On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, J.M. Capozzi wrote:
>
> I'm not going to bore you all to tears with all the charting and the
> formulae used, Monte Carlo simulations, how the fixed damage bonuses due to
> strength, offense and weapons skills seriously skew the results in favor of
> speed, and about half a dozen other variables. Most of those numbers are
> intentionally and forever hidden from the end users view.
Ok, thanks for the clarification. When you said faster was
better because of "more dual wield checks" I thought you were
saying the additional dual wield checks in and of themselves
were causing the extra damage, which they do not. It's the
above factors (damage bonuses skewed to favor faster weapons)
compounded with the additional checks that cause faster
weapons to be favored.
When you said "all other things being equal," I took that to
mean the faster and slower weapon had the exact same final
damage over time, just their speed is different. If that's
the case, then what I wrote up is correct - all dual wield
does is scale the effectiveness of the weapon by a flat
percentage. But it seems you meant the raw stats (dam/delay
ratio) being equal (I apologize for not making this
distinction clear in my example - I was just trying to keep it
simple). There is still something nonlinear going on here
that I don't see (the double attack not going off on the
second hand until dual wield passes 149 is an example of the
type of nonlinearity that could cause the effect you
describe). But given your clarification, I agree with you.
It does, however, turn the original question (dirk and
combine, which in which hand?) into a really muddled mess. I
suppose that's what you wanted though - no quick and easy way
to figure out the optimal arrangement. :-)
> Sorry for using such a large chunk of bandwidth, this was never intended to
> be such a lengthy thread on my part, simply an interjection, and a lot of it
> was due to perhaps less than clear language from me. This is my attempt to
> correct that.
Well, it got you to spill the beans on some of the internal
workings of the game, so I'm happy. :-)
--
John H. Kim
kim@...