Tar Patch -Res is unresistable

[Tylerst]

TLDR; Tar patch's Resistance debuff across all the AT's Dark Miasma, and Controller's Dark affinity, are flagged as unresistable, in both PvE and PvP. The pet version that NPCs use is also flagged this way, but only vs players.  It allows for any enemy to be defeated notably faster than normal in comparison to other -Res powers, particularly against enemies with high resistances such as Hamidon or Incarnate Trials.

 

 

I did some tests in AE with two defenders against a random boss I made. I used cold domination's sleet for comparison as it is another location based -Res with the same scale:

 

 

As you can see, the sleet was resisted as you would expect with 85%/90% damage resistances, with the -30% Res at 15%/10% effectiveness or -4.5%/-3% respectively, but the tar patch was flat out applied without damage resistance being taken into account.

 

So currently, you just need 10-12  tar patches  to floor any foe's resistance(I believe -300% is still the floor anyway).

 

I believe this is a problem that need addressed ASAP.  Even enemies with 90+ resistances like Hamidon would melt in the face of 2-3 tar patches.

 

Also, the NPC version of Tar Patch has the -Res marked unresistable, but only VS players. This is less breaking than players having access to it, but

would be nice for all the resistance based armor sets if it was fixed.😃

 

 

 

Here is my WP tanker in AE against 6 sleets vs 6 tar patches:

 

 

(Note that I was +1 compared to the enemies, so the -Res went from 30 to 27 due to purple patch)

 

As you can see, my tanker(which is at 92.05% S/L Resistance) is having -162% res applied(-27%*6) in both cases.

Since I have 92.05% Smashing Res the -Res should be at 7.95% effectiveness. In this case 162*0.0795 = 12.879

92.05-12.879 = 79.171

Math checks out on the sleet side(with rounding).

 

On the tar patch side, we see a flat 92.05-162= -69.95, Ouch.

 

I also looked into testing other npcs with Tar Patch, but the only one I could remember was Desdemona, and yes, hers is also unresistable to players, but I think all the npc based Tar Patches point to the same pet anyway, so fixing that should fix them all.

 

 

[Glacier Peak]

Good bug find!

[Bopper]

Interesting find. I can only dig so far in my past stuff, but I think Tar Patch originally was resistable in PVE and unresisted in PVP (not sure if intended, but thats how I see it flagged in an old spreadsheet). Perhaps while doing recent changes with tar patch, the flag accidentally got set.

[Elmyder]

Great find! Just wanna chime in say that I really hope this gets fixed soon, because it's massively game breaking. Especially thinking of speedrunning, people now generally consider runs done during degen bug to be invalid. So this runs the risk of causing similar issues if it's left unfixed for too long.

[XaoGarrent]

My gut instinct is to respond with "Good!" Because it's a rare case of resistance based sets learning what life for a defense based set that isn't SR feels like. Mind you it's only/mainly in lolPvP that players have to face this, but still. Point stands conceptually at least.

 

That and I hate how anything short of a large resistance debuff or a massive stack of small ones is rendered pretty much pointless once both purple patch and mob resistance is factored in. A system on a curve would have made way more sense, at least for enemies.

[Elmyder]

I personally have no investment in PVP, but this is incredibly broken for PVE. For example: No need to hold green mitos in theory if you can reduce their res to 0 with just 3 darks. Unstoppable on Reichsman and Honoree? No longer matters with a couple darks.

[Elmyder]

TLDR: This is not only broken for enemies with high resistance. It's also artificially scaling up all other -res debuffs. So if you're running with another res debuffer, it's broken on everything.

 

@Burk and I brought a dark miasma corruptor and a blaster with surveillance into Lambda to see this for ourselves on Marauder. What we learned is that it's even more broken than indicated in the OP. Specifically, not only is tar patch unresisted, but it is actually lowering the base resistance number that is considered in the calculation for how much other debuffs are resisted. This is not supposed to happen. See here: https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Resistance_(Mechanics)

 

Here is a screenshot to demonstrate:

 

 

Marauder's resistance to s/l is 95%. Tar patch is lowering this by 20.25% unresisted, bringing it down to 74.75%. So the question then was, are these other debuffs being resisted by 95% or 74.75%? If you do the math, it's the latter. 36.1% is exactly the final resistance number you get by adding up all the other res debuffs, scaling by 0.2525, and subtracting from 74.75. In full detail:

 

95-20.25-(36+13+5.2+23.4+20.25+4.5+8+10.8+13+11.7+7.2)*0.2525 = 36.104875

 

How broken is this exactly? Say you are fighting Reichsman and he pops unstoppable, bringing his resists up to 95%. 2 dark defenders and 2 cold defenders together can bring him down to -res cap on their own if they are using burnout, before counting -res procs: 95-30*4-30*8*1.25 = -325

I tested this on hami because it should have in principle been the same and would've had huge implications for hami raids. I did not know this, but apparently hami has his own unique lower res cap of 75%. With this bug, I can achieve this on my own using one corruptor tar patch:

 

 

However, obviously still incredibly broken. Here is what I'm able to do to a green mito on my own with its shield up:

 

 

With this league, a green would take over 10 seconds to kill. I put tar patch on it from the start and it would die in literally 2 seconds. For clean numbers, consider if I was a defender applying -30% res with tar patch. This would lower the green's res from 90% to 60%, which corresponds to 4 times more damage getting through.

Edited May 20, 2020 by Elmyder

[macskull]

4 hours ago, XaoGarrent said:

My gut instinct is to respond with "Good!" Because it's a rare case of resistance based sets learning what life for a defense based set that isn't SR feels like. Mind you it's only/mainly in lolPvP that players have to face this, but still. Point stands conceptually at least.

 

That and I hate how anything short of a large resistance debuff or a massive stack of small ones is rendered pretty much pointless once both purple patch and mob resistance is factored in. A system on a curve would have made way more sense, at least for enemies.

So a couple things here: 1) until Issue 13 all Defender debuffs were unresisted in PvP and 2) movement slows don't do anything in PvP anymore to the point where you can basically walk through Tar Patch like it's not even there.

 

Additionally, even though a resistance debuff may be lessened by resistances or the purple patch, you're still doing the same percentage increase in damage.

[Uun]

This was fixed in the player version last year but still exists in the NPC version used vs. players. The NPCs that use this power seem to be limited to Shepherd Prophets, Decaying Murk Eidolons, Desdemona and the Mission Maker. Seems to be insta-death to anyone but @Werner.