ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Since Aim got rid of the whole "you are rooted" thing I am wondering which of these sustains is better?

As an example on my current slinger:

Aim: gives me 100% crit, extra accuracy, and extra physical power (so...?) but only 100% attack speed. (165% crit modifier)


Rapid Shot: gives me lower Physical Power (which...matters? Or not? None of my skills scale with phys power?) 22 lower accuracy, and a crit rate of 30%. Sheesh. BUT it gives me 200% attack speed.

So I have a *gut* feel that Rapid shot is more damage, since my weapon also has 3 on hit damage effects, *and* I still have 30% chance to crit, but I'm not expert on this.

Anyone know the actual math here can help me out?

Cheers.

There was an in-depth analysis a while back -- don't know if anything has changed since then:

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=33873

Regardless of your build, Aim early on at level 1 is a more useful then rapid shot, because it's free stats. the crit, the phy power (which helps to make sure your status effects stick for their longest duration) and accuracy(which makes cretin skill status effects stronger/longer), and most importantly (unless this was removed in the last week I haven't played ToME) Armor Penetration. While rapid shot isn't as useful early, it takes a lot of stats for some minor speed upgrades. Late game though? It depends on your build. Generally I tend to take aim on bow archers and rapid shot on sling archers. mostly because sling archers have more natural crit rate because they use cunning as a main stat, so Aim's only really good for the phy power and armor pen on sling archers. That's my two cents anyway

Physical Power factors heavily into damage. I broke 600 damage before level 10 with a skeleton aimed shot archer.

I had the same question, so good thread.

Read the older one and found a lot of the meta-analysis is years old, referring to old betas. Possibly still valid, but hard to be sure at all about.

It takes out entirely talents, and any Physical Power to Damage (not sure if it does, but it seems to), and works back when aim was a stand-still as well as bow mastery going up to 10/10 (not sure how that changes things).

I'd be curious in the current 1.2.x era game where it stands.

My guess is Rapid shot still is able to do more damage 'raw' for almost any end game build, but at a cost of not consistently landing your status arrows effects for max time, which is a significant portion of any archer build (over half the available class talents are 'hit and do status effect'. Almost all of the offensive ones). Even at level 1 of each, it's a 34 point difference in accuracy, which unless you're already in the 90s, is going to be a fair chunk, and may make the difference between healthily being 20 over (so always landing the stat and the overkill status), and not.

It seems obvious that between level 1 and 10, Aim is the right choice. It's probably the same between 10 and 20. Probably between 20-30 is where it starts to become a question, since stats are getting high enough to hopefully ignore the large starting penalties without dramatic miss rates.

I'm going to wait, and check it out a bit in the training room later.

Edit:

Also, it seems unlikely that aim is best at 5/5. Viewing that it goes up multiplicatively per level on the penalty but logarithmically on the benefits, it's quite possible it's best at 1/5 or 2/5, since that's applying the smallest penalty for the most significant chunk of benefits, leaving you still shooting fast, but with a healthy boost to a lot of the core choices.

It seems really unlikely that 5/5 would give better results than 3/5 or 1/5 on damage per round, and it's difference on landing stats I suspect is 20 points which seems costly at the price of an additional 24 percent drop in attack speed. It looks like aim actually got nerfed somewhat versus what's on the wiki, since that reports level 1 only giving a 5 percent instead of 8 percent drop.

It actually seems the opposite for Rapid Shot, whose penalties are going up logarithmically while its bonuses go up multiplicatively. So it'd seem that any Aim 5/5 versus Rapid Shot 5/5 comparison would be weighing Aim at its weakest versus Rapid Shot at its strongest, and that's where the old analysis thread did its checks.

Rapid Shot actually makes you better, not worse, at deploying those debuffs. Many of them will come from your equipment, and you will rarely miss or have them resisted even with the lowered accuracy (Precise Strikes and maxed dexterity, woohoo!). More shots in a shorter amount of time = more debuffs applied. You can even happily spread them out and disable multiple opponents during one or two turns.
As for damage, one pointto consider are diminishing returns when it comes to damage. In the end, what physical power aim adds is hardly comparable to the difference in attack speed, and you can easily reach close to 100% crit with Precise Strikes even with Rapid Shot - at least on a slinger. On a bow archer, crit might still be an issue.

When I last played Archer, Aim did not root me in spot, and it didn't deny me the use of Rapid Shot. So my question is, what about using both? Or was that just a bug I had?

Red:
Well, trying an archer right now has Aim not root in place, but does have Rapid Shot and Aim as mutually exclusive. Activating one deactivates the other.

Fhtagn:

While I follow your logic, it doesn't quite connect for me. I'm referring to the large set of archer abilities that comparing level 1 aim vs level 5 rapidshot are getting 40ish less accuracy, which affects all their landing. Certainly if you build around a suite of status effects delivered separately on hit (always a good thing) those will land more easily with rapid shot, but at the cost of reduced reliability on your moves that could be stacking with them for even more status pain.

Of course, with max dexterity and easy generic point availability to take some combat accuracy and precise strikes, it's entirely reasonable that you could swallow a 40 point accuracy cut and still be singing a solid 80ish. I tend to find 90 to be a good target for dominating with the power or save of choice, with Athatamon being the only thing that asks for more. Anyhow, could be a non issue, but too early for me to see. I'm playing a bow archer skeleton at the moment, so won't be pumping cunning too much by default.

Anyhow, will keep an eye on it. Have them both at one and leaving them there until I have more spread out specials and a better idea what mid-late game accuracy will look like. Aim is working pretty well at level 1 right now in just mauling through things.

Even in the late game, Aim (at 1/5) seems to be the best in many cases, unless you can reach very high crit rate with your gear while rapid shotting.

The big factor that can't be ignored here is talents. If your gear does not allow a high crit rate for Rapid Shot, it is a comparison of fewer hits with (much) bigger damage versus more hits with less damage.

So with Aim, many of those hits will be talents: steady shot, vital shot, multishot, etc.. and you will be critting with all of them.
With rapid shot you will soon have used up all your talents and firing normal shots.

However, when your gear is good enough to reach very high crit rate (say, 90%) while doing rapid shot, the difference in damage per shot will be much smaller, and the extra speed becomes the winning factor.

grobble why are you bumping a 2 year old thread?

Sheila wrote:grobble why are you bumping a 2 year old thread?

Because it's still relevant for people playing archer?

Yeah it's the most recent post about the topic I could find.