Stunning

[Oraticus]

It's been a while since I played a melee class, but even with the odd scrapes with ranged characters I thought stunning from physical attacks only occurred when stunning was attached to that attack, i.e. "hits to stun for 4d5".

Now I'm finding that just plain 'ole average attacks are stunning my HE warrior. It's not even hard attacks, or a series of blows landing... it's just an odd light little tap that stuns my warrior...

The water troll misses you.
The water troll hits you (9).
You have been stunned.

That was a whopping 2% of my HP. Nothing in monster memory says that a water troll's second hit can stun. Has this always been the case that melee attacks have a chance to stun if they're not associated with any statuses, or is this new to 4.1?

[Pete Mack]

It's done as a percentage of the damage roll max. So a roll of 9 out of 2d5 will stun you.

[Oraticus]

Ok, so since he landed a "hard" blow by his standards, he was able to stun? What does the chance to stun roughly work out to, for instance, in the case of my buddy the water troll who managed to do 90% of his max damage for that blow?

Does that also mean that a white icky thing that hits me for 2 damage has a chance to stun my clvl 30 HE warrior because that was a high roll for his measly 1d2 hit die? Seems a bit weird. :P

[Derakon]

As usual, the math on this stuff is (probably) unnecessarily complex. There's a sliding scale that depends on how much damage the attack does as well as how good of a hit it was compared to what the enemy is normally capable of. The reason why Grand Master Mystics are so dangerous is that they have an Nd1 attack (e.g. 20d1, I forget exactly), which means they always do the maximum damage their attack can possibly do, and that damage is also high enough to always pass the "is this a big enough hit to be stunworthy?" check. Master Mystics have a similarly-weighted attack, but the damage on it is low enough that they don't always stun.

I don't think the odds are particularly high that a 9-damage hit would stun, but they're clearly nonzero.

[Oraticus]

Got it... thanks for the info. I had thought that "stun" had to be mentioned in the attack to hit, but I see from monster memory what you mean about the 20d1 stun attack. At least there's a check to make sure the hit is hard enough to qualify as a stunning attack!