warum langsame waffen besser sind ...

[tkey]

für den schede .....  

DAOC Technical Analysis of Weapons
by Johanas Lightbringer of Gaelbane/Underfoot (Midgard, Kay)
4 April 2002

Two of the most frequently asked questions in DAOC are:

1) Is a 2H weapon better or worse than a 1H weapon, and
2) All other things being equal, is a faster swinging weapon better or worse than a slower swinging weapon?

While the answers are both complicated and somewhat context dependent, this article tries to provide technical insights into these two questions.


2H VERSUS 1H WEAPONS

2H weapons offer some advantages over 1H weapons which apply to both RvR and RvE. These advantages USED to be somewhat offset by two disadvantages of using 2H (no shield and 50% penalty to parry rates), but since the 1.47 patch the parry disadvantage was removed.

DISADVANTAGES OF USING 2H:
No shield. This not only reduces your block rate to zero, but also prevents you from getting the nice stat bonuses from magic shields and from using shield styles if you can spec shield. If you have 42 or more shield, this is actually a significant disadvantage. Of course you can use your shield, then switch to your 2H to whack your opponent, but in practice this can take a couple precious seconds, not to mention introduce the possibility of miskeying during combat.

Using a shield is a much more defensive way of playing, and if your immediate goal is to live rather than to kill (for example, during a fort raid in which you are surrounded by 20 strong friends and are engaging a bowman), by all means a shield is the way to go. The analysis below really only applies to the situations in which you are trying to kill something.

ADVANTAGES OF USING 2H:
1) You get an intrinsic damage bonus per second above the stated dps of the weapon. I've parsed my own combat logs and here are my own results soloing with styles and a self-damage add buff:

1H hammer with comparable stat bonuses as 2H hammer, 14.6 effective dps (16.2 dps at 90% quality): 37.3 dps

2H hammer with comparable stat bonuses as 1H hammer, 15.0 effective dps (15.0 dps at 100% quality): 47.3 dps

Correcting for the effective dps difference, this represents a 23% bonus to dps for the 2H weapon. This is quite significant. Others have also performed this experiment and consistently reported a 10-25% higher dps from a 2H weapon compared with a 1H counterpart with the same dps.

2) There is an advantage of using a 2H that most people don't realize. Your actual dps is always higher than your calculated dps when your fights last less than an infinite amount of time. This arises because the swing timer on your weapon does not start until after your first weapon swing. Your actual swing rate is therefore much faster than the listed spd of your weapon when the fight lasts only a small number of swings. Using a slower swinging 2H weapon can enhance this advantage

Example:

long fight (S=swing, S or - represents 1 second of time):
S---S---S---S---S---S---S---S---S---S (target dead)
Your weapon has listed spd = 4.0 (one swing every 4 seconds). But in reality you swung 10 times in 37 seconds = 3.7 spd. So your damage per second is 10% higher than if the fight lasted forever.

short fight:
S----S----S (target dead)
Your weapon has listed spd = 5.0. But in reality you swung 3 times in 10 seconds = 3.3 spd! So your dps is 50% higher than if the fight lasted forever.

So the EFFECTIVE DPS of a slower swinging weapon (which is in general a 2H weapon) can be MUCH larger than a faster swinging weapon because the first swing of any melee fight comes with no delay. In practice, my 2H RvR melee fights against yellow/blue con opponents typically last about 3-4 swings, so I get a 50-33% dps bonus to my 2H hammer. My 1H RvR fights (spd 3.2) typically last about 7 swings, which gives me a dps bonus of only 14%. So the actual dps of my 2H hammer is 36% more than that of my 1H hammer simply from the fact that my swing timer doesn't start until after the first swing. This can be a huge difference.

In the most rigorous analysis (see below), this advantage of a slower swinging is often partially offset by wasted time "overkilling" your opponent. For example, if your opponent has only 50 hp left after your third swing of your 2H weapon, it is somewhat time wasteful to wait another 5+ seconds for a death blow that will likely land way more damage than is needed to kill your opponent. How can we quantify this time wastage and does it offset the above dps bonus of using a slower (e.g. 2H) weapon?


SLOW SWINGING VERSUS FAST SWINGING WEAPONS

The goal of using a weapon on an opponent is to kill that opponent in the smallest amount of time possible. All other things being equal, you will have a much better chance of winning a fight in which you deal 1200 points of damage in 30 seconds than one in which you deal 1200 damage in 60 seconds because every second of the fight may inflict incremental damage (or other unfortunate effects) on you. We can therefore use the Time to Kill your opponent as a measure of weapon desirability.

How does the swing rate (spd) affect Time to Kill? A superficial analysis might conclude that as long as dps was the same, spd should not affect Time to Kill. This conclusion, however, is not correct because the swing timer begins after your first swing (see above) and because damage is delivered in discrete quanta rather than in a continuous stream.

By inspection,

Time to Kill = # of swings to kill after the first swing x weapon spd

# of swings to kill after the first swing = INT [(target hp - 1)/damage per swing], where the INT function simply drops all fractions. For example, if each swing does 100 damage and your opponent has 1000 hp, it takes INT (999/100) = INT (9.99) = 9 swings after the first one (10 total) to kill your opponent. If he has 1001 hp, it takes INT (1000/100) = INT (10) = 10 swings after the first one (11 total) to kill your opponent

damage per swing = weapon dps x weapon spd

Therefore, Time to Kill = spd * INT [(target hp - 1)/(dps * spd)]

Now let's set the dps of our model weapons to be constant at 55.0 (this is approximately the actual dps of a level 50 tank using the best weapons in the game and a high level damage add). Keeping this dps FIXED at 55.0, let's compare the Time to Kill for a 3.0 spd weapon and a 5.0 spd weapon:

target hp TTK (3.0 spd) TTK (5.0 spd)
========= ============= =============
1000 18.0 sec 15.0 sec
1400 24.0 sec 25.0 sec

This is perhaps surprising; it is significantly faster to kill a 1000 hp opponent using a 5.0 spd weapon than a 3.0 spd weapon, but if your opponent has 1400 hp the time to kill is much closer (and slightly favors the 3.0 spd weapon). The quantized nature of melee combat is at work here. To see the overall picture of how weapon spd and target hp interplay to determine the Time to Kill, we can plot the above equation on a three-dimensional surface:



To maintain perspective, each colored band represents a 5-second range of Time to Kill. As expected, the surface is full of steps and plateaus. For example, it is just as fast under these conditions to kill an opponent with 600 hp as one that has 800 hp if you are swinging a 5.4 spd weapon. Each swing of a 5.4 spd weapon does 297 damage total, and the parameters happen to result in a final third swing needed to kill either opponent.

The way that the Time to Kill changes as a function of weapon spd, however, suggests that on the average you will kill your opponent faster with a slower swinging weapon! Only rarely does the slower swinging weapon require more time to kill than the faster weapons, and most of the time it requires significantly less time. This effect is especially pronounced when you are facing opponents with average or lower hp (less than ~1300) and using the slowest weapons in the game (~4.5-5.5 spd).

Does the fact that in reality we miss a certain fraction of the time change this analysis? Missing does increase the statistical noise of this model, but it turns out not to change the result. A common misconception is that missing hurts slow swinging weapons more than fast swinging ones. As long as the miss RATE is the same, however, the overall added Time to Kill resulting from missing will, on the average, be the same for slower or faster weapons. This results from the fact that a faster swinging weapon will miss more TIMES per fight than a slower swinging weapon, even though the damage lost per miss is greater for the slower swinging weapon.

Is there any disadvantage to slower weapons then? One subjective disadvantage is that having fewer swings per fight increases the statistical noise of your hit/miss ratio. Even though in the long run your hit/miss ratio is by definition the same as a faster weapon with the same miss rate, some people may place value on the fact that a faster weapon will deviate from its expected hit/miss ratio less dramatically on the average than a slower swinging weapon. Of course half the time this deviation will help you, and half the time it will hurt you, but people traditionally view risk aversion as worth something.


CONCLUSIONS
If you are trying to kill something, use slower swinging weapons if you don't mind the slightly higher statistical noise that naturally arises from fewer swings per fight and if you don't view your shield as crucial to your livelihood. You get both an intrinsic damage bonus from a 2H weapon and an extra dps bonus that arises from the quantized nature of melee combat and the fact that you get your first swing without having to wait at all, regardless of the spd of your weapon.

-Joh

(aus dem fianna forum gequotet)

[Schede]

danke.