I did the request of the user and attacked heroes in S1 that have 110-113 defense and then attacked the Dark Lord with 90% defense down (10 stack with El Duque) which was 951 - 856 = 95 defense.
Here are the numbers: Against units with 110 - 113 Defense
El Duque special = 2150 - 2698 damage (~2400 average)
Strong tile damage (817 attack - El Duque) = 516 damage
Normal tile damage (767 attack - Mica) = 256 damage
Two purple units tile damage (774 attack - Ludwig + 858 attack - Xnolphod) = 533 damage
Against the dark lord at 10% defense (95)
Two purple units (weak) = 114
Red tile damage (El Duque) = 105 damage
El Duque special = 1125
Strong damage (Mica) = 200 damage
Even though the dark lord has less defense (95 vs 113), he took less than 50% damage from El Duque’s special (2,424 vs 1,125) and tile damage was closer to 40% of expected (105 vs. 256)
The numbers are showing that the dark lord had more effective armor that what was displayed, and by a significant amount.
Either El Duque’s skill description is wrong, or there is a hidden defense cap that is negating the stacks from El Duque.
I thought of a possible theory, and this is a bit of a stretch, but i think, if the stack does become higher than the normal defense down, then the subtraction comes from the highest defense down, and not combined of stack and defense down. I noticed that the negative defense was that of the stack, and not the normal defense down. If you want to, you could test this theory.
what formula do you use for damage calculation? I am not into the details, but if I remember correctly it´s not as simple as adding all the defdowns together, they are more like separate factors. It´s somewhere on this forum.
Ah I see, I did understand you wrong there, the stack is the only def down, so it should only be a single factor, unless every stack counts as a separate factor? But I doubt that.
The visual is maybe not all that important, it´s just displaying what it says. 90% less defense. But 90% defdown doesn´t translate that directly into damage I don´t think. Again I don´t remember the exact formula, but if you find it on the forum and put your values in you may just get to the result that you saw.
The reason why it is not as direct is that you could generate more than 100% total defdown by adding other types of def down (like normal and EDD) that would then end up in negative defense and infinite damage which would cause all sorts of problems and probably cause the game to crash. So the game makes sure this can´t happen. No matter how many def downs you stack you´ll never get close to 0 def. If you next time for example add a regular def down or an EDD, I would assume the def shown to be lower than 95, maybe around 50 (if you add 50%EDD). The damage would be higher than now, but even farther away from what you expect.
Anyway that´s just guesswork. Maybe someone who knows the details of damage calculation can help you.
There is no known exact damage formula for now. I am the one who create the current best damage. It doesn’t work at high -%Def ailment. It work fine until about -44%Def. Below that it doesn’t work. (Yes, that mean it doesn’t work for any EDD.) It isn’t complete and need more reseach.
Back to the bug.
Yes, the defense will appear to be lower like this picture
But the damage will not go higher.
Yes, it look like there is a “hidden” defense down cap. But we need the confirmation from the staff.