Gearing a ranger

[bcbrown]

Snaggles kindly offered to send me a couple parses with Swarmcaller and the two epics against a froglok forager. Here's the results of a quick analysis.

First, I've been doing some parses on my own ranger, and found some interesting patterns. Here's a damage histogram from a Fellspine's Tail in mainhand vs Bloodmaw, 574 hits:

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The most obvious observation from this graph is the huge spike at 22 damage, which exactly equals 2*damage + bonus, or 2*7+8. There's a min value of 9 (or 1+8), and a max value of 34. The other thing I noticed was that there's more hits above this modal value (46%) than below (15%), with 39% at the modal value. I'm not going to go into the rest of my analysis here, as that's far too much for a single post, but I wanted to use this to illustrate my expectations when I started to look into Snaggles' parse.

I expect to see a similar graph for the Swarmcaller, with a modal value of 2*29 + 34 or 92. For Earthcaller + Swiftwind, since both weapons are slashing, I won't be able to pull them into two separate graphs, so instead of a single modal value I expect two, at 2*14 + 11 = 39 for EC and 2*13 = 26 for SW.

If you normalize those modal values by delay you get:
Swarmcaller: 92/41 = 2.24
Earthcaller: 39/24 = 1.625
Swiftwind: 26/21 = 1.24
Earthcaller + .75 * Swiftwind = 2.55

So the epics should be roughly 2.55/2.24 = 13% more DPS than the Swarmcaller.

On to the data

Swarmcaller: Three fights, with durations of 1:44, 1:42, 1:44 (from timestamp of first swing to last swing). Total 168 hits, 0 misses, 168 swings. Total damage is 17720, average hit is 105, DPS is 57.16.

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Earthcaller + Swarmcaller: Two fights, with durations of 1:18 and 1:24. Total 255 hits, 0 misses, 255 swings. Total damage is 11494, average hit is 45, DPS is 70.95.

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Discussion

Both graphs are more or less as expected, but there's some interesting wrinkles. The first is the secondary peak at the max hit value; I haven't seen that on any of my parses. The Epic DPS is higher than Swarmcaller as expected, but it's 24% higher rather than the 13% higher I expected.

I'm very surprised that there seems to be zero misses in the logs. I had a 90% hit rate (at level 51) against a level 5-8ish mob, but Snaggles had a 100% hit rate (at level 60) against a level 45 mob. His strength is something like 230 while mine was at 138.

Given the delays and a 75% dual wield success rate, I'd expect the Earthcaller to be about 54% of the total epic swings and the Swiftwind to be about 46% (1/24 vs 1/21 * .75), but the modal peaks imply the Swiftwind has about twice has many hits as the Earthcaller (7% at 26 damage vs 3.9% at 39 damage).

Finally, I'll note that there were 168 and 255 hits for Swarmcaller and Epics, while my Fellspine parse had 574 hits. Given the results I've found so far I think you need about 500 hits to avoid the data being excessively noisy. So I'm not too surprised that not all the projections line up exactly. The secondary peak at exactly the max value is very interesting, though.

In the ranger AC thread I laid out a theory for defense calculations: you'll have peaks at min and max hits and how much AC you have determines the relative proportion of min and max hits. We already knew there was some player-specific calculation that uses the "damage table" values to smear out the damage values, leading to values above what would be the max value for an NPC. The parses I ran suggested that's likely accurate, where the underlying distribution is past the squelch point such that all the min/max values are at the max value, and the "smearing" can lead to up to 30% of all hits being past the modal value, up to twice as high. Snaggles' parses suggest a similar conclusion, except with enough "something" (strength, +attack, skill levels, the "extra offensive bonus" rangers start getting at 55) the "smearing" gets capped at a ceiling leading to a secondary peak at the observed max damage.

[Snaggles]

Thanks bcbrown!

Honestly the 100% hit factor could have been my missed turned off. I figured that would only affect what is displayed in-game. Sorry if that threw a curveball.

I’ll do more parsing on those Kromrif Guardsmen as they are much closer to where my character is parked. Maybe a dozen or so with epics, and then the other weapon.

I will say this, I expected the Swamcaller to be a total dog. It was very close to the Epics outside the one frog. It slightly bested the epics on the one Guardsman. Roughly a SBOZ is 11% better ratio than the Earthcaller. A Woodsman is roughly 19% better ratio than a Swarmcaller. I don’t think this will stop people from hunting for SEOC’s anytime soon.

I don’t know if that’s sufficient enough to speculate but at least on level 45 npcs with a level 60 player, I expect the Woodsman would be competitive if not maybe a bit better on average. On level 60+ raid targets with higher mitigation, I would expect it to run further ahead. The woodsman applying a 31dmg bonus every 3.5 seconds (8.857/sec) unhasted vs the SBOZ an 11 every 1.8 seconds (6.111/sec) unhasted. That doesn’t even consider the price difference between these two setups.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

I'm working on a DPS calculator based on the EQEMU code. Got it mostly working, and so far the results seem pretty close to the P99 results I am getting. Will share it soon. I can share why there is a spike on the WeaponDamage * 2 + Damage Bonus value.

Basically there are two offsets that are applied to the Weapon Damage:

1. First there is a D20 that is rolled, skewed against the attacker's Offense vs. the defenders Defense. Generally speaking the D20 is skewed towards rolling 20 (which is divided by 10 to get 2). As as simple data example, out of 350 D20 Rolls, 100ish of them are rolled as 20 against a level 50 mob as a level 52 Monk. This is the first reason why you see a lot of values at WeaponDamage * 2 + Damage Bonus. You can also read this as WeaponDamage * (D20 Roll / 10) + Damage Bonus.

2. There is a second multiplier that multiplies the result of WeaponDamage * (D20 Roll / 10) before the Damage Bonus is applied. This multiplier has a fixed chance based on level to simply not happen. At level 60 there is a 23% chance of simply not using the second multiplier. If you do use the second multiplier, you can boost the result of WeaponDamage * (D20 Roll / 10) by up to 285% higher at level 60 before adding the Damage Bonus. This second multiplier is increased with your Weapon Skill, Strength, and ATK.

So not only do you have a lot of D20 Rolls that are skewed towards 20, but you also have a percent chance to not use the second multiplier. The result is having a higher number of your damage values at WeaponDamage * 2 + Damage Bonus. As the mob gets harder, the damage values become more diffuse. The easier the mob, the more damage values end up at WeaponDamage * 2 + Damage Bonus.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

I forgot to mention the second multiplier is also a roll. So if your max damage percentage multiplier is 285, you are rolling a d285 and multiplying the Weapon Damage * (d20 / 10) by the result. Thats why you don't have a ton of max hit rolls, and why they are more distrubuted.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

Here is a link to the thread related to the DPS calculator:

https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...67#post3731967

Let me know what you think.