Wednesday, 5th March 2014, 21:43 by Siegurt
A little lesson about weapons in crawl:
Let's take a +0 +0 great mace vs a +0 +0 mace,
Stats (by examining them):
Great mace: Accuracy -4, Damage 17, Delay: 1.7, Min delay 0.7
Mace: Accuracy +3, Damage: 8, Delay: 1.4, Min delay 0.7
If you *just* take the damage per delay (That is to say the damage done per unit time) you can already see the great mace is way ahead.
You can also see that the "Min delay" is the same, so ultimately with enough training, they will swing equally fast, with the great mace doing more than twice the damage in the same unit time.
Now you might say "But my mace is +9 accuracy" Well, here's a little secret, Typically your accuracy is around 80-95% each point of accuracy improves that by something like an additional 1%, so you can take +9 accuracy and estimate that it will let you hit a little less than 10% more often, 8 damage plus 10% is 8.8 damage, still *WAY* worse than the great mace.
A similar (but less extreme) example applies to bonuses to damage, as a very rough approximation, you can say each point of damage enchantment on a weapon is about half as valuable as a point of base damage, therefore in order to have a mace approxmate the amount of damage of a great mace, you'd need approximately +18 damage enchantment (Which can't occur normally)
Brands are another thing to consider, there are some pretty good brands out there, some are a percentage of the damage done (flame/frost/crushing/holy/dragon slaying) and those do between 25% and 75% damage on top of the base damage, for a mace that's the equivalent of +2 to +6 base damage (again as a rough approximation) there are some brands who don't rely on the damage done, and simply do a flat amount of damage done (electricity, distortion, pain) which are pretty good, electricity and distortion are roughly equal to +5 base damage (elec is slightly better), pain is roughly half your necromancy skill. And finally there's draining, which it's roughly equal to +1 and +12.5% (So in the case of your mace about +2) base damage
So yes, a +0 great mace of nothing is still way better than that mace.
This is all simplified a lot (There's a host of different ways that skill and stats interact, but for a rough approximation you can ignore those), but it's close enough to work with and relatively easy to remember
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