Armorsmith Archive
Thread: question by MCH: special protection vs. effectiveness?
I'm an MCH, and thought I'd ask this question here since if anybody knows, it would be the experts. I had asked on the CH board what pet effectiveness was and someone posted an excerpt from The Complete Guide to Armor - gave a great explanation of armor effectiveness and special protection. Except I didn't quite understand the difference between special protection and effectiveness other than that protection values override effectiveness values. But other than that are they essentially the same thing?
The reason I ask is that pets have stats for both special protection and effectiveness. When we CH talk about a pet, we always mention its special protections (resists) but never talk about its effectiveness values. For example, I recently tamed a ravenous roba that has special protect vs. heat 75%, and Effectiveness 30% in pretty much everything else. So, exactly what does that mean? There aren't too many pets that I can think of that have special protection and effectiveness statsthat cover every category and decent stats at that. But - is effectiveness the same as resists? Because if it is (or at least comparable) then we CH have been overlooking some important stats for our pets. Especiallyin the case of something like the ravenous roba which seems to have some sort of protection against everything.
WTS wrote:
from the end user's point of view there is no difference. 50% special protection is the same as 50% effectiveness for a creature.
Exactly. The difference comes up when you are looking at slicing adn other such issues. But in terms of game mechanics, a 50% kinetic special protection on one pet will block the same amount as a 50% kinetic effectiveness protection on a different one.
So, yes, the creature you have is far more valuable since it covers many resists. Keep in mind, however, that for 90% of your game experience, the only resist you really want to worry about are Kinetic and Energy. Most of the others are only seen on high level MOBs and in PvP. But a 30% protection to all resists creature would be far better in most PvP situations than one that has several vunerabilities.