Alternate Everquest

General => Tips and Tricks => Topic started by: Dolmir on February 18, 2019, 09:42:40 pm

Title: Unusual combat math
Post by: Dolmir on February 18, 2019, 09:42:40 pm

TLDR: don't use the time-honored (2 * damage + damage bonus) / delay formula for weapon quality. Substitute 3.5 for 2.

After spending some time poring over damage-per-hit histograms I have come to understand that melee damage calculation is not exactly what I expected. Precisely what I found is that weapon damage per hit follows a strongly bi-modal distribution, with one mode at roughly (2 * damage + damage bonus) and the other mode at roughly (5 * damage + damage bonus). The relative frequency of each mode makes me believe that each formula occurs with equal probability. If this is true, we should use formula (3.5 * damage + damage bonus) to estimate weapon quality. I am not aware of this behavior in any other flavor of Everquest and I cannot find an explanation for it in the stock EQEmu code so this seems to be a custom thing for AEQ.