Two Arts Limb Damage

Aesh

Do all the sword abilities in twoarts do varying degrees of limb damage, not taking stance into consideration?

Would a compassslash deal out more limb damage than a targeted drawslash?

I'm aware that centre/arm/legslash does a lesser amount of damage to the secondary target. Just curious about the rest.

Eld

Limbslash does 1.5x as much damage to the strong side as to the weak side. Compass is somewhere in between, closer to the strong side. How much closer depends on who you're hitting, because they scale differently with the target's max health; compass has smaller flat damage component and does a larger percentage of the target's max health, so they'd do equal damage to a target with some absurdly high health (I don't remember just how high, but upwards of 10k, maybe more like 15k). For typical health ranges, I think compass is somewhere around 1.3-1.4x an off side limbslash. As far as I know, targeted drawslash does the same limb damage as compass. 

They're also all affected by your stance, with thyr doing the least, followed by mir, unstanced, sanya, doya, and arash.

Tael

I don't know if it's still the case or if we were even correct at the time, but when Dorn and I were testing it, we concluded that drawslash did slightly less than compass (I think it was only something like 5%), though I'm 99% sure the difference is such that they're still functionally interchangeable if you're prepping with the minimum number of attacks.

I don't think there's really any reason to ever use targeted drawslash over compassslash though, so most people sort of just ignore it.

On a more high-level note, the relationship between on-side arm/leg/centreslash, off-side arm/leg/centreslash, and compassslash has to be what it is to ensure that it's possible to prep every max health value. The way it's set up, every opponent will go from no breaks to a double break after either (1) an equal number of arm/leg/centreslashes on each side or (2) a single compassslash to each side then an equal number of arm/leg/centreslashes to each side. If the proportions were substantially different, that wouldn't be assured and some opponents could theoretically be impossible to prep for a double break.

Eld

Tael said:

I don't know if it's still the case or if we were even correct at the time, but when Dorn and I were testing it, we concluded that drawslash did slightly less than compass (I think it was only something like 5%), though I'm 99% sure the difference is such that they're still functionally interchangeable if you're prepping with the minimum number of attacks.

It's possible that drawslash is a little weaker than compass. I don't think I ever found a case where drawslash took more hits to break than compass, but I didn't test drawslash all that extensively because as you say...

I don't think there's really any reason to ever use targeted drawslash over compassslash though, so most people sort of just ignore it.

On a more high-level note, the relationship between on-side arm/leg/centreslash, off-side arm/leg/centreslash, and compassslash has to be what it is to ensure that it's possible to prep every max health value. The way it's set up, every opponent will go from no breaks to a double break after either (1) an equal number of arm/leg/centreslashes on each side or (2) a single compassslash to each side then an equal number of arm/leg/centreslashes to each side. If the proportions were substantially different, that wouldn't be assured and some opponents could theoretically be impossible to prep for a double break.

Actually, even as they are, there may well be a couple people for whom that could be a (theoretical) problem. Unless I've made a mistake in the algebra, what you need is for compass to do at least half as much as an off-side limbslash (not a problem) and less than an on-side limbslash. Looking back at my testing notes, the point where compass catches up to on-side limb slash looks to be lower than I was remembering, probably around 9-9.5k, which is still pretty absurd, but not unheard of - for people above that, there may be a few pathological cases where you can't prep for a double break with alternating limbslashes without changing stances or similar. Very unlikely to ever really come up as a practical issue, though.

Tael

Eld said:

Actually, even as they are, there may well be a couple people for whom that could be a (theoretical) problem. Unless I've made a mistake in the algebra, what you need is for compass to do at least half as much as an off-side limbslash (not a problem) and less than an on-side limbslash. Looking back at my testing notes, the point where compass catches up to on-side limb slash looks to be lower than I was remembering, probably around 9-9.5k, which is still pretty absurd, but not unheard of - for people above that, there may be a few pathological cases where you can't prep for a double break with alternating limbslashes without changing stances or similar. Very unlikely to ever really come up as a practical issue, though.

How are you using compass?

The idea when you're alternating slashes and only one limb breaks is not to compass that limb first next time. The idea is to compass both limbs then alternate slashes. Unless things have changed since I tested it as BM, the relationship between compass and limbslash was such that for any opponent where alternating slashes won't double-break, a single compass to each limb functionally puts their limb health into a range where it will. That was a long time ago and I never tested it on anyone with truly extreme health values, but I never found any exceptions to it when I was testing and it's pretty easy to see how it could be purposefully designed to work like that.

Incidentally, do you have your testing results handy? I had an idea for trying to figure out a few things, but all of my notes died years ago when my old laptop died and I don't have a BM anymore.

Aesh

So from I'm getting from these posts the method for optimal limb damage is:

1)Perform one Compassslash on the limbs that you want to see mangled
2)Alternate arms/legs/center slashes until doublemangle is achieved.

So to prep someone's legs, you would

1)Compassslash one leg
2)Compassslash the other leg
3)Alternate leg slashes until both are damaged

The more HP the other player has = more slashes are needed to break.

Is this correct?

Tael

Aesh said:

So from I'm getting from these posts the method for optimal limb damage is:

1)Perform one Compassslash on the limbs that you want to see mangled
2)Alternate arms/legs/center slashes until doublemangle is achieved.

So to prep someone's legs, you would

1)Compassslash one leg
2)Compassslash the other leg
3)Alternate leg slashes until both are damaged

The more HP the other player has = more slashes are needed to break.

Is this correct?

Like I said, I'm not totally sure what I said is still true since this was more than a year ago and we never tested really extreme health values, though I've brought this up a few times and no one's ever provided a counter-example (not that that necessarily means it's right).

The idea is that every person can be double-broken in one of two ways:

1. Alternate limbslashes until both limbs break.
2. Compassslash the left once, compassslash the right once, then alternate limbslashes until both limbs break.

So if you alternate limbslashes and you end up with a single-break, strategy #2 will work (though don't forget to compass the unbroken limb to break it and reset it first). Similarly, if you try strategy #2 and it doesn't work, that means strategy #1 will work (again, don't forget to reset the unbroken limb). Neither strategy will work 100% of the time - you need to either try one first or figure out which health ranges require which strategy through testing.

The point of compassslashing is to change the limb's effective health from being in the range where alternating slashes won't double break it to being in the range where alternating slashes will double break it.

Aesh

Noted.

I have many more questions about the class which I will post here as I'd rather not spam a bunch of new topics. As much as I'd love to have these answered IC, I don't think I've ever seen another Blademaster in Aesh's city.

Blizzard and Thunderstorm. Do these abilities stay in the room for a bit after using them (like noxious cloud) or do they only hit everyone in the room once? I can test the twoarts and (soon, I have up to chin) striking abilities that require shin energy but it will be awhile before I get Shindo transed.

Sena

Annihilation/thunderstorm/blizzard just hit everyone in the room once.

Eld

Tael said:

Eld said:

Actually, even as they are, there may well be a couple people for whom that could be a (theoretical) problem. Unless I've made a mistake in the algebra, what you need is for compass to do at least half as much as an off-side limbslash (not a problem) and less than an on-side limbslash. Looking back at my testing notes, the point where compass catches up to on-side limb slash looks to be lower than I was remembering, probably around 9-9.5k, which is still pretty absurd, but not unheard of - for people above that, there may be a few pathological cases where you can't prep for a double break with alternating limbslashes without changing stances or similar. Very unlikely to ever really come up as a practical issue, though.

How are you using compass?

The idea when you're alternating slashes and only one limb breaks is not to compass that limb first next time. The idea is to compass both limbs then alternate slashes. Unless things have changed since I tested it as BM, the relationship between compass and limbslash was such that for any opponent where alternating slashes won't double-break, a single compass to each limb functionally puts their limb health into a range where it will. That was a long time ago and I never tested it on anyone with truly extreme health values, but I never found any exceptions to it when I was testing and it's pretty easy to see how it could be purposefully designed to work like that.

Ah, I see. I was thinking of using a single compass, rather than one to each limb.

Incidentally, do you have your testing results handy? I had an idea for trying to figure out a few things, but all of my notes died years ago when my old laptop died and I don't have a BM anymore.

Sure, with the disclaimer that all data is at least a year or two old. 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nqsQQ5CfK9bqZcQWelnPRIv38yYuDFf-TbcyRbXadPA/edit?usp=sharing

There's a lot of extraneous stuff there, but the meat of it is columns A-I of the sheet called "New data". It's just the number of slashes of a particular type to break for different combinations of max health, band, and stance. No checks with different combinations of slashes or anything like that. The rest of the columns with predicted damage are my attempts at coming up with formulae for the limb damage for each slash, assuming that there's some damage value for each slash and a limb breaks when the total damage done to it exceeds the person's max health. The sheets called "lightly/moderately/heavily damaged" are the same thing, but with the number of hits to get to each level on a sawbones assessment. I didn't do very much testing with sawbones, so there's probably not enough data in those to add much.