A Few Questions/Observations From an Old Player

[Ed_47569]

Another question is what is the Enchant Weapon cap? I was able to get bolts up to (+15, +15) along with Til-I-Arc.

+15 on any weapon or ammo is the limit that you can enchant yourself - although very, very hard after +10, expecially for Artefacts which, in addition, only get 1/2 chance to succeed.

[Oramin]

Yeah, I've been slowed from +8 to +7. On the other hand, I was able, last night, to kill Harowen (+30) on approach by backing off and turning the separating wall between us into mud and then shooting from range with a +17 speed. Harowen never reached me.

Another question is what is the Enchant Weapon cap? I was able to get bolts up to (+15, +15) along with Til-I-Arc.

[Timo Pietilä]

Looks like switching over is worthwhile.

Couple of more advantages of HXBow are that it has slightly longer range which gives you one extra turn of shooting compared to longbow and that bolts don't break quite as easily as arrows saving you some ammo.

Only bad thing in it is that it and its ammo are quite a lot heavier than bow and arrows.

[Oramin]

Turns out the (approximate) damage equation was earlier in this thread, so I could do the math myself. Here's the equation for the convenience of the reader (and so it can be corrected if I have it wrong).

A = (Avg Base Damage Ammo) + (Ammo Bonus Damage) + (Launcher Bonus Damage)

B = (Launcher Multiplier) + (Ammo Slay/Brand Multiplier)

Avg Damage = A * B * (# of shots)

Note that this doesn't account for crits which should require using the To Hit numbers.

Ok, running with that we have:

Longbow of Extra Shots (x3) (+14, +15) <+1> with (1d4) (+12, +12) ammo:

A = (2.5) + (12) + (15) = 29.5

B = 3

Avg Damage = 29.5 * 3 * 2 = 177

Longbow of Extra Shots (x3) (+14, +15) <+1> with (3d4) (+12, +12) ammo:

A = (7.5) + (12) + (15) = 34.5

B = 3

Avg Damage = 34.5 * 3 * 2 = 207


Compare with:

Heavy Crossbow of Extra Shots (x4) (+16, +20) <+1> with (1d5) (+12, +12) ammo:

A = (3) + (12) + (20) = 35

B = 4

Avg Damage = 35 * 4 * 2 = 280


So even regular ammo from the Heavy Crossbow does a lot more damage than Mithril Arrows from the Longbow.

Running the numbers for Branded (x3) ammo we get:

Longbow of Extra Shots (x3) (+14, +15) <+1> with (1d4) (+12, +12) (x3 branded) ammo:

A = (2.5) + (12) + (15) = 29.5

B = (3) + (3) = 6

Avg Damage = 29.5 * 6 * 2 = 354


Heavy Crossbow of Extra Shots (x4) (+16, +20) <+1> with (1d5) (+12, +12) (x3 branded) ammo:

A = (3) + (12) + (20) = 35

B = (4) + (3)

Avg Damage = 35 * 7 * 2 = 490


Looks like switching over is worthwhile.

[Oramin]

Thanks.

Can I get a little math help. I'm (L43 Dunadan Paladin) using a Longbow of Extra Shots (x3) (+14, +15) <+1>. I have a Heavy Crossbow of Extra Shots (x4) (+16, +20) <+1> sitting in my home.

Assuming that I can get the ammo up to (+12, +12), since I have the appropriate Spellbook, what is the damage per round?

Obviously, I'm trying to decide if I should switch over and I would have to give up my specialty arrows for ordinary bolts until I find some higher quality ones. I should also note that I'm on L51 of the dungeon and am currently running with a base Speed of +9 (which is normally a few pounds overloaded for +8).

[Derakon]

You can still trigger traps intentionally. I believe you want to hit the '-' key; it'll prompt you for a direction to move-without-alter in.

[Oramin]

I've been wondering, when did the game switch over to auto-disarming of traps?

I used to occasionally use traps as escape devices (Teleport, Trap Door). Now there doesn't seem to be any way to deliberately trigger them.

Also, while I like the way that simply noticing monsters move via Telepathy no longer stops multiple actions (such as resting until healed), I did recently have a problem with a room of animals that included tunnelling critters. I was building a long tunnel so I could keep firing OoDs into the room when I apparently got close enough for them to notice me. Instead of my digging stopping on walls disappearing, it didn't stop until a monster (a *lot* of monsters) suddenly had LOS on me.

It wasn't lethal (this time) and I'll take greater care now that I now that it is the way things work, but stopping when things are coming through walls or digging through walls to you would be a good thing.

[Patashu]

...you know already a lot more than just deviation. Which makes my point, standard deviation without additional info is just useless number.

If you don't know the distribution, you can sample it, and then you can estimate the population mean and standard deviation from the sample mean and sample standard deviation.

How did you get 2.5% out of that and values of 505, 5050 and 6060? My question is how do I use that info in practical way. Do I have to look it from a table Patashu posted, or is there a easy way to use it in calculations? I hope answer doesn't include integrals or laplaces.

You can calculate it, but the calculation is non-fundamental, so you may as well use the table.
Once you have the table and use it, you can determine what % chance outliers a certain number of SDs away from the mean are to happen, which is very useful for considering risk and risk averse strategies' merits compared to each other. I would not downplay this tool just because it requires looking at a table and using math.

Frak, I was hoping to get something useful from that. Apparently it isn't useful number for any of the people that doesn't have that table.

Whenever I need the table, I google 'z score' and every image is the table. (Basically, z score is how many standard deviations a sample is from the mean in a distribution, positive or negative)

[Oramin]

Ah, good to know that about the vulnerabilities. Thanks.

[fizzix]

So, did somebody have an answer to the Til-I-Arc question?

Vulnerabilities are not applied to melee damage. Whether they should be is debatable. When the game decides a message it goes through all possible slays and only picks a new one if it's more damage than whatever earlier one it found. Fire is the first slay it checks, and since it applies and nothing is greater, it picks that.

[Gorbad]

Frak, I was hoping to get something useful from that. Apparently it isn't useful number for any of the people that doesn't have that table.

There is a thing called the Empirical Rule, which is exactly for people that don't want a table.

Some prerequisite info:

A 'normal distribution' is a standard bell curve, so most of the results will be in the middle. Like was said earlier, imagine 2d6, the odds for 2 and 12 are much lower than for 7 to occur, this is a bell curve, or normal distribution.

Standard deviation is a way to calculate how much your entire set of rolls differs from the mean (the average, i.e. 7 for 2d6). To do that requires a simple formula, but well, wikipedia is your friend. basically you find how much each separate sample differs from the mean, square that difference, sum all those, divide by the number of samples and take the square root. What it does is make a meaningful 'average' of the differences from the mean. For 2d6 this is about 2.41.

Anyway... the Empirical Rule (a great rule of thumb) is that in a normal distribution about 68% of all results if you sample ("roll") often enough will be within one standard deviation of the mean, so between 4.6 and 9.4 (7 plus or minus 2.41), 95% will be within 2.18 and 11.8 (twice the standard deviation), and 99% will be within plus or minus 3 times the standard deviation.

[Oramin]

So, did somebody have an answer to the Til-I-Arc question?

[Derakon]

To use the standard deviation, you need to also know the mean and the distribution. Without those, it's useless. The distribution is the shape of the curve, so the tables we've been referring to are also useless unless you happen to be working with a "normal distribution", as we have been here.

For example, the distribution of a 1d20 roll would be very flat, since every value has an equal chance of occurring. So even though the mean is 10.5 and the standard deviation is (according to the Net; don't feel like doing the math) 5.77, that doesn't mean that you have lower odds of getting a 20 than a 11.

[Timo Pietilä]

2.5% is from Derakon's post. Probability to be above two standard deviations. There is just a table or graph of pre-calculated values of normal distribution.

Frak, I was hoping to get something useful from that. Apparently it isn't useful number for any of the people that doesn't have that table.

[LostTemplar]

2.5% is from Derakon's post. Probability to be above two standard deviations. There is just a table or graph of pre-calculated values of normal distribution.