See Spells.xls for details about it

For Paladin, with VIT max 180, it means he is limited at DFE -90. And with missile damage from enemies on Doom mode it means that arrows won't even stun the guy.

Maximum damage per one arrow on Doom is 255 points of damage. With ARD mod it becomes 127 points. Next, DFE comes into play, successfully reducing the rerst of the damage by 90 points (!!!). What do we have left? Tiny 37 points. It won't stun a player. No way. That makes me think that maximum DFE from a decent set of items should let through about 43-51 points of damage. So, that the character will be stun not always, but less and less as he gains extra levels. That means, that maximum DFE must be limited at the value of 127-50=75. 75 points, approximately. This shouldn't come from VIT cutoff as such, but instead it should come from item builds.

My Paladin has level 43, so he needs damage of 44+ to stun him..

---to be continued---- (dinner break)

yea, it's logical. I'm thinking, I'm thinking... Shield IS for blocking. With a block done, a character gets no damage at all.

I'll get my glad to doom ASAP and then I'll know what's going on in there myself.

About damage again, arrows are affected by AC, magical attacks (which are also affected by ARD) usually hit you because they use difference between MLVL and CLVL to determine a chance to hit. And also the y are affected by resists. That's why they hit more often without bringing disbalance to the game: hit more often, but less hard. Arrows OTOH are supposed to hit hard, but seldom. I'm sure that in about 35% arrows must stun a character with decent protection on Doom. Probably, character stun formula should be changed somehow for this. I dont know yet, gotta give it a thought...

This requires lots of thinking....

Yesterday, before dozing off, I was thinking about this whole DFE + stun shebang. And I think I got a nice solution. I can improve the absorption on ArcShield. Currently, it absorbs random [10-60]% of melee damage left from melee attack damage after DFE modification, average 35% absorb. I could improve the formula so that it would be random [30-70]%, average 50% absorption. And by lowering total DFE and increasing resistance to melee attacks this way, some place is left to free up space for arrows so that they coould effectibely stun a character.

I could also link character stun formula to some other parameter rather than clvl. For example, make it (1+curVIT/8), this way a character would get stunned less often when in Fury state. But, I gotta think about it also.

Or ARD power could be decreased to 25% only, but then magical damage and arrows would become extremely dangerous. Least possible solution.

Or, I could simply balance out the values of DFE on magical and unique items. But then again, paladin vs gladiator is a serious problem on later stages of character development. The first has block and shield gives additional dfe. otoh, he has lower VIT limit and his dfe has lower limit. Gladiator has higher max VIT, but he wears no shield and thus it's more difficult for him to achieve high dfe value like paladin does. Plus, maximum dfe value should still allow for charaacter stun and thus must not be higher than 80 points at all cost.

I'll explain it again, even though I recall writing it somewhere:
initial arrow damage from a shooter on Doom mode is usually around 190-255 points. Lets take a value of 250 for instance.

The damage absorption goes in the following way:
1) Armor Class check: if armor class check is successfull, skip damage, if not go next
2) ARD: divide damage by one half. 250 / 2 = 125
3) DFE: add DFE value to damage. If current DFE on player is -90, then damage received is 125 - 90 = 35. This will never stun clvl 40 character.

That's what I'm talking about. I think, even in cathedral, skeleton archers should be able to stun characters sometimes. Rarely, but they need this. Of course, Gloom clan will have the highest chance to cause stun on character with their arrows.

If the character is of level 50, then the damage must sometimes be higher than 50 points to allow for stun.

Currently, all melee damage on Doom stuns characters just because it's very high. While arrows have a potential to not stun a player. I'm trying to bring this to some alternative solution when both melee and missile damage CAN stun a player, but not always, and missiles would stun less often than melee attacks, because usually characters get attacked by multiple shooters at a time and only by a few melee monsters.

The only solution about melee damage I can think of is AS with higher absorption and more randomness in absorption percentage. Randomness - for stun chance: if one hit will receive low percent of absorb it will stun, another hit which gets high absorption will not stun. An improvement, no? ,-) Oh yeah, by the way, I could also link AS damage absorption random percentage to some character parameter like CLVL. For example, (25 + Rnd[clvl])%, or maybe (30 + Rnd[curVIT/8])%. The latter will give more absorption potential when under Fury (which gives clvl*2 boost to curVIT).

Regarding arrows, they still need stun potential. For clvl50 characters the percentage of hit is low already due to high AC, the percentage of arrows that would stun will be dependant on monster damage. I might need to revise monster damages actually, to make this thing work better, and give the monsters damge with more randomness. Say, 220-240 instead of 238-240. Then it will be easier to balance damage for different clvl players with different DFE values. Thank god, melee attackers will not require such adjustments because of AS absorption randomness.

upd:
As to melee monsters, sometimes, their damage should be reduced below 50 points too, to accomplish this.
If damage is 250 points, 70 DFE will leave 180 points after that. With AS absorption of 50%, it wil result in 90 points, 75% absorption will give 170 / 4 = 42 points approximately. Already better, but still to high. 80% will result in 34 points. Good. That would be nice already. If lower limit would be something like 30%, it would give 119 points of damage. The result: with AS's damage absorption of 30-80%, final damage received from initial 250 will be random [34-119].

Secondary problem: how to make gladiator use Arcane Shield more effectively

upd:
See this document for more info on the subject
Probably, you'll give me some advice based on that info...

upd:
the formula now is 20 + Rnd[10 + (baseVIT / 4)]%

I'm also thinking about changing gladiator's skill to AS. He'll have better chance to use Fury than AS as magic anyway...

upd:
OK, it seems that I finally got it working, now it's time to cut down DFE

upd:
DFE adjusted in affix data and on unique items, now to other things...

upd:
I'm thinking about giving Uber Diablo resistance to physical damage...