Reaper DC / Save Scaling

[andreascott89]

I am going to play a charm/hold Bard next life in Reaper, and I am trying to figure out how enemy saves scale with the reaper level.

I looked all around the wiki and forums, and didn't find anything, so I did a little testing. I thought I would post the results in case someone else was curious.

The situation:
Quest: Retrieve the stolen goods (Base ML 2)
Enemy: Kobold in the front (CR 3)
Spell: Suggestion (DC 22)

Data / Results

Reaper	N	Success	Fail		Low	Mid	High		Joint: R1/Delta	Joint: Delta (R1=8)
1	100	69	31		6.4	8.2	10.0		8.4	8.0
3	100	54	46		9.2	11.2	13.2		11.2	11.0
5	100	36	64		12.9	14.8	16.7		14.1	14.0
7	100	27	73		14.8	16.6	18.4		17.0	17.0
								R1 Base	8.39	8.00
								Delta	1.43	1.51

I tested Reaper 1,3,5,7. For each Reaper level, I tried suggestion on the Kobold 100 times. The Success / Fail data is reported in the Table.

Low / Mid / High

For each Reaper level, you can use the success/fail data to estimate the Kobold's Will Save. For example, in Reaper 1 I charmed the Kobold 69% of the time. Since my DC was 22, this corresponds to an estimated Will save of 8.2. The 8.2 is the mid-point estimate. Given only 100 tries, the 8.2 estimate has a lot of uncertainty with it. The Low / High columns report the 95% confidence interval. In this case, the 95% confidence interval for the estimated Will save ranges from a low of 6.4 to a high of 10.0.

Joint Estimation Analysis

I was interested in trying to figure out how much the DC changed with each Reaper level, so I wanted to use all of the data to try and figure this out. I started off by making the assumption that the Will save goes up linearly with the Reaper level. In other words, I assumed the Will save progression looked like this:

Will Save = R1 Base + Delta*(Reaper Level - 1)

Delta here is how much does the Will Save increases for each level of Reaper. The Will save for Reaper 1 is the R1 Base. For Reaper 3, it would be R1 Base + 2*Delta, etc.

The "Joint R1 / Delta" column gives the results when I jointly use all the data to estimate both R1 Base and Delta (I used maximum likelihood estimation if you were curious). In this case, the R1 Base is estimated to be 8.39, and the Delta is 1.43.

If I force R1 Base to be an integer and estimate Delta, then the best integer turns out to be 8. With R1 Base equal to 8, the estimated Delta is 1.51. This is the data reported in the "Joint Delta (R1 = 8)" column.

Conclusion
Long story short, the scaling for Reaper in this case seems to increase enemy saves by about 1.5 per reaper level.

I am not sure if this scaling applies to other Base Dungeon Level / Enemy CR combinations, however. It could be that the 1.5 is the result of a more complicated formula. For example, the formula could be:

Will Save = R1 Base + CR/2 *(Reaper level - 1)

Since I only test on one enemy in one dungeon, I can't tell if the 1.5 is fixed or calculated as something like 0.5 * enemy CR.

If you have more data / insight into DC scaling please add you information. If you are a Dev, and could just tell me, that would be even better!

-J

[Gargoyle69]

+1 !

Impressive work :-)

I get how much work went into this, so you may not be interested in doing any further work of this sort, but if you ever were, doing this on one more creature of a different CR rating would be incredibly interesting and might be very illuminating.

I for one, salute you.

[blerkington]

That's interesting. I've heard different things about whether or not saves increased in reaper.

I'm a little surprised to hear it could be by as much as 1.5 per skull, but I guess that could be undercut by base saves being too low to start with for near max or max DC builds. So the increase often isn't noticeable if you're already well over the DC normally required in elite.

Anyway, well done and thank you.

[Sam-u-r-eye]

This is great!

Would you be willing to check the Kobold's save on elite?

[andreascott89]

Would you be willing to check the Kobold's save on elite?

That sounds like a good idea. Here are the results:

73 succeed
27 fail

Low / Mid / High: 5.6 / 7.4 / 9.2

It looks like the difference between elite and R1 is either nothing, or a boost of 1 to the will save. The data suggest a difference of 1 is more likely, but I don't think you can confidently tease out a one DC difference with just 100 data points. Telling the difference between a kobold that saves 30% of the time and one that saves 25% of the time would probably take another 100 or 200 tries on each kobold.

It is annoying not to know for sure, so I will probably run a few more tries on each kobold. However, right now I am sick of trying to charm the little grasshopper kobold!

-J

PS: Gargoyle69: I would like to try for another CR/Quest level combination. I checked the level 3 quests, and they all seem to have a bunch of non-charmable mobs by the entrance (spiders, etc.) This is just a naked vet stat level 7 character, so not really able to handle higher quest level reaper easily solo. When I start doing this on my main, I will find a good setup and repeat the analysis in a different setting. -J

[Sam-u-r-eye]

During Lamma Sev said that there was only 1 save increase for the mobs per skull; however, I complained incessantly that such a DC increase wasn't enough to stop my Pale Master / Necrolock, from dominating high skull content. He never followed up on the difference.

[Gargoyle69]

PS: Gargoyle69: I would like to try for another CR/Quest level combination. I checked the level 3 quests, and they all seem to have a bunch of non-charmable mobs by the entrance (spiders, etc.) This is just a naked vet stat level 7 character, so not really able to handle higher quest level reaper easily solo. When I start doing this on my main, I will find a good setup and repeat the analysis in a different setting. -J

Awesome! Thank you so much in advance :-)