Salem

I understand the difficulty is the sum of the difficulties listed on artifact and garment, the lower difficulty on both is used when the proficiencies on the piece of clothing and the artifact match...

The question is:
Is the difficulty then compared to my Thread and Needle value or is it just an absolute representation of the failure rate (like, 0 = success, 100 = failure or something...)?

Thanks.

the second. The percentage you see on the popup while slotting is the "result"

Yes, I believe it does indeed compare the required proficiency level to your current level, but I have no clue what the exact formula it uses is. I assume it picks a matching set between clothing/artifice, and the match with the lowest difficulty at that, but you'll have to have a dev confirm or dig through posts.

it goes like this:

assume you have an artifice with difficulty A to B, and clothing with difficulty C to D. This means that the chance that you will FAIL to slot lies between (A+B) and (C+D). Where in that interval it lies is slightly more complicated.

If the artifice and clothing share no proficiencies, it is roughly the highest of the two (i.e. very little chance to succeed). If they do have matching proficiencies, than the higher the matching proficiencies the more towards the lowest fail chance your actual fail chance will tend. This is not linear, i.e. the lowest fail chance will never be exactly reached. It is something along the lines of "every 50 levels of the proficiency they match in, you halve your distance from your current fail chance to the lowest fail chance". (actual numbers may and do vary, but it gives you an idea). Aside from that, I have honestly no idea what happens if multiple proficiencies match.

Kandarim wrote:assume you have an artifice with difficulty A to B, and clothing with difficulty C to D. This means that the chance that you will FAIL to slot lies between (A+B) and (C+D).

I think you mean "between (A+C) and (B+D)", to begin with. :)

But that's not true either; it would mean that if A+C > 100%, then it would be impossible to slot the item ever, which is not true. Rather, the range of the chances of success lies between the products of the chances to succeed for either item. That is, assuming that A, B, C and D are normalized to 0.0-1.0 rather than in percent terms, the chance of success lies between (1-A)·(1-C) to (1-B)·(1-D). For example, if the artifice has difficulty 10-50 and the clothing has 20-40, then then chance of success lies between 30%-72%.

Where the proficiencies come in it gets a little bit more complicated, but if you don't care for the exact maths, suffice it to say that you only gain from having more matching proficiencies on the artifice and clothing. It only gets better with more matching proficiencies and higher values in those proficiencies, never worse.

For the actual formula, assuming P is your values in the set of matching proficiencies, a selection factor is calculated by the following formula:

This selection factor (clearly lying between 0 and 1) is used to linearly modulate between the lower and upper bounds of probability.

loftar wrote:math skills

Ah, so that's how multiple proficiencies are used, thanks for the explanation!
The chance interval does make more sense now, combining failure rates as they are supposed to

Kandarim wrote:The chance interval does make more sense now, combining failure rates as they are supposed to :)

Indeed, a more intuitive way to think about it might be that you simply have one chance to fail for the artifice, and one chance to fail for the clothing (described precisely by their difficulty ratings), and you simply have to pass both. That would match the math.

I have tangential questions RE combat power modifiers. How do combat modifiers work? I searched the forums, but couldn't find an answer.

This is the closest I got from Jorb:

When determining damage, a comparison is made between the power of the attacker, and the defense of the defender, and the damage is modified accordingly: Up if the attacker has more, and down if the defender has. Whenever (and at whatever level) the attacker's power and the defender's defence values match, the final attack damage remains unmodified.

1) Additive, multiplicative, both? Are +x to common combat added to YB or used as a modifier? +YB seems ruled out based on the above, leading to....
2) If attacker attack bonus = 15, Defender defense bonus = 5, is 10 used in a formula that determines the attack damage coefficient?
3) If so, do innate bonuses exists? I.e. do crickets (etc) have innate defense used in said formula?
4) Do players' humors impart any sort of innate attack/defense values?

Forgive me if this has been answered or - more likely - never divulged. If I was less lazy I would try to plot damage against a cricket with varying gear.

Happy hunting.