Cryfowl's Complete Proccing Codex

Everything you ever wanted to know about Proccing
By Cryfowl

Special Bonus: the soundtrack to my adolescence... errr this guide

“	"I see magic in your eyes I hear the magic in your sighs Just when I think I'm gonna get away I hear those words that you always say"	”
	- "Abracadabra", Steve Miller Band 1982

In all my years of Shadowbane I can't imagine a game mechanic more misunderstood than proccing. It seems everyone has their opinion (and often not much else) as to whether procs are great or procs suck balls. How do procs work? Which procs are best? and why can't I seem to kill anything with them on my toon? A long time ago I developed a sort of fascination on the topic and I have tested, theorized, discussed and even badgered devs for answers about the mechanics of procs. Eventually one of them even provided me a cut and paste of the actual code concerning them for study. I always try to participate in every thread where procs come up but it's inevitable next week some noob will start a thread asking all the same questions all over again. Well cupcake, it's time I finally fulfill my long procrastinated promise of writing a comprehensive guide concerning these mysteries so now everyone and their brother no longer have any excuses! In the future I can simply link this codex and call it good.

“	"Come on feel the voltage Light thick and through From the whites of my eyeballs To the soles of my shoes Blow my fuse (Hey hey) You got nothing to lose."	”
	- "Blow my Fuse", Kix 1988

Let's start with a basic definition. This wiki has a pretty good one so let's use that: "A Proc is an enchantment associated with a weapon that grants it a five percent chance of discharging spell-damage, bleeding over time, poison damage over time, health drain, or stamina damage. 'Proc' is short for "programmed random occurrence". In the past I've also read that PROC is an acronym for Percentage based Random Occuring Casting - In either case it hardly matters because both give you the idea of what it is. In a nutshell, a proc is a prefix, suffix or enchantment available on a weapon that enables the random casting of a specific spell-like damage. It's as if suddenly your sword just gained the power to throw fireballs or lightning bolts at your foe. NICE! Yep, that's bonus damage any Shadowbane slayer can appreciate. While we're here it might prove beneficial if you start by reading the whole page on MW to get the basic ideas. Take your time - i have a full cup of coffee - Come on back when you're done.

Ok, so I assume you understand that every weapon (every item really) in Shadowbane has 3 available slots: Prefix, suffix, and enchantment. There's tons of different things available for all three of these slots but we're just concerned with the procs. Procs are available in all 3 slots. While prefix and suffix are pretty straight forward some folks get confused with the enchantment one. Basically, the enchantment slot is only used by a class (Crusader, Assassin, Nightstalker) or Discipline (Undead Hunter) that has a PROC enchantment spell. There are other castable enchantments in game such as Forgemaster and Ratcatcher but those are not procs so we won't be discussing them here although they do use the same slot as Proc enchantments. Proc that are applied to a weapon as a Prefix or suffix are permanent. Procs that applied as a casted Enchantment have a limited shelf life and expire after a set amount of time - always pay attention to this as the mouse over for the timer in game is not always 100% reliable. A good rule of thumb is most of the casted Enchantments have a duration TWICE as long as the spells recycle time (so dual wielders can just barely keep both weapons procced all the time) Now, procs in Prefixes are are limited to Tier 1, suffixes can be Tier 1,2,3( or even 4) and enchantment procs are rated according to trains in the class / disc spell. I'm not going to give all the individual names for all the different Tier procs here in this guide you can look those up on MW. "Wait up what are Tiers? " you ask , - I know - I know more on this later. I promise.

“	"You're poison runnin through my veins You're poison, I don't wanna break these chains"	”
	- "Poison" , Alice cooper 1989

These are the different types of damage types available on procs. These are single casted direct damge types:

• Fire
• Lightning
• Cold
• Holy
• Unholy
• Poison (class Enchantment only)
• Mental
• Magic
• Health Drain (Vampire) ** (grant's you the damage amount as a heal)

Other types of procs:

• Poison = As a suffix / prefix it applies a poison damage DoT : 30 sec duration w/ 5 sec pulses
• Stamina = does not damage opponents health but rather their stamina
• Bleed = does "Bleed" damage applied as a bleed damage DoT: 30 sec w/ 5 sec pulses.
• Snare = does no damage but applies a 40% snare debuff . Only available baked into Vorgrim * Dagger. No Tiers applied.

“	"The unknown troubles on your mind Maybe your mind is playing tricks You sense, and suddenly eyes fix On dancing shadows from behind Fear of the dark, fear of the dark I have constant fear that something's always near"	”
	- "Fear of the Dark", Iron Maiden 1992

PROC Mechanics

All of these apply their normal damage type. Thus, all the normal game mechanics concerning resists and exposes apply. They simply act as if your toon had cast them as a spell so that means that power damage buffs, debuffs, stance bonuses etc. will all apply too. One thing that does not affect them is a power block as your toon does not actually need to cast them they are baked into your weapon thus fire automatically. This also means that they use the Min and Maximum spell damage formulas to determine damage (you can find these in MW as well) so things like your INT and SPI will also play a role in damage amounts. The last important thing to note is that all procs use 0 for "focus line" in the damage formulas as they have none - even the ones that technically do like crusader and assassin.

How do they work? well, simply put each individual proc has a 5% chance of going off each and every time you successfully hit an opponent. Let's be clear here sunshine, the KEY words in that phrase are successfully hit! That means that the comp goes through all it's normal calculations concerning ATR/DEF, passive defence etc BEFORE it worries about whether your PROC went off. ONLY AFTER you have successfully hit does it check for a proc going off. I simply can't stress this enough, if you are not hitting your opponent you never had the chance to proc. Knowing this you must realize now that great ATR or at the very least a reliable means of dealing with an opponents defense is a must if you want to have any luck at all wielding PROCS. Now let's go back to the first sentence a minute. Each PROC has a 5% chance of firing. Now this 5% is per each individual PROC so the math here is cumulative which means it is really easy to figure out your chances of a proc going off - just take 5% * (the total number of procs you are wielding) The most any one can ever have would be 6 procs total and that's a dual wielding toon with prefix, suffix, and enchantment slots filled with procs on both weapons. So in this example this toon would have a 30% chance of any 1 of his procs going off on every good hit!' 'NOTICE: I said any one there. That's important because if you start changing the parameters like saying "what are the odds that 2 will go off on the same attack?" or "what about all 6?" well then you are changing the math involved and I suggest you start reading about odds and probability because that goes way deeper than I care to go in this guide. "Can more than one PROC fire on the same attack?" you ask. The quick answer is yes, sunshine, they can. The comp checks for each PROC you have individually so that means you can have more than one fire at a time but the more PROCS you have the longer the odds are of them all going off at once. (however the more procs available would make it easier for 2 to go off) I've seen two fire on a handful of occasions and I have spent countless hours testing them on a 6 wielder (which has the best odds of 2 going off simultaneously) I have never seen 3 the odds are that small. You will likely win the lottery before you see 6 go off at once. But if you truly want to know the chances are it's: ( 5^6 / 100^6)

“	"You put me in the deep freeze Oh baby don't you leave me Stone... Cold, your leavin' me cold Stone Cold... I thought I knew you so well Stone Cold... Can't break away from your spell"	”
	- "Stone Cold", Rainbow 1982

Ok Babycakes, let's get into the next important game mechanic that matters in any discussion of PROCS: attack speed. I assume you know this already but for all the Gomers out there I will briefly explain what weapon attack speeds mean. All weapon speeds are expressed as a number (possibly with a decimal involved) IE: Sapphire Bow has a 45.0. Now it is commonly agreed upon that 10 = 1 second in real time thus you can figure out your speed by moving the decimal 1 place left so SAPPHIRE BOW will fire 1 time every 4.5 seconds. NOTE: this doesn't account for any modifiers like stance, ALAC buff or prefix / suffix. If you want to know the end result of your toons attack speed then take your weapons speed and apply all the bonuses. By the way Babycakes, there is a speed cap in game of 1 second and once you hit that (yes it's possible) you are wasting points, suffixes/prefixes etc that could be better used elsewhere cause they are no longer helping you. "So why is this important?" well, if you want to figure out what your average PROC DPS is - here is how: Start by figureing out your total PROC % of one going off (see above paragraph) and now figure out how many attacks it will take on average before you hit 100%. So a 6 proccer has a 30% of a proc going off we can reasonably expect he will proc once every 4 attacks. If we know his attack speed (say it's 2sec) then we know he'll PROC once every 8 seconds on average. Next it's 60 seconds divided by that number so 7.5

From there you can figure out it's PROC DPS with: Average Proc amount * 7.5 / 60 = PROC damage per second. [ average proc amount will depend of toon build etc. , it's x7.5 because he will be able to expect to proc 1 time every 8 seconds thus should average 7.5 times in 60 seconds] If you already know your toons regular DPS then add that to your PROC DPS to get total DPS. This knowledge is massively important when attempting to figure out the value of a build compared to other build option.

It is vitally important to remember that when ever we talk about % based averages that there is a large degree of luck involved. Averages only work over long periods of time and your PROC success can vary widely Yes, you could possibly Proc 20 times in 30 seconds and watch you foe crumple under a massive rainbow of particle affects. It's also just as possible for you to go for 10 minutes without proccing once ! The lesson here is that time works in the proccers favor. Plan for this! Every Proccing based build (a build that depends on procs for it's primary damage source) must be build for endurance. The longer you can stay in a fight the better the chances are that your procs will win the fight for you. Even if you only plan to use procs as a supplemental source of damage it's still wise to figure out your average proc damage even if it's only to enable you to better evaluate whether or not something else might be more beneficial as a suffix to you.

“	"You weave your spell Your eyes beckon me Your lips they speak, lies and misery I know it's wrong, but I can't turn away The flames draw near, they're telling me to stay"	”
	- " Into the Fire", Dokken 1984

Well there Sweet Cheeks you've made it half way through this wall of text and I am down to half a cup of coffee. Let's dive into what is seemingly the hardest concept of procs their strengths and the Tier system. Right off the bat in order to clearly understand how the procs are rated against each other for strength let's dive straight into some game code. Now don't you tremble there Sweet Cheeks, I'll hold your hand and talk you through it. It's not to hard and you don't need to be a computer programmer or anything. I can put this in lay mans terms.

This is a direct copy of the game code governing procs provided to me by a previous Dev on the Emu project:

"ID" "IDString" "modType" "minMod" "maxMod" "percentMod" "ramp" "useRampAdd" "type" "string1" "string2"
"288" "PROC-LIGHTNING" "Health" "-13" "-53" "0" "0.057" "0" "Lightning" "" ""
"1280" "PROC-MENTAL" "Health" "-20" "-46" "0" "0.057" "0" "Mental" "" ""
"1374" "PROC-HOLYBLADE" "Health" "-17" "-50" "0" "0.057" "0" "Holy" "" ""
"1543" "PROC-POISON" "Health" "-4" "-7" "0" "0.057" "0" "Poison" "" ""
"2371" "PROC-HOLY" "Health" "-13" "-53" "0" "0.057" "0" "Holy" "" ""
"2791" "PROC-FIRE" "Health" "-15" "-51" "0" "0.057" "0" "Fire" "" ""
"2900" "PROC-BLEEDING" "Health" "-3" "-8" "0" "0.057" "0" "Bleed" "" ""
"2915" "PROC-UNHOLY" "Health" "-13" "-53" "0" "0.057" "0" "Unholy" "" ""
"2973" "PROC-COLD" "Health" "-13" "-53" "0" "0.057" "0" "Cold" "" ""
"3390" "PROC-POISONBLADE" "Health" "-21" "-45" "0" "0.057" "0" "Poison" "" ""
"3949" "PROC-DISEASE" "Health" "-4" "-7" "0" "0.057" "0" "Disease" "" ""
"4151" "PROC-MAGIC" "Health" "-18" "-48" "0" "0.057" "0" "Magic" "" ""
"5095" "PROC-ACID" "Health" "-3" "-8" "0" "0.057" "0" "Acid" "" ""

That's almost complete but we're missing a couple so we need one more quote from a Dev in the Forums:

Indeed. Remembering that DISEASE, BLEEDING, POISON and ACID (the low ones) are 30 second DOTs with 5 second damage pulses. Stam is :

4526 PROC-STAMINA Stamina -5 -12 0 0.057 0 Magic

Snare is a flat 40% snare irrespective of tier of proc. Vampyre is 25pt drain with a 1.43 ramp and 100% efficiency.

- Amaz

So the very first blue line going across the top is the header describing the colums defined by the quotation marks running vertically below. We only need to look at a couple the rest don't matter. These are the ones we're interested in:

• IDSTRING= name of PROC
• MODtype= this is what it affects, that's going to be health for all of them with the one exception of STAM proc
• minMOD and MaxMOD= these are the min and max damage base numbers or in essence 1 train.
• ramp = how the min/max damage numbers are adjusted per train (it's the same across the board so no real importance there)
• type= this defines the damage type of that proc

OK, now in the horizontal rows we can discard DISEASE and ACID as they are not available as PROCS in game. The rest are pretty straight forward except for 2 and I will go a little in depth with those HOLY and POISON. Do you see that there are 2 seperate entries in that list for each of those IE: HOLYBLADE & HOLY, PoisonBlade & Poison holyblade is the class/disc enchantment proc used by Nightstalkers, Crusaders, and UndeadHunters. Poisonblade is the class proc enchantment used by Assassins. It's vital you notice that even though they have an identical damage type as their counterpart procs that they are actually different spells with different base damage numbers and in the case of poison different applications. The Assassin poisonblade proc is a one hit, direct poison damage proc similar to all the other direct damage procs. The poison (prefix/suffix) proc is applied as a 30 second DoT with 5 second pulses and much lower base damage numbers. Nest up let's discuss the Tier system.

“	"Holy Diver You're the star of the masquerade No need to look so afraid Jump on the tiger You can feel his heart but you know he's mean Some light can never be seen"	”
	- "Holy Diver", Dio 1983

You may have heard of the Tier system in Shadowbane. Essentially, it means that Tier 1= 1-10 trains Tier 2 = 11-20 trains etc etc. you get the idea. This starts to break down when talking about procs however because obviously there is a huge difference between a spell damage with 1 train and one with 10 trains. It also doesn't help that until now the exact train level of the prefix / suffix procs have never been disclosed by a dev. UNTIL NOW :D

Its quite complicated because essentially weapon procs work like normal spells, generally speaking T1 procs cast as a Rank 1 power, T2 procs cast as a Rank 11 power, T3 procs cast as a Rank 35, T4 as Rank 40. There are slight variations, but largely this is the case. A normal damage calculation is then done as if the player had cast the spell with no focus and the indicated rank of the power. See Formulas for spell damage formula.

- Amaz

Let's quickly note here that prefixes procs are always limited to T1. Suffix procs can be T1,2,3 (or 4) *** T4 suffix proc weapons were once available in game as FC items only and are no longer available. Enchantment procs use actual trains and are the only procs available to hit R4 (sader and NS only - UH is capped at 20). So the Tier training levels for procs are OFFICIALLY: T1= 1 train T2= 11 trains T3= 35 T4 = 40

“	Enraged my mind starts to smoke Enforce a mental overload"	”
	- "Angry Again", Megadeth 1993

Now that we've come this far Pumpkin it's a fairly straight forward matter of plunking in the base damage numbers, the trains involved with your proc and your toons stats into the game formulas to figure out damage ranges for your toon and your choice of weapon / proc. Just for simplicity I am going to quote one more DEV from the forums:

minimum damage (rank 40) = minMod+(powerRank*(minMod*ramp)) maximum damage (rank 40) = minMod+(powerRank*(minMod*ramp)) ex. Poison Blade

minimum damage (rank 40) = 21+(40*(21*0.057)) = 68.88 maximum damage (rank 40) = 45+(40*(45*0.057)) = 147.6 ex. Consecrate Weapon

minimum damage (rank 40) = 17+(40*(17*0.057)) = 55.76 maximum damage (rank 40) = 50+(40*(50*0.057)) = 164 Plugging those into the spell damage formulas on the wiki, assuming 292 Intelligence and 102 Spirit after buffs/gear,

min = (0.0045*292+ 0.055*(292-0.5)^0.5+0.006*102+0.07*(102-0.5)^0.5+0.02*0)*69 = 246 max = (0.0117*292+0.13*(292-0.5)^0.5+0.0024*102+0.021*(102-0.5)^0.5+0.015*0)*`48 = 902[/code] adjusted for Mage Assassin offensive stance (+46%) min = 246*1.46 = 360 max = 902*1.46 = 1317 seems about right to me so overall,

Type Min Max LIGHTNING 39 159 MENTAL 60 138 HOLYBLADE 56 164 POISON 12 21 HOLY 39 159 FIRE 45 153 BLEEDING 9 24 UNHOLY 39 159 COLD 39 159 POISONBLADE 69 148 MAGIC 54 144 STAMINA 15 36

That's calculating for rank 35 on rollable suffixes, rank 40 for Assassin/Crusader/Nightstalker powers

Not sure how to calculate Vampyre, though. Using the above formula it's way too high. Paging Dr. Amaz!

- Aeroch

Aeroch makes a very important observation about Vampyre PROCs here in the last line. Up until now I have left it as is because this is what was directly supplied to me by Amaz, but Aeroch is correct. Vampyres base damage numbers can't be right. Now the efficiency is actually 100% that never changes and it's easily testable in game so that leaves us with base damage numbers and the ramp. Right off we know the base damage is wrong because if it were a flat rate of 25 then your toon would always proc for the exact same amount on the drain and this simply isn't the case. There must be a range. The ramp might also be in error. Every single other proc n game uses the exact same ramp why would this one be different? I am simply going to have to do some more testing and update this in the future.

“	"If you want blood, you got it Blood on the street Blood on the rocks Blood in the gutter Every last drop You want blood You got it"	”
	- "If you want blood" ACDC 1978

Well now we are almost to the end and it's time for a quick summary of the strengths of the procs:

Rated by max damage possible: DIRECT DAMAGE:

1. HOLY BLADE (Crusader, Nightstalker @ 40 trains)
2. Unholy, Holy, Lightning, Cold,
3. Fire
4. POISON BLADE (Assassin @ 40 trains)
5. Magic
6. Mental
7. Vampyre

OTHER:

1. Bleeding DoT
2. Poison DoT
3. Stamina
4. snare

A word or two concerning strategy

Of course all everyone wants to know is which one hits the hardest? Well it's right there so now you know. Yes Burst damage is nice but There is a lot more to be understood though if you truly want to excel at this game. To begin with, you should absolutely know beyond any doubt precisely what your toons role is before you even make it! This can make a huge difference in which procs are best suited for you. In addition to that take a moment and consider your most likely opponents. On lore and fighting an oblivion charter? use holy as opposed to unholy. Building a bane recon bow scout? poison DoT suffix will make the opposing scouts scream in frustration. While a small group support scout might choose a Bleed Proc instead just to combat those assassins. It's worthy to note that while I ranked them according to max damage here they are all balanced in that the MIN damages for those lower on the list are much higher meaning they all share about the same AVERAGE DPS regardless of spell. Another thing to note here is that the procs (just like their spell counter types) can carry other beneficial effects like Lightning has a micro stun component.

So this is finally the end to the wall of text. I plan to update this soon - particularly the missing info on the vamp proc but we are 99% there. I want to shout out special thanks to all who have helped my research and discuss procs over the years.: Guildies past and present - DEVS past and present - and those of you who take the time to post thoughtful information on the forums. If you see a Human scout named" CRYFOUL" on track be sure to send a tell and let me know how you liked the guide. I'll arrange for a personal demo, lol

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