Bst And Adapa Shield Questions For Those Who Know.

I have a few questions I hope ppl (Paladins) will have some insight on. Its really my first time paying specific attention to the numbers on shield blocking, so I want to make sure I understand correctly.


1. Where do we find the list of what order defensive attributes take place? I know its often referred to, but I wasn't able to find it on bg-wiki earlier. though I mostly looked at counter and shields and shield skill pages.

So is it Evasion > Shield Block > Counter > Intimidate ?


2. Block Rate:
Obviously bst shield skill is mediocre. 300 skill + 16 merits + 112 from Adapa Shield (112 and 107 are pretty common)
I understand it will affect the block rate (Base 55% for size 1)j

But how much? Any experience pld's (or other jobs) have a sense of how much the block rate will go up or down from the enemy skill (level) vs player skill? How much will this go up and down.

2.5 More on Block rate really... and Reprisal. I'm assuming it caps at 100% because I don't see a cap listed on the wiki and some examples show higher than 100% on wiki.
Adapa shield should have a 75% block rate without considering the skill comparison. Wouldn't reprisal add another 37.5% to this?
Meaning that it can hit 100% even if monster skill vs player skill reduces it as far as 67% ?


3. Damage Reduction
There is 1 part in the formula on bg wiki that I"m a little unclear on:


Adapa shield has 63 def. Does this mean I get another 31% damage reduction from the def on the shield? That seems high to me.

I understand this would be multiplied by 50% reduction from gear, so total would look like 75% damage reduction for attacks blocked by shield. Is this correct?
With reprisal up this is any attack to your face.

Thank you for any insights and clarifications.

(BSt actually has access to 2 more defensive traits it can stack with these, Counter and Killer Effect)

1: I don't think there's a specific page for this. At least not that I know of. The order of operations should be:
Intimidate > Evasion > Parry > Shadows > Counter > Shield Block.

2: You can expect to see around a 1% change in block rate for every 5 shield skill difference. Or to be more precise skill * 0.215. This value may vary slightly between different skill ranges and shield types, but this number has proved fairly accurate in most of the comparison's I've done.

Keep in mind that the base block rate is what the rate will be when player shield skill and monster combat skill are equal. And you are never going to be equal with any monster in ilvl content. So that base will be reduced.

Also the base block rate for a size 3 shield should be 45%. Not sure where you're getting that 55%.

As for what your actual block rate will be, I may be able to dig up some numbers later, but I wanted to get the basic answer out sooner than that would take.

2.5: Reprisal. A couple of things to consider here.

Firstly, Reprisal interacts with block+ is a way that is not favorable to the player. Reprisal is applied to the current block rate before block+ gear. So the block+ doesn't get modified by reprisal.

block rate = (Base*reprisal)+ block+

This sucks.

Next up, some corrected values. since the correct base for a size 3 shield is 45%, against a mob with matching skill we would do

45*1.5=67.5 + 20 = 87.5%

Or at least, it would have been. if it weren't for our next subject.

Block rate caps. Block rate hard caps at 100%, but that's not the only cap in play. There's another cap based purely on the players shield skill. And this cap also limits gains from block+ gear and reprisal. It's the reason why Priwen can't hit 100% block rate even with reprisal up.

So it's very, very, unlikely that BST would actually hit that 87.5% block rate with reprisal up with the shield skill it has.

I don't have a formula for the cap atm, though I may be able to infer something from some of my existing data. I'll try to come back to this in another post along with the expected block rates.

3: Block dmg reduction.

Adapa is a size 3 shield, so 50% dmg reduction base. Then the def on the shield /2 so 31.5. I've always floored this to 31. FFXI tends to floor things,. and well, good luck actually being able to detect a 0.5% difference in any tests. And BST has no shield def bonus traits so we can skip that.

So 50%+31. 81% dmg reduction on block. PDT would be applied to the remainder. So you be taking 9.5% of the original dmg, or reducing dmg taken by 90.5%.

I also feel the need to note that not all physical attacks are shield blockable. Needles and throatstab type attacks are physical and can be mitigated by PDT, but they can't be shield blocked. Further you can't block ranged attacks, which is incredibly stupid. And why EES still tends to hurt a bit.

I feel like since this post didn't go into the actual block rate value you'd have vs any reasonable ilvl content it may give an overly optimistic idea of what BST's block rate would be like.

Something to consider before I get into a full block rate analysis.

BST shield skill. 428. PLD shield skill with Aegis 440. Actually pretty similar huh?

Now have you ever seen what PLD's say about Aegis' block rate now days? It's garbage. Floored at 5% on like 132 mobs iirc. There's still Adapa's block+ and the PLD vs BST skill gap to consider, but I just wanted to say not to get your hopes up too much.

If you have a specific mob level or range of levels you're curious about, it would be useful to know that so I can try to figure block rates for the content you're actually interested in rather than a random example.

Ha!

Well maybe I was too hasty, but I thought I checked all the shields bst could use and I thought they all said size 1.

so that is where I was getting the 55% from. All from bg wiki, but I look now, and it definitely says size 3 on the Adapa Shield page...

But thank you! This is exactly the information I was looking for. I was trying to get a general picture from the available data, but the data painted a picture that seemed too good to be true.

So it seems there is an overall problem with shield block rate for ilvl content. It mainly affects aegis users because there are special block bonuses to Ochain and Priwen.

I did not know about this stuff at all because I don't play paladin.

It looks like realistically I can hope for a 25% block rate on high level content using Adapa shield, and only 20% from Sacro Bulwark.

However, maybe on Ilvl 119 or nearish content, blockrate would be pretty good?

I don't have any specific content in mind. I'm just trying to figure out how useful a shield is for potential tanking on bst main.

Thank you very much for your response

Just a quick fyi about how block+ interacts with the block floor... Unlike Inquartata for parries, block+ is added before the floor is applied. So if your calculated block rate was -10%, and you have block+20 you'd waste half of that block+ just getting out of the negative values. And would end up at 10% block rate. So in this example, you only gained 5% block rate over the floor with your +20. -.-;

So that 25%(which I'm assuming you were getting from the 5% floor+Adapa's block+20 ) isn't a guaranteed minimum or anything. You could, and probably would have floored(5%) block rate on the really high level content.

For lvl 119 content.. I don't actually have any samples for lvl 119 mobs specifically but after looking at tests that were near in level and accounting for the skill and shield type differences, I'm getting BST at about 16.58% block rate base on 119 mobs. Rough numbers mind you.

Apply reprisal to that and we get 24.87%. Then add in Adapa's block+20 for 44.87%. Which is not completely terribly, actually.

Keep in mind that this will drop quickly as mob level rises though.

This is probably accurate with the one exception being that Counters can proc before Shadows if the Counter is triggered from Ninja's Tactical Parry trait Job Point bonus. The JP category gives a +20% chance to counter a parried attack, in which case the game technically doesn't consider it a true "counter". The game replaces your parry with a counter instead, but outside of this trait, you normally wouldnt be able to counter through shadows.