On Weapon and Class balance

[Cronicler]

Greetings
I was recently composing my thoughts on another post about the my wishes, suggestions and the bits that felt sub-par or were annoying for me, as this game series move forward.
As you probably guessed, after a bullet point about the feel of weapon progression, I started writing about the damage imbalances but as I took a deeper look into it, I begun to realize that most of what I perceived as "imbalance" was actually a trick of numbers and perception.
Now there is an imbalance between Str and Dex based weapons (and Firearms are horribad) but I can see what the Devs were aiming for and basing their calculations upon on paper and how a certain class and gameplay trends (the reality) made things do sideways a bit.


During my lengthy explanation, I'll be using certain formulas to represent weapon damage capabilities and ability bonuses to make the comparisons easier and simpler to see.

-Base weapon damage is going to be represented by Xd3, where X is the base minimum damage written on the weapons info panel and d3 means a three sided dice (so a possible result of 1, 2 or 3). Yes this isn't completely precise but it is close enough for ease of comparisons.
-The damage modifiers from X/5 Weapon Skills, Critical Hits, Backstabs, Dual wielding, Weapon Special Attacks (If it has one) only apply to the Xd3 part of the damage equation; so the base damage of a critical backstab with a dual wielded Cutlass on 5/5 weapon skill rogue is: 12d3 x2 x3 x.75 x 2 or 108d3
-Lastly the damage component from the ability scores are added to the first part. This bonus will be referred as STR or DEX as the complete formula ([Ability-10]x[d2/2]) is both cumbersome and frankly unneeded for the accuracy of comparison. (In cross class and ability comparisons) We just need to remember that every 2 difference in ability points mean a d2 difference in damage output

When I say a weapon specialist, I mean a character with 5/5 weapon skill, 5/5 accuracy and 5/5 crit. When I say an x weapon hybrid, I mean a character with 5/5 Armour, 5/5 weapon skill, 5/5 Accuracy.


Here are the base damage stats for the end game gear:

Heavy:
Bane.........: 27d3 + STR 6.3sec.
Meteor......: 24d3 + STR 4.5sec Fire, +20 Accuracy
Claymore...: 22d3 + STR 5.0sec Cold,
Scythe.......: 11d3 + STR 3.5sec x3 instead of x2 Crit damage, +5 Crit
Light:
Sicke Sword.: 15d3 + STR 4.3sec +5 Accuracy
Cutlass.......: 12d3 + STR 3.3sec
Serpent B....: 13d3 + DEX 3.5Sec +15 Accuracy
Moon B.......: 10d3 + DEX 2.8Sec +10 Accuracy
Ranged:
Throwing Axe: 9d3 + STR 5.0Sec
Shuriken......: 6d3 + STR 3.5Sec
Cross Bow....: 11d3 + DEX 5.5Sec
Repeater.....: 19d3 6.0Sec
Cannon.......: 40d3 6.0Sec

Then lets add the 5/5 Skill bonuses as well as DW variants where possible:

Bane.........: 54d3 + STR 6.3sec.
Meteor......: 48d3 + STR 4.5sec Fire, +20 Accuracy
Claymore...: 44d3 + STR 5.0sec Cold,
Scythe.......: 22d3 + STR 3.5sec x3 instead of x2 Crit damage, +5 Crit

Sicke Sword.: 30d3 + STR 4.3sec +5 Accuracy
(DW).........: 18d3 + STR
(Rogue DW).: 22.5d3 + STR
Cutlass.......: 24d3 + STR 3.3sec
(DW).........: 14.4d3 + STR
(Rogue DW).: 18d3 + STR
Serpent B....: 26d3 + DEX 3.5Sec +15 Accuracy
(DW).........: 15.6d3 DEX
(Rogue DW).: 19.5d3 DEX
Moon B.......: 20d3 + DEX 2.8Sec +10 Accuracy
(DW).........: 12d3 + DEX
(Rogue DW).:15d3 +DEX

Throwing Axe: 18d3 + STR 5.0Sec (x2 as you can throw 2 with 1 action)*
Shuriken......: 12d3 + STR 3.5Sec (x2 as you can throw 2 with 1 action)*
Cross Bow....: 22d3 + DEX 5.5Sec 20 Armour Penetration*
Repeater.....: 19d3 6.0Sec :^)
Cannon.......: 40d3 6.0Sec :^)
*Throwing and Missile weapons have no minimum skill requirements

So what does this large complicated list mean? Disregarding the accuracy part of the damage calculations (for now) and looking at bare raw numbers:
Assuming all of our characters have identical stats, In the worst case scenario, at about +18STR*, the a rogue light weapon specialist [DWS] using two Sicke Swords will reach parity with +18STR Heavy weapon specialist [HWS] using Bane.
*As in +18 damage bonus from str stat or perks.
If the HWS was using Meteor Hammer and DWS was using 2x Sickle Swords, parity would have been reached at +5 STR and at +20STR if DWS was using a sickle sword and a cutlass.

Against non rogue DWS and Throwing Specialists [TWS], the Bane HWS will be keeping ahead in damage output until about +31STR and parity with Meteor HWSwill require +18STR

When you add in other variables on top of these raw numbers, like weapon speeds, available gear bonuses, and special abilities like backstab capability and double bombing during some moments, you can see that all three of the STR based weapon specialists are equally viable options.




So what about Dex based weapons?
I think one part of the problem with DEX based gear lies in the relative weights of DEX and STR stats;
2 points of STR translate into +d2 damage and +6 kg carry capacity whereas
2 points of DEX translate into +d2 damage, +4% Resist, +4 Hit, +2% Dodge chance.
This makes every point of DEX more valuable than STR and in a min-max scenario.

The important part for our damage comparisons is the +Hit values; Due to the +Hit modifiers (Bane is 60%, Sickles are 65%, Meteor is 80% while Serpent and Moon are both 100%* hit rates) the DEX weapon specialist [DLWS} will make up for her damage loss on single attacks with her consistent output, death of a thousand cuts in other words.
And this brings us to our next point, weapon speeds; The differences between heavy weapons and str light weapons are small enough that you can treat them as equals against all but the fastest enemies. DEX light weapons on the other hand are much faster and can generally squeeze an additional attack about half the time. This fast attack rate coupled with the accuracy actually makes up for the lost damage in a surprisingly short amount of time.
*Barring critical misses. I think the hit is capped at 95%.

So what about missile weapons?
Unfortunately, there is no denying that among all the weapon classes that we have looked at so far, Missile Weapons are the weakest category. Yes, you find quite a lot of reusable ammo that will allow a MWS to remain active all the way through the big fights, access to some really nifty special attacks and increased damage output against armoured targets; golems, crabs and so on (Any enemy that can produce a bonk sound with low damage numbers I think), but none of these make up for the lowest base damage, loss of the use of second hand and the slow speed of the weapons.

*The 20 Armour penetration ability at 5/5 is roughly equivalent to a bonus of up 10d3 damage (depending on how much armour the enemy has). So against such targets, the 22d3 + DEX base damage becomes 32d3 + DEX compared to 36d3 + STR of the TWS with 90% hit rate compared to the 60% of the TWS



Conclusion:
The main difference between the weapon damages seems to be a problem of perception. Because certain specialties are less fidly to use (single click vs double click, weapon speed more appropriate to the combat rhythm you have during the majority of your dances) and produce 1 hit kills ()if they hit), certain specialties feel better.
I'm a guy that thinks of min maxing possibilities and overall balance while I play and even I was really surprised to discover that the end result was actually balanced.
I think the devs are a victim of their own success in this case, their balance was so spot on that, coming from regular games, it felt and still feels unbalanced.



Afterword & some musings
As you probably noticed, I didn't touch the firearms. That is because I'm not sure if there is a good solution to mitigate their low damage and lack of scaling damage: to be viable choices at the end game, the repeater needs at least 30 to 40 d3 damage output and the cannon needs a 60 to 70 d3 damage output. Unfortunately, those damage numbers would basically bork the mid to castle part of the game.
One possible solution that comes to my mind is adding one magical and one academical regents into the game (to the catacombs and pyramid forex) that can be used to upgrade you ammunition.
A basic ammunition provides 0 damage bonuses, ammunition that has been treated once provides 25% damage increase and double treatment means 75% damage increase.




Update 1: Classes

Of the 8 Class choices present in the game, only 3 of them have abilities that effect the damage output of weapons.
These classes are fighter, barbarian and rogue.
As level 12 seems to be the earliest one can finish the campaign and level 16 is generally the upper limit for those who had to backtrack a lot and/or did some intentional grinding & farming (herders for food or sewers for bullets or whatever) I'm going to assume level 14 is the median for end game characters.

Fighter:
Fighter speed bonus make the usage of special attacks during regular combat more feasible. Coupled with some willpower and energy bonuses (books, non brewed will pots*, amulets), fighter's base 78 energy pool at level 14 means you can perform up to 3 Devastates (Bane, 60 Energy) or up to 5 regular special attacks every other combat.
Because it is hard to quantify the additional damage from the Devastates, I can't reliably give an opinion if fighter is better or worse than the barbarian for the 2 handed weapon specialist.

Barbarian:
As far as Damage numbers are concerned, Barbarian's bonus is the easiest to put into comparable numbers; every 2 levels, the barb gets an additional d2 damage (and 6kgs), resulting in a +7d2 bonus damage at level 14.
Unfortunately, this blunt power approach is enough to overcome the both the 15% penalty on base weapon for dual wielding and the meager advantage a rogue dw had over 2 handed weapon users.

Normally, with everyone at +25STR (+5 character creation, +1 Tome, +9 Gear, +10 Pots (alchemist party, 1/3 of pots) ) a dual Sickle rogue would be averaging ~155 damage, a Bane warrior would be averaging 152 damage and a dual sickle warrior would be averaging 147 damage.
When you replace the warrior with a barbarian, the average damages jump a decent 10.5 points; an average of 163 damage for the 2 handed barbarian and 158 damage for the DW barbarian.

Yes if barbarian is leveled even higher, the average damage will increase an additional 1.5 damage every 2 levels but even if you grind up to 18th level (which is pretty much the hard cap for all classes except farmer) it will only add an increase of 3 points to the numbers stated above. So even with the Barbarian's str bonuses, I believe that rogue remains a viable option for the melee dps specialist spot.



On the Thrown weapons side of things, things also fall out as expected: The barbarian bonus means that a barbarian thrower will be averaging about 77 damage per throw while a rogue will be hitting for an average of 66 damage per throw.
Then, we add in the additional crit chance modifiers from the rogue ability and we see that compared to a barbarian's 92.4 damage average on 20% crit chance, a rogue thrower will have 89.1 average damage on 35% crit chance. Again, barbarian is better but by a small margin and not the initial huge gap it first seems like.

*Because your caster (should be) taking at least 3 points in concentration, using the +50 energy from the tomes on your melee specialist seems a better option to me.
**For comparing str based specs, the race of the barbarian isn't important as nothing is stopping you from making a minotaur rogue, keeping the perk/starting stat based bonuses same.




DEX side of the things;
Of course, as you have already deduced, the barbarian's extra stats pretty much buries the slim and subtle advantage dex light weapons had for achieving damage parity under the an additional flashy pile of raw numbers.
When you look over a period of 10 attacks, both single and dw dex weapons still mount a higher damage pile than both the 2 hander barbarian and DW barbarian but as they lack the 1 hit kill capability of STR weapons, the dw dex feels a lot weaker.


Poor, unloved missile weapons :'(




Next Up: Gear and how does all of the above fit into what is possible in the game?






















[Random Tangent: The sad truth is, even with the limited options in the game, if you are willing to put everything onto one min-max character, it is possible to get a +49(+) DEX character (probably +57 on average) that can push his evasion to 95% with 100/47/47/100 base resistances (with the capability of trading 2 evasion for 50 poison resist and/or 2 dex stats for 50 cold resist if/when needed) and 0 miss chance.
Kinda broken, isn't it]

[Karinas23]

dex only increases shock resistance

[minmay]

Well it makes sense for missile weapons to do less damage than melee weapons, since, y'know, you can't use melee weapons at range.

[Jad]

I made a calculator for comparing weapon DPSs that I posted at viewtopic.php?f=18&t=8021

It's pretty helpful for visualizing the difference between weapon types.

Now there is an imbalance between Str and Dex based weapons

Whilst pumping dexterity does give you more overall than strength, this is balanced out by their being fewer DEX boosts than STR ones. DEX has no equivalents to the +1 per level, +1 per skull, or +20 per potion bonuses that STR has, so whilst you can use every crystal flower for DEX, as far as end-game damage goes you still couldn't compete in damage with STR-based character while both were using everything at their disposal. And that's not even considering how DEX characters suffer more so from enemy damage reduction than STR ones. So, whilst DEX has an advantage in terms of survivability, STR has one in terms of damage, making the "imbalance" arguable.

In the worst case scenario, at about +18STR*, the a rogue light weapon specialist [DWS] using two Sicke Swords will reach parity with +18STR Heavy weapon specialist [HWS] using Bane.

Could you go into more detail how you are calculating this stuff? My own maths show that even at base strength a dual-wielding rogue comes out slightly ahead of a two-hander when comparing just basic attacks. If you meant 2H weapon abilities then according to my calculations you need like 30 strength to equal the DPS of 10 strength fighter spamming devastate.

*The 20 Armour penetration ability at 5/5 is roughly equivalent to a bonus of up 10d3 damage (depending on how much armour the enemy has)

Do you actually know how protection/damage reduction is calculated, or the how accuracy/evasion hit chance interaction is? If so please inform us, I haven't been able to find that information elsewhere on the internet.

[Cronicler]

Jad;
Point 1: Explaining my words;
Because there isn't much +hit variation between str weapons (and none from the stock character* I'm assuming that is the wielder) you can see the damage output at a single glance. Dex based weapons on the other hand are a bit deceptive due to their inherent accuracy bonus as well as the accuracy bonus from the wielder's stats.
That's what I was aiming at with that sentence.

*Hearty Mcalwaysreadyson: Human farmer, 15 str & 15 dex at char creation, has drank one third (7) of alchemistless party's stat potion stock on his primary damage attribute (so either 22 str 15 dex statline or 15 str 22 dex statline), 5/5 weapon skill, 5/5 accuracy, 5/5 critical as he is a damage "specialist".

Also, as you have noticed, I didn't take my initial findings to the next level of complexity by applying different aspects of various character classes other than rogue DW bonus. As I wrote at the end, I am going to do this but I need a bit of time to actually compose the next part of the post from my jumbled notes and proofread it a couple of times to make sure I don't let embarrassing mistakes (calculation or copypasta, Hi Karinas!) slip by (2 x 22.5 shouldn't equal 25 forex )


Point 2: DWS vs HWS comparison;
I'm assuming that the combat is moving at about 3ish seconds per step so at first step the bane swings, at second step the sickles swing, at third bane and so on and both weapon users have 5/5 weapon skill in their respective specializations.

A heavy weapon specialist using Bane with +18 STR (28 str on the char sheet) deals 57d3 + 9d2 damage
A light weapon specialist (str rogue) using Sickles at the same + 18 STR deals 22.5d3 + 9d2 twice

On average, Bane will deal 118 or 119 damage (at +60 hit rate) on a hit
On average, Sickles will deal 117 combined damage (at +65 hit rate) on a hit
I assumed that the 5 point difference in hit/miss rates only provided a minor increase (something along the lines of a x1.05 multiplier if you wll) to average dps and there you have my reasoning.



Point 3: Damage calculations
All of my thoughts on armour, evasion and hit are rough approximations primarily based on what I observed using my own characters and live testing. (hunting mosquitos with bane and recording how many swings it took to hit and comparing it to the results from meteor hammer, going to the beach and letting a turtle chew on me while recording the damages and then doing it again after letting my armour spell fade, noticing that XBow damage was pretty consistent whereas throwing weapon damage was quite reduced against magma golems)

As far as I've been able to determine, the armour values seem to work on a simple flat reduction system.
(Possible Damage - Armour Value = Damage Received) The average loss of damage per hit on non penetrating weapons (compared to their average damage on wolves and murlocks) was roughly in the same area as my initial guesses and that is how I arrived at the 10d3 value.

[Cronicler]

(Also added to the original post)
Part 2: Classes

Of the 8 Class choices present in the game, only 3 of them have abilities that effect the damage output of weapons.
These classes are fighter, barbarian and rogue. As level 12 seems to be the earliest one can finish the campaign and level 16 is generally the upper limit for those who had to backtrack a lot and/or did some intentional grinding & farming (herders for food or sewers for bullets or whatever) I'm going to assume level 14 is the median for end game characters.

Fighter:
Fighter speed bonus make the usage of special attacks during regular combat more feasible. Coupled with some willpower and energy bonuses (books, non brewed will pots*, amulets), fighter's base 78 energy pool at level 14 means you can perform up to 3 Devastates (Bane, 60 Energy) or up to 5 regular special attacks every other combat.
Because it is hard to quantify the additional damage from the Devastates, I can't reliably give an opinion if fighter is better or worse than the barbarian for the 2 handed weapon specialist.

Barbarian:
As far as Damage numbers are concerned, Barbarian's bonus is the easiest to put into comparable numbers; every 2 levels, the barb gets an additional d2 damage (and 6kgs), resulting in a +7d2 bonus damage at level 14.
Unfortunately, this blunt power approach is enough to overcome the both the 15% penalty on base weapon for dual wielding and the meager advantage a rogue dw had over 2 handed weapon users.

Normally, with everyone at +25STR (+5 character creation, +1 Tome, +9 Gear, +10 Pots (alchemist party, 1/3 of pots) ) a dual Sickle rogue would be averaging ~155 damage, a Bane warrior would be averaging 152 damage and a dual sickle warrior would be averaging 147 damage.
When you replace the warrior with a barbarian, the average damages jump a decent 10.5 points; an average of 163 damage for the 2 handed barbarian and 158 damage for the DW barbarian.

Yes as barbarian levels more, his average damage will increase an additional 1.5 damage every 2 levels but even if you grind up to 18th level (which is pretty much the hard cap for all classes except farmer) the damage numbers won't shift a noticeable degree in favor of the barbarian class.



On the Thrown weapons side of things, things also fall out as expected: The barbarian bonus means that a barbarian thrower will be averaging about 77 damage per throw while a rogue will be hitting for an average of 66 damage per throw.
Then, we add in the additional crit chance modifiers from the rogue ability and we see that compared to a barbarian's 92.4 damage average on 20% crit chance, a rogue thrower will have 89.1 average damage on 35% crit chance.


*Because your caster (should be) taking at least 3 points in concentration, using the +50 energy from the tomes on your melee specialist seems a better option to me.
**The race of the barbarian isn't important as nothing is stopping you from making a minotaur rogue, keeping the perk/starting stat based bonuses same.





Of course, as you have already deduced, the barbarian's extra stats pretty much buries the slim and subtle advantage dex light weapons had for achieving damage parity under the an additional flashy pile of raw numbers.
When you look over a period of 10 attacks, both single and dw dex weapons still mount a higher damage pile than both the 2 hander barbarian and DW barbarian but they lack the 1 hit kill capability of STR weapons.

Poor, unlowed missile weapons :'(

[Jad]

As far as I've been able to determine, the armour values seem to work on a simple flat reduction system.
(Possible Damage - Armour Value = Damage Received) The average loss of damage per hit on non penetrating weapons

I'm like 99% sure that isn't how it works. It seems to be more along the lines of protection/4 = damage reduced, with there possibly being some diminishing returns. I did some fairly extensive testing in the dungeon editor with varying amounts of protection and never could get the formula 100% down, but it was clear that 1prot = 1dr isn't the case.

[Cronicler]

Jad;
Possible, even probable as armour also worked in such a way during our trek trough the Grimrock Mountain.

I haven't extensively (100+) tested it but from my cursory testing I got the impression that Armour Penetration seems to be working a lot closer to 1:1 ratio because I'm not really seeing any difference on bow shots between on wolves and on Magma Golems

[Jad]

Jad;
Possible, even probable as armour also worked in such a way during our trek trough the Grimrock Mountain.

I haven't extensively (100+) tested it but from my cursory testing I got the impression that Armour Penetration seems to be working a lot closer to 1:1 ratio because I'm not really seeing any difference on bow shots between on wolves and on Magma Golems

That seems like not so great of a way to test considering you don't know the protection scores of different enemies. The way I went about it was to make multiple characters with different protection values and let enemies attack them for awhile whilst I recorded the damages. I was comparing average damage taken by 0, 50, 100, 150, and 200 scores in protection. So, when for example my unarmored character took 60 damage from an enemy you would expect, if it really was 1:1 prot/dr, that a 100 armor character would take 0 damage, but in reality the armored character was still taking around 40 damage.

Also, the Scythe outperforms Bane once you reach around 30 strength. Perhaps you should use it for your baseline instead . The big advantage it has is that the "Harvest Time" special ability has no additional cooldown over a normal attack, so as long as you have a decent amount of points into the critical skill it quickly starts to overtake Bane's Devastate dps once you acquire additional strength.

Sickles are also outshined by the Bone Blade and Cutlass even with base strength if you can manage to attack after each cooldown, you also get them much earlier in the game so IMO they should be the standard for strength dual wielding.

[Cronicler]

Frankly, the only reason I did some cursory testing on bows was the fact that not including some info about them would have been both a cop-out due to laziness and my weird fetish of trying to be as impartial and objective as I can during dissecting a game's mechanics.
With the loss of the off-hand, low base damage, lack of DEX scaling options compared to STR stacking and the lack of skill prerequisites; Missile Weapons were clearly designed as a secondary option.
The only good point of it is the abundance and light weight of ammo, which allows you to plink all day...
except the enemy will probably be able to get to you before you could take a second shot and forcing you to switch to real weapons do deal with it...




As for Scythe, I think it might be a very viable option in combination with the warrior ability but I didn't have a warrior in neither of my runs and as both runs were on hard diff. special attacks were quite a bit hard to pull off in the middle of a dance.
Bone Sword&Cutlass combo seems quite nice but their rhythm was a bit unsuited for my parties so I don't have much experience in using them. I didn't want to speak based solely on theorycraft and the comparison list was getting as longwinded as it is already.