+10 sling vs +7 greatsling

[d3k0]

Hi all,
as spriggan hunter I got the +7 Punk greatsling (freeze, rC+) and some time later a nice +10 sling with the same freeze branding.
So I thought: nice, the damage should be the same (10 base damage + 7 = 17 for the greatsling, and 7 base damage + 10 = 17 for the sling).
Moreover, the sling has a couple of advantages:
- minimum delay of 0.6 against 0.7
- I can wield a shield
- greater accuracy (both base accuracy and the +10 that involves also accuracy)
But... when I ran fsim (without shield), I found that the greatsling has slightly more damage output (I ran against a boring beetle). Why?
Thanks all!

[Sandman25]

Base damage does not include weapon enchantment and is multiplied by something.

[njvack]

Mod note: Moved to Advice.

[advil]

Base damage has a much greater impact than enchantment at meaningful levels of training (it's not simple addition, as sandman25 says), so often a higher base damage weapon is better than a lower base damage weapon that should be comparable, especially on higher armour opponents. Punk is an amazing weapon, I had it on a Ha recently and it just killed, really effective at every stage of the game. I think it would have to be a fairly special buckler that would cause me to use it over Punk, your SH will never be that high on a Sp anyways. Think a randart buckler with some slaying, or conceivably resistance. I definitely wouldn't choose an unbranded buckler over Punk, probably even with that hunting sling.

[d3k0]

Ok, thank you very much, so there is no way without fsim to understand what weapon is better, correct?
In my specific case the sling has also a +4 Dex, but I'd like to understand the general mechanics.
Thank you all!

[Sandman25]

See http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Ranged_combat for details. It is somewhat changed in 0.16-0.17 (there are new weapon types) but I failed to find the description in learnDB.

[Lasty]

d3k0: The general gist of it is that base damage is multiplied by a percentage based on Fighting skill, weapon skill, and str/dex before the damage for weapon enchantment and +slaying is applied. As a result, the higher your Fighting, weapon skill, and stats are, the more base damage matters. A skilled player name crate has a rule of thumb that for one-handed weapons (e.g. ones you'll use with ~10-16 weapon skill), 3 slaying/enchantment is worth about 2 base weapon damage, and for two-handed weapons (e.g. ones you'll use with ~18-26 weapon skill) 2 slaying/enchantment is worth about 1 base weapon damage. These are rough approximations, but they serve fairly well.

At very low weapon skill, enchantment tends to matter significantly more, of course.

[Sandman25]

Was Fighting changed to increase ranged damage?

[Siegurt]

Was Fighting changed to increase ranged damage?

A long time ago now, yes. (Fighting and weapon skill currently have the same type of effect on ranged weapons as they do on melee weapons)