Has anyone proposed changing the way # of blows is handled?

[ewert]

Agree with previous. Finding endgame gear at lvl98 (I dive after getting enough stats / util at low 30s to 90s) and the top 3 weapons are found often enough.

[PowerDiver]

Do you remember my priestly ferric diving thread http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=2110? I found a MoD att+2 as well as two MoD HA in a 400K ironman game. With the change to item depth = max{DL,ML}, they are now common enough in the depths.

[Derakon]

Agree with previous. Finding endgame gear at lvl98 (I dive after getting enough stats / util at low 30s to 90s) and the top 3 weapons are found often enough.

I assume two of the top 3 are Deathwreaker and Doomcaller, but what's the third? Ringil?

[Pete Mack]

I think he means MoD, BoC, SoS

[o-o]

When I observed the impact of heavier weapons, I had a high level paladin who had to decide between the Scimitar Hakadekket (sp.) and the Lance of Eorlingas. I had maxxed stats, +13 Ring of Damage, and those gauntlets that gave me (+7, +7). It seemed to me that +40% attacks (7 as opposed to 5) *must* be better with +40 DMG before counting the weapon, but the lance always did more observable damage.

So I spread-sheeted it. 3d8, slay evil, +360 on the critical roll, +21DMG: there was no comparison in terms of damage. Roughly: (3d8*6)+65=146, with Narya and Nenya and Fingolfin. The Lance was much more deadly, and killed both Sauron and Morgroth in my first victory. It seemed unbalanced that I should have 5 (max) attacks with such a deadly weapon, to be honest.

[Derakon]

Criticals are so opaque that I can't really take them into consideration when calculating damage. It'd be nice if they were simpler. Something along the lines of "Chance to crit is 0 to 20% based on Strength*; crits multiple dice damage by (1 + weapon weight / 5)". No crit qualities needed, and you could display your crit chance on the character sheet and/or easily incorporate crits into the average damage display.

* Yes, realistically some weapons would be better off with a Dexterity-based crit chance, but remember I'm going for simplicity here.

[PowerDiver]

I thought it might be refreshing if the discussion in this thread had some relevance to the subject line, so here goes. This isn't perfect, but here's a suggestion on a possible approach with fractional blows. I think it is still a little generous to starting chars.

All of the arithmetic is assume to be floating point. Stats range from 3 to 40, with 18/50 being 23 etc. I think 18/200 should count as 40 instead of 38, but that doesn't matter to this discussion. The formula is for mixed classes. Add or subtract 20% for warriors or 0% fail classes.

#blows = min { (5 + (STR^2)/40)/(3 + \sqrt(weapon weight in lbs))), (1 + (DEX/10)) }

I suppose alternatively 1 + (DEX^2)/275 makes sense if you believe in max relevant dex of about 18/150, but it would be nice for the formula to give at least 1.25 for str = dex = 3 with a dagger, so that when you subtract 20% you still get 1 blow.