Weaken Defense

This is a brief article on the effects of weaken defense, an interesting little ability that many creatures have, and many people initially ignore. So, let us look at what it is that weaken defense is explained to do, from there we will expand into what that means, and then into what it is that it actually does.

“Weaken Defence
Creature will lower targets defence attribute for the next two rounds. Effect value is based on attack attribute. Temporary effect, applies next round, lasts 2 rounds.”

Alright, so what does weakening a creatures defense do? Let’s look at how damage is calculated from an attack. Damage=Attack-Defense, but can not be reduced past 1. Pretty simple right? This means that if a person attacks for 500 damage and the opponent has 450 defense, the creature will take 500-450=50 damage. On the other hand if a creature attacks for 1 damage (hypothetical, but in fact entirely possible) against a creature with -342 defense the damage dealt would be 1–342=343 damage. So you might be thinking, how is this useful? Let’s simply look at an example in which a single creature is attacked by 6 maxed grassan. The first option is for us to set them all to haotic damage. This means that (without vit) the average damage per round will be 600. If we used weaken defense on one instead, what would the result be? Well, the weakener would do 0 damage, but reduce the crit’s defense by 100, meaning every other grassan would deal an extra 100 damage. Thus the average damage (after the first round when weaken has not yet come into effect) would be 1000 damage, a good improvement. This is of course ignoring the effect that weaken defense lasts “TWO*” turns. This means that each other grassan’s attack is actually increased by 200 damage each turn bringing our average per turn damage (after the second round) to 1500 damage.

We went from 600 damage, to 1500 damage by switching one little creature over to weaken, a good deal yeah? We’ve over doubled the damage. So the obvious question now is, how do we maximize this function? How many weakeners should we have and how many hitters? Before we go though, we may want to look at what weaken defense ACTUALLY does. In all actuality, weaken defense lasts little sideways 8 turns. That’s right, the entire battle. So now on the fifteenth turn your grassan that you’ve so intelligently switched over to weaken is using weaken for 100 again. The targets defense this turn is? -1400 (remember, the fifteenth hasn’t kicked in yet), yeah, that’s right, -1400 (assuming it had 0 defense to start with, a poor assumption, but hey in most cases it doesn’t compare to -1400). So how much damage do you average this turn? Well, that’s 100–1400=1500–> 1500*5=7500 damage. That’s a fair amount of damage for one turn. So now with this new assumption let’s attempt to maximize our utility in a situation of 6 grassan.

Read on at your own risk. You may find that this contains spoilers. More than likely you won’t understand it. If you have a good grasp of basic algebra you can at least use a calculator to do the potion of this that I have used calculus for.