I want Strength Weight back.

[Tressol]

Why was it removed?

Okay, I understand that it's a fringe mechanic that will only have a substantial effect on a minority of characters, and that it's notation in game had mysteriously vanished over the past few versions... But why remove it? The solution (imo) is to explain it better to newbies, not to take out something that adds a bit of depth to weapon choice.

The change hurts species with a high Dex/Str disparity the most - Ogres, for instance, will be highly affected, as will late game users of Short Blades, of all things... What's the point in this?

Furthermore, the removal leads to silly places; the ideal Quick Blade user is now someone with perhaps enough Stealth to get off a stab, but also as much STR as possible (I guess this makes Shadow Dragon Armor more viable...). The ideal user of a Whip or similar light, fast weapon that's not a Short Blade is just the strongest guy available - stealth isn't even a factor (So, I guess Ogres will use whips?).

To explain my rationale about weapon choice in the new system; a) high attack speed makes STR more important because more instances of damage (think slaying), b) High accuracy means that DEX scarcely helps user offensively, as you will already be hitting due to high accuracy. Similarly, a high dexterity character "ought" to use the heaviest weapon they can get the skill to lower delay on. Big accuracy penalties aren't really an issue - in fact, without them DEX is essentially entirely defensive.

Why? The only reason I can think of is to "not distract new players with something trivial," ("It is better for the Strong" messages were super vague) but is this actually good for the game? Strength Weight is an interesting mechanic, and perhaps the solution is to make Str/Dex play *more* of a role in the effectiveness of weapons (INT is already a major factor in spell damage/power) so that it cannot be considered trivial.

[PleasingFungus]

nah

[PleasingFungus]

The primary reason that sbl users often prefer dex is because of a general playstyle synergy. The big advantage of sbl, for everyone but VS, is their bonuses to stabbing. To take advantage of that, you generally need some combination of stealth and hexes, both of which lean you toward light armour, and light armour gets more of an advantage from dex than from str. That was true before, and it's true now - the removal of stat weighting has not changed 'the ideal sbl user' at all.

Even before the change, I'd be very startled if skilled players had been putting thought into the str/dex weighting of their weapons when making weapon selections or when making stat choices. There are other arguments for removing str weighting (e.g.), but that's a good enough reason in itself, imho.

[duvessa]

Strength weighting was removed because it didn't affect your decisions if you knew what it actually did. Sounds like you are one of the people who did not know what it did; ogres and short blade users were the two least-affected groups by this change.
Indeed, you don't even know, at the most basic level, what the effect of strength on damage is now, as demonstrated by your claim that attack delay affects its value. Perhaps that information should be added to the game to prevent threads like this one.

[PleasingFungus]

we could put it in the manual!

[le_nerd]

Please also put in the manual that there is a breaking point for STR below which you actually get a malus on damage; or just remove that stupid sillines.

[nago]

Is that really a thing?

[Tressol]

...ogres and short blade users were the two least-affected groups by this change.

I just re-read the article on the wiki (and yeah, the wiki sucks but...). I just can't see how this could possibly be true unless that article is totally wrong or I have totally misconstrued it. 100% Str Weight would mean only Str to damage and a 50/50 split of STR and dex to hit, right? How does this not affect Ogres (Usimg a GSC, say) when it becomes all Str to damage and all Dex to hit?

Indeed, you don't even know, at the most basic level, what the effect of strength on damage is now, as demonstrated by your claim that attack delay affects its value...

Well, I'm not sure exactly how it works, that's true (and part of the reason I posted in CYC). I assumed it was a flat bonus added to damage based on Str, and that more instances of damage would thus apply it more often. Where can I find better information on what it does now?

Anyway, I still like the idea of Str weight in principle. Being basically inconsequential on a majority of characters (which I conceded before) doesn't seem like cause for removal to me, but maybe that's just me.

[crate]

It affects ogres less than almost any other race because they already had much more str than dex and were using weapons with high str weight (giant (spiked) clubs).

Similarly it affects shortblade users less than most characters because they already (usually) had much more dex than str and were using weapons with high dex weight.

edit: I'm pretty sure this is true (especially the ogre case since accuracy doesn't matter as much) but I'm too lazy to do any math to check it at the moment.

Anyway it didn't really add anything to the game, except sometimes players found out that str weighting was a thing but did not know it was entirely meaningless so it led to some confusion for no benefit; therefore you should remove the confusion (or make it meaningful, but the devs decided not to go that way, which is fine). You could argue that str/dex in the oldranged system were possibly interesting, perhaps, but good luck getting that back in crawl.

[Siegurt]

You could argue that str/dex in the oldranged system were possibly interesting, perhaps, but good luck getting that back in crawl.

It was interesting... in the same way as a train wreck is interesting... you look at it and say things like "now how did that get there" and "oh the horrible tragedy of it all"

[crate]

Having "str gives you more damage" and "dex speeds up your attack" seems fine to me, I don't see how that is a train wreck. Obviously the particular implementation had problems (magic numbers, but you can get rid of those), but it actually works better from a player standpoint than how melee weapons currently work imo.

[Sar]

Wasn't it actually Strength that influenced your attack speed with oldranged, at least with longbows, or am I just making things up now?

[crate]

str did more for your attack delay with xbows, dex did more for slings/bows (but str gave you so much damage with bow/sling so it was always much much better until you got to the right magic number)

I was really talking about how bows worked, since xbows were different

[Sar]

Wasn't 15 Str the magic number you had to have to get your Longbow to mindelay? Or something like that.

[crate]

You wanted like 14 str for max damage bonus on a +9-to-damage longbow (it depended on longbow enchantment, so yes the particular implementation here is a huge mess).

I think str and dex contributed to reducing delay (along with skill) until you actually reached min delay.

[Tressol]

It affects ogres less than almost any other race because they already had much more str than dex and were using weapons with high str weight (giant (spiked) clubs).

Similarly it affects shortblade users less than most characters because they already (usually) had much more dex than str and were using weapons with high dex weight.

edit: I'm pretty sure this is true (especially the ogre case since accuracy doesn't matter as much) but I'm too lazy to do any math to check it at the moment.

I'm baffled by the idea that suddenly not having extra to-hit on the least accurate melee weapons around (-7 to hit on a GSC) is not a big deal, but let's focus on the other case.

Since accuracy doesn't matter as much (apparently) this hugely affects short blade users because thier (usually high) dex no longer gives them damage. Instead they get perhaps a tiny bit more accuracy, which they definitely don't need. What they hurt for is damage. A zero str weight weapon (Quick Blade) was 50% Dex to damage and 50% Str, 100% Dex to hit, which means that Dex was at least contributing to damage (and one was generally stupid-accurate). Assuming the overall contribution of stats to combat has remained the same (not sure about this), it's now 100% Str to damage and 100% Dex to hit, which is outright worse for a high Dex quick blade guy. You can say that the numbers are tiny anyway, but it definitely hits those who would use a weapon with extreme weight (very low or very high) and have high stat disparities the hardest.

[Siegurt]

It affects ogres less than almost any other race because they already had much more str than dex and were using weapons with high str weight (giant (spiked) clubs).

Similarly it affects shortblade users less than most characters because they already (usually) had much more dex than str and were using weapons with high dex weight.

edit: I'm pretty sure this is true (especially the ogre case since accuracy doesn't matter as much) but I'm too lazy to do any math to check it at the moment.

I'm baffled by the idea that suddenly not having extra to-hit on the least accurate melee weapons around (-7 to hit on a GSC) is not a big deal, but let's focus on the other case.

Since accuracy doesn't matter as much (apparently) this hugely affects short blade users because thier (usually high) dex no longer gives them damage. Instead they get perhaps a tiny bit more accuracy, which they definitely don't need. What they hurt for is damage. A zero str weight weapon (Quick Blade) was 50% Dex to damage and 50% Str, 100% Dex to hit, which means that Dex was at least contributing to damage (and one was generally stupid-accurate). Assuming the overall contribution of stats to combat has remained the same (not sure about this), it's now 100% Str to damage and 100% Dex to hit, which is outright worse for a high Dex quick blade guy. You can say that the numbers are tiny anyway, but it definitely hits those who would use a weapon with extreme weight (very low or very high) and have high stat disparities the hardest.

I think you misunderstand the scope of "tiny" .... in this case on a quick blade, 25 dex would contribute d (15/2/39*5) damage, or around a 90% chance of adding a single point of damage, before AC is subtracted off (on an average critter, probably something like 50% of those bonus points would be negated) and note that low str would have a tendancy to cancel those bonuses out.

[le_nerd]

@Nago: indeed there is such a breakpoint in weapon damage/strength. Copied from badwiki, but its still in the game:

If Stat < 9: Multiply by 1 - 1d(9 - Stat)*3/39 (average bonus: -3.8% for every point below 9).

[advil]

I somewhat recently did some fsimming with SpEns in 0.17 vs 0.18, with an eye to seeing how they were impacted by the switch to str weighting. With a +9 unbranded qb, about 1 point less of average effective damage per turn is what I was seeing at str 4. This basically seemed to go away with str ~8, though I didn't fsim various higher strengths super carefully. If you wanted to get outraged at this issue (or not) I'd recommend first fsimming particular cases and then seeing if the numbers actually outrage you.

Where I do think this change has a real impact is with D:1 SpEns (and I suppose other Sp starts), which percentage-wise see a huge drop in AvEffDam. Here's what I posted in r/dcss about this:

I did a quick fsim with a D:1 SpEn in 0.18-b vs 0.17.0 (the other version I happened to have lying around) and there was a consistent hit of around 0.3-0.4 average effective damage per turn. I tested this with adders, jackals, kobolds (all more like 0.8 vs 1.1 AvEffDam) and orcs (1.4 vs 1.8 AvEffDam with no armour, 0.6 vs 1.0 with leather). I was able to get this to go away by boosting Str to 8 (SpEn normally is 4), though I didn't test this very heavily. This is all with the starting +1 dagger. I suspect that given the low overall numbers this could be pretty noticeable in scenarios where a SpEn is trying to toe-to-toe fight something.

[duvessa]

It affects ogres less than almost any other race because they already had much more str than dex and were using weapons with high str weight (giant (spiked) clubs).

Similarly it affects shortblade users less than most characters because they already (usually) had much more dex than str and were using weapons with high dex weight.

Right about ogres, wrong about short blade users; the reason it affects short blade users so little is that short blades have awful base damage.

I'm baffled by the idea that suddenly not having extra to-hit on the least accurate melee weapons around (-7 to hit on a GSC) is not a big deal, but let's focus on the other case.

Having 20 str gave you a whopping...+2.5 accuracy on giant (spiked) clubs in the old system. The increase to ogres' M&F and Fighting aptitudes gave them more than enough accuracy to compensate for this. I wonder why you complain about this, but not about the about the balance disruption when the effect of str on their damage was literally doubled a few more versions ago.

@Nago: indeed there is such a breakpoint in weapon damage/strength. Copied from badwiki, but its still in the game:

If Stat < 9: Multiply by 1 - 1d(9 - Stat)*3/39 (average bonus: -3.8% for every point below 9).

In case someone wants to know just how bad crawl is:

  Code:

int attack::player_stat_modify_damage(int damage)
{
    int dammod = 39;

    if (you.strength() > 11)
        dammod += (random2(you.strength() - 11) * 2);
    else if (you.strength() < 9)
        dammod -= (random2(9 - you.strength()) * 3);

    damage *= dammod;
    damage /= 39;

    return damage;
}
int melee_attack::player_aux_stat_modify_damage(int damage)
{
    int dammod = 20;

    if (you.strength() > 10)
        dammod += random2(you.strength() - 9);
    else if (you.strength() < 10)
        dammod -= random2(11 - you.strength());

    damage *= dammod;
    damage /= 20;

    return damage;
}

The former is used for mainhand attacks, the latter for offhand attacks. These two "different" formulas provide almost identical results, but I could not convince the developers to use the same formula for both stat bonuses. Probably the funniest/saddest part is that 9, 10 and 11 str are identical for mainhand attacks, but not for aux attacks.

-----

And you people do realize that str ALWAYS increased damage more than dex for every weapon except quick blades, right? Even with demon whips, a point of str gave you more damage than a point of dex, always. For quick blades they gave you the exact same amount of damage. Similarly, dex ALWAYS increased accuracy more than str for every weapon except giant (spiked) clubs.

[le_nerd]

Probably the funniest/saddest part is that 9, 10 and 11 str are identical for mainhand attacks, but not for aux attacks.

Not longer entirely true as of this recent commit...

  Code:

6c060d3 | Ada482 | 2016-05-06 14:33:19 -0500

Tightened the 0 bonus/penalty range for STR.
STR = 9,10,11 would not pass either if statement, providing no appreciable
benefit to damage scaling for going from 9 to 11 strength. This was a classic
inclusive/exclusive range if statement bug.

[Tressol]

And you people do realize that str ALWAYS increased damage more than dex for every weapon except quick blades, right? Even with demon whips, a point of str gave you more damage than a point of dex, always. For quick blades they gave you the exact same amount of damage. Similarly, dex ALWAYS increased accuracy more than str for every weapon except giant (spiked) clubs.

I do realize that, yes. I chose extreme cases mostly because I was typing on my phone and didn't want to juggle tabs/do math just then. What I didn't realize was just how small the overall effect was. Again, I think that the best solution here would be to increase the overall effect that stats have on combat and keep Str weight, but keeping that balanced would require reworking basically every weapon in the game as well as coding/testing/balancing the new stat formulas, so... I understand why that will probably never come to pass. It would also limit certain character archetypes - branching into melee from spellcasting backgrounds would be less good, as that stats you wouldn't have would count more and thus be missed. Why does INT get to be such a major contributor to spellpower while STR and DEX are so largely defensive? *shrug*

/joke?

FR: Remove stats. Overall, stats serve only to limit potentially interesting skill combinations and the use of some items that might otherwise present an interesting strategic choice (It's more interesting to ask "Should I train Armor at this stage?" than "Do I have enough STR?" when finding some good body armor). Skills can do everything that stats do, but more elegantly and while allowing players more choices. Also, remove food - removing INT at the same time means that we don't have to gripe about solving the hole it leaves in the Spell Hunger formula. Species with extreme stats in some areas receive racial mutations that give some roughly equivalent benefit instead (Ogres get a bonus to melee damage and a rank or two of Sturdy Frame, perhaps). Ability damage replaced with Drain.

/end_joke(?)

[duvessa]

FR: Remove stats. Overall, stats serve only to limit potentially interesting skill combinations and the use of some items that might otherwise present an interesting strategic choice (It's more interesting to ask "Should I train Armor at this stage?" than "Do I have enough STR?" when finding some good body armor). Skills can do everything that stats do, but more elegantly and while allowing players more choices. Also, remove food - removing INT at the same time means that we don't have to gripe about solving the hole it leaves in the Spell Hunger formula.

This, but unironically.

[tasonir]

The funny quirk of old ranged combat formulas is that if you managed to get chei early and build some decent piety on a ranged user, you were suddenly really deadly with bows/crossbows. You could reach min delay with a bow (back when there was just one type of bow) with around 9 skill and max chei piety, so that was fun. Aside from abusing it though, the new formulas are better.

I like stats a lot, although I can see why some people wouldn't like them. They tend to function more as limitations in crawl, rather than benefits. You have a good melee character going, but you only have 10 int, so you're prevented from being an effective caster. You picked int on level ups since you're trying to make a hybrid, and now you'll never have enough dex to be really effective at dodging. Your deep elf caster can't even afford to wear a fire dragon armor without significant penalties, so you're stuck in a robe all game long.

This is actually one of the reasons I love chei so much - you can do all the things at once. This may not be strictly optimal, but it's certainly very freeing.

[Sprucery]

If all stat increases were controlled, you could already think that stats are a skill, which you can only train every once in a while.

FR: make all stat increases controlled.

[wheals]

Please also put in the manual that there is a breaking point for STR below which you actually get a malus on damage; or just remove that stupid sillines.

Uh, why? The malus only exists insofar as the formula is constructed a particular way; you could create an equivalent formula where the base damage is the current damage at 0 Str, and the malus is represented by having a lower bonus.

There would be a good point here if moving from Str 9 -> 10 or Str 10 -> 11 didn't increase your damage at all, but that's been fixed.

[duvessa]

Please also put in the manual that there is a breaking point for STR below which you actually get a malus on damage; or just remove that stupid sillines.

Uh, why? The malus only exists insofar as the formula is constructed a particular way; you could create an equivalent formula where the base damage is the current damage at 0 Str, and the malus is represented by having a lower bonus.

It is a breakpoint because the multiplier changes from 3 to 2 for mainhand attacks. However, the likelihood of this breakpoint ever mattering is small (and indeed, I wonder why it even exists).

[genericpseudonym]

Why was it removed?
To explain my rationale about weapon choice in the new system; a) high attack speed makes STR more important because more instances of damage (think slaying), b) High accuracy means that DEX scarcely helps user offensively, as you will already be hitting due to high accuracy. Similarly, a high dexterity character "ought" to use the heaviest weapon they can get the skill to lower delay on. Big accuracy penalties aren't really an issue - in fact, without them DEX is essentially entirely defensive.

You're misunderstanding the mechanics here. Strength doesn't add a slaying-like bonus, it adds a percentage multiplier similar to fighting or weapon skill. A character with 49 strength (but otherwise equal skills) will do exactly twice as much damage as a character with 10 strength, whether they're swinging a quickblade or the Dark Maul.