Defence & Damage reduction

Hello readers! My name is Elquines and I'm a guest contributer on Distinguished Sword. Today I'm going to blog about a small experiment I've done recently with regards to defense(DEF) and defence rating(DR) as it is computed in Granado Espada.

Many of us would had dabbled in a bit of armour enhancement by now. Giving up our hard-earned vis to the enhancement npc in exchange for some defence upgrade and hopefully a +1 DR if one is lucky. Just how effective is that and would it be worth the amount of vis trying to upgrade a piece of armour to +4 or +5?

DEF	DR	Damage	Link	Comments
121	32	117	Link
122	32	116	Link
123	32	115	Link
124	32	114	Link
125	32	113	Link
105	32	136	Link	Fury skill -20 DEF
141	33	95	Link	High Guard stance

Looking at the first four data points we can see that it follows a nice progression of 1 DEF to 1 damage reduction. It starts to fall apart once I tried using Fury skill in my Roof guard stance to reduce my DEF while keeping my DR. Instead of getting the expected 133 damage I've got an additional 3 point damage. Testing it further with High guard (equipping a shield gives additional one point in DR) shows that one addition DR does help a wee bit in damage reduction, but not really significant.

Lets look deeper in Fury. When i used Fury, it simulates a much lower level armour with a overpowered DR option. Given that 1 DEF = 1 Damage reduction. For a 105 DEF I would expect to see damage of 133, instead I see a 136 instead. What does this mean? If we ignore +5 armours, since each enhancement step gives addition DEF and concentrate on armours with +DR option we can see that if one can get a armour that causes the DR to match a higher level armour it is almost as good as equipping the higher level armour.

That being said, it becomes uneconomical to upgrade a piece of armour without having the intention to upgrade it past +4, cost versus damage reduction especially for higher level armours is simply not worth it.