability
+80 armor = 200%
+120 armor = 400%

Of course it can be argued that durability is sub-exponential when you take into account that some damage you face is armor ignoring. Furthermore, whatever growth rate it technically is doesn't matter much since we are only interested in a very small section of the function anyway (16-19), not extrapolating things to infinity.

And yeah, with EBSoH + OoU minions are hitting almost 70 damage per hit, which translates into over 800 DPS if you have 22 bone fiends (though chances are you have at least a few vamps/horrors). Even against warriors with 100 armor they are hitting 55 damage per hit. God forbid using Volfen Blessing to give all your minions +33% IAS as well, GW should immediately stop and tell you that you have won the game when you reach 1200 DPS.

Xenomortis · May 21, 2012, 06:27 PM // 18:27

The damage you take with increasing armour is an example of exponential decay (that is exponential growth, just with a negative exponent). This is not logarithmic (if it were, the damage taken would increase with armour since log(x) is an increasing function and its image covers the reals (it gives both negative and positive output) so simple things like -log(x) wouldn't work either).

This is easy to see knowing the damage formula and as a result, the number of hits required to kill you is an exponential function of armour.

TLDR
Awien's observation is correct, but the conclusion was missed, and Kunder (still) needs to check his definition of a logarithmic function.

The raw amount of damage reduction may appear to decrease, but because it's still halved every 40 armour, armour doesn't mathematically suffer diminishing returns (until rounding errors become significant).

As for Masochism; the armour boost on Bone Minions is only +6, the health boost +40; from the bone minion's perspective, this is great, but to the player it's near inconsequential; we want that extra death nova damage and the 11th minion.

Kunder · May 21, 2012, 08:25 PM // 20:25

A logarithmic function is the inverse of an exponential function. Not sure how you can argue against one and accept the other. Run numbers one way you get one, run them the other and you get the other.

As mentioned, the technical definition isn't important because we're only covering a change in X from 1.5 to 1.7. Being exponential has little to do with the increase in power at such small factors, it was merely a nice term to use to draw attention to the poorly understood fact of minion scaling.

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As for Masochism; the armour boost on Bone Minions is only +6, the health boost +40

In fact, at these levels (16/17 DM with Masochism taking us to 18/19), the health bonus does more than the armour boost for durability.

+6 armor is +11% effective health. Furthermore, no-one uses Bone Minions. Bone Fiends do get +3 armor per level, but they aren't the front liners.

Talking about Bone Horrors, the armor boost is +8 for 2 levels (+15% boost to EHP). Now, at that point the +EHP from armor is approximately 1.5x the +EHP from health. EHP of lvl 18 = 541, EHP of lvl 18 + 40 HP = 590, EHP of lvl 18 + 8 armor = 622.

It should be noted though that comparing them separately is just stupid. They are multiplicative bonuses. The +armor is good because you have a lot of +health already and vice versa.

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from the bone minion's perspective, this is great, but to the player it's near inconsequential; we want that extra death nova damage and the 11th minion.

EHP for lvl 18 vs lvl 20 is 541 vs. 678. I think +130 effective health for each minion is pretty damn substantial, don't you?

At best you MIGHT hit one or two enemies with Death Nova during a battle, and it's only a pathetic +10 damage each.

11th minion only gives a +10% improvement to EHP, while the level boost gave all minions +25% EHP. 11th minions also adds +10% damage which is approximately the damage increase that all other minions get from +2 levels. Still a nice gain but not better than +levels.

But in any case, you get all of these. That's why not putting Masochism on your bar is one of the dumbest moves you can make. +25% minion EHP, +10% minion damage, +10% minions, +skill effects, +soul reaping. It's pretty much a second elite skill when you add it all together.

Xenomortis · May 21, 2012, 09:24 PM // 21:24

Who the hell uses bone horrors and fiends on a hero? Unless the meta has suddenly switched from Minions+Nova, then Horrors and Fiends are hardly relevant. Although I put in +5 armour into my calculator, not 6 armour, so yeah, the +6 armour is slightly better than the 10% boost in health. An 11th minion is also not equivalent to a 10% increase in health across 10 minions in anything but the most simple and unhelpful model.
And it's pretty damn rare for humans to run a minion bar; if they are then Masochism is definitely superior to pretty much anything else that could be shoved onto the bar for the given reasons (and more).

And f(x)= a*2^(-x/b) isn't logarithmic, it's exponential. You do know there is a difference between log(x) and e^(-x) right? Or more generally, between reciprocal and inverse?

Kunder · May 21, 2012, 10:13 PM // 22:13

We're talking about MMs here. MBs are worse builds, don't run them.

Keep in mind that if both armor and health boost +10% then together they boost +21%, so the total EHP of your minions is boosted more by the +levels than the +minion. Of course all 3 are boosted, the total for a bone horror force is nearly +40% EHP. As I mentioned, Masochism also boosts your minion damage by +10% which is equivalent to the +10% damage of an extra minion.

Beyond that its hard to quantify whether the benefits of the extra minion (more soul reaping/body blocking/targets) are more important than the drawbacks of an extra minion (increased weakness to AoE/increased sac from BotM/less individual HP). I'll certainly agree that an additional minion is more important when running EBSoH/OoU though.

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And f(x)= a*2^(-x/b) isn't logarithmic, it's exponential. You do know there is a difference between log(x) and e^(-x) right? Or more generally, between reciprocal and inverse?

I never said it was. But any exponential function can be inverted if you want to work backwards to find the armor from the damage.

EDIT: Whoops, I mixed up terms in post 39. Disregard what I said then if that is what you are referring to.

Kunder · May 22, 2012, 07:40 PM // 19:40

Death Nova is vastly overrated, sadly. At the moment its only real usage is to pre-buff all your minions before battle, which does lead to a very impressive amount of damage. Unfortunately taking 30s to do that before every battle is a complete and utter waste of time unless it's a boss battle or something.

Adjacent AoE that relies on Minion AI to land in the right place is just a horrible concept to base a build around. It needs to be at least Nearby AoE to deserve the power people attribute to it. That way it can at least hit whatever the minion is chasing after.

(Not that Minion Bombers need a buff, minion spam is always imba whether its MM or MB.)

Relyk · May 22, 2012, 08:02 PM // 20:02

Any frontliner can easily get enemies balled on a minion wall to get hit by death nova. I'm not sure about casters but EVAS would give the same control.

Martin Firestorm · May 22, 2012, 09:28 PM // 21:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kunder

Death Nova is vastly overrated, sadly. At the moment its only real usage is to pre-buff all your minions before battle, which does lead to a very impressive amount of damage. Unfortunately taking 30s to do that before every battle is a complete and utter waste of time unless it's a boss battle or something.

Adjacent AoE that relies on Minion AI to land in the right place is just a horrible concept to base a build around. It needs to be at least Nearby AoE to deserve the power people attribute to it. That way it can at least hit whatever the minion is chasing after.

It works because foes attacking the bone minions kill them quickly due to their low level, so they're at adjacent range. The minion AI does not need to find them. But the problem is hero MMs lag behind so badly casting DN that it's just not worth the damage, plus their minions hang with them so you don't have your minion wall up soon enough.

Daesu · May 22, 2012, 10:04 PM // 22:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Don't know about the meta but Minion Masters, as opposed to Minion Bombers, just seem more effective to me. When using (dual) MM's with, at least, a ranger or caster primary as the pc, bone fiends become relevant as the can take advantage of any Ebon Battle Standard of Honour the PC brings. The combined damage from minion attacks + Order of Undeath + EBSoH is likely better then that of Death Nova.

Unfortunately a minion bomber is the only MM build that the hero AI is able to play out effectively. A human MM with PvE skills like EBSoH is expected to exceed their damage but unless you play a MM yourself, you can't always have a MM with you.

You cannot compare a human build with PvE skills against a hero build without one. This is true for the other builds besides MM. The human build, with PvE skills, usually wins the damage numbers. My human mesmer build with Pain Inverter dishes out more damage than my hero mesmers also.

Kunder · May 22, 2012, 11:11 PM // 23:11

Quote:

Any frontliner can easily get enemies balled on a minion wall to get hit by death nova. I'm not sure about casters but EVAS would give the same control.

If the enemies are balled up you have already won. Use 100 blades/VoS/Death Blossom/Splinter Weapon/MoP and do 10x as much damage as Death Nova would, and much more reliably. Casters have tons of various AoE that will deal damage more efficiently. A Panic mesmer will do well over 100 DPS while interrupting every skill/attack used. Death Nova does... 40 DPS, under perfect conditions. Estimate under half that in realistic conditions.

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It works because foes attacking the bone minions kill them quickly due to their low level, so they're at adjacent range. The minion AI does not need to find them. But the problem is hero MMs lag behind so badly casting DN that it's just not worth the damage, plus their minions hang with them so you don't have your minion wall up soon enough.

If an enemy is ranged the minion can die without hitting anything. If the enemy has enough damage the minion can die before the necro is done casting (2s cast time FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU). If the minion is positioned so that it only hits one target the Death Nova is basically a waste (Deathly Swarm is as good or better). Even when it works right, mediocre damage for the time investment.

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Unfortunately a minion bomber is the only MM build that the hero AI is able to play out effectively. A human MM with PvE skills like EBSoH is expected to exceed their damage but unless you play a MM yourself, you can't always have a MM with you.

You cannot compare a human build with PvE skills against a hero build without one. This is true for the other builds besides MM. The human build, with PvE skills, usually wins the damage numbers. My human mesmer build with Pain Inverter dishes out more damage than my hero mesmers also.

Umm... take a hero MM and bring EBSoH yourself? Does that solve the problem? Honestly every caster(minus monk healers)/ranger/paragon build should have EBSoH, its an amazing buff and it works on the whole team + minions.

That leaves melee that can't use EBSoH on minions quite that well, but MMs put out more damage than MBs even without EBSoH/OoU anyway.

Daesu · May 23, 2012, 03:17 AM // 03:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kunder

Umm... take a hero MM and bring EBSoH yourself? Does that solve the problem? Honestly every caster(minus monk healers)/ranger/paragon build should have EBSoH, its an amazing buff and it works on the whole team + minions.

That leaves melee that can't use EBSoH on minions quite that well, but MMs put out more damage than MBs even without EBSoH/OoU anyway.

Taking EBSoH doesn't work well on my warrior who is a frontliner since the fiends tend to be far behind and not beside him. Besides, I don't like hero team builds that places a constraint on my player skill bar.

There is also the question on what the rest of the hero MM skill bar should look like besides bringing fiends. The last time I tried OOU the hero didn't use it well, but I have not tried it recently. It is worth testing if a MM build would work better on a hero now.

Martin Firestorm · May 23, 2012, 02:57 PM // 14:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kunder

Death Nova does... 40 DPS, under perfect conditions. Estimate under half that in realistic conditions.

If an enemy is ranged the minion can die without hitting anything. If the enemy has enough damage the minion can die before the necro is done casting (2s cast time FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU). If the minion is positioned so that it only hits one target the Death Nova is basically a waste (Deathly Swarm is as good or better). Even when it works right, mediocre damage for the time investment.

I'm not a big fan of the MB, but you are badly understating its usefulness. DN is usually pre-cast on most or all minions. That's why the MB hero lags behind so much, but the minions usually begin the fight with DN on. At 16 DM you're getting 105 armor ignoring damage everytime one of the little guys blows up, not to mention poison. Throw in dwayna's sorrow and you're also getting a great source of constant, party wide healing.

The problem with the MB is not lack of damage, it's that your necro hero becoms a minion babysitter, constantly casting minion supoport or raising minions, not to mention the lagging behind problem. With the MM you can add utility or other damage which he'll actually use. I have bitter chill, deathly chill, and deathly swarm on mine, and he's always in the fight using those and his utility sttuff. It's very effective since the HM update, and the MB is less effective, but not as much less as you're saying.

Daesu · May 23, 2012, 07:12 PM // 19:12

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Originally Posted by Amy Awien

I guess you can borrow my hero MM's so they can teach yours. All they have to do to be good MM's is cast minion making spells when corpses become available, cast OoU frequently and cast BotM when neccesary.

Like I have said, if the hero AI now works well with OOU then feel free to share your build. Last I tested it was about 3-4 years back and the hero didn't use it well, but I understand that there have been several revisions to the AI since then. Good to know that new hero builds have opened up and it is time to re-visit some of the old unsuccessful builds.