xivarmy
Well-Known Member
There's a few modes that make sense:
For attack >> defense, your defense almost doesn't matter. It'll do something at low attrition but you don't need very much for that purpose, what you get from GBs probably is enough. This tends to be optimum for attrition ceiling as the following mode will be "wasting space" on defense to take > 5 damage *anyways* near their cap (one special exception that I'll discuss last).
For attack > defense, your defense exists to reduce damage taken at low to medium attrition. For GBG farmers this is often what matters most to them anyways - some ability to go to high attrition and comfy fighting at low to medium attrition. 72.5% of attack as defense would fit this bill - probably optimizing for medium-attrition : desire to have AO crit still be a OHK (requiring attack of 2.25* defender's defense to be 100% reliable) and to take reduced damage per hit (requiring defense of about 67% more than defender's attack to on average take twice as many hits to die and reliably not get one-shot by keeneye). Assuming attack and defense stats on units are about the same, this would be ~75% of attack as defense. This is optimizing for a region that is *well short* of your actual attrition cap - but if all you want to do is hit the loot pinata fast, it probably suits you. Note that the ratio would probably be somewhat lower in Jupiter because of base defense > base attack.
For defense > attack, you're starting to optimize around taking hits near your attrition cap (but possibly not at your attrition cap). This isn't likely to have reliable results quite yet, so this is probably the region that has least to recommend it. One possible exception would be if you're resting on a force field unit, it may be taking use of your defense at this point (Steel Warden in Mars probably the best option). It also might start to be viable in SAJM because of units having base defense > base attack.
For defense >> attack, you are likely benefitting from both stats all the way to your cap and are *highly* effective at mitigating damage at medium attrition. "Equal Space" was my guideline for this - resting on sentinel outposts for the defense (which it's hard to get enough) - but these days you'd go to things like Eagle Mountain and Heroes Tavern that give both for the attack - and then supplement with some sentinel outposts. This remains an extremely difficult target to reach efficiently (I'm kinda trying in one world) so it's hard to say in practice how well it works compared to just stacking attack...
*Special Exception: Flyers vs Artillery-laden defenses at 150 Attrition!
Here you're looking for two specific things from your boost:
1) to not take 10 damage from a non-keen eye hit.
2) If you can moving the needle out of 1 damage dealt. (would make it a lot more viable without constant-resets til you get enough AO-KeenEye procs to have a bigger number to multiply)
So you're not looking for a ratio so much as individual targets.
We'll look at Mars & Jupiter as these are the two ages that matter most (Keen Eye is a big factor in making this work well because it multiplies your pitiful damage, especially combined with an AO crit
).Sentinel vs SAM : To never take more than 9 damage from any enemy unit @12000% boost requires 1487% defense - getting meaningfully further than this is not realistic. To start *possibly* doing more than 1 base damage against even a single enemy non-artillery unit requires 2395% (moves dmg vs sentinel to 1-2). To reach 1-3 at minimum vs all non-artillery units requires 4484% attack.
Abyssal Glider vs SAJM : To never take more than 9 damage from any enemy unit @12000% boost requires 1204% defense - getting meaningfully further than this is not realistic. To start doing more than 1 base damage against even a single enemy non-artillery unit requires 3082% attack (and that's the harpoon glider that you probably don't want to be fighting because of contact). To reach 1-3 at minimum vs all non-artillery units requires 5335% attack.
