Looking for a detailed explanation of how Potency and Tenacity work

I may be wrong but as far as I'm aware this sort of information and calculations is not information that they give out.

If that's true, that seems like an extremely silly policy haha

No one has any idea how this works?

No, they deliberately keep us in the dark to increase the chances of is investing in bad characters.

OK, I think this is how it works:

An ability has, say, 60% chance of applying a negative status effect to an enemy. The toon with that ability has 110% potency. Mulitply these two together in decimal form,

0.60 * 1.10 = 0.66 = 66% chance of applying the negative status effect.

HOWEVER, you need to factor in the target's tenacity. Suppose the target has 40% tenacity, the chance of successfully applying the negative status effect to that target (if the attack lands, of course) is:

0.66 * (1.00 - 0.40) = 0.396 = 39.6%

I'm not sure if this is correct but, having played around with this method for various toons' potencies and tenacities, there does not appear to be any particularly outlandish results.

I have not seen anything confirming a real tenacity/potency formula, but that multiplicative model by RFC (above) doesn't really work.

For Example, Sidious has 0% potency, the rancor has SOME sort of tenacity (assume for this example, 50%), yet every once in a while sidious is allowed to land a dot or heal block. Using a multiplicative model, sidious would never land any negative effect.

It is seems more likely that there are separate formulas for an effect triggering vs and effect 'taking hold'. So for sidious landing a heal block, the first calculation is:

• 1st check if heal block 'activates': chance to activate: 100% chance to trigger
  
• 2nd check to see if tenacity blocks it (if it triggered): 50% block chance
  
• 3rd check to see if potency can overcome the block (if block occurred): 0% chance.
  

That model doesn't quite work either though, because Dooku has ridiculous potency, and you've probably seen his stun get resisted plenty of times. So it's much more likely that there are 2 checks involved, maybe something like:

• 1st check to see if heal block activates: 100% chance to trigger
  
• 2nd check to see if effect takes hold: (tenacity / 1+potency) in our example, the resist will be 50% / 1 = 50% still. So a 0% potency sidious still has a chance of landing a heal block!
  

I had always assumed that there was some base chance to resist, and this was increased by the defender's tenacity and reduced by the attackers potency. Then it's a random roll after that.

resist = base_resistance + tenacity - potency
if( random(100) > resist) 
    inflict_pain()

base_resistance is just some global base common to all heroes, like 5% or 25%, whatever the developers have decided upon.

Hmm, interesting thoughts all! This is the conversation I was hoping to initiate. I have thoughts based on my G10 Luke which has 80% potency and seems to almost always apply his negative effects now, which I think I mentioned in my first post.

Anyone else?

Pretty confident there are two checks. First is to see if it triggers. And second to see whether the effect actually takes. (As far as I know, seems that negative effects can trigger even on a dodge, but not certain. If not, that would of course be a third check.)

As far as the tenacity v potency check, it is opaque and I don't know the math. If someone is willing to collect the data and reverse engineer it, that's doable.

As far as my working hypothesis, I'd assumed that the baseline is some arbitrary number, say 1 for simplicity. So 0 tenacity v 0 potency would be 1:1, or a 50% chance of applying. Then, 100% v 0 could be 2:1, or a 66% chance of application. Etc.

Of course, I just pulled this right out of my arse. Both the initial baseline (50%) and scaling function assumptions could be totally wrong. But if someone's willing to test hypothesizes against observations, it's crackable. Just curious whether someone has already bothered (virtually certain) and willing to share.