What damage do various weapons deal ?(shield wall, 2H, dual)

[b0rsuk]

How much damage do various weapon categories deal ? Let's find out!

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Weak character
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Strength: 10, Dexterity: 10
Dagger damage: 42
Shield wall damage: 36.8
Mace damage: 46
Two-handed damage: 54
Untrained dual dagger damage: 63.0
Dual dagger damage: 84
Mace and dagger damage: 88.6966697892

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Average character
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Strength: 30, Dexterity: 30
Dagger damage: 62
Shield wall damage: 55.2
Mace damage: 69
Two-handed damage: 84
Untrained dual dagger damage: 93.0
Dual dagger damage: 124
Mace and dagger damage: 131.393409564

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Natural maxed character
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Strength: 60, Dexterity: 60
Dagger damage: 93
Shield wall damage: 83.2
Mace damage: 104
Two-handed damage: 131
Untrained dual dagger damage: 139.5
Dual dagger damage: 186
Mace and dagger damage: 198.172105011

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Maxed with +30 to all
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Strength: 90, Dexterity: 90
Dagger damage: 122
Shield wall damage: 110.4
Mace damage: 138
Two-handed damage: 176
Untrained dual dagger damage: 183.0
Dual dagger damage: 244
Mace and dagger damage: 260.551632776

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Buff character
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Strength: 110, Dexterity: 110
Dagger damage: 142
Shield wall damage: 128.8
Mace damage: 161
Two-handed damage: 206
Untrained dual dagger damage: 213.0
Dual dagger damage: 284
Mace and dagger damage: 303.061954201

I wrote a simple damage calculator in Python using information from this page:
http://te4.org/wiki/Combat_Damage#Basic ... alculation

It assumes plain voratun weapons, 1.30 Combat Training mastery, doesn't know about resistances and armour. No artifacts were harmed in the experiment. Daggers use Str/Dex. "Untrained dual daggers" are daggers with full off-hand weapon penalty. The Python code is here: https://dpaste.de/knIv6/

Thoughts:
Using 1-handed weapon as baseline, various weapons deal approximately:

• Shield Wall: 0.8 damage @@
• Dagger: 0.9 damage
• Mace: 1.0 damage
• Two-handed: 1.25 damage @@@
• untrained dual daggers: 1.33 damage
• Dual daggers: 1.78 damage @@@@
• Mace and dagger: 1.90 damage

Wyrmics, Berserkers and the like succeed despite using 2-handers, not because of that.

Daggers have the highest APR and critical chance bonuses, 2-handed weapons the worst.

Dual wield starts with best baseline damage, get two good crowd control attacks and have great activated talents in general. Cooldowns are a bit worse - 8, but you get more talents you want to use, and Momentum is not bad at all if you have cooldown/fatigue issues.

No class uses a single 1-handed weapon or dagger - missed opportunity ? Let me propose something: by not wielding a bigger/extra weapon or a shield, characters would be better at using items. This would mean charms cool down twice as fast. You'd trade damage/protection for extra flexibility.

The advantages of 2-handed and a single 1-handed weapons are(relative to dual daggers):

• many more shops available
• you only need to max 1 stat
• you don't need to spend 5 class points
• Legacy of the Naloren is an extremely good weapon and you can get it in every game if you want

I don't include mindstars, bows, slings, staves and reavers because I have little experience with them. Reavers don't seem to deal 2.0x damage in any case, because they never deal full damage with off-hand weapon. Bows complicate things with 2 common options - Rapid Fire and Aim, and uncommon rate of fire. Mindstars are just weird and classes use them differently.

Training both Weapons and Daggers for dual wield is a bad deal. I used to do that with Marauders, but apparently the generics are much better spent elsewhere.

It's strange that most classes don't actually use Str for daggers (Strength is listed as one of stats daggers use). Playing as marauders taught me that omnipresent Lethality even affected other design choices - very few artifact daggers actually use Str/Dex! This is annoying for marauders. On the other hand, it's somewhat refreshing to play with ordinary (ego) weapons instead of the usual "always artifacts".

[SageAcrin]

Yup, weapon categories are, in a talentless vacuum, not balanced.

IIRC, someone did a similar analysis; Slings come out near the bottom and Bows are a bit weaker than two-handers. Staves at endgame are above Slings, IIRC, but relatively worse before that(they have very low base damage values that grow faster towards the end of their curve.). I don't think Mindstars were out as of that assessment, but given their curve, I suspect they start terrible and end out above two-handers, assuming you have Psiblades(If you don't, the damage is likely abysmal).

Given that the effective multiplier on Sword/Shield talents is around 500%, and that dual-wield heavy classes are invariably 0 Life Mod classes, it's probably intended that the weapons not be balanced.

As you said, two-hander wielders succeed in spite of their weapons-or, rather, are balanced by other upsides.

The weapon/dagger thing bothers me a lot, though. Maybe Weapon Mastery and Dagger Mastery should finally be merged and the Weapon Mastery talent just take the best of Str/Dex.

[b0rsuk]

Yup, weapon categories are, in a talentless vacuum, not balanced.

The effect of this: experimentation is less profitable than mere lack of talents would imply. And Sword+Dagger probably won't be viable until a class comes out that explicitely gives bonuses to sword+dagger, because that's the ToME4 way of doing things.