For those who don’t know, when you purchase Potion of Armor and get 25% Skull Damage Reduction, this stacks with any existing skull damage reduction on the troop or your hero. It is not additive however. So if a troop already has 25%, it won’t have 50%. Instead, the incoming skull damage is reduced twice. Here’s a table showing the amount of damage blocked at various skull damage reduction levels based on 100 incoming damage:
Base Skull Damage Reduction
Incoming Damage
Potion of Armor Reduction
Total Skull Damage Reduction
Flat % Increase
0%
100
75
25%
25%
20%
80
60
40%
20%
25%
75
56.25
44%
19%
33%
67
50.25
50%
17%
40%
60
45
55%
15%
50%
50
37.5
63%
13%
65%
35
26.25
74%
9%
80%
20
15
85%
5%
Potion of Armor is clearly most effective for troops/heroes that have no skull damage reduction, because it reduces the damage by 25% when it wasn’t being reduced at all. So the total reduction increases a full 25%. However, as your base skull damage reduction increases, the “effectiveness” of the 25% decreases.
For instance, Stonehammer has 80% skull damage reduction. So the amount of damage that gets reduced from Potion of Armor is already really low. That’s easy to see: if you get attacked for 100 and it’s reduced by 80%, you have 20 incoming damage. If it gets reduced another 25%, it only gets reduced by 5, down to 15. But if your original skull damage reduction is only 40% (Holy Armor), then your damage taken is 60, and 25% reduction on that is 15, so you only take 45.
This means for instance that if 50% skull damage reduction normally is good enough, then you could get by with a troop that has only 33%, because with the 25% Potion, that’s a total of 50% damage reduction.
Of course, at higher delve levels, you’ll want all the damage reduction you can get…
Do you know for a fact that it’s happening as you describe?
Because if the troop does have 25% skull reduction. And you stack on potion of armor. Then it’s supposed be 37.5% reduction not 50%.
If you follow igniteice’s post, your damage is reduced effectively by 43.75% (3rd row starting with 25% in the “100” column). Not sure how you worked out your percentage, but it should be
reduced by 25% from troop (75% left)
reduced by 25% from potion (75% left of 75% = 56.25% damage taken)
If the troop was armored (25%) and had the potion too, they would normally take 3/4 damage… But with the potion, they savr another 1/4 off that 3/4 or 3/16 worth for a total protection of 1/4+3/16 or 7/16 or 43.75% so taking 56.25% as mentioned above…
Unless OP edited things and I missed that… And ninja-ed.
No I haven’t edited anything. In game works exactly as I described. It doesn’t matter the order you do the reductions in, since it’s multiplicative, but it doesn’t stack them, it instead reduces the incoming damage twice: first by one damage reduction, then by the next one. I’ll edit the column titles though to be easier to read.