Hey there, I was curious if anyone knew when Sonic Barrier's absorb came into play. For example, say 1500 white damage is coming in, does it first check to see if it's shielded, assume it is at 50% absorb, then goes through armor, say 50% again, bringing the damage down to 375. Then the barrier is there, and that 375 is taken from the 1000 barrier, leaving 625 for the next attack.

 

OR, is the barrier outside the armor and the shield, so 1500 comes in, 1000 of it is absorbed by the barrier, the remaining 500 triggers the shield, taking it down to 250, then the armor is there, bringing it down to 125 coming through, with nothing left of the barrier?

I believe Absorb is applied at the moment you take the damage, such that it has to get through Defense and Shield to be eaten away. If it didn't, it would do almost nothing.

I believe Absorb is applied at the moment you take the damage, such that it has to get through Defense and Shield to be eaten away. If it didn't, it would do almost nothing.

 

I can confirm this.

Felt this would be a good place to ask this, but where does the sonic barrier bubble get its number from? I assumed it was like the sage and gunslinger bubbles that come from bonus heals, but I was recently told by somebody it was actually from Endurance. Any insight?

Felt this would be a good place to ask this, but where does the sonic barrier bubble get its number from? I assumed it was like the sage and gunslinger bubbles that come from bonus heals, but I was recently told by somebody it was actually from Endurance. Any insight?

 

There's a lot of questions based on this, and the only explicit formula I've been able to find for it is outdated and largely wrong (mainly because the number it says most tanks should be at is way higher than it actually should be).

 

From what I've been able to tell, I highly doubt that it's based off of Endurance. The only things based off of that are percentage based effects that are generally explicitly labelled as such. You would also start seeing bigger differences in absorb ratings between hp stacking tanks and mitigation stacking tanks, which you don't really see. I'm pretty sure it's based off of Bonus Healing but, for some reason, is either bugged to be a largely static value based only on level (like the Shadow Techniques) or has a *really* low coefficient (such that it's functionally the same regardless of how much power you stack because it takes way more Bonus Healing to make a difference than you're gonna be able to pack on). As such, most Guardian tanks just treat it as a static ~1000 damage absorbed per Blade Storm used.

According to the script files, Sonic Barrier is a heal similar to Static Barrier (for sorcs). The relevant line looks like this:

 

AbsorbDamage: SpellType=>Force, StandardHealthPercentMin=>0.05, StandardHealthPercentMax=>0.05, HealingPowerCoefficient=>1, DamageType=>None, AmountPercent=>1

 

Thus, we should have the following equation:

 

HealingBonus + 0.05 * 7085 = <amount absorbed>

 

We then have to take into account the set bonus:

 

(1 * HealingBonus + 0.05 * 7085) * 1.2 = <amount absorbed>

 

That should be the final value. Your bonus healing can be found on your character sheet (in the Force section). If you want to compute it, the value should be something like the following:

 

1.05 * (0.14 * Strength + 0.17 * Power + 0.17 * ForcePower) = HealingBonus

 

All of these formulae come from the following post: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=63362

 

Unfortunately, something seems to have changed slightly in the game mechanics, specifically relating to healing, around the 1.4 patch timeline. We haven't quite figured out what is different yet, but the healing calculations are coming out wrong (usually low by around 5%, but it's not always linear). So, while I can say with certainty that the above math is exactly how the game would have computed Sonic Barrier's absorb value pre-1.4, I can't say with certainty that it is *still* computed in this fashion. I do know that the above numbers should be at least within 5-10% though.