Blademaster limb counter

Kuy

OH DEAR GOD THIS IS FRUSTRATING.

So, I've been fiddling around with Dorn's blademaster limb counter.  I have absolutely no idea what's going on, but it seems like the stances are off.

It seems like it's decently accurate when I'm in Sanya, but that's about it.  So, question time:

1.  Has anyone else had a problem with this limb counter recently?  If so, how did you fix it?

2.  Is there a more up-to-date limb counter for BMs available, or is it a matter of bucking up and fixing it myself?

3.  How does each stance affect the amount of limb damage your strikes inflict?  For example, while the ABs for Sanya and Mir don't mention affecting the strength of limb attacks, it takes an extra hit to break a limb while in Mir when compared to Sanya.

Do note, I'm not trying to say Dorn's done a bad job, especially since he's made this thing free to the public.  The version I have, however, is from a forum post from last year, so it's pretty reasonable to think some things have changed since then, heh.

Nim

Kuy said:

3.  How does each stance affect the amount of limb damage your strikes inflict?  For example, while the ABs for Sanya and Mir don't mention affecting the strength of limb attacks, it takes an extra hit to break a limb while in Mir when compared to Sanya.

I use my own cheap limb counter that only tracks number of hits, but from what little research I've done, I can definitely say that each stance seems to do a different amount of limb damage. Actually, each stance + slash type combination (I've assumed but never proven that arm/leg/centre slashes are the same, but compass and draw slash appear to be different) seems to do a different amount of limb damage.

The complexity plus me not having a ton of time is basically why I still use said cheap limb counter.

Eld

Personally, I don't pay a lot of attention to the specific numbers - I mainly use the counter as a way to keep track of how many hits I've gotten in on each limb and roughly how many more I need - if I end up being off, I adjust and prep again. I also have the sawbones trait, and use it probably more than I should need to to adjust as needed. I've found Dorn's to be mostly pretty reliable, but certainly not 100%. I don't know of any other publicly available ones; I've long intended to gather more accurate numbers and put one together, but haven't gotten around to it (the start that I got on this data collection is largely the basis of Dorn's counter, I just never got it to a form I was happy enough with to release).

On your question 3: All the stances do different amounts of limb damage, Thyr<Mir<unstanced<Sanya<Doya<Arash. Compass slash does more than the weak side of a leg/arm/centreslash, but less than the strong side. As far as I've seen, targeted drawslash does the same as compassslash, though I've heard claims that drawslash does slightly less.

Kuy

Eld said:

Personally, I don't pay a lot of attention to the specific numbers - I mainly use the counter as a way to keep track of how many hits I've gotten in on each limb and roughly how many more I need - if I end up being off, I adjust and prep again. I also have the sawbones trait, and use it probably more than I should need to to adjust as needed. I've found Dorn's to be mostly pretty reliable, but certainly not 100%. I don't know of any other publicly available ones; I've long intended to gather more accurate numbers and put one together, but haven't gotten around to it (the start that I got on this data collection is largely the basis of Dorn's counter, I just never got it to a form I was happy enough with to release).

On your question 3: All the stances do different amounts of limb damage, Thyr<Mir<unstanced<Sanya<Doya<Arash. Compass slash does more than the weak side of a leg/arm/centreslash, but less than the strong side. As far as I've seen, targeted drawslash does the same as compassslash, though I've heard claims that drawslash does slightly less.

This is all wonderful information!  Thank you so much!

Here's a question 4:

Knights, monks, and blademasters all rely on limb damage via weapons.  Since limb health is related to max health, would the various "breakpoints" of max health be standard across the board?

That is, if it takes "300 limb damage" for a monk to break a 4000 health individual, will it take a knight and a blademaster "300 limb damage" to break that same individual?

Eld

Kuy said:

Eld said:

Personally, I don't pay a lot of attention to the specific numbers - I mainly use the counter as a way to keep track of how many hits I've gotten in on each limb and roughly how many more I need - if I end up being off, I adjust and prep again. I also have the sawbones trait, and use it probably more than I should need to to adjust as needed. I've found Dorn's to be mostly pretty reliable, but certainly not 100%. I don't know of any other publicly available ones; I've long intended to gather more accurate numbers and put one together, but haven't gotten around to it (the start that I got on this data collection is largely the basis of Dorn's counter, I just never got it to a form I was happy enough with to release).

On your question 3: All the stances do different amounts of limb damage, Thyr<Mir<unstanced<Sanya<Doya<Arash. Compass slash does more than the weak side of a leg/arm/centreslash, but less than the strong side. As far as I've seen, targeted drawslash does the same as compassslash, though I've heard claims that drawslash does slightly less.

This is all wonderful information!  Thank you so much!

Here's a question 4:

Knights, monks, and blademasters all rely on limb damage via weapons.  Since limb health is related to max health, would the various "breakpoints" of max health be standard across the board?

That is, if it takes "300 limb damage" for a monk to break a 4000 health individual, will it take a knight and a blademaster "300 limb damage" to break that same individual?

That's my guess, but I don't think it's known for sure. In any case, if there is some absolute limb damage scale like that, the damage numbers for various attacks aren't known (for example, I can't give you a conversion factor between, say, a blademaster's compass slash in Sanya with a level 1 band and a monk's HFP in bear stance). I've often thought about trying to come up with such a thing, but haven't ever felt up to collecting all the requisite data.

Kuy

It seems like everything would be a lot more accurate if, instead of rounding to the tenth decimal place, it would round to the hundredth.

Is there a way to make that happen?

Eld

Sure. In the script called "Limb Counter", find the displayLC() function. At the beginning of that, there are a few statements like:

   dispDamageRightLeg = math.round(damageRightLeg, 1)

Just change the 1s to 2s, like

   dispDamageRightLeg = math.round(damageRightLeg, 2)

Kuy

Woo.  Yay for fixing things.  Having it round at the hundreth is helping quite a lot.

To solve the varying stances, I tried to fiddle with the values in the script.  After an hour or so, I decided just to change the assess trigger to set my breakpoint differently depending on my stance.  It'd working pretty well so far!

Dorn

It should already take your stance into account for how much damage a hit does - if it's not, that's a major bug, and I'd have appreciated you telling me about it. The breakpoint ought to remain largely static based on health level, though I'll freely admit I get the thresholds wrong - I'd estimate 80% accuracy, which is 20% too inaccurate for my tastes but 80% better than nothing.

I opted to round to the tenth for simplicity purposes, mental math and all that - rounding to the hundredth should work fine if you make the window slightly wider, no big deal. Bear in mind though that the internal math already uses as many decimal places as exist - all calculations work off of 'damageRightLeg', not 'dispDamageRightLeg', for instance, so this would be entirely a UI feature. In 99% of cases this won't make a big difference, but it's there in case it does.

EDIT: I'd also actually like to check what version you're using, just to make sure this isn't a bug I fixed already: Does the counter have an 'Optimal Prep Path' entry at the bottom?

Kuy

Dorn said:

It should already take your stance into account for how much damage a hit does - if it's not, that's a major bug, and I'd have appreciated you telling me about it. The breakpoint ought to remain largely static based on health level, though I'll freely admit I get the thresholds wrong - I'd estimate 80% accuracy, which is 20% too inaccurate for my tastes but 80% better than nothing.

I opted to round to the tenth for simplicity purposes, mental math and all that - rounding to the hundredth should work fine if you make the window slightly wider, no big deal. Bear in mind though that the internal math already uses as many decimal places as exist - all calculations work off of 'damageRightLeg', not 'dispDamageRightLeg', for instance, so this would be entirely a UI feature. In 99% of cases this won't make a big difference, but it's there in case it does.

EDIT: I'd also actually like to check what version you're using, just to make sure this isn't a bug I fixed already: Does the counter have an 'Optimal Prep Path' entry at the bottom?

Yup!  It does have the "Optimal Prep Path" entry.

After fooling around with it on quite a few people, I... can't really tell what's happening, exactly.  It does take into account the stance I'm in - I don't think I'm saying it doesn't (I've just been having issues with Thyr stance not being quite right. Adjusting the breakpoints up for just Thyr stance has worked wonders).  What seems to be happening is a strange inaccuracy in the "damage values" (if you can equate the values in the script to the amount of "limb damage" the strikes do) in a few particular instances.

For example, there are situations where combinations of offslashes, slashes, and compassslashes where I'll get a limb to 12/10 before it will finally break, when going about it the simplest way would have it break right at 10.  I'm not sure where the inaccuracy is or what exactly is happening, but it's consistent enough in the situations I've seen it to indicate that there's something wrong.

Please don't be offended by any of this!  I am in no way trying to say you've done a bad job or your work is garbage!  This just isn't something that's easily quantified without knowing the inner workings of the code or exactly how limb damage in these situations functions.  You sure as hell have estimated the values pretty close.

I'll eventually sit down and try to figure out exactly why this situation is happening, but I just haven't had the time this weekend.  But yea, it seems that the values aren't quite on the money, so when it comes down to trying to micro-manage the breaks with weird combinations to bypass parry (I don't have airstrike yet - I'm two skills away) weird things happen.

I've pretty much just reached the conclusion that the problem isn't the counter, but the inefficiency with which I have to break sometimes due to lacking airstrike

Dorn

Right, okay, that makes more sense now.

Generally, I'd advise altering the damage values rather than the breakpoints? I got the values I use by basically smacking things of differing health values and tweaking the numbers until it fell into sensible ranges - L3 Thyr LimbSlash was originally 2 points, for instance, until it was proven that was too high but 1.8 was too low. All the damage values can be found in the bandcheck() function, I'd suggest commenting out the originals and copying them in with new values so you have the originals to fall back on.

I'm not surprised there's combinations the numbers fail on - I tried using the most sensible setups I could think of to get the basic values, including breaking solely with off-slashes, on-slashes, compasses, alternating pairs, etc, but there's probably some strange mix that breaks it.

If you actually do identify more accurate numbers, could you forward them to me along with logs demonstrating (and listing target maxhealth and projected breakpoint)? I'm always up for making the setup more accurate, I just got fed up of trying to refine the numbers down much further, it's a bit hard to find test subjects after you hit the obvious counts (and frankly I'm too damn lazy)

Synbios

I might just go one step further one of these days when I don't need my crit-related trait anymore: Get sawbones and test something about limb damage.

Of course, I first need to know if sawbones gives a 'definite' limb health in terms of numbers, or if it just gives a vague 'your limb is very healthy' message.

Sena

Synbios said:

Of course, I first need to know if sawbones gives a 'definite' limb health in terms of numbers, or if it just gives a vague 'your limb is very healthy' message.

No numbers, just a few descriptions that correspond to certain ranges (so you can tell that it's somewhere between x% and y% (don't remember the exact ranges), but nothing more than that). And if the limb is already broken/mangled, you can't even get that much, you only see the level of the break.

Synbios

Sena said:

Synbios said:

Of course, I first need to know if sawbones gives a 'definite' limb health in terms of numbers, or if it just gives a vague 'your limb is very healthy' message.

No numbers, just a few descriptions that correspond to certain ranges (so you can tell that it's somewhere between x% and y% (don't remember the exact ranges), but nothing more than that). And if the limb is already broken/mangled, you can't even get that much, you only see the level of the break.

Man, that sucks. Would be nice if they had a hard number for limb health instead, like the WOUNDS system in Lusternia.

Dorn

Hell, I'd settle for the displayed percentages in Aetolia. Not even the pre-curing, just being able to check your limb and go 'okay it's at 10% damage so that attack/combo did 10% to it good to know'

Anedhel

You can more or less test that in relation to sawbones anyways, just replace % with the message. I.e. it takes 2 drawslashes to move it from one level to the next for X health.

Eld

Anedhel said:

You can more or less test that in relation to sawbones anyways, just replace % with the message. I.e. it takes 2 drawslashes to move it from one level to the next for X health.

Yes, but the brackets for sawbones are large enough that it won't get you anything much more precise than we've already got.

Anedhel

Fair 'nuff! Sucks to be BM then, I guess. Sawbones works a charm for chivalry/weaponry :O

Antonius

Standard weapon attacks are easy to count, since it's just weapon damage versus target health. I really don't envy BMs having to factor in stance and different attacks.

Caladbolg

@Dorn I use your limb counter and im not sure about everyone else's experience with it but as far as accuracy goes i've never had a problem with it. but im also using a level 3 band and have it set I have a level 1 might be outdated though.

I would also agree though to giving closer numbers out would be a benefit to achaea in general.

Most of the numbers come from some odd forumla that I personal would never be able to figure out if people like Eld and Sena didn't put hard work into finding them for us. And people like Dorn finding it coding it into a limb counter and putting it out to the public for free.

Even if Dorns limb counter is off a bit, being able to tweak it isn't hard (takes some testing) and with out one your basically boned.

Kuy

Caladbolg said:

@Dorn I use your limb counter and im not sure about everyone else's experience with it but as far as accuracy goes i've never had a problem with it. but im also using a level 3 band and have it set I have a level 1 might be outdated though.

I would also agree though to giving closer numbers out would be a benefit to achaea in general.

Most of the numbers come from some odd forumla that I personal would never be able to figure out if people like Eld and Sena didn't put hard work into finding them for us. And people like Dorn finding it coding it into a limb counter and putting it out to the public for free.

Even if Dorns limb counter is off a bit, being able to tweak it isn't hard (takes some testing) and with out one your basically boned.

The numbers in Dorn's counter are really easy to get.

The problem is that there is no possible way to get numbers precise enough to make a counter that's as reliable as it could be, as we have no way of measuring limb damage besides correlating health values to the number of each slash it takes to break a limb.

Dorn

Yeah, it took a few weeks of dedicated testing, finding/begging/bribing people in the untracked health brackets to be broken repeatedly while I figured out the likely values. I complain affectionately about the work it took to make the limb prep path display, but honestly that only took me about six hours and I at least knew it was accurate once I was done.

One thing to bear in mind, level 1 and 2 bands will be the most inaccurate - I had access to both a level 3 band and an unbanded sword for testing, but in order to get the level 1 and 2 values, I extrapolated from the unbanded values.

If someone wanted to take my work and advance it, maybe finding some way to make use of Sawbones to more accurately gauge the damage, and update the numbers and post it, I'd be more than happy for them to do so, provided I at least got credit for the initial work. Or if they wanted to send me the numbers to put in, I'd credit them for it.

@Caladbolg: I never actually found any formula for limb damage. Eld was looking for one, I believe, but I decided to just find the values the hard way and use them to invent a formula that would work, even if it wasn't entirely accurate.

Just putting that out there to make sure nobody thinks I 'solved' limb damage or something. >.>

Caladbolg

Yeah I mispoke with the formula part.

But still I and im pretty sure most of the blademaster community thanks you for your limb counter.

Pretty sure i've said it before but i'd still be out here breaking people like Jacen twice to get his legs to prep right.

Ernam

Plug for Manda!

No seriously though.  It's awesome.

Kuy

I thought Ernam was a Priest nowadays. When did her become a necromancer?

Ernam

Oh holy crap.  It was like the 5th thread down on BM class section, had no idea it was so friggin old.