With the armor and hp alone, just to make sure I was doing the math correctly, as it was nothing more than an example.
Solar crest doesn't help you hit towers
Leave solar crest to tanky frontliners or utility supports
This is more of an example of something I came to understand. Its like I never even realized just how much potential there was for heroes like Slardar, Weaver and Dazzle. It was something obvious, just not to me, and now it is. What's important isn't just the bonus damage from having reduced armor, its what it does for you when you actually do have a big damage item to supplement it.
The example I gave isn't just a 44% increase in dps, its a 92% increase in all physical damage you deal. If, and I'm saying IF, this was an example of a single 1000 flat damage attack, it would have gone from reducing it to 480 damage, to taking 1440 damage. That is a gigantic difference. Its just something to think about for now.
Just played a game with ta i kill ns which normally tanky at 20min in 1 meld shot. Slardar crush and ult then i blink to kill him from 75%hp and you know what i did to sniper after that. https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2998696445
yeah i also have the feeling that armor reduction gets to little attention from dota players..
imagine a game with following lineup: ta, slard, dazzle, ck and tide. that would be rape.. how to counter this shit?
well i think sven is best counter to armor reduction strats. lich, dazzle, dk and axe come to my mind too.
Not going to lie, I have to face down an average of like 2 ghost scepters every time I play TA, so it isn't beyond me to go for a situational Diffusal against armor buffs that can be dealt with through purging. But yeah, there are still counters to this kind of anti-armor strategy, and I think that its important that there are. It brings better balance and strategy to the game imo. I just don't think its as highly valued as it could be atm in the meta.
What does debuffing 20 or so armor do for your teammates dps on an enemy hero? What does picking up an AC or Solar Crest do for you or your team, who are more important in this patch than they have ever been before. Solar Crest doesn't do damage to towers. That's true, but that's also only one side of the story. The other side turns a creep into a veritable tank that allows you to siege for longer periods and take towers, in a way, faster and more efficiently and earlier in the game than you would have otherwise. I'm not saying its perfect, I'm not saying its even that good. But in patches to come, I think, or at least I hope, its going to be fundamentally important to view the game with a little more openness in the future. Am I the only one getting this vibe from Valve? I must be going crazy.
The most detailed post I have ever seen in my entire life.
Thank cat for the information. Gonna try a build similar to this!
^ Good luck =3 Just make sure you get some kind of mobility item to actually DO the damage. The attack speed in this build is atrocious, so I highly suggest Pike to land premeditated blows.
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Let's add a Daedalus to the mix, but only for one hit, and it crits. It won't be the first, on Meld, it'll be any hit after that.
24 + 44% = 35 Phase Boot damage + 50 + 44% = 72 Deso damage + 80 + 44% = 115 Refraction damage + 74 + 44% = 106 TA basic damage + 76 + 44% = 109 Daedalus damage. All together this time you'll have 437 damage. But this is a crit from Daedalus, so now we take 437 and multiply it by 2.3. You get 1005 damage and that'll be every time you crit. Maybe its not PA level damage, but you could probably argue that Sven would be given a run for his money.
If you were to add a Daedalus to every hit without a single crit, you still get 2910 overall damage. That's roughly 22.5% increase in damage without a single crit. For every crit that happens during these 6 attacks, its roughly another 20% increase in overall dps.
I imagine that the percentage ratio increase for dps doesn't change all that much for the most part, just the magnitude of numbers.
You may already have seen this graph but its still useful. http://dota2.gamepedia.com/File:Dota_2_armor_graph_plain.svg
You'll see that reducing a 0 armour hero to -10 armour is a 40% damage increase. Similarly reducing a 10 armour hero to 0 armour is also a 40% increase. You get the biggest effect from minus armour strats when the enemy armour is between 10 and minus 10.
Minus armour is the fastest way to increase the damage you deal in the early-midgame when your enemy has low armour values. Unfortunately it becomes less effective as your enemy get higher armour values. Reducing an enemy's armour from 40 to 30 will increase your damage by about 5% (which is far less that the 40% increase between 10 and 0). Since enemy heroes can buy armour items far faster than you can reduce their armour, your damage does fall off slightly later on. Deso for example reduces 7 armour and costs 3500 gold. A platemail costs 1400 and gives 10 armour. This means that its very easy for enemies to itemize against your strategy.
This doesn't mean minus armour strats aren't viable. It is very possible to stack a lot of minus armour early on and just destroy enemy heroes before they have a chance to build armour items. But you can't let the game drag on too long. Eventually they will have enough armour to survive or will buy items like ghost sceptre that interfere with your strat. So ending early when they have no chance of beating you in a fair fight is necessary.
Never seen that before. You have a point there regarding counter strategy to anti-armor strategy. I guess if they spend that much in defensive items, I hope at least some kind of advantage can be taken then to counteract this defense heavy counter-strategy. And wow I made myself light headed fast.
So I think the gist of what the best strategy from what you said is, if you're going to pull a heavy anti-armor strategy, then do it fast and do it hard.
Op?
You know that "24 + 44% = 35 Phase Boot damage + 50 + 44% = 72 Deso damage + 80 + 44% = 115 Refraction damage + 74 + 44% = 106 TA basic damage"
is the same as doing 24+50+80+74 amplified by 44% RIGHT ?
I did a super long, round about and unnecessarily over-worded equation that has me confused atm?
Well it might be superly overly complicated to the point where the person who wrote it isn't sure they understand, but at least there's no mistakes, so.... there's that.
how do people still not know about dota wiki?
http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Armor
and another good calculator
http://devilesk.com/dota2/apps/hero-calculator/
there is no need to waste time doing all that math yourself
Будь ласка, увійдіть до системи для написання коментарів.
So I made this hero build where TA goes Solar Crest, Deso and AC as core items a week ago and I couldn't help but feel it was a bit silly of a build despite my sneaking suspicions that Valve wants physical damage reduction items to be slightly more relevant in the meta since 7.0's release. To put my worries to rest, I did a little experiment, and even recorded it, which I don't think is worth posting as it only confirms what most of you probably already knew for a long time now. I never fully understood how armor worked until this point. I always thought if what you were attacking hit 0 armor, even if they went into the negatives, that would just mean they took 100% of the physical damage you had and no more. But through my little experiment, I found out that wasn't actually the case. I don't how many people actually understood this or if I just missed the memo on damage resistance, but now I have an answer and I'd kind of like to share it.
My TA build, which I aptly refer to as Anti-Materiel Templar Assassin, utilizes four armor reduction items and skills to increase dps. One is a skill, three are items. Math done short comes out to 32 armor reduction total for Solar, Ac, Meld and Deso. You can't really pull this kind of build without mobility on TA blah blah blah, not the important part. The important part comes from item and skill stats. Let's assume I have my standard Phase Boots, AC, Deso, Solar and only my skills to work with.
We'll do 6 hits from TA who is level 8 with 4 levels in Refraction and Meld and no agility accelerating items
Phase Boots have 24 damage per tick
Deso has 50 damage per tick
Refraction instances have 80 damage per tick
TA basic damage has 74 damage per tick
1 use of Meld has 200 bonus damage
Let's assume Shine goes above their head first and stays there for the entire duration and Meld is the first attack which applies Deso debuff before damage is calculated. So every single hit will have 32 reduced armor.
Next up is our challenger: Bloodseeker. Who, for the sake of argument is level 25 with 18.7 armor which comes out to 52% physical damage reduction. With all 4 armor debuffs on him, and before we start calculating damage, he now has -44% physical damage reduction. Now we can do some math.
First Hit
200 + 44% = 288 Meld Strike damage + 24 + 44% = 35 Phase Boot damage + 50 + 44% = 72 Deso damage + 80 + 44% = 115 Refraction damage + 74 + 44% = 106 TA basic damage
The total for the first hit comes out to roughly 616 damage.
Second Hit Through Sixth are the exact same in damage
24 + 44% = 35 Phase Boot damage + 50 + 44% = 72 Deso damage + 80 + 44% = 115 Refraction damage + 74 + 44% = 106 TA basic damage
328 damage each
The grand spanking total of all 6 hits comes out to about 2256 physical damage. If this still seems on the small side, then please remember that this isn't exactly an end game TA we're talking about here. No talents, level 8 still, and no real huge damage items like a Daedalus. The attacks did take about 4.5 seconds to fully complete all 6, but that's another can of worms.
Maybe in most realistic scenarios, the enemy will have items and skills and even more armor than this to make up for it, but I'm here to share a single view point on armor reduction and nothing else. That's all hyperbole anyway. And maybe a lot of this is too, but its there, and I shared it because I'm irritated with the lack of anti-armor strategies still largely in effect in 7.02, when Valve is gently trying to steer the meta away from largely dominant magical damage drafts. Then again, that also might just be my imagination. Feel free to correct me on all points and uh.. thanks for reading.