Mass Vs. Speed Question

[ElectricPaladin]

I received my initial training in roguelikes from my dad, who never taught me a lot of the basics. As a result, although I've been playing for a while, there are a few basics I don't know. One of those basics is the relationship between weapon weight, number of attacks, and overall effectiveness.

I now know that the prevailing wisdom is that it's better to go for number of attacks than high damage rating, apparently because you deal more damage and have more chances to hit. The newest version of Angband's expanded examIne function makes that clear, which is awesome.

My question is this: other than high damage dice (which is, ironically, of dubious value to the high strength characters who can wield such weapons and would rather be wielding something light and quick) is there any balancing benefit to large and heavy weapons? Or should I only be wielding heavy weapons when they have some other special power I find useful, like (Defender) or (of Region)?

Thanks.

[Marble Dice]

Weapon weight determines critical hit chance. Heavier weapons will crit more often, and harder. In practice this doesn't usually make a huge difference, and it's certainly not worth it in the early game when you can get more damage, more reliably with multiple attacks.

The main benefit of large/heavy weapons is that they usually have large base damage dice which are important for slays. Things like Acid Brand, Slay Evil, *Slay Dragon*, etc, only modify the base damage dice, not the +dam bonus. Especially later in the game once you start to max your stats, it's not hard to get multiple attacks even with the heavy weapons, and when you do, you can do some serious damage with slay properties on a heavy (high base damage) weapon.

[Mondkalb]

With heavy weapons you have better chances for great hits which deal more damage and may have side effects like stunning your foe.

edit
me too slow ... (side effect of heavy weapons)
/edit

[Pete Mack]

@mondkalb --
there's no stunning in V. You need to play O or one of it's relative for that...

The big deal is for slays and brands. For small dice, they don't matter much; for big dice, the differences can be really enormous.

[PowerDiver]

I came up with an approximate formula a long time ago

Critical Damage = (1 + all-to-hit-bonuses/8 + weight/3lbs) + (weight/30lbs)

as a percentage of adjusted base damage.

So a 30 lb weapon gets you roughly an additional +11% * base damage, but if the weight costs you a point of speed that could drop you anywhere from 3% [around speed +25] to 10% [at normal speed] of TOTAL damage to account for fewer actions for the lower speed when encumbered, and fear of double moves means it is really worse than that.

When you factor in encumbrance, weight doesn't help much in total. It's about the number of blows and the multipliers acting upon the damage dice.

[Mondkalb]

@mondkalb --
there's no stunning in V. You need to play O or one of it's relative for that...

The big deal is for slays and brands. For small dice, they don't matter much; for big dice, the differences can be really enormous.

But there is some side effect possible? Haven't I seen different colored stars with foes? Or was it really not Vanilla?