Huntress DPS Theorycrafting and Guide -- need community help as well!

While there's plenty of minor examples (kobolds), the big one is always going to be bosses, especially the higher level stuff like the summit boss with his heat seeker fireballs that hit for a ton of damage on the high difficulties. You pretty much have to have >50% armor and decent health, otherwise you're not able to do you're job.

To throw in another example, Spooktacular can also be annoying on insane with the hundred plus ogres tossing their stuff around hitting you for a fair amount and there's little you can do about it.

May never be the "Wisest" but I think between DPS skill buffs and HP buffs... that too can do alot. Least for a huntress. I mean we are fighting in the distance. Mow anything close to you and pick everything else off in the distance.

After I upgraded my VW I easily earn MVP (and there's another most valuable *something* I get but can't remember) and usually knight and janitor and can't remember what the 1st kill reward is...but the point is that I get the most (and most valuable points-wise) kills on tons of maps and I don't even max my attack or piercing shot past 60. I'm tempted to drop it even further...but might as well wait for the math to come out regarding the diminishing returns roll-off.

In this game it's not so obvious because gear pretty much means nothing will be at 0, but in other games with diminishing returns even dropping one point in a skill is far better than leaving it alone. Is health linear? I forgot to pay attention (I don't understand why we can't incrementally spend our points after we respect). That's probably the best stat to max on the character if someone has points leftover and I would argue gear should be used to get resistance well over 50% (around 80% ideally).

Effective health is *always* going to increase DPS unless someone never dies. In fact, the more one raises one's DPS the more loss occurs while waiting for the death penalty countdown. Think about it, if you have 1K DPS but you have to wait 10 seconds to respawn you lose out on 10K damage. When you're doing 80K DPS you lose out on nearly a million damage in that same span of time! Compared to a level 1 huntress fighting ogres on non-insane a level 70's health doesn't scale very well at all compared to the ogre's at insane.

Well for that discussion to work. You are implying someone dies, thus get defense. But if you are the type who doesnt die and are quick. Then DPS buffs would be the way to go. So the stuff to discuss is more Def Huntress vs Attack Huntress playstyles and let people choose.

However, I will admit, ALOT of what we are talking about will change up alot when you factor in PVP. Cause thats one I would say need Def on.. Hard to be DPS when they kill you.

Not so much about buffing defense and more about not ignoring it; you can easily get 60% plus armor rating just simply by making sure the armors you select have a decent bane armor stat and taking advantage of the set bonus; but so many people ignore armor completely and then rage when assassins one shot them.

I try not to let those assassins get to me, I can avoid those easier really. They are bumbling. You just get out of range, then they land right in front of you. Its those Pesky Goblins/Kobolds that can get the best of me during a heavy wave. Cant see em heh. But that hasnt happened much anymore. Mostly now I die due to ZOOPS and walking/jumping into that pit of lava... which no amount of def buff can help. =)

you don't have to die in order for effective health to be beneficial for dps. just taking damage will force someone to stop and heal oneself, thereby reducing dps. if it were otherwise, then this thread would be unnecessary and it'd be a pretty boring game mechanic if everyone just needed to put as many points as possible into hero attack for maximum dps

you don't have to die in order for effective health to be beneficial for dps. just taking damage will force someone to stop and heal oneself, thereby reducing dps. if it were otherwise, then this thread would be unnecessary and it'd be a pretty boring game mechanic if everyone just needed to put as many points as possible into hero attack for maximum dps

The point is, you're a huntress... you shouldn't be getting hit at all, and if you do get hit, you probably won't die and will get insta-healed at the end of the wave. Especially if you have points into hero speed, Dark Elves are slow in comparison.

Certainly most of the time you can expect to not die, probably very often you don't even need to heal yourself, you'll make it through to the end of a wave and get auto-healed. Nevertheless, there comes a point when diminishing returns is affecting additional points in DPS stats so heavily, that you can't help but ask yourself if you wouldn't rather have 50 more HP or 2% armor than 50 DPS, especially when ogres on Insane are packing 500k+ hp, and 50 additional DPS would be nearly unnoticeable while 50 health might mean you don't get 2-shotted, and instead get 3-shotted, an effective durability increase of 50%.

A couple points on Armor, Health, and Effective HP:
Your character resistance / armor is 75% of the sum of your 4 armor pieces' resistances, which means if you have a set bonus (of all same-type armor) then you essentially get full effect of the original listed resistances, as the set bonus is 20-25%.

Health has diminishing returns just like the other stats, and is influenced by your character-type's base health -- a squire will simply have a better starting health, and each additional point of health will help him more than a Huntress, assuming they have similar hero Health skill. A Huntress has more base speed than a squire, for example, to counter balance this. I'm pretty sure that an Apprentice has higher base Cast Speed too. Who even knows what monks are good at?

Effective HP (a non-listed stat that is essentially "how much UNMITIGATED damage would I have to take in order to die?") is a function of the proper armor/resistance to a damage source and your current HP. Obviously if you have 0% fire resist, your effective HP against the dragon boss is going to be crappy. If you have 50% armor mitigation towards a damage source, you can take 2x your health in UNmitigated damage before you die. To maximize survivability, the question to ask yourself is, at a given health pool / % mitigation, which stat makes the most sense to upgrade to improve your survivability?

When upgrading armor for survivability, your options are +1 Hero Health, +1% resistance of a specific type, or possibly +1 Hero Speed if you think that will be your best bet -- dodging things. I suppose even another possibility is simply more damage -- if you can kill something fast enough, you lower the time you have to deal with the incoming damage... though in typical monster waves, you probably take damage from things behind you, or ranged attacks, or things you can't avoid by simply adding more damage.

So let's look at the two "real" options for effective HP:
+1 Hero Health -- adds an amount of HP, subject to Base Hero Health and diminishing returns
+1% (or +1.25% if you have armor set bonus) resistance to a type of damage source -- which will only help you against the correct types of damage

Let's say we know the incoming damage is physical (and most damage certainly is, though bosses seem to do a lot of fire damage... are those robot rockets from Throne Room boss fire?), the question is will +1 Hero Health be more than a 1.25% increase in HP at your current level of Hero Health skill? If so, it is giving you more effective HP than the appropriate resistance.

Note that while your hero health scales diminishingly, your resistance numerically scales linearly, and in fact scales proportionally better the more you have! Consider the case where you already have 50% resistance to something -- adding an additional 1% resistance will increase your total resistance to 51%, which is a nominal/numerical increase of 1%, but an effective decrease of incoming damage by 2%! If that seems vague, imagine the case where you mitigate 98% of the incoming damage (though this isn't possible in the game) -- an additional 1% more mitigation means you'll mitigate 99% of the damage, which is a real increase in damage reduction of 50% -- if something was hitting you for 1000 with 0% mitigation, it would hit you for 20 with 98% mitigation, and only for 10 with 99% mitigation, and the difference between 20 and 10 is 50%. That final point to bring you up to 100% mitigation is the difference between taking minor damage and INVULNERABILITY, which is an infinite % increase. Despite these ridiculous cases, it goes to show that once you have great armor, adding additional resistances actually makes even more sense than before. (Many games, such as DotA or WoW, have the armor stat scale diminishingly numerically, to prevent armor scaling from being too effective. In this game, they simply cap maximum resistance to 80 or 90%, I can't remember which)

Some notes on side-bonuses of increasing mitigation over health pool:
Healing will be much more effective, making a healing aura or fairy significantly more effective, and any time/mana spent self-healing will use less mana and time. Boosting health pool will simply be a larger delay in you dying, while mitigation / healing is what will truly allow you to "tank" monsters with ease.

The bottom line to maximize survivability -- choose whether +1 Hero Health or +1% resistance would increase your effective hp by a larger amount. The calculations would be...
+1 Hero Health is simply (new max HP) / (old max HP) to determine a % increase in effective HP
+1% appropriate resistance is (new mitigation% - old mitigation%) / (100% - old mitigation%)

I always shake my head when I glance back at what I wrote, and proceed to click the "Post Quick Reply" button... :/

This came from another thread (regarding set bonus; interesting in terms of maximizing defense stat):

It's a 25% buff, strictly rounded up. Optimal stats are therefore of the form 4n+1 for any n>=0.
If you care about damage reduction as well, here's some more info: only 75% of DR on your gear contributes to your character DR. If you have a total of 80% DR across all four armour pieces, your character would have 60% DR.
Additionally, the ideal base DR for a piece of armour is 15 or 17. Every other base DR would increase to 23 ( 11,12,13,14,16,18,20,23 ), whereas the progression for 15/17 is ( 15,17,19,21,24 ). With four pieces in a set at 24 DR each, your character DR caps out at 90%.

This came from another thread (regarding set bonus; interesting in terms of maximizing defense stat):

Sick info!

FYI: If you don't put points into health, you get to put points into a far more useful stat, Hero Casting Rate. You'e not deciding Health or DPS stats, you're deciding to be useful, or wasteful.

FYI: If you don't put points into health, you get to put points into a far more useful stat, Hero Casting Rate. You'e not deciding Health or DPS stats, you're deciding to be useful, or wasteful.

Trying to follow, are you saying Hero casting rate is bad? I know personally (Tho I am a trap huntress more) that being able to repair walls fast is nice.

Tho that being said, as for Armor Def vs Attack... There is something satisfying by having high attack speed with high dps that pierces... and you run into the wave like an anime char... hold the fire button down, and run through.. Turn around and see all those mobs dead in one pass. =D So Guess I would be the follower of possibly adding to hero health. (As it does help vs boss fights and goblins/kobolds..) That and char speed to get around fast to protect the crystal or RUN AWAY!

Trying to follow, are you saying Hero casting rate is bad? I know personally (Tho I am a trap huntress more) that being able to repair walls fast is nice.

Tho that being said, as for Armor Def vs Attack... There is something satisfying by having high attack speed with high dps that pierces... and you run into the wave like an anime char... hold the fire button down, and run through.. Turn around and see all those mobs dead in one pass. =D So Guess I would be the follower of possibly adding to hero health. (As it does help vs boss fights and goblins/kobolds..) That and char speed to get around fast to protect the crystal or RUN AWAY!

Was saying putting your level up points into Health is wasteful, and Hero Casting Rate is extremely valuable.

FYI: If you don't put points into health, you get to put points into a far more useful stat, Hero Casting Rate. You'e not deciding Health or DPS stats, you're deciding to be useful, or wasteful.

I definitely used to agree with you, but considering the diminishing returns on stacking additional cast speed (which I usually run 90ish, +70 from skill levels) and the legitimate DPS an animus contributes (which means a fairy is useful only on the most dangerous of modes/levels), I would say there are definitely times that upping survivability stats is a good idea -- but obviously subject to how comfortable you feel, and your predictions on how likely you are to die.

Besides, a monk or an apprentice is SOOO much better at repairing, if that's what you're getting at about cast speed. They should really know to leave the Huntress to pure DPS, because having her repair is very often a waste of time, and a suboptimal team setup.

I definitely used to agree with you, but considering the diminishing returns on stacking additional cast speed (which I usually run 90ish, +70 from skill levels) and the legitimate DPS an animus contributes (which means a fairy is useful only on the most dangerous of modes/levels), I would say there are definitely times that upping survivability stats is a good idea -- but obviously subject to how comfortable you feel, and your predictions on how likely you are to die.

Besides, a monk or an apprentice is SOOO much better at repairing, if that's what you're getting at about cast speed. They should really know to leave the Huntress to pure DPS, because having her repair is very often a waste of time, and a suboptimal team setup.

You can get plenty of badly scaling health from gear. But I've found that even without some kind of ridiculous overcharge skill, I repair extremely fast, enough to be highly useful even without such an ability. And since Huntress is probably the fastest class, getting to those nearly-dead towers is much easier.

You can get plenty of badly scaling health from gear. But I've found that even without some kind of ridiculous overcharge skill, I repair extremely fast, enough to be highly useful even without such an ability. And since Huntress is probably the fastest class, getting to those nearly-dead towers is much easier.

Do you have 70 points into Piercing shot? With the bad scaling on it I moved those to hero cast rate and did 19 in PS and kept 70 points into Hero Health for the boss occasional damage and to be able to survive an insane kobold. When my gun and animus do ~100k DPS, the ~3k DPS increase I was seeing with a PS build was not worth it to me.

Do you have 70 points into Piercing shot? With the bad scaling on it I moved those to hero cast rate and did 19 in PS and kept 70 points into Hero Health for the boss occasional damage and to be able to survive an insane kobold. When my gun and animus do ~100k DPS, the ~3k DPS increase I was seeing with a PS build was not worth it to me.

PS scales exceedingly bad using a Van Wolf as well, due to the heavy base damage nerf.

PS scales exceedingly bad using a Van Wolf as well, due to the heavy base damage nerf.

Yeah, I only really use it for electric immune mobs, none of which survive 2 PS anyways.

Do you have 70 points into Piercing shot? With the bad scaling on it I moved those to hero cast rate and did 19 in PS and kept 70 points into Hero Health for the boss occasional damage and to be able to survive an insane kobold. When my gun and animus do ~100k DPS, the ~3k DPS increase I was seeing with a PS build was not worth it to me.

My VW only does 55k DPS... and still gets an additional ~9k DPS from PS. I find your additional PS DPS increase to be slightly mythical, lol. But that aside, yes, I kept 70 points in PS and have my spare 19 in Health atm. How much health do you have with all 70 in it?

Figured I'd post this (rough) gem of a find:

http://forums.trendyent.com/showthread.php?15785-perfect-drop-compendium

An excellent starting attempt at weapon/item stats that are very excellent, so you know whether something is "worth upgrading" or if you should farm/buy a better version.

And since Huntress is probably the fastest class, getting to those nearly-dead towers is much easier.

Yea thats one thing I like, Being able to run fast, Start repair on that critical defense, stop short, mow the down with my attacks, finish repair, and move on.

Also my stats as of right now. I may respec to fine tune this. But so far as a trap huntress with abit of DPS balance in it, This has been working well for me as a universal fill in for whatever. Trap range is nice and does a good job holding a line while I am busy guarding a section.

Yea thats one thing I like, Being able to run fast, Start repair on that critical defense, stop short, mow the down with my attacks, finish repair, and move on.

Also my stats as of right now. I may respec to fine tune this. But so far as a trap huntress with abit of DPS balance in it, This has been working well for me as a universal fill in for whatever. Trap range is nice and does a good job holding a line while I am busy guarding a section.

Your build is extremely hybrid, except for the slight focus on trap health and damage -- great for keeping diminishing returns on your stats low, but not really specializing in anything. Certainly a good all-around build for when you're not sure if you'll have a niche role to play.

A lot of people that have a spare alt character choose to "min/max" and have a focused tower or aura character, leaving their Huntress as a full pure DPS build, "saving" you the hundreds of points you have invested into trap skills. Note that you can swap characters during build phase -- you just need to make sure your alt's towers don't due during combat phase, because you won't be able to rebuild them on the fly. Just an idea you might be interested in for the long run.

You don't have an armor set bonus (all four pieces of armor as the same gear type -- leather/chain/mail/plate/pristine) which means you're missing out on 25% more stats on most of your equipment. Even if you are downgrading gear slightly, given your hybridity I bet there is a great chance your total stats will go up by hitting a set bonus, by finding the nicest 4 pieces of gear that match material type.

Your 30 skill points in Invis is a little odd in my opinion -- do you use it often? I consider them almost wasted stats, and pretty much rejoice when I find nice gear with no Invis skill on it.


On an unrelated note, I'm interested in the buff they're giving to Guardian-type pets -- making them buff multiple nearby traps/towers/auras, instead of singular. Potential switch in team builds, opting for utility pets?

Your build is extremely hybrid, except for the slight focus on trap health and damage -- great for keeping diminishing returns on your stats low, but not really specializing in anything. Certainly a good all-around build for when you're not sure if you'll have a niche role to play.

I play just with friends. So we have a variety of types high and low levels or alts. I play pure huntress atm. So I try to fill the void best I can. I just wanna be sure if I put a trap down. It does dmg, and has the range. Trap count is so I dont have to keep checking on it. The Buffs in my hero side, help me zoom across the map, do decent DPS, but enough to move a wave down on hard in 1 single pass. (Doing like 10-15k DPS solid stream)

[QUOTE]A lot of people that have a spare alt character choose to "min/max" and have a focused tower or aura character, leaving their Huntress as a full pure DPS build, "saving" you the hundreds of points you have invested into trap skills. Note that you can swap characters during build phase -- you just need to make sure your alt's towers don't due during combat phase, because you won't be able to rebuild them on the fly. Just an idea you might be interested in for the long run.[/QUOTE]

May do another huntress sometime for pure DPS. Why? This could be my PVP Huntress. I dont know how a trap huntress will be in PVP.. But a high DPS one that makes people scream OP is


[QUOTE]You don't have an armor set bonus (all four pieces of armor as the same gear type -- leather/chain/mail/plate/pristine) which means you're missing out on 25% more stats on most of your equipment. Even if you are downgrading gear slightly, given your hybridity I bet there is a great chance your total stats will go up by hitting a set bonus, by finding the nicest 4 pieces of gear that match material type.[/QUOTE]

Tell me about it.... trying to find the right parts... is not easy.. if you got some, let me know. =D Once I get those parts. \o/

[QUOTE]Your 30 skill points in Invis is a little odd in my opinion -- do you use it often? I consider them almost wasted stats, and pretty much rejoice when I find nice gear with no Invis skill on it.[/QUOTE]

Actually to be honest with you? I dont think I have put any points in invis, or just a couple. Rest was from armor. Do I use it? Yes. I really do.
1: Lets me zip in the middle of a wave, destroy them from the inside without being hit.
2: Lets me upgrade or repair in peace!
3: Lets me escape when I need it.
4: Lets me hide to let the mob walk into place, if they see me it disturbs that perfect line they march in... thus my Piercing would suck and not crush em as much.

I wouldnt put skill points in it tho.

But yea, so far this hybrid of mine, I will fine tune once I hit 70. Otherwise it has been a solid performer, I mean been using it on the Hard Halloween DLC. Which isnt all that easy. So least its been performing on a good return map. =)

Also that pet I got, was from Deeper Well Med Survival Wave 15. Wasnt too bad really. =)

I would like to chime in and comment on the weapons inherent attack speed. Unfortunately, I wish it was as "easy" as a decimal in the attack speed rating that isn't displayed, but it is definitely not the case and each weapon type definitely has an inherent speed that is then multiplied by that attack speed rating you can increase.
For a quick and easy test of this, take any crystal tracker at 5atk speed, increase it to 6, and then see if you attack anywhere near 6 times a second. My best crystal tracker, which has a reported 6 atk speed, empties its ammos of 25 in right around 7.1s. This comes up to 3.52 shots per second, way under what you would expect from a 6 atk speed stat if this was truly speed/second. This is also backed up by the rough numbers given by the test dummy, which give a dps equal to 4 times the base shot dmg.
I really wish Trendy would fix this and make it so that every single weapon is comparable to another by simply looking at the attack speed stat. As it is, it can be very confusing and misleading.

I would like to chime in and comment on the weapons inherent attack speed. Unfortunately, I wish it was as "easy" as a decimal in the attack speed rating that isn't displayed, but it is definitely not the case and each weapon type definitely has an inherent speed that is then multiplied by that attack speed rating you can increase.
For a quick and easy test of this, take any crystal tracker at 5atk speed, increase it to 6, and then see if you attack anywhere near 6 times a second. My best crystal tracker, which has a reported 6 atk speed, empties its ammos of 25 in right around 7.1s. This comes up to 3.52 shots per second, way under what you would expect from a 6 atk speed stat if this was truly speed/second. This is also backed up by the rough numbers given by the test dummy, which give a dps equal to 4 times the base shot dmg.
I really wish Trendy would fix this and make it so that every single weapon is comparable to another by simply looking at the attack speed stat. As it is, it can be very confusing and misleading.

That's depressingly complex, lol. Mod tools, nao!