Hi, I was trying to use BiB to select gear for my monk and got a really weird result where it is saying Highborne Compendium is better than my 445 Edicts of the Faithless.
I went to go use the simulator to see why that was and the logs aren’t really clear how it’s handling stagger damage. In game, stagger seems to apply prior to absorbs, then ticks every 0.5sec (and can be absorbed). But the only place i can find it in the sim log is under healing or miscellaneous (and sometimes with confusing notes, like being triggered by blackout strike???).
One thing i also noticed in the sim, is how Edicts itself behaves. Looking here in the logs for Edicts:
At first glance it appears to mostly be working fine (although shields absorb stagger ticks, and it doesn’t appear to be doing that), but then between timestamp 278, and 333 it seems to just break. It refreshes and falls off several times but doesn’t absorb ANY damage in that time frame. My character, however, is clearly taking damage based on the HP percentages on the right.
I can provide insight! I’ll try to go through in the order you mentioned things.
Looks like Edicts isn’t absorbing stagger damage because of a technicality in the simulator… self-damage isn’t registering as “physical” or “magic” damage, so the physical shield from edicts isn’t absorbing it. I’ll find a fix for that. Also the shield has a 15second duration in the simulator for some reason, not sure why - I’ll fix that too. We’ll re-rank it. In some quick tests, it still looks like highborne is better from a defensive perspective.
Stagger in the simulator works just like the game - it was a beast to implement. Those events you see with blackout strike triggering something named “stagger” is for Staggering Strikes. That is an event that reduces your stagger amount. Stagger shows up as self-inflicted damage every 0.5 seconds in the log if you filter to “stagger” in the spell column you can see it.
In this simulation example you are seeing the shield drop off with no absorbs because you dodge everything in that window and it’s not absorbing the stagger.
Thank you very much for looking into it! I can definitely understand stagger being difficult to implement, it’s a really special edge case mechanic in the game. It’s also nice to know I helped find not just one, but two bugs! With this information, i feel like my gut feeling of Edicts being the better choice is still correct. I’ll have to wait for the fix to make sure.
And I forgot i had a Staggering Strikes trait, so blackout strikes effecting stagger does make sense now.
