Dodge/Graze Rework Proposal

[Surrealistik]

It would be nice to have more ways to manipulate Dodge and Glance which can be both absolutely frustrating and hard to influence (yes I'm aware that there's a couple of rare ways to do so, and that guaranteed damage/hits help).

Suggestions for intuitive and rational ways of letting the player deal with these:

• Expansion of game elements that now reduce Dodge/Glance such as abilities like Holotargeting, Suppression (hard to dodge when you're pinned down with gunfire), gun attachments, etc...
• Dodge and Aim are now opposed rolls; if Aim succeeds on its roll by a greater margin than Dodge, Dodge does nothing; this makes sense as it's harder to dodge a more accurate shooter. Might require a universal increase to Dodge values to keep it relevant. That all said, it is silly that a crackshot sniper shooting someone who is out of cover is as easy (or difficult) to dodge as a rookie shooting the same target in cover.
• Dodge is reduced or eliminated by certain debuffs: it should be impossible to dodge while you're stunned/unconscious/frozen, and more difficult while you're poisoned, panicked and disorientated.
• Dodge is ignored by units attacking from Stealth/Concealment; you can't dodge what you can't see and aren't aware of. Possible exception for psionic aliens due to their prescience/sixth sense, who might retain dodge against stealthed/concealed attackers in proportion to their Will as a reflection of their psionic power/capability; Sectoids would lose quite a bit of Dodge in this way, but Avatars/Gatekeepers by contrast would be basically unaffected by this penalty.

[Surrealistik]

Having dodge increment with empty inventory slots and lighter weapons alongside mobility might also be an idea.

[Surrealistik]

Bump.

[Devon_v]

If you're thinking of Vanilla dodge, it's already changed in Long War. Dodge and Crit oppose each other just like Aim and Defense do. A good Crit score already negates Dodge.

What you may be seeing is the Graze Band, which is a new mechanic. If you hit or miss within 10 of the target number, the attack is a Graze. So if you have an 80% shot, and you roll a 70, it will be a Graze even if the opponent has no Dodge. However, if you roll a 90, which would be a miss in vanilla, it will also be a Graze for half damage,

It simulates edge hits that don't fully connect with the target

[Ithuriel]

@Devon_V- from my understanding I didn't think that Crit and Dodge were directly opposed like Aim and Defense? Aim and Defense work like this: your hit chance is %(Aim-Defense) but I thought that Crit and Dodge were rolled separately, i.e. you have X% chance to roll a crit- if so, upgrade damage 1 category, and you have Y% to dodge, if so downgrade damage one category; if you pass both the crit and dodge rolls, they cancel each other out.

In summary, I thought that whereas Aim and Defense directly counter each other, Crit and Dodge are independent rolls with opposite effects.

[Devon_v]

@Devon_V- from my understanding I didn't think that Crit and Dodge were directly opposed like Aim and Defense? Aim and Defense work like this: your hit chance is %(Aim-Defense) but I thought that Crit and Dodge were rolled separately, i.e. you have X% chance to roll a crit- if so, upgrade damage 1 category, and you have Y% to dodge, if so downgrade damage one category; if you pass both the crit and dodge rolls, they cancel each other out.

In summary, I thought that whereas Aim and Defense directly counter each other, Crit and Dodge are independent rolls with opposite effects.

There is only ever one roll made. In vanilla Dodge and Crit simply replaced linear sections of the shot bar, which is what lead to low accuracy shots always being crits if they connected. Long War calculates them into relative sections of the shot bar, so for instance 50% to hit, 50 Crit will be 25% chance of a crit because that's half of the successes in that situation. That's what the "To Hit" modifier on the Crit wing is doing. Dodge works exactly the same way, but in reverse. Rather than making extra rolls, 1 point of dodge and 1 point of crit simply negate each other as they have the exact same odds of causing precisely opposite effects.

In practice, it more or less works like you think, but all the percentages are mathed out before the shot roll is actually made, and the result just determines which part of the potential results gets used.

[mattprice516]

Ithuriel is correct. Crit and Dodge do not additively cancel each other out in LW2. While the math IS done beforehand and then parsed into a single actual RNG roll, it's done based on Crit and Dodge being independent rolls. If you are shooting at a target and you have 50 Crit, they have 50 Dodge, the end result will be that 25% of shots will be upgraded (Crit roll succeeded, Dodge roll failed), 25% of shots will be downgraded (vice versa), and 50% of shots will not be upgraded or downgraded (both rolls succeeded or both rolls railed).

[trihero]

Ithuriel is correct. Crit and Dodge do not additively cancel each other out in LW2. While the math IS done beforehand and then parsed into a single actual RNG roll, it's done based on Crit and Dodge being independent rolls. If you are shooting at a target and you have 50 Crit, they have 50 Dodge, the end result will be that 25% of shots will be upgraded (Crit roll succeeded, Dodge roll failed), 25% of shots will be downgraded (vice versa), and 50% of shots will not be upgraded or downgraded (both rolls succeeded or both rolls railed).

Yeah this is the thing that confused me the most. I think one of the tips somewhere says dodge counters crit and crit counters dodge, but my assumption was it did so in a straightforward additive manner but it's clearly not. You can have 100% to hit with 74% crit and 21% dodge, and still get graze hits and oh my, is it painful.

What's more confusing is that on the "crit" display, dodge is indeed subtracted straight off from crit. So there is both an additive component and a multi-roll check component.

I personally turn off the graze band as it's aggravating to have 100% hits on 0 dodge units graze, and just in general going lower than your minimum damage when you're counting on that min damage to kill something.

[Ithuriel]

@Long war crew- just from an optimization standpoint I suppose 1 roll is better; that said, technically speaking the way it's actually done is functionally indistinguishable from what I described. I simply described it as separate rolls because it was easier for me to distinguish what I meant.

@trihero- as far as I know, the subtraction off of your "crit" display is in fact the actual effect that the enemies' dodge has on your chance to land a crit. It's not their precise dodge value (I'm not certain, but I suspect all enemy dodge values are multiples of 5). The game does the relatively complicated math for you, and just shows you the net result.

[trihero]

I much preferred the vanilla style where if you have 100% to hit, you can't graze. I think this is only true for hail of bullets in LW2.

[mattprice516]

@trihero Dodge and Crit counter each other, but only insofar as if you roll both of them they cancel out.

The additive modifier you see to Crit (and Hit) is the actual modifier on your absolute chance to Crit (or Hit) from the conditional probability. It's not the clearest display unfortunately (a PI-style bar would be better but no PI-style mod has been updated to properly account for the Graze band yet).

@Ithurial Yep - that's the same reason I described it as separate rolls when I laid the system out here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/ ... it_chance/

To the end user it's the exact same thing - the "combining them into one roll" thing is really just a coding/optimization thing, not something I personally consider part of the system's design (though amineri, who actually came up with the system and figured out how to make it work, might very well disagree). I'd just as soon never mention the fact that it pre-computes the conditional probabilities because I think it confuses people, heh.

[trihero]

So I guess the confusing part is then how much dodge they have? I can understand that the -crit you see on the display is the final estimation of your unconditional crit chance, but then I'm just lost as to how much dodge chance they have. I imagine there must be some portion of their dodge that is undone by your crit in the same way that -crit shows up in the form of dodge.

[Ithuriel]

but then I'm just lost as to how much dodge chance they have. I imagine there must be some portion of their dodge that is undone by your crit in the same way that -crit shows up in the form of dodge.

So from my understanding, you technically could calculate their exact dodge value as follows: (% penalty to crit due to dodge)/((% to land a crit)+(% penalty to crit due to dodge)). In other words, figure out what percentage of your crit chance WITHOUT dodge is lost due to dodge, because that's the chance that they effectively roll a dodge and you roll a crit at the same time.


@mattprice516- actually amusingly enough that post was what I was basing my information on I just tbh couldn't quite remember where I'd seen it.... Also I'm currently in the the fourth and final year of my Bachelor's in CS, so I'm rather familiar with both optimization, as well as being very possessive of exactly how you did your work XD Thanks for the clarification, appreciate it ^^

(......OMG SOMEBODY THAT HELPED MAKE LONG WAR POSTED IN MY THREAD OMG LSKJEFLKSEJLAJFLSJFLKSEJF #fanboying ^^)