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Wielding Weapon Selection Screen

Weapon Selection

This was discussed in the forum and some devs said it was sufficiently promising to create a page here, so here goes.

The idea is to have a “Wield which weapon” screen, similar to the spellcasting interface, that would tell the player roughly how effective they would be with each of the possible weapons. It would look something like this:

Wield which weapon?

Weapon                 Accuracy     Damage     Speed         Brand          Other
-) Unarmed             Good         ##..       ########      Confuse    
a) +0,+4 dagger        Excellent    ###..      ######..      N/A
b) -1,-2 dagger "Gyu"  Excellent    ##...      ######..      Protection     Blink, SInv, rElec
c) +8,+8 scimitar      Fair         ######...  ###...        Flame

The Accuracy column would account for armour penalties, rings of slaying, enchantment (I), weapon skill, dex, etc.

The Damage column would account for anything that affects damage other than weapon brand, because it would be too complicated to factor brands in. The player would still have to weigh brands separately.

I think that brands need to be factored in somehow. Some of the brands operate differently depending on the base weapon type. It would also be confusing for a player to see “Damage” represented, as it would be largely incorrect without including brand damage. — fnwc 2010-01-06 22:28

The Speed column would account for brand, because there is only one brand that affects speed and it is very straightforward. And of course skill, weapon type, etc.

The graphs above are just made up out of thin air, I have no idea how those weapons would compare or how you would set the scale — djnrempel 2010-12-27 22:28

There should be an always-present line for unarmed, too. And brands at least should come after the weapon name, distancing the two with blocks of stats makes it harder to track or select a specific item. — og17 2010-12-28 06:31
This is a very good idea, thanks for moving it here from the tavern. I would think that for damage we need a logarithmic scale. If this idea ripes a bit, we could dispell the myths about weapon choice being an arcane art. — dpeg 2010-12-27 23:14
How would a log scale help players understand weapon choice, what with logarithmic scaling being conceptually harder (and more confusing, unless explicitly explained) than direct relationship, and all? — mrmistermonkey 2010-12-28 01:23
Please don't use log bars, they're no good for comparison and comparison is the point. The spell display is already much less useful than it should be because of this. — og17 2010-12-28 06:31
I would suggest having the speed column use words like “average”, “above average”, etc. This is how crawl already reports your speed when you press @, and it's a bit more useful to the player. With a representation like ###… I don't know how fast that is, exactly (I would assume 10, but it could easily be 11 as well). The nice thing about using words, is you know that average = speed 10, and anything else is either faster or slower than that. — evilmike 2010-12-27 23:54
The nice thing about bars is you can see the minimum delay. — mrmistermonkey 2010-12-28 01:23
Use bars and put a center point in them representing 10 speed, so ######…. would become #####|#…. (| being the center point). And I would like to repeat my opinion from the forum thread: use the same method of information for all three values. Accuracy: ####……, damage: ########., speed: #####|….. OR accuracy: poor, damage: great, speed: fair. With spell success, using different scales makes sense, as one represents your success rate (a percentage) where as another represents your spell power (a flat number). There is no such difference here. It's also worth considering that neither accuracy nor damage nor speed have hard caps - different weapons have different minimum delays, and there is no minimum or maximum for damage I'm aware of. As such I think it would be better to use the bars. — minmay 2010-12-28 04:15
Am I correct that the max weapon speed is 3, and the slowest is 20? If so “Speed” column could be named “Delay” and have 20 spaces, and an indicator at the 10 point. — danr 2011-01-17 17:17
You'd of course also have to indicate each weapon's minimum delay; if you're going with this, I guess have 20 minus min. delay spaces. It might also be nice to put base delay in there somewhere (to see impact of shields or whatever increases delay), but it's not as important, and might result in very cluttery bars. — mrmistermonkey 2011-01-17 19:38
Rather than listing brand and other special properties separately, the weapons could just use the autoinscribe descriptions, eg. {venom +Blink}. I'm not sure about log scales, it would depend on the size of the increments. The important thing is that a meaningful difference should be apparent to the player. — djnrempel 2010-12-29 04:43
I think the character's relevant weapon skill value should be a column on here somewhere as well. — fnwc 2011-01-07 02:54
A possible solution to showing the added damage due to brands could work something like
 
 Weapon                        Accuracy     Damage         Speed         Brand          Other
 a) +2,+5 dagger "Derp"        Excellent    ###+.          ######..      Flame          +RAGE -TELE 
 b) +1 Quarterstaff            Excellent    #####?..       ######..      Chaos
 c) -1 Spiked Flail            Poor         #######??.     ####....      Elec
 d) -5 Giant Club              Terrible     #######..      ####+++.      Speed
 

With +'s representing being guaranteed damage (vorpal, flame, frost, drain etc) and ?'s representing chance of extra damage (electric, chaos, distortion etc)

Again, the numbers are just made up. —loginerror

It can also be indicated with color and letter - usual damage is a black #, fire is red F, ice is blue I , etc. (with appropriate icons in Tiles version).
Distinguishing between guaranteed and random damage might not be that useful, unless the chance is also displayed (in percentage). —sinsi 2011-04-5 15:30
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dcss/brainstorm/interface/weapon_wield_revise.1324571117.txt.gz · Last modified: 2011-12-22 17:25 by XuaXua
 
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