Miscellaneous Maths/Testing II

Sena

This is a continuation of my old thread here. To start things off, I was curious about juggling after the artefact javelin thread, so I tested it a bit.

Juggling seems to reduce the damage of thrown weapons by 75%, and reduce the balance cost of throwing by 70%.
It takes about 1.2s balance to begin juggling an item.
I didn't test limb breaks, because the jester I was testing with had inept weaponry and no proficiencies. Thrown weapons did almost no damage normally, and even less with juggling.

Eld

Woo, nice to see this thread back. In case anyone's curious, I started doing a little testing of drawslash damage on denizens a bit ago. Stance and band have no effect on damage against denizens. With trans Two Arts, I do 545 damage with 15 strength, 569 with 16, 592 with 17. Haven't gotten to test with more or less yet.

Sena

Backstab damage (at 12 strength) is 300 + 40% of max health.

Synbios

Sena said:

Backstab damage (at 12 strength) is 300 + 40% of max health.

So if someone is down to approx. 50%, backstab is fatal?

Cooper

Not if you have super health. But yeah, sort of.

Sena

Synbios said:

So if someone is down to approx. 50%, backstab is fatal?

50% is a bit high (most people will have more than 3k health), and it's reduced by cutting resistance (but not armour). It does mean that most people won't be able to survive 3 backstabs at once, and in order to survive 4 you'll need close to 50% cutting resistance (or 40% plus vitality).

Raiel

Do poisoned backstabs count as poison damage or physical damage a la arrows?

Tvistor

Physical damage to my knowledge.

Iocun

Since most serpents tend to go for con specs, there will be some that have below 12 strength though (notably atavians, sirens, and grooks). Won't make that huge of a difference in average though.

Sena

That reminds me, before diminishing returns, a point of strength changes backstab damage by about 6% (most likely 1/13*8/10).

Sena

So, I made a list of the times for every IC date change I've seen in 2012 (I'll get to the other years later), to get a more accurate idea of how much the length of a day varies. Here's what I have so far.

Average day length: 3601.93334960938 seconds.
Minimum day length: 3598 seconds.
Maximum day length: 3715 seconds.
Number of full days (consecutive date changes) tracked: 195
Total date changes tracked: 444

Thaumas

What's your usual ping? Counting the server side lag when day change occurs, it seems to me that it's straight 3600.

Sena

My ping is usually 30-60ms.

Non-server-side lag would affect both ends of the day equally. If that was the cause of the variation, the minimum would be much lower. The majority of days are within a couple seconds of 3600 (that much variation could easily be lag on my end), but some (23 aren't within 2 seconds, 9 aren't within 5) are much higher.

I'd guess that server-side lag delays the IC time in the same way that it delays other timers, like denizen attacks. That would account for the day occasionally being longer than normal, but never shorter.

Sena

Got most of the dates I've seen since 2008 (I didn't have timestamps on everything before that). Here's what it looks like now.

Average day length: 3613.46704101563 seconds.
Minimum day length: 3590 seconds.
Maximum day length: 11071 seconds.
Number of full days (consecutive date changes) tracked: 2246
Total date changes tracked: 4023

That 11071 was because of several hours of downtime in 2010. If I remove the days with things like timewarps or downtime obviously extending the length:
Average day length: 3606.89599609375 seconds.
Minimum day length: 3590 seconds.
Maximum day length: 3843 seconds.

The farther back I go, the more long days (and thus server-side lag?) I see.

Also, this is a pretty good indicator of how much my activity has been declining over the years. I have 1453 days logged for 2008 (actually a few hundred higher, because that's only counting ones with timestamps), 934 for 2009, 583 for 2010, 616 for 2011, and 471 for 2012 (though there are a couple months left).

Tvistor

Sena scares me. I feel like if I look Sena in the eyes my very soul would be quantified and tested under reasonable experimental conditions.

Xer

Hrm... considering that eye sigils have some effect on the soul, there are at least *some* reasonable form of experiments that can be determined... let's see if I can extinguish a soul before they pray...

Xith

Holy shit, it's f-ing Rainwoman.

Tvistor

Out of curiosity @Sena, do you know at what point backstab begins to be affected by diminishing returns?

Cooper

Everything starts at 12 for diminishing returns.

Sena

If you mean from strength, same as everything else. The first point of strength/intelligence (from the base of 12) is normal, then every point beyond that is less effective than the previous point.

Tvistor

Thank you, did not know that.

Sena

Decided to test bow damage.

Longbows: 200+MaxHealth/13
Darkbows: 400+MaxHealth*2/13
Crossbows: 500+MaxHealth*0.17

If anyone has artefact bows, I'd like to test them as well.

Edit: I also confirmed that unenvenomed arrows are cutting damage, envenomed arrows are poison damage.

I also only tested subterfuge, I assume chivalry is the same but it could be different.

Shoot/snipe and aiming have no effect on damage.

Also, balance is the same for all three types. The only differences are damage and accuracy.

Antidas

@Sena I got a lupine, hit me up some time when you wanna test

Rangor

Could you check if the dmg stat/runes on bows have any impact on speed and damage?

Sena

Rangor said:

Could you check if the dmg stat/runes on bows have any impact on speed and damage?

Tested that before, runes and augmentations don't do anything.

Eld

In light of the recent bugfix to make Two Arts stances affect drawslash damage against denizens, I did a little bit of testing on a falcon.

14 strength, no band:
thyr: 403
mir: 455
unstanced: 481
sanya: 507
doya: 533
arash: 558

14 strength, level 3 band:
thyr: 455
mir: 507
unstanced: 533
sanya: 558
doya: 584
arash: 610

17 strength, no band:
thyr: 461
mir: 520
unstanced: 550
sanya: 580
doya: 609
arash: 639

17 strength, level 3 band:
band:
thyr: 520
mir: 580
unstanced: 609
doya: 668
arash: 698

I'm pretty puzzled by a few things, particularly that the unstanced damage with no band at 17 strength doesn't match what I was doing with 17 strength before the change, as I would've expected it to. It's also odd that the banded sword ends up with exactly the same damage as the unbanded one in a stronger stance in so many cases. In any case, I don't see a way to reconcile this with the nominal 15% damage increase for a level 3 band stated in the HELPs. If I get a chance later, I'll test with 13 strength, and see if I'm running into some odd effect of diminishing returns on strength.

Sena

I just woke up, so I'm not ready to see if I can make all of the numbers fit, but my guess would be that some bonuses are being added together before being applied. Arash, for example, seems to add the same amount of damage regardless of the band, but increases with strength, which implies that the stance and band are added (so they don't affect each other), while strength isn't. There would have to be something else increasing your damage (like unstanced having a damage bonus and thyr not having a damage bonus, rather than unstanced being 0 and thyr being negative, for example) for that to explain it though.

Eld

Didn't even notice that it was the same amount added for each stance, regardless of band (well, almost the same: banded Mir with 17 str is 580 instead of 579, for example. Probably indicative of rounding of some sort). Also just noticed I missed Sanya in with the band and 17 str, but I guess it's probably 639.

Sena

Drawslash is significantly better than staffcast, even fully artied staffcast. This was the case even before stances and bands increased the damage.

@Eld If you can test with 12 strength (it can be reduced by vitiate, right?), that would be best. That removes strength entirely as a factor.

Eld

@Daeir Keep in mind that the extra damage in Arash comes with a hefty increase in damage taken, so it's not really viable as a standard bashing stance. The standard has long been to use Thyr for bashing, or sometimes Mir if you need the help tanking whatever you're fighting. I doubt that will change all that much with this change, since even with the reduction in damage, Thyr is still probably going to have the highest DPS of any of them except Arash. Come to think of it, though, I should get back to the testing I started on drawslash times in the various stances, and see if that's still true

Sena

I've been playing with the numbers a bit, can't manage to make them add up nicely. Seeing the damage at 12 strength would likely help a lot.