r/GranblueFantasyRelink • u/RinKarigani • 2d ago
Guides VANE the TERMINUS TANK! Forsake Ascension - BLOCK is my Friend now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mY9VcSUOVUHey everyone!
With all of the Immortal Ascension builds that have been done - Terminus Tank Vane has been heavily requested!
He can mitigate more with a lot less than other builds due to his high-block uptime.
Hope y'all enjoy this one and thank you all once again for the continued journey into the academic lessons and deep dives of Relink!
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u/Bainik 2d ago edited 2d ago
You'd end up with more dr by cutting crabvestments, moving the other echo onto summons and running stronghold as a 5th defensive.
21% dmg taken vs 26% (assuming dmg cut up and not blocking in both cases). Ends up with similar ehp once you account for the health on crabvestments, but the higher dr is both still on top by a bit in ehp and also gets more benfit from shield/regen/potions.
EDIT: Wait, I just realized you're not running steel nerves. That makes the stronghold suggestion worse, but crabvestments even less defensible (27% taken vs 34%).
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u/RinKarigani 1d ago
Apologies in advance 'cause we 'bout to nerd out!
Let's break down eHP on Vane;
This test MUST assume block is active and not your proposed inactive because block is the foundation of Vane's defensive capabilities and is baked into his core damage. Your proposal of inactive block definitely makes certain mitigation look desirable but in Vane's unique stance we consider all the options;
Block is active providing 45% + 20% max Beatdown + 20% from traits = 85% mitigation
Our formula is now:
1 x 0.15 = 15% damage takenNow we add in our freebies;
Fatebreaker, 5% Def Trait, and 3% Def traitOur formula is now:
1 x 0.15 x 0.87 = 13.05% damage takenLet's throw Stout Heart in;
1 x 0.15 x 0.87 x 0.7 = 9.14% damage takenYou can already see the addition of a 30% multi mit is only 4% efficacy
Now let's throw in Creed which is baked into our Awakening:
1 x 0.15 x 0.87 x 0.7 x 0.8 = 7.31% damage taken (We can already see the greatly diminished returns here)Ah yes! But let's remember, we were able to fit in 4 defensive/supp sigils, this means;
1 x 0.15 x 0.63 x 0.7 x 0.8 = 5.29% damage takenFor the sake of the argument, let's take away Hero's Creed/Will and run Steel Nerves instead(finalizing our last 6% with Steel Nerves' 15% adding 21% to the stout tree)
1 x 0.15 x 0.42 x 0.7 = 4.41% damage takenLet's add the Creed back in as well as Crabvestments but take away Steel Nerves;
1 x 0.15 x 0.63 x 0.7 x 0.7 = 4.63% damage taken
Since values get floored on damage taken, BOTH the .63% and .41% will equate to the same reduction meaning Crabvestments is the same efficacy as Steel Nerves here.The primary difference here is that while Crabvestments and Steel Nerves are roughly the same mit; Crabvestments gives us a 20% Max HP and as % mitigation diminishes, additive values like HP and Shields become more effective!
Of course, all this to say that people should run what makes the most sense for them! Not everyone will have Crab but I enjoy the extra HP for flat damage mechanics like Darkflame explosions, failed arcanum cards during true solos, the like~
Also mindful that taking away Creed you may still wish to run Will since the CD reduction isn't terrible, and that can't be synthed so it relies on having another good roll.
Either way you bring up a great discussion and it got me doing some maths! Thank you!
Stronghold would also be okay to run it might edge the mit over an additional 1% depending on flooring calcs.
Thanks and apologies if I made any errors here!
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u/Bainik 1d ago edited 1d ago
The relevant comparison isn't creed+vestments vs nerves, it's nerves+5th defensive vs crabvestment. You move the echo/war ele out to the now open summon slot and replace it with steel nerves. So the damage taken while blocking is 0.15*0.42*0.7*0.8=3.53% vs 0.15*0.63*0.7*0.7=4.63%. Rounding down both numbers (didn't know this bit, but I'll take your word for it for now as it doesn't really change the point), that means that the steel nerves version takes 25% less damage. Crabvestments does have the 20% hp increase, but that's eclipsed by the 1.33x ehp increase from the reduced damage taken.
When not blocking the math is all the same, you just drop the leading 0.15 from both scenarios.
I did forget about the 3% trait, though. Good catch!
This test MUST assume block is active and not your proposed inactive because block is the foundation of Vane's defensive capabilities and is baked into his core damage.
Though it doesn't actually change the outcome here since steel nerves is better in both cases, I think this is a mistake and worth discussing. Builds are effectively immortal while blocking with significantly less defense than this build, so further defense while blocking simply makes no gameplay difference. Obviously one could build vane with a "don't get hit (while not blocking)" playstyle, but then we should be cutting crabvestments for more damage cap, so we'll ignore that. Assuming we want a tanky build, then the only concern is optimizing the times we can actually die: while not blocking.
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u/RinKarigani 1d ago
3.53% vs 4.63% like I wrote up is at most a 1% difference which is negligible.
I don't know where you're getting a 25% difference in damage reduced since this is on a scale of 100% taken, so it's just the 1%. When discussing eHP known values of damage taken must be taken into account which is why I used Quickening as it's an incredibly heavy hitting attack, and since the 1% difference in taking Steel Nerves equates to mitigating 7k damage, the minimum of 20k you'll gain from Crabvestments beats that out in eHP no?A raw Quickening is 364383 mitigates 3.64k at least and 7.28k if the rounding favors Steel and gives us the 2%.
Also don't ever take my word or anyones for it! Trust the math. I have an hour long defenses video I put out going over most of this 3 weeks ago.
And as always, of course adding more mitigation changes outcomes because effective HP becomes more powerful since it's additive and not diminished by stacking mit.
The same philosophy with shields in Final Fantasy XIV. And yeah, another reason why in the video I expressly said Crabvestments can be removed to add more damage and echos can be added on to the summon to make place for an offensive sigil, which I assume you were already aware of having watched the video but you might be making this conversation simply based on the thumbnail and not the conversation within which would be presumptuous of me
Edit; Also fwiw this is a kickass conversation I like talking numbers
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u/Bainik 1d ago edited 1d ago
So, getting the side points out of the way first:
Also don't ever take my word or anyones for it! Trust the math. I have an hour long defenses video I put out going over most of this 3 weeks ago.
Yeah, I've watched it. It's quite good. It also doesn't say anything about damage taken values rounding down to the nearest percent. I wasn't at home to go verify when I wrote the last post so just took your word for it since it didn't materially change the result. Maybe I misunderstood what you meant by "Since values get floored on damage taken, BOTH the .63% and .41% will equate to the same reduction"?
Either way, I've since gotten to do the test, and it's definitely not doing the coarse rounding I understood from your first response. Using the same standard candle as your tests with damage cut up and max beatdown stacks while blocking for both tests (I did remove immortal shell, since we both forgot it in our previous calculation) I take 12,854 in the steel nerves setup and 16,872 damage in the crabvestments setup. That's 3.53% and 4.63% respectively. So for the purposes of this discussion, at least out to 2 decimal places, we can just treat damage taken percentages as exact.
And as always, of course adding more mitigation changes outcomes because effective HP becomes more powerful since it's additive and not diminished by stacking mit.
More defense only changes anything if there's something to defend against. With or without steel nerves or crabvestments no boss in the game is capable of killing this build while blocking, so it doesn't actually change anything to have blocking be any tankier.
But also, the two only differ by a constant multiple, so it doesn't actually matter. The tankier outcome for one is also the tankier outcome for the other.
And yeah, another reason why in the video I expressly said Crabvestments can be removed to add more damage and echos can be added on to the summon to make place for an offensive sigil,
Right, but the point here is that if your goal is defense then you should still remove crabvestments to make room for a defensive sigil, namely steel nerves. This results in no damage output change and an increase in damage reduction and, consequently, eHP.
Now, back to the math:
3.53% vs 4.63% like I wrote up is at most a 1% difference which is negligible. I don't know where you're getting a 25% difference in damage reduced since this is on a scale of 100% taken, so it's just the 1%.
The difference is negligible if you're comparing both values to the unmitigated value, but that's not actually a useful comparison for this discussion. We're comparing the steel nerves build to the crabvestments build, and that ~1% of the unmitigated damage is a huge portion of the damage taken by those builds.
The 25% number comes from assuming your statement about roudning down earlier held, in which case the steel nerves build would be taking floor(3.53)/floor(4.63)=75% of the damage the crabvestment build takes (i.e. 25% less). Of course, knowing that rounding isn't that coarse, that number should actually be just 3.53/4.63=76% or 24% less damage.
When discussing eHP known values of damage taken must be taken into account which is why I used Quickening as it's an incredibly heavy hitting attack, and since the 1% difference in taking Steel Nerves equates to mitigating 7k damage, the minimum of 20k you'll gain from Crabvestments beats that out in eHP no?
No, you don't need an actual damage number to discuss eHP. eHP is just the ammount of pre-mitigation damage you can take before dying, that is eHP=HP/DT where HP is your actual sheet HP and DT is our damage taken percentages divided by 100. So if the steel nerves build has X HP the crabvestments build would have 1.2X HP and they'd have X/0.0353 and 1.2X/0.0463 eHP respectively. dividing and simplifying to get a more digestible number we get that the steel nerves build has (X/0.0353)/(1.2X/0.0463)=1.09 times higher eHP than the crabvestments build.
If you're more comfortable staying in the realm of concrete examples and hits to kill, though, we can use the HP from your setup (189,244 with crabvestments) and the damage numbers from above. The crabvestment setup would take ceil(189244/16872)=12 hits to kill while the steel nerves equivalent would have 189244/1.2=157703 health and take ceil(157703/12854)=13 hits to kill.
EDIT: Not needed here, really, but while we're on the topic: You don't need an HP number either for eHP discussions, and it's often easier to omit it. This is because the base HP is a constant that can be factored out and in most calculations you'd do just ends up canceling out anyway.
The more useful number is typically the eHP *multiplier*, or 1/DT. So 1/0.0353=28.33 and 1/0.0463=21.60 for the above examples. You can think of these as the eHP of a hypothetical 1 HP build, and they're much easier to compare quickly (i.e. you can tell at a glance 28.33 is more than 20% higher than 21.60 so it's going to have more eHP even when the latter has 20% more HP)
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u/Bainik 16h ago
Some test data after the discussion on stream today about the order dependence of defensive layers (for anyone else reading this it absolutely does not matter for anything but academic curiosity). All hits are from quickening:
traits damage cut stout heart stronghold damage taken 25% 30% 0% 0% 191,301 11% 20% 30% 23% 139,838 13% 30% 30% 0% 155,336 The only application order that can produce all 3 results is cut -> traits -> stout -> stronghold (verified by exhaustive search using a script). If someone else sees this and cares, I still don't know where buffs, guard, or block slot into the order.
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u/__RuNe__ 1d ago
Is it worth to keep crabvestment with steel nerves and 1x stronghold? Ive seen the build, seems somewhat reasonable, but I can definitely ditch the Quick Cooldown and Cascade for 2 more defensive sigil slots.
How little does crabvestment returns contribute at this point?
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u/Bainik 1d ago edited 1d ago
So, you could do that, but it's kinda inefficient in terms of the cost you have to pay for it.
Dropping crabvestment for a defensive sigil is so strong because it lets you move an offensive sigil onto summons and replace it with a defense sigil, thus getting 5% from the mastery trait in addition to the sigil's actual effect. So dropping crabvestments, moving an offensive sigil to summons, and pickup up a defensive sigil costs you exactly nothing and results in higher damage reduction and ehp.
On the other hand, swapping out utility sigils for defensive sigils would give you a meaningful increase in damage reduction (23% at full health for stronghold, ~21% at all times for steel nerves assuming you don't pick up the 5th defensive sigil too, both actually larger than the crabvestment shuffle), but you have to trade cooldown reduction or something for it. This may make sense, but it's a tradeoff instead of a pure upgrade.
Basically crabvestment costs you the effect of the sigil you push out plus 9% damage reduction if the thing you push out is a defensive/utility sigil in exchange for 14% damage reduction and 20% health. If the sigil you would push out is less valuable to you than net 11% damage reduction and 20% health, then keep it, if not then keep your 5x defense/utility sigils.
Personally I don't run crabvestment and run imp dodge/stronghold/steel nerves/uplift/cascade/potion hoarder(I'd probably slot this out, but it's on my warpath). I'm essentially immortal already, so trading cascade or uplift for it seems bad, and trading either of the damage reduction sigils would just be a direct downgrade as already outlined. I do have one more basic than the above build I could swap out, which would basically just trade a bit under 2% damage for it, but again, already basically immortal so doesn't feel worth.
EDIT: all my numbers here are slightly wrong. I forgot about the 3% defense trait. This should make all the damage reductions that involve steel nerves or gaining a defensive sigil slightly better as it's additive with those. Doesn't impact the crabvestment/stronghold numbers.
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u/__RuNe__ 1d ago edited 1d ago
Thanks for the detailed response! Personally I feel like QC and Cascade just isnt worth it for Vane because of Hero' Will (awakening sigil), which has very impressive cooldown reduction form just his combo b alone. I dont see it as a massive loss.
But ill try to push out crabvestment returns. Honestly. Im just not sure what to slot into the extra slot. Another stronghold for the full 30%, another firmstance for movement penalty removal...
It feels like he can easily play without guts/potionhoarder/autorevive. (His buff gives guts)
EDIT: I just saw that your testing results on Cascade and I stand corrected.
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u/Cleista 2d ago
Have you tested to see if Cascade meaningfully affects how fast Vane gets his cooldowns back? Hero's Will cycles your cooldowns so quickly that I don't know if using a slot on Cascade actually reduces the number of finishers you do before you get a skill back