damerell wrote:bel wrote:damerell wrote:Furthermore you must recognise that each time you post in this thread it is not to address the entire previous post but to desperately single out some particular point to object to.
I have no interest in this discussion, but just because someone picks a point to reply to doesn't mean that they're trying to dismiss your argument.
Not in general, no. However, while I would be delighted to discover that Berder agrees with almost everything I have said in this discussion, I don't really get the impression that they do. For example, I don't think that their most recent post means they accept that this percentage-increase metric is obviously flawed and they merely need to consider the situation as the chance to dodge tends to 100% to avoid division by zero. However, since that obvious flaw was the main point of my preceding post, perhaps you are correct and they do accept it.
The problem with your theoretical "tends towards zero" situation is that it doesn't apply specifically towards shields, it applies to *all combat power* as you tend towards 100% dodging rate, you win *all combats* with no risk, at that point, not only is there no point in training shields, there's no point in getting more HP, or AC or EV or even offense either (unless you're optimizing for other things than win percentage)
Since Berder et al's point is about the *relative value* of SH when compared to HP, AC, EV and offense (in that a shield that provides a fixed amount of blocking power doesn't change it's bonus *relative to the other possible choices for increasing your combat power*) when the value of everything drops to 0, yes, the value of SH tends towards 0, but so does the value of *everything else* proportionally SH stays just as valuable for increasing your combat power as everything else.
The point about SH always being equally valuable is predicated on the fact that you actually need to improve something, because if you are already perfect, combat-wise, then you have no need to improve, so *nothing* has any value (from a win-percentage perspective, if you win all combats with no risk, then you can't possibly improve no matter what you do)
So the question is "If you want to improve a measure of your combat effectiveness, and reduce your chances of dying and thereby increase your chances of winning, what is most useful" Berder's measure is effective for this, yours isn't (or at least overly complicates the issue for no additional measure of accuracy)
If I evade 20%, 80% or 99% of all attacks, *and still need to reduce my chances of death* a shield that blocks 20% of attacks still improves my chances by 20%. Yes, in the 99% case, it's 20% of a much smaller number, but this entire conversation is predicated on the fact that in that case you wanted to improve your chances of not dying, and a 20% improvement is still a 20% improvement, even if you start with a very small chance of dying in the first place.