Love your analysis, but regarding the Meargh's items, it believe it the Changer of the Ways should be accounted for as an inseparable part of the Staff she wielded.
Said staff giving her a '+20 Tzeentch Staff' base level bonus (and +15 to magic rounds but this isn't about that).
So any given round of combat, a roll of 5 or higher on a D18 means the staff is neutral effect or better overall, than not having it.
The ability absolutely has a chance of being debilitating, but lacking the ability would equal lacking the staff, which would place her at an even greater disadvantage since her base bonus would not be -10 compared to Snorri, it would be -30.
Likewise, going the other way around. She had an equal chance of the staff providing a massive total bonus of +45 or greater, up to a maximum of +60.
That's is potentially half our entire bonus statline right there in a single item.
It's potentially insane, is what it is.
Which, playing double-or-nothing with a Tzeentch themed staff of sorcery, is pretty much on point I feel.
Anyway, just my two cents that came to mind when seeing your comprehensive post.
You're right that having the staff and Changing of the Ways and rolling a 5 or higher is better than not having the staff at all. The best case for her would have been to not have Changing of the Ways but still have the staff's bonus. Lol, at least at that point her bonus wouldn't be jumping all over the place willy nilly.
My own perspective when approaching my analysis was obviously different, because I was treating Snorri's score as the score she needed to break even against, for the sake of probability comparisons.
I think that eliminates the argument that its better than Zharrgal given the current context of our other equipment (better stats, set bonus and not currently capped)
Pretty much. The Eye does have a synergy with Mhorni; if the Eye's damage activates on a round, and then Mhorni also activates, Snorri can do 4 points of Equipment Damage instead of 2.
4 Equipment Damage a round is really really high in the grand scheme of the system as a whole. That's enough to instantly delete the Tzeentch staff, or a lesser tier but more sturdily built item.
Yeah, but this was a Maergh in one of the outlying cities, not one of the inner ones or the capital. The fact that she was this strong doesn't bode well for what the stronger Maerghs will be like.
If they follow a build close to this lady's, they're still pretty screwed. Even if the bonus is higher than Snorri (and I'm talking on the order of +25 or even a full tier higher), he still wins eventually.
Okay let me put this into context.
If the next Meargh we fight has stats of 165 odd then BungieOni calculated that it would take 11 rounds for Snorri to lose.
Given Snorris DoT to equipment that is enought to destroy about 14 hp worth of equipment. This is twice what the Meargh we just fought brought.
That is enough time to destroy 100+ points worth of stats flipping the fight far into our favour. It would probably be an even fight after two or three rounds, and based on that Snorri would win in round 8 or 9 with all existing damage regened after the Mearghs DPS fell below what was needed to reliably damage Snorri.
This isn't considering that SB also passively kills off supporting benefit from minions that can't withstand the storm.
In other words, if all future Mearghs are more or less on the same build as this one, giving them all an extra Mythical item more than that one we just killed wouldn't even give them even odds against Snorri.
Snorri hard countered this build so well that I don't actually think we need to worry about individual Mearghs anymore as they're going to be largely comparable but if they're lucky then their build will be more shifted towards previously cast hard to disrupt rituals.
The actual danger coming up in the future is that we're probably going to have to fight the Shard of Hashut and the Meargh that bound it at the same time. Not because that Meargh is probably much more powerful, but because the action economy could double their DPS.
Pretty much this. And like, as I mentioned in my original post UlseDovThur, a 165 combat bonus is only
somewhat consistent. Specifically because of standard deviation stuff.
Out-dpsing the regen is also pretty possible, Snorri regens 1 every other round, whereas the Meargh regened 2-4 60% of the time every round (or she would have if that amulet wasn't destroyed so early). Snorri is clearly on the low side of what is possible as far as Regen goes as its approximately 1/4 the expected regen rate. So I'm pretty interested in seeing how we could get more single target damage in the future.
Wiggles hand. You are right Snorri is kind of on the low side, in raw number terms.
My perspective is a little different because I think in terms of system interactions, because the way I look at it is that Snorri cannot go higher in his regen without breaking the basic core loop of the combat system. If he's regenerating one wound every round, or two wounds every other round, he can't be killed by any enemy without multi-wound effects. He becomes immortal, and the 165 meatstack I mentioned prior? It stops being a problem.
Multi-wound effects have only really shown up on Grudged Artillery and Traps. Or having a DoT that can work to cancel some of the Regen.
Amusingly Snorri fighting himself in a mirror match is a fight with a lot more back and forth to it, since Snorri does actually have items vulnerable to Equipment Damage and the DoT could slowly kill him.
