Almighty Wall of Text
Now, we all know about the meta Blast Rifle / Semi-Auto Sniper Rifle / Frag Grenade / Damage Diffusor stacked Cyber Rig combo that plagues PvP currently. This thread is going to focus on the Cyber Rig part of the loadout so please refrain from bringing non-Cyber Rig related complaints to this thread. Thanks in advance.
Now, for those not aware, Damage Diffusors are cyber chips that decrease the damage the user takes by a set amount (1.5 + 0.5 per tier, maxing at 3.5 at Supreme tier).
The counterpart of the Damage Diffusor, is the Damage Intensifier, which increases the damage the user can inflict by a set amount (this one is an exception, since it has a common variant. Has such, it has 0.5 at common tier, 0.75 at uncommon tier, 1.0 at rare tier and from then on it gets +0.5 per tier, maxing at 2.5 at Supreme Tier).
Damage Intensifiers have conditional variants, the weapon specific intensifiers and the critical damage intensifiers (1.0 + 0.5 per tier, maxing at 3.0 at Supreme Tier).
Has you have noticed, even the weapon specific weapon chips and critical damage chips have a lower increase than a Damage Diffusor, which reduces damage from all direct damage sources, being more global than the loadout limiting conditional damage chips. However, it gets much worse.
Math Incoming
You see, even if Damage Diffusors granted Mitigation in a 1:1 ratio when compared to damage increasing chips (i.e, a damage increasing chip giving the same amount of damage increase that a Damage Diffusor gives in mitigation), the Damage Diffusors would still be at advantage because of the way damage mitigation works. To explain, to take half damage, you would need to somehow stack 50% damage mitigation, but to double your damage you would need to stack 100% damage increases (I say 100% because you already deal 100% damage at base, so 100% base + 100% chips = 200% damage, double damage).
To understand why this happens, we need to take into account the concept of eHP:
Originally Posted by Math
Now that eHP has been explained, let's introduce chips to this concept.
Having damage mitigation means in mathematical terms means taking less damage by a set amount. By other words, having 10% damage mitigation means that you now only take 90% of the damage an attack would deal to you, i.e, an attack that originally dealt 10 damage now only deals 9 damage. Pretty simple, right?
Now to take this into account with the eHP definition, this would mean that your health is now 1 / (1 - 0.1) = 1.11, an 11% increase in eHP for just 10% mitigation! Buy 10, get 1 free?
Taking the above into account, we can get the following equation:
Originally Posted by eHP
With this in mind, we can formulate a graph relating the damage mitigation of Damage Diffusors with a character's eHP difference:
Spoiler:
From the graph, we can get the following information:
- Cyber Rig with 6 Epic Damage Diffusors: 17,6 % eHP increase
- Cyber Rig with 6 Legendary Damage Diffusors: 22 % eHP increase
- Cyber Rig with 6 Supreme Damage Diffusors: 26,6 % eHP increase
In comparison to damage increasing chips:
- 6 Supreme Damage Intensifiers = 15 % Damage increase
- 6 Legendary Conditional Damage Intensifiers = 15 % Damage Increase
- 6 Supreme Conditional Damage Intensifiers = 18% Damage Increase
If we analyze this data, we can affirm that:
- 6 Supreme Damage Intensifiers are 2,6 % weaker than 6 Epic Damage Diffusors and 11,6 % weaker than 6 Supreme Damage Diffusors (Trion, what the hell?);
- 6 Legendary Conditional Damage Intensifiers are 2,6 % weaker than 6 Epic Damage Diffusors and 11,6 % weaker than 6 Supreme Damage Diffusors;
- 6 Supreme Conditional Damage Intensifiers are 4 % weaker than 6 Legendary Damage Diffusors and 8,6 % weaker than 6 Supreme Damage Diffusors.
In sumation: Cyber Chips are incredibly badly balanced, making Defensive Chips much stronger than offensive chips by several tiers.