questions about weapons

[Gakhan]

ive been told the base damage for the weapon counts more than the +enchantment.. how much more? and for one example, a +1 demon whip of draining > +3 mace of vamp? vamp is nice but how much more damage would i do with the demon whip? with 25 str, and does str matter a lot? ive read a bunch of times dex > str in overall usefulness

[celem]

Strength matters a little bit more for big heavy weapons, Dex matters a little more for the small fast ones. You Str is more likely to be governed by the sort of Armour you want rather than weapon to be honest. By and large increasing Str to get more melee damage isnt going to do all that much. (Frankly at 25Str the situations necessitating more are very few, thats enough for 99% of characters)

Base damage does count for quite a bit, vamp is a nice brand, but the healed damage is 1d(damage-you-did), so unless that mace got enchanted all the way to the top its going to be pretty horrible, even then to be honest, maces just suck too much against anything with lots of AC.

The demon whip in this example has 3 more base damage (though slightly lower accuracy) and is faster (which is a big deal). The long and short is that those 2 specific weapons you listed, the dwhip will outdamage the mace even at the enchants they are at now and will only get further ahead with skill and enchantment. The only thing the mace has going for it is vamp, which i normally like on a really big-hitting weapon... 1d(0) healing is doing you no favours.

[Gakhan]

i see, thank you

[nago]

For str question: generally you want to get a value of the ER's armour you use +10/20% - it's a very very general rule, keep in mind you may use armour even with str far under the ER value (like 13 str and a plate), just suffering biggest penalities (to ev, spellcasting and so on). The rest of points may go into int if you cast spell for which spellpower is important, dex otherwise.


I've been thinking for like 10 minutes how explain how is possible to decide what weapons are good (and when), and how compare two with different base type/enchantment/brand and God there are so many things, caveats, exceptions and what-else. I hope someone else is able to give you a brief and proper answer, I'd just paste this quote of crate, hoping it's still accurate. I don't think this rule can be reliably if comparing weapons with different min-delay

<crate> roughly +3 to-dam is +2 base damage for onehanders and +2 to-dam is +1 base damage for 2handers

Probably dcss would really benefits to get some consistency, or at least transparency for weapon selections, at least for new players.

[Gakhan]

thank you nago.. yeah id like to have something to judge my decisions on accurately lol i have not been playing to to long, only one win, a 15 rune run, but im still guessing on a lot of stuff

[Siegurt]

Crate's rule is a great approximation, even when it's wrong, it's close enough that the difference by which it's wrong is small enough that it doesn't matter.

If you want an *accurate but annoying* accounting for how much better base damage is see this:

Spoiler: show

Base damage is increased by 1/30 for each point of fighting, and 1/25 for each point of weapon skill.

This means that with 27 Fighting and 27 weapon skill you improve the base damage of a weapon by almost 4x (3.95)

The reason for the difference between one-handed and two handed weapons, is that you need more skill to get two handed weapons to min delay than one-handed ones, so in the usual case, you'll multiply your base damage by around 1.5 for one-handed weapons during most of the game that matters, and by 2 for two-handed weapons (for most of the game that matters)

You should *not* usually train your weapon skill past the min-delay point, because you get diminishing returns at that point, and there's more important thing to train usually (at least in a 3 rune game, you'll always have more important things to train than more weapon skill)

EVEN MORE USELESS TRIVIA FOLLOWS; ONLY READ THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU LIKE MINUTIAE, NEVER USE IT TO MAKE ANY IN-GAME DECISIONS EVER:
Strength and dexterity also raise your base damage by d(2/39) for each point of *weighted average* beyond 10, where the weights are evenly matched for the lightest of weapons (daggers) and weighted almost entirely toward strength for really heavy weapons like giant clubs, this means ultimately you'll get something like 10-40% more base damage from your stats, note that that's a relatively small number compared to the 100-300% more base damage you'll be getting from skills) It also means that strength is always more important than dex for doing melee damage, and should never be taken for this reason and this reason only.

Note that you don't need any of that information to win, or play the game well, but that's the information.

[Gakhan]

thank you, ill still probably play how i "feel" is good or working but i like seeing the numbers