[bcbrown]

Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I just want to say necro rogue pet has crazy hit distributions on these fm giants! (level 44 pet and -20 AC debuff)

Fascinating stuff, Jimjam. Wiki has the giants at level 50, so I'm surprised to see such a huge spike at max hit.

I looked at the giant's hits against DSM, and I saw some weak indications of something similar; 20% at min hit and 13% at max hit.

The other interesting thing I noticed was that your histrogram shows Jibartik with exactly 20 unique hit values. The giants were similar: almost all the values fell into 20 distinct values, but 1% didn't fit that pattern.

Everything I've seen when looking at player damage points toward that pattern not occuring in player hits. DSM's unique hit values on the giants, for example, ranges from 35 in mainhand punches to 93 in IFS hits.

This suggests a conclusion that:
* mob damage and player damage have different calculations
* player damage has something to add some noise to "smear" hit values across more unique values
* this difference in calculation, either intentionally or unintentially, leads to a high percentage of player hits at some value that's right around the average for that weapon.

There's some code in the EquEmu implementation that looks like it might be adding that noise:

	int basebonus = hit.offense - damage_table.minusfactor;
	basebonus = std::max(10, basebonus / 2);
	int extrapercent = zone->random.Roll0(basebonus);
	int percent = std::min(100 + extrapercent, damage_table.max_extra);
	hit.damage_done = (hit.damage_done * percent) / 100;

I'm starting to seriously wonder if this is a bug in the p99 codebase - I can imagine it might be intentional to treat mob and player damage rolls differently, but I find it harder to believe that the spike around the average value is intentional. I also wonder if the spikes at max and min hit are intentional.

Jimjam, you said you recalled a thread where Rogean discussed the damage calculations. Would you mind doing a little digging? All I could find were some patch notes without a lot of detail.