Offhand Question

[lecompte]

A revultant whip is amusing and an earthcaller (14/24) will get you killed with the procs but ... at 9/17 a fayguard parrying dagger will do some nice damage and piss of enchanters. At 60 you get a mainhand bonus of 11 (I think). So (earthcaller) 25/24 vs (fayguard) 20/17 vs (revultant) 16/14

[Yinikren]

Correct on the damage bonus being 11, but it isn't added to the weapon damage like you think.

((Offense+STR)/100)*WeaponDamage+DamageBonus+1=Maxhit.
So, a 60 Ranger with 200 STR:
(240+200)/100=4.2.
4.2*X+12=MaxHit. Replace X with weapon damage.

[williestargell]

Quoted from Alla's post at http://everquest.allakhazam.com/foru...63025478334105

3) Damage bonus is damage added *after* all other damage has been calculated. Thus, with a damage bonus of 1 in your primary hand, your minimum hit will be 2.

Basically your min hit at 60 is going to be 13 - 12 of which is the "damage bonus +1" half of your equation. This highlights the importance of damage bonus vs. ratio. The damage bonus might be a small portion of your max hits, but it is over 90% of you min hits. The better a mob's mitigation is, the more important damage bonus becomes.

At some point the low delay of a weapon is good enough that the ratio doesn't matter. Obviously something like Moss covered Branch/Twig fell into this category or it wouldn't have to get nerfed into secondary only. I don't know at what point that is, if fayguard dagger or revultant whip will measure up with better ratios. But they are worth testing on high end mobs with alot of mitigation.

Haste effects are also difficult to calculate. Hasted characters using low delay weapons may benefit less if there is a "minimum delay" - I recall on live there being talk of a minimum delay of 1 second (delay of 10). So at 100% haste your 17 delay would get cut to 10 instead of 8.5. And swinging the pendulum back in favor of ratio - with delay of 20 being optimal.

The only way to tell is to parse them out because we all know that things don't work quite the same on p99 as they did on live.

[Thulack]

Thanks willie. I knew people here were all messed up with how they thought damage bonus worked but i couldnt find the info i needed to post. and when i said 1 month into velious i ment 1 month into Kunark.

[lecompte]

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

Correct on the damage bonus being 11, but it isn't added to the weapon damage like you think.

((Offense+STR)/100)*WeaponDamage+DamageBonus+1=Maxhit.
So, a 60 Ranger with 200 STR:
(240+200)/100=4.2.
4.2*X+12=MaxHit. Replace X with weapon damage.

So fayguard at 200 str is 4.2*9+12= 49.8 divided by rate /17 = 2.93
Revultant at 200 str is 4.2*5+12= 33/14 = 2.375
Earthcaller at 200 str is 4.2*14+12=70.8/24 = 2.95

And, of course, this doesn't really talk to how much damage you may actually do unless we are talking about a mob with zero mitigation. I have a few thousand parses but I cant tell what weapons I was using or what haste I had at the time. My head hurts.

[Yinikren]

Good math discussion Willie, I like it. Your minimum hit will actually be 12 at level 60, which is your DB+1. Also, minimum delay on this server is 5, so users of extremely fast weapons don't have to worry about losing attacks because of a delay cap.

It would be interesting to collect enough parses to see at what weapon damage/str point does using a higher damage weapon outdps something like a Rev Whip. I guess it would also become dependant on mob mitigation, where more mob mitigation=more of your damage is done by your damage bonus alone, so a faster weapon would win.

Do any of you high level rangers regularly run around at 255 STR? My newbie has decent(read:not the best) gear and only hits 135 str with all his bonus points into STR. Is it possible to easily hit 255 STR raid buffed or should something like 200 STR be used as a high-end milestone instead?

[Yinikren]

Also, another thing I just thought of: parse times. In Kunark, with 32k hp mobs, fights are over in about 20 seconds, so burst is king. Come Velious, with 440k+hp mobs, burst will have a much smaller level of relevance, and sustained dps will become king. It would not surprise me one bit to see fast onehanders outparse better ratio weapons simply because of the rate of attacks vs. mob mitigation - that damage bonus is guaranteed damage.

[koros]

The formula you want to use to determine weapon performance is ((damage * 2) + (damage bonus))/delay.

This assumes the hit distribution is normal, which it approximately is for most mobs. High AC mobs change the skewness of the probability distribution to the left, while extremely low AC mobs change it to the right. Until Luclin there were very few examples of extremely high AC mobs.

TL;DR use ((damage * 2) + (damage bonus))/delay to determine relative weapon performance for mainhand.

[Elmarnieh]

I'd like to see some parses on even 7 level under non raid mobs, even cons, and equal level warriors.

The fact is that level/ac and ATK is going to determine a lot of best weapon for the scenario. If you're going to be hitting in the top 25% of the scale go for your high damage weapons, if you're hitting in the bottom 25% go for fast...anywhere in the middle well thats where the parsing comes in at.

[koros]

Your hit distribution changes are relatively small. The skewness isn't going to change enough to ever put your average hit in the top 25%.