Talk:Steel Fiber/@comment-72.186.113.208-20130922055850

The damage reduction formula suffers from the fact that you are basically measuring imaginary numbers. They don't really exist. You will not see those numbers in the actual game you play whatsoever. The reason it is used, is because it allows a constant value to modify variable armor values of different frames.

To get an actual effectiveness value of the true effect, you need to find the damage you actually take. This is the real number that matters, since it is what hits you. (Aside from armor ignoring damage, which would bypass it.)

To then find how it affects your build, you would need to find how much damage it would let you survive with a given damage received value. To get that, you would change the %  of damage received into a decimal value. You then divide the health of the frame by that decimal value, to see your health value as if you were receiving full damage.

To find the effective change in health for a given increased rank in Steel Fiber, you would need to compare the change in the damage RECEIVED values (not the damage reduction values, bolded to prevent miscalculations.) This will tell you the actual effect of the higher rank.

Two ways to do it. Easy way is take the same given health and divide each by the two damage received values. Take those two and divide the higher one by the lower one. That will be the percent change.

For example, useing the 70% assumed peak efficiency for a 150 armor frame (Mod drain 9) and 1k health:

Mod Drain 9 would give 3400 effective health. Going up a rank would give 3549 effective health, for an increase of 4.4% Mod drain 8 would give 3249, which means Mod Drain 9 gives a 4.6% increase over its previous rank. So there is only a .2% difference in the two ranks. Not really enough to count anything as a peak area, since there isn't all that much of a difference.

The second way gives the same results, but is the formula version instead of the common sense version. It's why I prefer the first, everything derived is useful information. Divide the higher damage received number by the lower, and that's the difference. Doesn't matter if decimals are used. But it still has to have the initial value applied to health to get effective health, and then the difference applied to the the health to find the higher health from decreased damage received.

One other thing to note, is healing is also essentially amplified by increased damage reduction values. Since it heals everyone the same, but their effective health is different than their effective health.

So useing above values, if both are showing 600 health of their 1000 health, and they get healed to full, the guy with more damage reduction actually received more healing. Which counters any minor loss in effectiveness at higher ranks. All depends on builds, and aura used.