Scourge
Overview
The Corruptor is a dastardly villain indeed. As a Corruptor's foe health wanes, the Corruptor can start to land Scourge hits with his attack powers for up to double damage. The weaker the target is, the greater chance the Corruptor has of landing Scourge. Once a foe is weak enough, there is no escaping the Corruptor's wrath. A Corruptor shows no mercy.
Definition
Scourge is the Corruptor's Inherent Power. It is a random chance for bonus damage per attack, defined as granting a 2.5% chance for every 1% of an enemy's Hit Points below 50%. That is to say, if an enemy has 50% or more HP, Scourge will never trigger. But the lower the enemy's HP gets under 50%, the higher the chance of Scourge becomes until 10% HP, at which point and below Scourge is guaranteed to go off.
The graph of Scourge's probability compared to the enemy's percentage of hit points looks like this:
As an example, this graph shows that at 40% enemy HP, the chance to Scourge is 25%.
It is important to note that Scourge's calculation uses the enemy's base Hit Points, meaning any boosts to Max HP will proportionally lower Scourge's starting point below 50% enemy HP.
Mechanical Significance
Perceived Effectiveness
Because Scourge demonstrates no effect until an enemy is nearing defeat and is more likely to do so the closer the enemy is to being defeated, it may be difficult to conceptualize its overall impact or to quantify its average benefit.
The majority of gameplay will be spent fighting enemies of Minion class, which have few enough Hit Points that dealing double damage with Scourge may result in significant overkill, as often the attack without Scourge would have defeated the enemy anyway. For this reason, players may perceive Scourge as being counter-intuitive or meaningless, as the situations where it's most likely to trigger are generally situations where it is not needed.
On the other hand, Scourge sees incredible benefits against enemies with very high HP, such as Archvillains or Giant Monsters. In battles where the enemy will stay standing for several seconds even in its last 10% of its Hit Points, Scourge will provide a near-constant double damage bonus towards the end of the battle.
Statistical Quantification
Since the net benefits of Scourge highly depend on the situations in which it is applied, only a very general description can be used to express its average effectiveness. In the graph above, the "2x Damage" region accounts for 30% of the entire damage plot. To put it another way, if Scourge is attempted against enemies with random percentages of their total hit points, Scourge will succeed 30% of the time. From a strictly statistical point of view, Scourge effectively adds a net average of 30% to all Corruptor damage dealt.
Such a broad statement can only be accurately applied on a very large scale: all Corruptors attacking enemies during an indeterminate period of time. Nonetheless, the calculation cannot be made any more specific while remaining applicable in all situations, so it should be interpreted as a 30% average boost to damage for mathematical considerations.
When treating Scourge as a 30% bonus to damage, it is important to distinguish it from a damage buff, which has a different significance in the damage calculation. Damage buffs are figured into the boost granted by the entity's combat attribute and any Enhancements applied to a power, but Scourge is actually applied as an additional multiplier after damage buffs are figured in.
Example: Consider a power with a 95% boost to damage through Enhancements.
- A 30% damage buff will be calculated like this: BaseDamage * (1.0 + 0.95 + 0.3) = 225% base damage
- A 30% Scourge bonus is calculated like this: BaseDamage * (1.0 + 0.95) * (1.0 + 0.3) = 253% base damage