hints

I charted this out for my own understanding, posting here if anyone else is interested. Defense gets less valuable the higher it gets, hence why at low levels you could increase it by 5 and see your absorb go up. Then later on it takes 50 to get the same increase. So here I chart exactly at what rate your defense is converted to damage absorb.

Def Abs Def-to-Abs
10 6% 63%
20 9% 45%
30 11% 37%
40 13% 32%
50 14% 28%
60 15% 26%
70 17% 24%
80 18% 22%
90 19% 21%
100 20% 20%
120 22% 18%
140 24% 17%
160 25% 16%
180 27% 15%
200 28% 14%
250 32% 13%
300 35% 12%
350 37% 11%
400 40% 10%
450 42% 9%
500 45% 9%
550 47% 9%
600 49% 8%
650 51% 8%
700 53% 8%

You might find this page useful if you've not seen it already, along with the absorb formula:

If [Defense] <= 1600, then: 2 * Square Root of [Defense]
Else: 2 * Square Root of ( ( 1600 / [Defense] ) * ( [Defense] - 1600 ) + 1600 )

Yep, that's what I used to chart this. I just wanted to track how your defense gets inflated and less valuable the more you have.

Ol Rolf came up with some pretty clever formulas back in the day.

Fun topic! Absorb is kind of funny...

More defense absolutely causes the absorb percentage gain to slow down, which looks like diminishing returns, but each additional bit of absorb actually has exponential gain. The most intuitive example I'm aware of is that going from 98% to 99% absorb effectively doubles your HP (since you're now taking 50% of the damage you were before), whereas going from 0% to 1% absorb is effectively nothing (since you're still taking 99% of the damage you were before). Taken to the extreme, the game's current formula would eventually allow you to reach 100% absorb, so this formula is something that needs to eventually be revisited.

Very true! It's interesting how the math works out to make it both inflated and deflated at the same time.

The most intuitive example I'm aware of is that going from 98% to 99% absorb effectively doubles your HP (since you're now taking 50% of the damage you were before), whereas going from 0% to 1% absorb is effectively nothing (since you're still taking 99% of the damage you were before).

Almost the same thing I was going to respond with in regards to the actual value of defense. Pretty much any game using percentage damage reduction you always want to know your EHP (effective health points) meaning how much damage you can take after accounting for the reduction. A more realistic example for bots I like to use is 50% vs 75%. Same idea where instead of taking half damage, you now only take a quarter of the damage (so effectively doubling your hp like in Ed's example). This would be in the ballpark of numbers of something with an iron pelt set like castrator vs a hellguard set like necromancers.

Extra real world example, think about reactions one has to certain sales on Steam games. See a 50% or maybe even 75% discount and that's pretty nice, but you see one of those 95% ones and you have to change your pants.