I have had a bruiser as an alt for a few years now and I like the gameplay style a lot, so much so that it has practically become my main over the last few weeks. In these last few weeks I have spent more time analysing the AA trees to try to get the best out of him, but have a hard time getting my head around the wording and scaling on the few AAs that relate to Riposte. In particular: 1. In the combat stats, why do I not get to see what my base riposte is? I see a stat for Extra Riposte (currently 17.2%) but nothing for my base value. 2. In the Bruiser tree, in the SF achievements on the bottom row, there is the Reversal AA. In the description it claims to 'Greatly improve the bruiser's riposte damage and chance to riposte instead of parry'. Maxed out it gives +50 chance to riposte and +100 riposte damage. Now don't get me wrong, but what does this mean? +50 chance to riposte compared to what? Is it +50 onto the base figure that we can't see? What % increase does +50 give us? Am I right in my understanding that +100 riposte damage is exactly that. +100 damage doesn't seem a lot to me when we are talking about the HP pools of current mobs. If so, it can hardly be classified as 'greatly improved damage', can it? 3. Also in the Bruiser tree is the ability Bodyguard of Stone, which gives us a 10% chance of casting a stonekin when we do riposte, and also increasing riposte damage by 35. I like the concept of this, despite the low proc rate, and is why I need to understand the mechanic of the 'greatly improved riposte rate' from Reversal - more ripostes = more chance of stoneskins. Again, is an extra 35 riposte damage anything worth mentioning? 4. In the Shadows Fighter line we find Riposte Mastery, offering +25 riposte damage for an investment of 5 AAs. +25 damage? Really? TL;DR How does Riposte work? Is it worth ploughing AA points into Riposte based AAs?
Riposte damage isn't worth it. 1 = 1% up to some certain number and then it starts scaling. Certain unnamed people were using riposte damage to break dungeon maker and instakill hundreds of mobs at once, so they changed it so getting 1000+ riposte damage wasn't actually a 1000% increase. But even if they hadn't changed it it's not worth it. Extra Riposte chance is an uncontested chance to riposte an attack and is (I believe) completely seperate from Parry/Chance to Riposte. Regular Ripostes are based off your Parry, and +50 Chance to Riposte means 50% more of your parries will be Ripostes instead. I do not know for certain whether Chance to Riposte is additive or multiplicative, but based on the availability of the stat if you really went after it I am going to assume it's multiplicative, so that +50 would mean instead of riposting 10% of parries you'll riposte 15%. Bodyguard of Stone you'd have to do some testing yourself. I can tell you Riposte Damage is worthless, but I have no idea how much chance to riposte actually increases your chance to riposte.
I know that Xelgad told me that additional chance to riposte has a curve where you need "pretty much a million" to get 100% of your parries to riposte. I know I made every addorn additional chance to riposte with Herr and test stuff with the raid mobs and healing. I ended up riposting less than 1% more. So I'm pretty sure just the bruisers aa caps it out.
Thanks for the replies. I guess I will keep working on those AAs. It is not as if we don't have other nice AAs to use instead
