Show Actual Attack Delay Time

[Kautzman]

If we examine a weapon, it will show Base Attack Delay, but not adjusted attack delay based on your skill with the weapon, brand of the weapon (speed), minimum attack delay for a given weapon and various armor penalties. Just reading the leardb entry for attack delay makes my head spin and it's a pretty significant amount of work to determine the actual delay of the weapon when everything is factored in. It would be a great boon if the actual delay where shown next to base weapon delay.

Also, it seems like it would be good to standardize time in the game. The delays are listed in percents which doesn't mean much unless you know that 100% = 10 units of time. I think as a whole, it would do the game well to communicate the idea that 10 = standard move, 10 = 100% weapon speed, etc.

[hxy]

If you have "show_gold_turns" option enabled, it will tell you how much time the last action took (in the brackets). Try enabling it and hit something using your weapon.

[galehar]

The option is show_game_turns.
The 1 turn = 10 units of time is shown nowhere in the interface, so standardizing the weapon delay display to it is only going to make it even more obscure to beginners. Why would you need to know the exact attack delay? You just need to know when you've reached the minimum delay, and this calculation is really simple.

[galehar]

You just need to know when you've reached the minimum delay, and this calculation is really simple.

And the game never gives you any clues about it, ever.

Why do you need to know it? To know when to stop training a skill. I'd rather fix the real problem (not worth to train a skill past a certain point) than showing attack delay and min delay on the interface.

[absolutego]

right now you naturally assume those levels are actually useful. they are (pretty much) not, and are better invested elsewhere. it's one of the great transparency vs flavor offenders, up there with (off the top of my head) victory dancing and miscasts.

handling magic is much more intuitive (you can see spell slots, spell hunger, spell power and spell success).

making those skill levels useful would be optimal, of course, but it's a big undertaking and may break things (is it really necessary?). noting that you've reached your maximum attack speed somewhere like in the weapon selection menu danr started working on would help make sense of things, a lot. did anyone take it over?

[Kautzman]

The option is show_game_turns.
Why would you need to know the exact attack delay? You just need to know when you've reached the minimum delay, and this calculation is really simple.

The reason why it'd be nice to see delay is that right now, it's very difficult to assess the effectiveness of weapons without being rather familiar with the mechanics of combat, skills and armor penalties, and then taking the time to plug your numbers into a formula to get things like a damage range, actual attack speed, etc. In fact, the spreadsheet that was created that does this exemplified quite well how complicated the calculations for melee damage are and outside of the weapon "feeling" stronger over time, there is no indicator of an increase in damage.

Absolutego makes a great point in how magic is much more intuitive because the benefits of higher levels are immediately confirmed by the game via hunger, power, etc. I remember when I was new to the game, I was supremely frustrated with melee because I had no idea how much damage I could do, how long it took to swing, what my actual chance to hit a given mob was and various other things. I actually was working on coding in numeric damage reports into the game in frustration because it was the only way I could actually determine the effectiveness of the weapons. I perceive this lack of transparency as a 'bad thing™ ' and I think making melee mechanics more transparent would help a lot of people make better choices in the game. We could start with Attack Delay

[Galefury]

I don't think spells are more intuitive. For weapons you get some indication of how much damage they do, with spells you just have to guess. With experience both melee and magic are fine, but when I started playing crawl I was having a hard time estimating which was best in my situation and for my char both for weapons and spells.

[galehar]

I totally agree that it's very hard to make a good weapon choice without using lots of spoilers. Trying them out is always a possibility, but with so much variance in damage and monster stats and resistances, it's quite hard to evaluate a weapon's potential damage like that.
Having a menu which displays some weapon stats for comparison would help a lot. It has been discussed here already, but it's hard to design one which has enough information without looking like a financial spreadsheet.

[Kautzman]

I totally agree that it's very hard to make a good weapon choice without using lots of spoilers. Trying them out is always a possibility, but with so much variance in damage and monster stats and resistances, it's quite hard to evaluate a weapon's potential damage like that.
Having a menu which displays some weapon stats for comparison would help a lot. It has been discussed here already, but it's hard to design one which has enough information without looking like a financial spreadsheet.

Thinking about this a bit, simply attaching actual damage and actual speed to a weapon description would help tremendously. Both of those things are really difficult to calculate by yourself and effectively impossible to new players. Allowing access to those to pieces of information makes choosing a weapon really easy though by simply dividing taking delay/damage. In my head, it'd make sense to put the numbers right next to base damage/base attack delay in the description.