Best Tank Mage Weapon in-game test.

[Mikel123]

Actually, I'll add one thing. My calculations all assume these weapons do their average damage every swing. Which is a fine assumption to make when dealing with a 0 AR target.

But, for a target with some measure of armor, it's not as good of an assumption.

Assume you have one weapon that does the exact same damage every time. Like, 20 damage per hit. Every time. And assume another weapon does between 15 and 25, with equal likelihood of each. And assume the target's armor will block 18 damage per hit.

The first weapon will take 11 swings, and the results will look like this:

20-18=2
20-18=2
20-18=2
20-18=2
20-18=2
20-18=2
20-18=2
20-18=2
20-18=2
20-18=2
20-18=2

So the result is, in 11 swings, it does 2 damage every time for a total of 22 damage punching through.

Now the second weapon does 11 swings, and its result looks like this:

15-18=0
16-18=0
17-18=0
18-18=0
19-18=1
20-18=2
21-18=3
22-18=4
23-18=5
24-18=6
25-18=7

So over 11 swings, it hits on average equally as hard (average of 20 damage), but after the armor modifications, it ends up doing 1+2+3+4+5+6+7= 28 damage.

Since there is a cap on the down side of hits (if you hit for less than 0, you don't "heal" your target, you just do 0), higher variance actually works in favor of the weapons that have high-variance damage possibilities.

A true measure of damage over time that involves AR would take into account all possible weapon damages for each weapon, and figure out the likelihood of each damage number happening, and then weight the results accordingly.

I take the shortcut of simply using the average, which is probably good enough for this analysis. If we were building bridges or airplanes with these numbers, we'd want exact numbers. But for UO, my calculations are close enough

[MatronDeWinter]

I thought the qstick was the best Damage/Time!

Great post there Mike, helpful as always.

[Sandro]

I thought the qstick was the best Damage/Time!

Great post there Mike, helpful as always.

Wrong as usual?

[SighelmofWyrmgard]

finally brought up defender's AR ...

I was beginning to worry, reading through to page 3 and not finding any reference to the influence of defender's AR ...

This is, erm, very important and cannot be left out of any such comparison study.

Mike123 has remarked that higher variance will provide consistently higher results in consideration of defender's AR; he is 100% correct. All of the Standard Deviation "mumbo jumbo" (lol, it's valid and standard, statistical theory) is also 100% spot-on.

One thing I would like to interject, if I may:

There is contention in this thread confusing the average damage results provided with dps-style damage accumulation: this is not the purpose of the provided statistic; for each weapon tested, Matron is providing the expected magnitude of any one, single attack, and providing additional data to help measure the consistency, as well as the maximum variance from, that expected value; useful data for the Tank-Mage coup-de-grace which --I think I'm safe assuming-- is why the data was gathered, and posted here, and this thread entitled accordingly ...

Now, I'd like to discuss some neat stuff about Defender's AR, particularly in the context of this study.

1. Matron doesn't mention test-condition-defender-AR; could someone provide the baseline, please?

2. From the baseline, the numbers will start to change as the AR goes up: the harder-hitting weapons will hit even harder by comparison, because more damage "leaks" past the defender's armor, especially on the "below-average" hits; it doesn't take too much additional AR to get the higher-damage weapons drastically outperforming the runners-up. Bear in mind, as (I think) Mike123 mentioned, that there is no such thing as negative-damage; also remember that we are discussing the one-shot expectation, so weapon(user)-attack-speed is irrelevant, therefore magical enchantments will only magnify this effect.

3. Murphy's Law: again we have the one-shot-damage-expectation in mind here; that one-shot is 44% likely to hit your opponent's plate breast of Invulnerability, and only 7% likely to hit his beat-up, mundane studded leather gorget ...

If I've necromanced, I do beg forgiveness! Really, though, I'm amazed this thread hasn't been stickied/linked: this is a very useful overview (thanks Matron for the data). I certainly vote for a sticky!

SS