Deflect Who? Deflect What? Deflect this!

Practicing Safe Deflection

By: George Argyropoulos

a/k/a Dragon_Bane  

While deflection has been in the game for a good amount of time now, it seems people are still getting confused about this mechanic. Jefe (Battle Pirates Crib Admin), Renato (The Forsaken Council Admin) and I were discussing this recently and The Battle Pirates Crib show today will be covering it as I am covering it here in the blog. Given the limitations of the written form with regard to people's attention spans concerning this medium, this article  will be more of an overview of the subject than the show will be (which is embedded below).


I'm not sure if it is the less-than-clear delineation of PvP vs. PvE or if it is the mechanic of deflection itself, or even if it is the multitude of different deflections that is causing the confusion we are seeing, but this confusion does linger around this issue. Add to that the intertwining of these mechanics and I can understand how some people can become confused.


So to begin with let us get some context from which we will reference back to. The delineation of PvE and PvP. This was done earlier this year in March. As I discussed briefly in this article, Kixeye split the two aspects of the game to better control power creep and increase fleet longevity among other things. The original post by GD Raikan can be found here.


The quick and dirty definition that we are going to use is that any target that is player-centric (bases, Hyperions, player fleets) are PvP in nature and NPC-centric targets (Raid targets, armadas, DUBS) are PvE in nature. This separation becomes important when we discuss the various types of deflection in-game.

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Before I get into deflection, I do want to address the Order of Operations. As given to us by Kixeye. I will be ignoring this so that I can give just direct examples, however, it is good to know to understand the mechanic better. The order of operations (calculating damage) is this:

Evade, Resistances, Deflection.

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Moving on to deflection itself - Deflection is simply damage reduction taken out of every incoming hit. That means it is applied to every individual salvo that hits. When calculating this, you have to be very aware of the salvos a weapon fires. This is why players look to 'single shot damage' of weapons many times when taking deflections into account.


For example a ship (zero resistances) with 200 Assault Deflection being hit by another player with a single salvo missile that does 500 damage would only receive 300 damage. A multi salvo missile, say 2 salvos doing 500 total damage would calculate per salvo, so it would be 200 Assault Deflection from 250 damage leaving only 50 damage received per salvo,for a total of 100 damage.


Now that we have what deflection is covered, we have to define the damage incoming so that we can understand what it is we are reducing, which deflection applies and how it applies.

-Assault damage generally is damage that is received from ship-based targets.
-Siege damage generally is damage that is received from land-based targets.


That said, there are three main types of deflection. Each of these reduces, per salvo, the damage that gets through to the target.:

-Assault Deflection - Assault damage is reduced
-Siege Deflection - Siege damage is reduced
-Damage specific Deflection - Damage reduced is specific to a damage type


Looking at this, it initially seems rather simple, however, it gets more complicated. The first two are straightforward as we gave the example above. The latter is broken down even further:

-Ballistic Deflection
-Corrosive Deflection
-Concussive Deflection
-Explosive Deflection
-Penetrative Deflection
-Radioactive Deflection


These deflect exactly what they say they do. They were introduced for Conqueror and Defender hulls and you will see them displayed like this:

We should stop and take a breather here before we tie it all up together. We have a delineation of the game generally into PvP and PvE and we have 3 general categories of deflection. Upon first glance all this deflection flies in the face of the reasons given for the split in March.


Now we get to an interesting area. The delineation of PvP and PvE also necessitated Deflection Bypass. This mechanic is exactly like Resistance Bypass and the calculation is as follows:

Deflection Bypass = TypeDeflection# - (TypeDeflection# * TypeDeflectionBypass%)


This reflects bypasses that have been incorporated into the game, given to us thus:

-Ballistic Deflection Bypass
-Corrosive Deflection Bypass
-Concussive Deflection Bypass
-Explosive Deflection Bypass
-Penetrative Deflection Bypass
-Radioactive Deflection Bypass


For example, say you have 1000 Penetrative Deflection. The weapon firing at you has 75% Penetrative Deflection Bypass and deals 600 Penetrative damage.

Remaining Penetrative Deflection = 1000 - (1000 * 0.75)
= 1000 - 750
= 250

The calculated damage from that Penetrative salvo would be 350 Penetrative damage (600 Damage - 250 Remaining Deflection) since the Penetrative Deflection Bypass stripped off 75% of the total Penetrative Deflection that you had. They will mitigate the specific damage type only. They are not a generic deflection stat as are the Assault and Siege.


In PvE targets, these bypasses are incorporated in order to mitigate PvP oriented hulls from participating in PvE oriented content. The theory was that the PvP side would rely heavily on deflection while the PvE side would rely heavily on Resistances. Kixeye has kept pretty tight control over The Assault and Siege Deflection amounts in game so as to not escalate the power creep in that area.


This is a general quick and dirty overview of the subject of deflection and bypass. It will be covered in more depth on the show (embedded below). Please feel free to ask questions. Thanks for visiting!


You can learn more by watching the show which is on YouTube tonight, December 2, 2016 at 7 PM EST (4 PM PST):