Editing Myths and Misinformation (section)

==Stacking Defense Has Diminishing Returns, Unlike HP==

A common misconception is that as defense goes up, additional defense gets less effective.  This belief comes from players noticing that "reduce physical damage by XX%" stat on the character information window increases by smaller and smaller amounts with each additional defense increase (like from sharding garnet shards in armor).  While this part is true the increase of the reduction percentage doesn't say much about the effectiveness of the defense.  Consider that a 99% reduction is twice as effective as a 98% reduction despite the difference being "only 1%".   By comparison, a 51% reduction is not noticeably different than a 50% reduction even though the difference in percent reduction is also 1%.  This effect counters the perceived diminishing return from the character information window to give a constant increase in effectiveness.

For example,  if increasing your defense from 0 to 5000 allows you to go from surviving 1 hit to 2 hits, then at 10,000 defense you can survive 3 hits.  At 15,000 defense you will survive 4 hits and at 20,000 defense 5 hits.   Every 5,000 pdef in this case lets you survive one additional hit.  This constant increase of effectiveness is very similar to the benefit you receive from increasing your HP.  The only difference is that having 0 HP means that you can't take any damage at all while at 0 defense you still have your HP to rely on.  This is a consequence of the way [[damage|Damage]] is calculated.