Which LB for Distortion?


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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Monday, 20th November 2017, 16:12

Which LB for Distortion?

I am playing a HaAK, and now doing Shoals after clearing D, L, O and Snake. I am playing with LB and slings. What is the best LB to enchant with Distortion?
I also have only found falchions, swords and scimitars until now. Would it be a waste to enchant one of these?
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Monday, 20th November 2017, 17:10

Re: Which LB for Distortion?

Two thoughts:

  1. Which short blades have you found? With Ha's aptitudes, 14 LBl for mindelay on a scimitar ought to be enough to get a dagger to mindelay on crosstraining alone (14 Lbl @ 0 apt is 6000 skill points, times 40% = 2400, SBl at+2 Apt = 3394 skill points in SBl > skill 11)
  2. What is your EV? Distortion and riposte go very well together by passively transforming packs into serial encounters.
I'd distort either a dagger (even better a quickblade of course) or a scimitar depending on whether I'm in heavy or light armor respectively. I'd also do it now, because your character will only get stronger as an endgame LBl reveals itself and then the opportunity to get value from your capstone invocation will have passed.
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Post Monday, 20th November 2017, 17:23

Re: Which LB for Distortion?

MainiacJoe wrote:I'd distort either a dagger (even better a quickblade of course) or a scimitar depending on whether I'm in heavy or light armor respectively.


While the rest is a quite accurate advice, this is not. EV has bad sinergy\return with risposte. E.g. from here

The amount of damage that you get from riposte is not as high as you'd think, but more importantly it does not scale very well with EV. To calculate the amount of damage riposte gives us relative to tabbing something, we can use the formula [chance the monster misses * 1/3 * (our weapon delay/monster's attack delay)]. You can find out how likely a monster is to hit you by running fsim. Let's use stone giants as an example, assuming that we're using a sword at mindelay of 0.7 and no shield:
With a low evasion (10EV) character, the stone giant hits 77% of the time. Riposte will activate 7.6% (0.23*0.33) of the time we get attacked, but since we are tabbing at 0.7 and the stone giant only attacks every 1.0 turns we are only getting an extra 5.3% (7.6*0.7/1.0) damage from riposte.
With a high evasion (30EV) character, the stone giant hits 34% of the time. By the same formula as before, riposte activates about 22% of the time we are attacked but we only get about 15% extra damage beyond what we get from tabbing things.
So the net effect of adding TWENTY EV to our character is a ~10% increase in damage against a stone giant. This is an incredibly lousy return. Note that 10 EV is quite low even for a character in plate by the time vaults comes around, and 30 EV is often going to be hard to reach, and the damage increase is even smaller if you compare 20 EV against 40. You aren't adding 20 EV by training just a bit more dodging or by putting your stats in dex, and you are probably compromising your AC or your skilling or both to get close to that much. The stuff you sacrifice to go "all in on evasion" or whatever is pretty much always better than the additional damage you get from riposte.
Considering a more realistic example, suppose I can go from 25 EV to 28 EV at minimal expense. Under the same assumptions as before, I am going to get about 1.7% more damage against a stone giant from my additional ripostes. This is less damage than you get from a single point of strength. Increasing my EV may still be worthwhile on other grounds, but the damage scaling from riposte is tiny in any halfway realistic scenario.
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MainiacJoe

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Post Monday, 20th November 2017, 17:23

Re: Which LB for Distortion?

nago wrote:
MainiacJoe wrote:I'd distort either a dagger (even better a quickblade of course) or a scimitar depending on whether I'm in heavy or light armor respectively.


While the rest is a quite accurate advice, this is not. EV has bad sinergy\return with risposte. You shouldn't prioritize LB over another weapon just in sake of your armor and viceversa.
E.g. from here

The amount of damage that you get from riposte is not as high as you'd think, but more importantly it does not scale very well with EV. To calculate the amount of damage riposte gives us relative to tabbing something, we can use the formula [chance the monster misses * 1/3 * (our weapon delay/monster's attack delay)]. You can find out how likely a monster is to hit you by running fsim. Let's use stone giants as an example, assuming that we're using a sword at mindelay of 0.7 and no shield:
With a low evasion (10EV) character, the stone giant hits 77% of the time. Riposte will activate 7.6% (0.23*0.33) of the time we get attacked, but since we are tabbing at 0.7 and the stone giant only attacks every 1.0 turns we are only getting an extra 5.3% (7.6*0.7/1.0) damage from riposte.
With a high evasion (30EV) character, the stone giant hits 34% of the time. By the same formula as before, riposte activates about 22% of the time we are attacked but we only get about 15% extra damage beyond what we get from tabbing things.
So the net effect of adding TWENTY EV to our character is a ~10% increase in damage against a stone giant. This is an incredibly lousy return. Note that 10 EV is quite low even for a character in plate by the time vaults comes around, and 30 EV is often going to be hard to reach, and the damage increase is even smaller if you compare 20 EV against 40. You aren't adding 20 EV by training just a bit more dodging or by putting your stats in dex, and you are probably compromising your AC or your skilling or both to get close to that much. The stuff you sacrifice to go "all in on evasion" or whatever is pretty much always better than the additional damage you get from riposte.
Considering a more realistic example, suppose I can go from 25 EV to 28 EV at minimal expense. Under the same assumptions as before, I am going to get about 1.7% more damage against a stone giant from my additional ripostes. This is less damage than you get from a single point of strength. Increasing my EV may still be worthwhile on other grounds, but the damage scaling from riposte is tiny in any halfway realistic scenario.
screw it I hate this character I'm gonna go melee Gastronok

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Post Monday, 20th November 2017, 18:35

Re: Which LB for Distortion?

Hmm. Thank you, nago.

Since the main effect I was aiming for with riposte was not the damage itself, but the distortion effect, let's see: a free +5% on distortion brand application comes out to 0.7 (mindelay) / 1.05 = effective mindelay of 0.67. On a falchion, 0.6 / 1.05 = 0.57. The dagger is 0.5 with no riposte. This is against a single monster.

Since riposte processes on dodging, and dodging unlike shields gets applied to more than one attacker in a turn (correct?) then if one is facing two monsters at once, it becomes a 10% chance that you'll get a riposte distortion effect, 15% for three, etc. Neglecting the miniscule chance that you'll get two or more riposte distortions in a single 10 auts of enemy action:
  Code:
Effective mindelay for scimitar with one, two, three, four, five simultaneous attackers:
0.67, 0.64, 0.61, 0.58, 0.56
Effective mindelay for falchion with one, two, three, four, five simultaneous attackers:
0.57, 0.55, 0.52, 0.50, 0.48

So a dagger is better from the standpoint of distortions per aut even with riposte, except in the worst mobbings that you ought to be avoiding anyway. But beyond riposte, distortion is just a good damaging brand. Similarly to how an electric battleaxe isn't bad because electrocution is a good brand, a distortion scimitar isn't bad either. Now there are some situations when you don't want distortion: when you need to buff to take on the monster, it sucks to quaff potions and then see it teleport away to heal while your buffs expire. But if your best current long blade is a scimitar of protection or something lame like that, you need something that can do a chunk of damage and distortion is good at that. So here is my new advice:

If you have a scimitar with a good brand already, distort a dagger. Otherwise, distort a scimitar, not because of the riposting which is gravy but because distortion is a good damage brand intrinsically.
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Post Monday, 20th November 2017, 18:42

Re: Which LB for Distortion?

Shtopit wrote:I am playing a HaAK, and now doing Shoals after clearing D, L, O and Snake. I am playing with LB and slings. What is the best LB to enchant with Distortion?
I also have only found falchions, swords and scimitars until now. Would it be a waste to enchant one of these?


Ideal long blade target would be a demon blade, scimitar is worse, but not by a large enough margin that i would let it stop me.

If you dont plan on using the distortion weapon as a primary damage dealer (but rather as a secondary utility type thing for relocating things away from you, presumably with a different good brand on your primary damage doer) then selecting something with a very short attack delay makes the most sense and daggers/quick blades crosstrain (daggers also give you nice stabs for cheap kills sometimes, so a disto dagger can serve two purposes for the price of one inventory slot and minimal addition xp)

However if you dont want to maintain that much overhead (that introduces a lot of complexity to your decision making for a pretty small gain in combat efficiency, which you may or may not have the expertise to exploit well) and just want a good weapon to tab with, scimitar is ok. Demon blade would be better. You will probably eventually find a better long sword than a scimitar of distortion, but likely very very late, and possibly late enough that it wont make a difference.
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Barkeep

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Post Monday, 20th November 2017, 19:07

Re: Which LB for Distortion?

Having played a couple AKs I would no longer corrupt anything other than a polearm. It makes the blink effect so much less annoying.
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Post Tuesday, 21st November 2017, 18:17

Re: Which LB for Distortion?

MainiacJoe wrote:I'd distort either a dagger (even better a quickblade of course) or a scimitar depending on whether I'm in heavy or light armor respectively.


Why a dagger? Unless you're stabbing dudes (in which case distortion doesn't really help anyway), I imagine you'd want one of the higher-tier short blades: a rapier of distortion has the same mindelay as a dagger of distortion but does more damage. At +2 aptitude it doesn't cost much more XP to get the rapier to mindelay.

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Post Tuesday, 21st November 2017, 19:09

Re: Which LB for Distortion?

amalloy wrote:
MainiacJoe wrote:I'd distort either a dagger (even better a quickblade of course) or a scimitar depending on whether I'm in heavy or light armor respectively.


Why a dagger? Unless you're stabbing dudes (in which case distortion doesn't really help anyway), I imagine you'd want one of the higher-tier short blades: a rapier of distortion has the same mindelay as a dagger of distortion but does more damage. At +2 aptitude it doesn't cost much more XP to get the rapier to mindelay.

If you are stabbing things distortion doesn't matter, if you are distorting things with a short blade, you are doing so not for the damage, but for the distortion effect, so the base damage of the weapon doesn't matter.

If you distort a dagger then you have one tool that can be used for either purpose, and in this case he wouldn't lose access to the ability to use long blades to do damage.
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Post Wednesday, 22nd November 2017, 00:28

Re: Which LB for Distortion?

njvack wrote:Having played a couple AKs I would no longer corrupt anything other than a polearm. It makes the blink effect so much less annoying.


i believe that ordinary spear is the ultimate weapon for branding with disto because it combines superior reach and 0.5 delay. unless by some miracle you find demon trident, which may or may not be better (0.6 vs 0.5 delay, spear lets you hit most enemies twice and proc two distortions before they can swing once)

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