victory -- HaAK w/ shields and quick blade of distortion

[mps]

I felt like giving shields another try after bashing them so much on tavern, so I rolled up an HaAK on lld comborobin. Once again, comborobin was victorious.

Weirdly enough, I found a quick blade in the first levels of lair, before I had branded anything, so I figured might as well try that too. Here's the dump

http://lazy-life.ddo.jp:8080/morgue/com ... 071841.txt

I didn't feel bad using shields on a Ha, since they can't use real weapons anyway and the odds of finding a double sword were remote. I shot for about 70-80 total defenses, so I didn't skill dodge or armour as high as I usually would and used phase shift to push me over the top in the endgame. No good shields generated, but it was okay. A cheap 11 SH isn't bad and I overskilled, mistakenly thinking the Ha shield penalties were higher than they actually are.

The quick blade of distortion was okay, but inferior to a battleaxe of distortion. It was not really suitable as a primary weapon, for which I used a flaming scimitar in the midgame and a flaming demon sword in the endgame. It was good at applying distortion effects to thin out a bad situation, though, and it was pretty good in zot, though I ended up corrupting z:5 and leaning heavily on shadow creatures. Direct experience pretty much bore out my observations of other players using quick blades of distortion and my analysis in the other thread. It's not a bad option on a character that can't use big weapons, although in this game lajatangs were available which would've been a better choice.

Nevertheless it was a good character, easy to play. Found good spells. A++++, would use shields and make distortion quick blade on an HaAK again. All glory to comborobin!

edit: Also, though I forgot to say, I also wanted to try throwing. It was pretty good in the endgame. Used it on a few irritating zot monsters with excellent results. Manual of throwing helped a lot skilling it up.

[Sandman25]

Sorry, I am lost. So you used qblade of distortion thrice for

  Code:

 89513 | Zot:2    | Noticed an orb of fire
 89513 | Zot:2    | Noticed an orb of fire
 89514 | Zot:2    | loool...
 89517 | Zot:3    | Banished an orb of fire

  Code:

 90292 | Zot:5    | Noticed an ancient lich
 90297 | Zot:5    | Banished an ancient lich

and

  Code:

90971 | Zot:5    | Noticed an ancient lich
 91025 | Zot:5    | Banished an ancient lich


It took 4 turns to banish OoF, 5 turns to banish first Ancient Lich and 54 turns to banish second one?

Also note that our discussion is not 100% relevant for small species, buckler is not that great but you have just proved that qblade "kills" top tier monsters in 4-5 turns with 8 skills in a weapon category.

[mps]

The argument I made in the other thread was that quick blades of distortion don't make good primary weapons, but larger weapons, like battleaxes do. All distortion weapons banish zot monsters and they are useful for that purpose. The bit you point to was an unusually quick banishment, anyway. I believe the OOF was banished on the second or third strike. Most of the time there was going downstairs from a vault with a bunch of draconians and OOFs in it.

The quickblade was more of a back up option because you couldn't kill things in a reasonable amount of time with it. I used it a lot in zot, but I also used a lot of other tricks, so it's not like I was relying on fast distortion effects. On a character with a battleaxe of distortion, I use the battleaxe as the primary weapon because the damage is good enough to kill things consistently.

[Sandman25]

I was lucky to banish OoF on first strike last time I used distortion so you were not that lucky
10% chance for banishment means you have 1-0.9^N chance to banish at Nth strike, with N=6 it is 0.47. So you have 47% to banish monster after 1.5 turns (assuming target does not blink). Including teleportation we have 1-0.8^N chance to get rid of the monster, it is 49% after 3 attacks (0.6 turns).

[gammafunk]

Given that an event which prevents further melee and even exposes the player to additional damage (blink from distortion) can occur with a higher probability (about 15%) than than banishment in any one of those 6 actions, you probably don't want to just assume that said event doesn't happen when calculating the average number of turns/aut for a banishment.

[mps]

Good luck trying to get people on tavern to recognize this point, gamma.

[Sandman25]

Given that an event which prevents further melee and even exposes the player to additional damage (blink from distortion) can occur with a higher probability (about 15%) than than banishment in any one of those 6 actions, you probably don't want to just assume that said event doesn't happen when calculating the average number of turns/aut for a banishment.

You are right of course, but I am not math expert to take blinking into account and you can freely double number of turns in my estimate if you like. Killing any monster in about 3 turns is awesome. Feel free to calculate accurate chance for typical zot 5 layout and prove that my estimate is completely wrong.

[Sandman25]

Good luck trying to get people on tavern to recognize this point, gamma.

I am not sure why you are underestimating IQ of people you are arguing with but if you really feel this way, I am surprised you are still posting.

[mps]

Sorry, dude. I'm mostly talking about the other thread. -___-

[Sphara]

10% chance for banishment means you have 1-0.9^N chance to banish at Nth strike, with N=6 it is 0.47. So you have 47% to banish monster after 1.5 turns (assuming target does not blink). Including teleportation we have 1-0.8^N chance to get rid of the monster, it is 49% after 3 attacks (0.6 turns).

but I am not math expert

Wait, what?

[Siegurt]

Given that an event which prevents further melee and even exposes the player to additional damage (blink from distortion) can occur with a higher probability (about 15%) than than banishment in any one of those 6 actions, you probably don't want to just assume that said event doesn't happen when calculating the average number of turns/aut for a banishment.

Note that in many cases (When the creature is melee-only), blink actually does the reverse, it exposes the player to less damage while giving the player extra turns that they can use to do damage to the creature for free or escape or do whatever is most appropriate when the creature is at range.

Now as we get late into the game, more and more creatures have some sort of ranged attack which may or may not be dangerous, but overall I'd say blink is (for me) about 50% helpful, 50% detrimental. With a skew towards helpful earlier and towards detrimental later (by as much as 10-15% or so)

I'm not sure looking at distortion from the "per aut" perspective is useful at all, more like "how many attacks will the creature get to use on me in the time it takes me to deal with it in some fashion" which varies widely with the type of creature, whether blink is helpful or hurtful, positioning, etc. etc.

In any case I would argue that distortion is actually *even in the worst case* better than the same weapon with no brand (Given an intelligent player who responds properly to bad events), and in the best case is better than *any* other brand, and on *average* is better than most brands more than half of the time.

[Sandman25]

Sorry, dude. I'm mostly talking about the other thread. -___-

I think everyone understands your opinion in another thread. If you can kill monsters conventionally, don't use distortion, distortion is not about dealing max damage (though it deals max damage with short blades indeed), it is about avoiding monsters. When I feel underpowered as caster I find a distortion weapon and equip it.

[Sandman25]

Wait, what?

I used to be the person who confused percents with percentage points.

Spoiler: show

because we don't study percentage points in school or IT universities