Arena Rex Forums

Why is Sereqet hard to kill?

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13 vitality and 2 armor. It doesn't seem like much but its one of the game's break points where it often takes one more hit to finish them off. Solid 6 damage shots still take 4 shots for the kill, things like that.

There's a few points where 1 health makes a big difference. For example, Ban-Luca is slightly weaker against 8 damage strikes than other highly durable models. One more health would actually put her on par with the others I listed (though regardless, she's insanely durable against 4 damage strikes ).

I see... sounds like we need a chat about numbers.

To me, 2 defense 2 armour is the standard. Some have more, some have less, but 2/2, or 3/1, seems to me like average. Adding up to more than 4 is above average, less than 4 is below.

It sounds like you are saying that vitality is just as key - which makes sense. So what is average for vitality? 11 or 12? And Sereqet is slightly above that?

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Always a fan of talking about numbers! Taking apart game engines is half the fun for me.

Average is about 12 and Serequet is slightly above average at 13. That's a bigger difference than it seems though, because none of the models above 13 Vit have 2 ARM (except Otho).

The thing about ARM is that its just bonus health for each hit you take, so its kind of irrelevant without including the Vit portion. The more health you have, the more likely you are to survive an extra hit for Armor to matter more. The reason 13 is so relevant is that its an extra hit vs most things. If you're getting hit with 5 damage; it takes 4 hits to deal 12, but that leaves a 13 Vit model on one health still. This is true of 6 and 8 damage hits as well.

Keep in mind, none of this is outrageous. Serequet isn't "hard to kill" in an exceptional way (being a Titan is probably more relevant). It just takes an extra hit or one of the hits being slightly stronger to make up the difference and nothing survives a big hitter maxing their tree well. The point is just that one of the strengths of the model is being slightly harder to kill than others. She's also a hair slow (though her rider helps a lot) without a lot of pushing and slightly below average ATK.

Interesting indeed. I guess I value DEF and ARM more than vitality because the first two can actually stop you from taking any damage at all. Vitality only comes into play when you've failed to keep yourself from taking any damage, in my logic. So I don't see ARM as just bonus vitality - I want Ban-Luca's breastplate to soak up all damage against her, leaving her unscratched.

But your argument that armour + high vitality means more resilience than just armour is obviously sound for sure.

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ARM is definitely a lot better than Vit. Given the choice between 13/2 and 15/0, well, the former is strictly better. It's generally pretty unlikely to one shot anything so at the very least a point of armor is worth 2 health particularly if at some point it negates an attack completely. A good example of this is Leo, whose 16/0 is enough to put him on par with the generally solid 12/2 against most attacks but leaves him far more susceptible to low damage attacks (4 or less).

I don't generally rely on ARM completely negating an attack since that generally only happens on 1 success, but it happens and definitely can't be ignored; particularly on 2 or 3 DEF. It's a little harder to quantify the effects of DEF since there's so little variance in it, but fwiw, the average damage track ramps up along a 2/4/6/8/10 line (6 success gets weird since most models don't have it in their tree) so taking a success away can often be kind of like 2 armor that happens half the time... sorta...

Anyway, I guess the point of all of this is that if you want to know how tough something is; ARM is probably the go to stat. VIT is still important though, with the difference between VIT 12 and VIT 13 being particularly significant.

Agreed, obviously. And this is why I really struggle with ARM 0 models. They just seem to go down so, so quickly. And is why Viatrix is my most favourite precious.

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Completely understand. I play Legio after all.

Viatrix is very good. I've played her a couple times but since I mostly play Legio I find her kind of unnecessary. Since she's not significantly harder to kill than anything else her taunt is rarely as disruptive as it could be. It can still be good to force the opponent to spread damage a bit, but its less exciting than say, forcing attacks away from Leo. Even then, she's strong and independent enough to get the job done; I just feel like there are other kinds of defensive models that work better with Legio's generally solid durability.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, in terms of which models really are durable, and the value of DEF vs ARM and how it works with vitality.

No need for me to say much since the previous posts cover it a lot, but I will definitely agree that even a 1 difference in ARM makes a world of difference, and ARM in general is not to be overlooked. Despite her low vitality (10), Ban-Luca is quite difficult to kill unless you go all in with a power attack, and it's similar with other high ARM models. They're the "cans" that require you to be a "can opener".

The gladiators in the Morituri have some of the lowest survivabilityl in the game (minus Ur-Kek), followed by the Zephyri, making these two the most frail ludii, and part of that is a combination of average to below average vitality, and having 1ARM for a significant portion of the models. That one number makes a huge bit of difference, for the reasons previously stated.

Viatrix is a great defensive model, given she has my favorite defense stat combination (3/2), and good vitality to boot. I've noticed Taunt is prone to being underwhelming and sometimes inconsequential, but when it does work, it's great. Movement reactions are great for getting her into position, then like you both, I just counter attack with her and leave her alive.

Power Attacks themselves are quite interesting. They essentially boost your expected results from 50% (3 on average) to 75% (4.5). Whether this is a good idea vs attacking twice depends a lot on your specific tree and your opponent's ARM stat and fatigue level and whether you're spending favor.

Generally a power attacks are worth it. Only about a third of the models don't double their damage between the 2nd and 4th branches of the tree and against armor its better to give them 2 extra health instead of 4. Not surprisingly, its mostly the mounts that do best with a standard roll with their free attacks after the rider and on wild.

To that point, RRG's done a good job matching up abilities and trees. For example, Urien's damage spikes later in his tree, making him an attractive power attacker before taking Hot Blooded into account (and to make that shinier, Favor dice are better rerolls ). On the flip side, Hagal spikes early and gets a lot out of multiple attacks.

Exhausted targets are probably worth attacking multiple times instead. The free success largely negates ARM and is just gravy otherwise. If nothing else, the extra pushes are obviously an additional bonus that's very dangerous.