The Tavern

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!

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

Mod note: Moved to Advice.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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)