An oversight in the combat calculations to how PvP/PvM Defense, Damage Reduction and Defense worked together has been corrected, to where you can no longer have 100% reduction of damage to all monsters. We will continue to monitor the change for any necessary needed balance changes in the near future.
This was a bugfix that solved knights being able to stack PvM defense and damage reduction together into one modifier to get a permanent 100% damage reduction in PvM, regardless of their own defense/blocking (obviously unbalanced as and overpowered).
To fix this, they did a slight alteration to the formula of how damage is calculated, and that's where the problem lies.
Before the patch one week ago, things worked like this:
Attackers damage (-defenders physical block/magical block in case of successful block) X damage reduction curve (amount of damage reduction defender has based on his defense/mdef) X (1 - Damage reduction - PvP/PvM modifiers + crit damage modifiers + enhance damage modifier).
Now it works like this:
Attackers damage (-defenders physical block/magical block) X damage reduction curve X PvP/PvM modifiers X (1 - damage reduction + crit damage modifier + enhance damage modifier).
The importance is in the position of the PvP/PvM multiplier. While earlier it was merely a modifier that altered base damage, due to its new position, it now also has an effect on crit/enhance damage/damage reduction.
Since in PvP mostly people are using an honor set+epic weapon, the PvP multiplier will be 30% defense, which ends up being a 30% reduction to crit/enhance damage compared to before. It also affects damage reduction to some extent so that damage reduction is slightly weaker (mostly felt in PvM), but the only classes really affected by this are knights/crossbow scouts.
They should have documented this change some more since it was only a small last note at bugfixes, while the change it brings is a lot bigger than that.
Edited by jerremy, 07 November 2014 - 05:00 AM.