Defensive Spirit Analysis (Warning: Math ahead!)

[dfscott]

I've been playing around with ritualist spirit mechanics for a while. I've gone a bit overboard with the math, in fact. As I've started to tweak builds, I've seen a lot of debate about what it more important to a Communing Ritualist: Communing or Spawning Power. I made some charts for my own person use, but decided I would share them with my guildies and GWO friends.

Disclaimer: Most of this is based on knowledge obtained at various internet sources and not so much on experimental testing (for obvious reasons -- it would take forever to independently verify each combination!). So let me know if you see any discrepancies and I will try to correct them.

Basics

For the purposes of this article, I'm going to concentrate on the key defensive spirits: Union, Shelter, and Displacement, since they are the staples of most communing builds.

These spirits work by taking a fixed amount of damage whenever they "do their thing." Once they've taken more damage than their total health, they die (and stop doing their thing). Their "thing" is as follows:


Shelter: works like Protective Spirit. The amount of damage taken by the spirit varies by the spirit's level.
Displacement: works like a perfect version of Distortion (distortion is only 75%). Like Shelter, the amount of damage taken by the spirit varies by the spirit's level.
Union: Similar to shielding hands, except the damage reduced is always reduced by 15. Unlike Shelter and Displacement, the spirit always takes 15 points of damage, regardless of the spirit's level.}


If multiple spirits are up, Displacement is always applied first and if active, will nullify the attack. Next, if Union and Displacement are both up, the effect is applied in the order that they spirits were cast.

Spirits will stop working for 3 reasons:
you go out of range (roughly 2.7 times the aggro circle),
the spell expiration expires (and they die), or
the spirit takes so much damage (either direct or via its effect) that it dies}

You can't do much about the first one except to optimize placement. And in practice, it's the last one that will kill the spirit, so you're generally looking to maximize your spirits health. Here's where the math comes in. Spirit health is given by the forumula (from Guildwiki):

50 + (Spirit Level * 20) * (1 + Spawning Power * .04)

Note that the first number is the level of the Spirit, not the the associated attribute (which for all these spirits is Communing). This makes the calculations a little tricky. But you're lucky because I've already done all that for you, so enough discussion, on with the charts:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/unionchart.jpg

Communing Level runs across the top, and spawning power level down the side. The gray row is the spirit level, which as we know is what directly determines the total health of the spirit. The chart itself, while interesting, doesn't really tell us a lot about how effective the spirit, will be, so lets convert the total health to the number of hits that the spirit can absorb.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/unionhits.jpg

Now it's getting a little more interesting. Note that since the spirit takes 15 points per hit, a spirit at health 16 is equivalent to a spirit at health 30 -- both can take two hits before dying. That's why you see the same number multiple times.

One conclusion we can draw from this is that Communing is only slightly more useful than Spawning Power for a Union Spirit. This is because the damage lost per hit is the same, regardless of spirit level. Another interesting thing is that for Union, a Sup Communing rune+headgear, providing Com:16/SP:13 (the typical combo) is actually inferior to a pair Major runes and a SP headgear, providing Com:14/SP:15 (but only by one hit). This is because this spirit is level 8 regardless of whether you have Com 14 or Com 16.

For comparison, let's look at Shelter, whose spirit level is similar to Union, but whose damage taken is reduced based on the level of Communing:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/shelterchart.jpg

Now we see that Communing is more important than Spawning Power, due to the fact that higher Communing not only increases overall health, but it also reduces the damage taken per hit (it also increases the duration, but that's rarely a factor). You can also see that now the traditional 16/13 attribute build is slightly better than the 14/15.

Finally, Displacement not only scales like Shelter, but also levels much faster:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/displacementchart.jpg

Note how at low levels of Communing, Displacement will only stop a handful of attacks. (Even at high levels, it's only stopping around a dozen, which is why this and Union are not very useful with a minionmancer in the party due to minions using up your spirits).

Note: There's currently a bug in Displacement that causes it to always take 60 dmg regardless of your level of communing, so it actually behaves more like union than shelter. The chart above reflects how it's supposed to work, not how it actually works.

(continued in next post due to image limit)

[dfscott]

Now, for the more visually oriented, here are some pretty 3-D graphs to show how Communing and Spawning Power determine the efficacy of these spirits:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/uniongraph.jpg

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/sheltergraph.jpg

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/displacementgraph.jpg

So there's your math fix for the day -- hope you enjoyed it!

[Metatrons Gaze]

wow! Your my hero! Loveing the charts GO YOU

[bellissima]

Thanks Doyle!

[Bobross]

I've heard that displacement is broken, though...and takes 60 dmg regardless of the lvl in communing...has anyone here tested that?

[critical vengeance]

I've heard that displacement is broken, though...and takes 60 dmg regardless of the lvl in communing...has anyone here tested that?


yeah i did yesterday, and yep bugged it is.


Anyway nice graphs, some of them looked cooler than they seemed to explain a lot, but i guess that's what the charts are for lol. Still i loved the work, it sure will help a lot of people plan how to spend their points.

[dfscott]

I've heard that displacement is broken, though...and takes 60 dmg regardless of the lvl in communing...has anyone here tested that?

Yep, I actually noted that in the OP. The chart reflects how it should work, not how it actually does.

[antoninus]

Nice work and amazing graphs :)
/bowhead

[Zingeri]

You may want to include Signet of Creation math in there somewhere. At 14 HP/Sec, it's a LOT more procs for Union and a few more for Shelter.

[Kjentei]

This is very useful. Thanks and god job. /thumbsup

It's good to see how many times those spirits are dulling/preventing/evading us!

[lavenbb]

Hmm.. next time people say spirits don't do anything, I know what to throw in their face >:)

[Lightow]

You may want to include Signet of Creation math in there somewhere. At 14 HP/Sec, it's a LOT more procs for Union and a few more for Shelter.

This is highly seconded! SoC is a very handy skill for spirit spammers who want to get a few extra secconds of protection or want to use a different elite than rit lord.

[dfscott]

You may want to include Signet of Creation math in there somewhere. At 14 HP/Sec, it's a LOT more procs for Union and a few more for Shelter.

Yep, I was thinking of that as well, as I've just started experimenting with its use. One of the challenges is determining the optimal time to use it in the casting sequence. Too soon and it doesn't get all your spirits -- too late and they're already dead.

My intuition says that the best way to use it would be: Shelter->Union->Displacement->SoC. Displacement is usually your first one down, so using SoC right afterwards seems like the best plan. But I've been wrong before, so I have a new project for this weekend. :smiley:

[dfscott]

As promised, I did some research on Signet of Creation, which I've been playing around with and was surprised by some of the results. In case you're not familiar:

Signet. All Spirits and animated creatures in the area gain +1...6 Health regeneration. After 30 seconds, those spirits and creatures are destroyed.
Cast:2 Energy:0 Recharge:10

So this allows you to effectively cast a Healing Breeze on all your spirits, with the downside that they die no matter what 30 seconds after you activate the skill. For short-lived spirits such as Shadowsong and Dissonance, this isn't a problem, but it can be tricky to decide if it's worth it for the defensive spirits, our old friends Shelter, Union, and Displacement. It's a decently quick recharge, but that doesn't really matter since reapplications to the same spirit don't do anything. It's in the Spawning Power line, so it's easy enough to get a decent level of regen.

There are a lot of variables involved, so in order to be able to get some hard numbers, I held most of them constant and then examined what the effects are varying just a few variables. Specifically, I ran the numbers on just a few of the standard attribute combos:


Communing:16/Spawning Power:13 (the "Max Communing" build),
Communing:13/Spawning Power:16 (the "Max Spawning" build), and
Communing:14/Spawning Power:15 (the two major runes build)}

The last build was made viable by recent health penalty change for major runes. It's particularly advantageous to the Union spirit, since Union is level 8 whether your Communing is 14, 15, or 16, so you don't pay a price for the lower level of Communing. In the first build, Signet of Creation will provide 6 pips of regen, or 12 health/second. In the other two, it jumps to 7, or 14/second.

The main variable to consider here is the amount of damage and/or hits taken per second, since the signet provides healing over time (HoT). To take an extreme example, if you took a 100 hits for 100 points of damage in the first second after you activate it, it won't provide any benefit, since the spirit will be dead before it can get healed. So, to get maximum benefit, we want the damage to be spread out over as much time as possible. We can ignore the 30-second insta-death since either a) it will be dead by then anyway (e.g., Displacement) or b) we'll be able to recast it by then if it's not (I'm assuming we're running Ritual Lord, which most serious builds do).

So now we have to decide how many hits per second we're going to be taking. This obviously varies with the location, creature type, and party size. My rough guess is that 3-4 attacks per second is right for the typical mob in Factions, but YMMV. So instead, I ran it for a lot of different values and quickly found that outside of a fairly narrow range, the signet has no real effect. I've omitted the mind-numbing spreadsheets and just just posted the summary charts (I'll post the details if anyone really wants to see them, but they're not all nice and neat).

These figures make the following assumptions:

Only the current spirit is up
Attacks begin as soon as the spirit is cast
The signet is immediately cast after the spirit is cast (i.e., only a 2 second delay before it goes into effect)}


Let's start with the easiest case: Displacement.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/displacementsoc.jpg

A bit of explanation is probably in order. The far left column is attacks/second. Note that this is total, so if you have 8 swordsmen pounding on one person (about 1 attack every 1.33 seconds), this is equal to 1 swordman pounding on each member of an 8-person party (i.e., the 6 attacks/second row). 8 marksmen firing longbows (1 attack every 2.4 seconds) = 3.3 attacks/second -- you get the idea.

The white on gray text are the three different attribute distributions I mentioned before. Finally, the sub-columns of Normal and SoC are the number of attacks evaded/mitigated both with and without the use of SoC. The benefit column is just the advantage gained by using SoC.

The first thing that jumps out is that as soon as you're taking more than 2 attacks/second (and it's rare that you're not), SoC really doesn't benefit Displacement at all. This is because the spirit gets taken down so much faster than SoC can heal it (i.e., the same reason why Mending is worthless against high-level enemies). It's also worth noting that the C:16/SP:13 is the best build to run here, but if you do run a high SP build, the signet will benefit you more than it would a high communing build.

Next, Union:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/unionsoc.jpg

Union is very interesting, because Spawning Power really helps Union a lot, and it helps SoC as well. If we look at the 4 longbow scenario (3.3 attacks/second) and use the 2 major rune build, SoC gives us in the neighborhood of a 25% boost in the effectiveness of Union, which equates to 75-105 more points of damage negated! Note that bumping SP all the way to 16 actually hurts you here (assuming you then go with a minor Communing Rune), since you lower Communing and lose the extra level that Union would have at Communing 14. Ofc, you could always run two Sup runes, but that opens a whole other can of worms.

Finally, Shelter:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/sheltersoc.jpg

The first thing to note is the first column is different. Shelter only activates when you take damage greater than 10% of your health, so it makes sense that you're not going to be taking 8 and 9 spikes per second (if you are, you have bigger problems than worrying about how effective SoC is!). For this reaons, the scale in this chart is reduced. Again, this works on an average, so if you fight for 4 seconds and then everyone in the 8-person party is spiked for 100, it works out to 2 spikes/second (for various reasons this isn't completely true, but we have to make some simplifications to get our heads around this).

So you'll note that at low levels of spiking damage, Soc really doesn't help. This is because the spirit is tough enough that it's going to last long after 30 seconds anyway, so the extra health is wasted and you just end up killing your Shelter faster. The sweet spot for SoC+Shelter is around 1 spike/second, or a full party spike every 8 seconds (i.e., a pair of Dragon Stomping Jade Elementalists). Here we're seeing a 50% or better increase in spikes blocked through the use of SoC for all three builds (note that the Max Com build and the 2 Major rune build are almost identical, and both are slightly superior to the Max SP build). And as before, once the spikes are coming like mad (think Final Mission), SoC doesn't help much.

One caveat about Signet of Creation is that it effects your allies' undead minions as well, so don't cast it while they're "in the area" -- about 1/3 of the aggro circle. While the health boost is nice, your MM is going to be pretty upset when all his minions drop dead 30 seconds later. However, you shouldn't be running a communing build like this with minions running around reasons discussed in the earlier post. It also works on enemy spirits/minions, but again, you're probably not going to be close enough to them to make a difference.

Another caveat is that this only looked at standard attacks (melee weapons, bow fire, wanding). When you start throwing in AoE damage, the picture gets a lot murkier and is really hard to analyze in an rigorous fashion (just how fast is he going to cast that meteor shower and how many of us are going to be caught in it for how long?).

IMO, SoC is probably worth it, in most situations. My personal recommendation would be to cast Shelter, then Union, followed by SoC and then Displacement. This ensures that the spirit which most often benefits the most from SoC (Union) receives the maximum benefit from it, and unless you get a lot of spikes in the first 8 seconds of combat, Shelter should get plenty of benefit as well (most people pre-cast anyway, so this probably isn't an issue). And if you cast your spirits prior to combat, wait until you're about to start taking damage to activate the signet, otherwise the regen will be wasted since the spirits will already be at max and you'll just be starting the death clock sooner.

Whether you do the Max Communing or the two major runes build is a personal preferance. I prefer to stay with the max communing build, because I often take other Communing Spirits and it also means I can switch to full offensive spirits without needing to switch armor.

As always, feedback is welcome.

[Solaris]

so much information..im sorry but i fail to understand this..in simple terms,if i carry shelter ,union and displacement what is the way my attributes should be set that it would be most effective?

[neoflame]

Now that Displacement is supposed to take 60 damage/swing regardless of Communing, how does this affect optimal attribute distributions?

Edit: Nevermind, ran the analysis myself: 15 Spawning/14 Communing and 13 Spawning/16 Communing both allow Displacement to take 7 swings. 8 swings is reached at 16 Communing and 14+ Spawning.

[dfscott]

As you probably know, the July 14th update brought us an unexpected change to the Displacement spirit. It now agrees with the description, but instead of fixing the spirit's behavior, they simply changed the description to match what the spirit was already doing:

Create a level 1...8 Spirit. Attacks made by non-Spirit foes within its range are "evaded." Every time an attack is evaded in this way, this Spirit takes 60 damage. This Spirit dies after 30...54 seconds.

You might recall that similar to Shelter, it used to take less damage as your level of Communing increased. So let's see what this does to our friend.

But first, in reviewing the numbers, I discovered that my color coding was off on some of the previous graphs, namely Displacement and Shelter. So first, let's fix those:

Shelter
http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/sheltermatrixfixed.jpg

Displacement (pre-update version)
http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/displacementmatrixfixed.jpg

Now that's out of the way, let's look at the post-update version of Displacement. We only care about the bottom chart, since the life formula didn't change:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/displacementmatrixpost-update.jpg

Ugh! As neoflame mentions above, Where our Displacement spirits could used to be able to evade up to 11 attacks (note that the 12 wasn't really attainable since you can only wear one hat), we're now maxing out at 8, a 27% reduction in effectiveness. And the attribute combinations really don't help you that much since there's just not a lot of variety now -- the spirit is getting so pounded with every attack, it doesn't really matter how you spread it around.

Here's the sad news 3-D:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/displacementgraphpost-update.jpg

(hit my image limit, so this is continued in the next post...)

[dfscott]

(continued from previous post)

Since our Displacement is so much weaker, let's see if Signet of Creation can help out our poor nerfed spirit:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/displacementsocpost-update.jpg

This is even worse! Now, SoC provides almost no benefit to Displacement. Only one attribute combination benefits (only three were analyzed, but they are the most common three), but it only benefits a tiny amount and only when the attacks are coming at approximately 2/second.

Poor, poor Displacement -- a weak defensive spirit has just been made a lot weaker. :cry:

Edit: Just to clarify, the "nerf" is the way Displacement has been working all along. If you've been happy with its performance, it won't perform any worse. It's just that my original charts were based on the description of how it works, because I assumed that the spirit was bugged. But Anet is now saying that the spirits works fine, it's just that the description was bugged, so I've changed my charts to reflect the current behavior.

[Pougee]

Has anyone looked at the stats of say an anti melee defensive char Like Ele/Mes/Nec/Monk to compared a Rits overall coverage. I'm thinking more team pvp defense. Most balanced teams damage is based around warriors, You can notice a big difference when you do have a rit. But is the rit the most effective.

Soothing + Displacement + Union + Shelter + Recuperation are the usual spirits that are being used.

[Ashin]

I just need to thank OP for creating some of the most useful information on our profession. Great work and snazzy presentation to boot!

[Dante Volingrad]

I must say, kudos to the wonderful presentation. It all appeared very professional and as such I am more inclined to believe it, lol. I am starting up my first real Rt (I have made a couple before but killed them off too young to really gauge their use). The information you have provided to me has been helpful and I thank you for it.

[dfscott]

I must say, kudos to the wonderful presentation. It all appeared very professional and as such I am more inclined to believe it, lol. I am starting up my first real Rt (I have made a couple before but killed them off too young to really gauge their use). The information you have provided to me has been helpful and I thank you for it.

Thanks for the compliment and I'm glad you found this useful.

Let me add personal anecdote: A communing build just owns the UW. We took a 7-man team (unintentional -- one of the team err7'ed soon after arrival), and the monks were falling asleep.

[dfscott]

Well, Anet has thrown us communing Ritualists another curve with an update to Shelter:

Create a Level 1...7 Spirit. Non-Spirit allies within its range cannot lose more than 10% maximum Health from a single attack. When this Spirit prevents damage, it loses 75...45 Health. This spirit lasts 30...54 seconds.

To refresh your memory, the old Shelter lost 60...30, so this is a significant reduction in effectiveness -- 25% at maxed communing levels and 50% at the bottom.

So, I trotted out my charts and graphs to see how this changes things. We'll start with the matrix:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/sheltermatrix061406.jpg

Instead of stopping as many as 12 hits before, now we can stop only 8! As expected, we're seeing around a 30% reduction in effectiveness at the higher levels. Our pretty graph tells the same story:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/sheltergraph061406.jpg

So, the next question is: is Signet of Creation's effect helped or hindered by this change. The answer is, a little of both. Here's the chart for SoC under the new Shelter:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/sheltersoc061406.jpg

The sweet spot for SoC is now a lot smaller, but the effect of SoC in that sweet spot is larger. Viewed as a line graph, it's a bit easier to see:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/dfscott/oldnewsheltersoccomparison.jpg

In summary, this is not great news, but it's not terrible. Shelter has always been long-lived spirit -- even in tough environments such as the UW or FoW, it hangs in there a long time. However, not having to cast it also meant that you could use it for Feast fodder as soon as it recharged, and that might not be possible as much anymore.

[dfscott]

NeferJackal PM'ed me and pointed out that we have a new spirit buff in Nightfall:

Signet of Binding
Signet. Target allied summoned creature gains +50...170 maximum Health. After 30 seconds, that creature is destroyed (Communing)
Energy:0 Casting Time:1 Recharge:15

This skill is tailor-made for defensive spirits that lose life as they work. Plus, unlike Signet of Creation, this skill gives the spirit a big boost up front, which is important when your party is taking lots of damage. The casting time is half as long as well, which gets the buff started even quicker. The only downside is the fact that it's a single-target skill and the recharge is 15 seconds.

So, running the numbers:

http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/6228/sobbenefits3ie8.th.jpg (http://img340.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sobbenefits3ie8.jpg)

Wow -- much, MUCH better than SoC. This brings Displacement back to its pre-nerf values and makes it actually useable again. Union gets a massive boost, as does Shelter.

Now the only thing to decide is: which one to buff first? It's hard to choose here, because it really depends on what you're facing. My suggestion would be to buff the spirit that's dropping the fastest, the point being that the spirit that's dropping fast is the one that's doing most of the work and will therefore benefit the most. In most cases, that's going to be Displacement. With Shelter (and sometimes even Union), you can often wait until the signet recharge to buff it, so I think it's a clear choice. The only time I wouldn't is when you're taking tons of melee damage and Displacement is dropping immediately -- SoB really won't help in this case (but at that point, you'd probably be better off dropping Displacement and getting your monk to use Aegis or take an Ele with Ward Against Melee or something similar).

Another interesting (and totally untested!) option for heavy damage areas would be to go Rt/Me and use Mantra of Signets:

Stance. For 10...22 seconds, the next time you use a Signet, it recharges immediately (Inspiration Magic)
Energy: 10 Cast: 0 Recharge: 30

The energy cost will likely make this prohibitive to use with Shelter, but it may be possible with Union/Displacement combos. Cast Union, Cast Displacement, Activate Stance, Buff Displacement with SoB, Buff Union with SoB. A ritualist with Halcyon/Radiant armor and a +12 off-hand (49 energy), will be at about 19 energy after this sequence, before counting boosts such as Boon of Creation, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Note that it only makes sense to use this when Union is dropping faster than SoB can recharge, since unlike Signet of Creation, it doesn't matter when you use this SoB, as long as you can cast it before the spirit is dead.

Happy buffing!

[Xycury]

nice work!

i will have to break out my rit again.

[lavenbb]

With these, I wonder if cross-profession synergies would help the spirits further?

Spirits can be targetted by angelic bond, (which splits damage taken in half). I wonder if that would further prolong the spirits by 2X? Anyone want to test? :P

Obviously the spirit must be preventing some very serious spikes in order for this to be worthwhile, maybe some of the high end missions, and keep in mind that while displacement and union takes damage, shelter "loses health".

It could open up to new possibilities though.

[moenbase]

Great findings!
I was looking for this some time ago to make a build for DoA. To see if Shelter is still worthwhile. On my last few treks as a Protection Ritualist it didn't work out that well. If the tanking goes well enough it may still be better then Protective Spirit.
But with mobs and their weird agro they are most like to go for spirits first if they are too close.

[requinox]

With these, I wonder if cross-profession synergies would help the spirits further?

Spirits can be targetted by angelic bond, (which splits damage taken in half). I wonder if that would further prolong the spirits by 2X? Anyone want to test? :P

Obviously the spirit must be preventing some very serious spikes in order for this to be worthwhile, maybe some of the high end missions, and keep in mind that while displacement and union takes damage, shelter "loses health".

It could open up to new possibilities though.


I tried it with my paragon using Union. Union lasted twice as long. And as far as i could tell, there was no weird infinite Union-absorption loop.

[evil goblin]

O NO!THE MATH BURNS!;p
But realy good work theres some helpful stuff there.