I really should put my own posts into the analytics when I run them, but I'm not about to write a new script for the other tab, so I can't quickly find the last time I explained it.
Therefore short version, with crunching in the spoiler tag. Things we 'know'
as of Alpha-1 indicators and other claims
. I'm treating 'a page worth' as 'not going very advanced'.
1. Weapon Procs are enough of a system that they can probably be considered to matter and weapon attacks will be an option.
2. TTK is intended to be 30-60s or so
3. 20-30 hotbar slots, let's guess 15-18 attack skills
4. 15-18s cooldown on many skills
5. Tab Targeting is a thing.
So logically Intrepid:
1. Expects a player to take a bit over 3% of their health in damage per second as an average in a fair fight.
2. Doesn't expect most fights to contain more than 2x uses of most of the skills
3. Intends for players to strike with their weapon sometimes, enough so that it's worth putting points into that, so I'd guess at WORST 25% damage from weapon attacks (but I'll actually sorta-ignore it from here on)
We don't know what the cooldown of Dodge will actually be, but players have given lots of feedback that they don't want high mobility, and similarly we are at 'Split Body' with huge hitboxes/attack cones, making actually missing in a way that we can force, less likely.
Even assuming evasion, that gives us some number of uses of skills at the lowest, if 20 hit, at 4% damage each, and melee works decently, opponent dies. If we ignore melee, then 25 skills total. Let's be 'generous' and assume that skills take 45 frames maximum, to animate, so 0.75 seconds, around the point where the 'windup half' is reactable.
At a 40% or higher gear gap, even if we take it down to '40% gear gap only results in 25% extra damage', then the higher level person goes from 4% per skill on average, to 5%, and only needs to land 20 skills.
A player whose personal skill and accuracy rate is 90% but with lesser gear could land 25 of 28 skills for 100% damage. The player with the 5% damage per skill only needs to land 20 of the 28 skills, still requires almost 75%, though.
But we don't give endurance rewards, so, if we assume TopTierGear player has equal skill and lands 90% of attacks, they only need to do 22 attacks. NormalTierDude would have to force 5 mistakes beyond the 10% 'miss rate' for this to even be close.
Can players manage to force opponents to make a mistake every 6 seconds in a low mobility game? I think so.
Unfortunately all of this was based on offense stats only, and as soon as TopTierGear has better defensive gear too, this is a blowup, requiring someone to force their opponent to make a meaningful targeting or judgement mistake every four seconds or less.
Extending the factors by lowering the accuracy rate below 90% doesn't actually help NormalTierDude, it makes it worse, especially if Intrepid's plan is anywhere based on 'improving the damage of skills because people miss' (because it will almost certainly increase the multipliers for other reasons, if it doesn't, skill actually will trump gear by a LOT). It would explicitly rely on the opponent being inexperienced and not knowing what they're doing, or the execution difficulty of the game being enough that stress points actually affect this.
But Tab Targeting is a thing.
A gear gap of 20%, then resulting in a 12% difference in damage, makes TopTierGear need to land 22 attacks, and have to do at least 24, extending the survivability of NormalTier for roughly 3-4 seconds on average, or, if you look at it the other way, giving them 24 chances to force an error instead of 22. They could win here by forcing 3 total errors, within '24 seconds'. Add in the defensive gear again and they probably have to force 5 errors still in order to win, but TopTierGear still had to make 3 additional meaningful attacks, which still takes 3-4 seconds. 5 forced errors in 27-28 seconds is cutting it close, as it should.
To do the 'calculation' the other way, just assume TopTierGear isn't that good at the game yet and makes these errors on their own unforced, and NormalTier is a 'casual' who can't exactly tell when they caused it and when it was just their opponent's skill lacking (but they at least have the skill to hit with their own attacks). In case A, TopTierGear has to make 5 mistakes in order to fail to kill in the time it takes NormalTier (high skill) to kill them, in case B, they only have to make 3 mistakes for it to be even.
From there you can add an easy multiplier scale. If both players are at 80% accuracy rate, STK (starting from all previous premises) goes up to 32 vs 25 in case A, and 32 vs 28 in case B. If you started from 'make sure the TTK is 30s even at an 80% accuracy rate, then you're now at '7 mistakes in 30s' vs '4 mistakes in 30s'
If instead you went '30s is the fastest TTK for a perfect high (90%) accuracy fight' then simply extend by 'the time it takes to do the 5 additional attacks, which we will set at 6 seconds for simplicity:
'7 Mistakes in 36s' vs '4 mistakes in 36s'. But this is, again, before counting for TopTierGear's better defensive stats, which will always raise the number of errors one must force (let's say 9 vs 6). The ratios actually stay the same here, for the most part, until you get to the point where you need to start saying 'this game's accuracy is so volatile that distinguishing forced errors from unforced is difficult'. I have no opinion on if that's something to consider here.
Human error rate in competitive games of this type depends on a lot of things, but the distance between '1 mistake every 10 seconds' and '1 mistake every 6 seconds' is pretty large.
This WOULD have been my 'proof' if the premise itself wasn't off.