weapon blows

[Old Coach]

I have found a couple weapons that increase attack blows. When I wield the weapons (as a mage), they do not appear to increase the number of attacks I get per round. I remember thinking that "Blows" previously was awfully powerful, especially for non-warrior classes, and maybe it has been tweaked so that lowly characters such as my mage, do not become melee death machines when they carry a dagger of blows.

Is this something that has been addressed to tone it down? Better yet, is it just increasing the total blows that a character can get, given the appropriate dex and str?

[ghengiz]

I have found a couple weapons that increase attack blows. When I wield the weapons (as a mage), they do not appear to increase the number of attacks I get per round. I remember thinking that "Blows" previously was awfully powerful, especially for non-warrior classes, and maybe it has been tweaked so that lowly characters such as my mage, do not become melee death machines when they carry a dagger of blows.

Is this something that has been addressed to tone it down? Better yet, is it just increasing the total blows that a character can get, given the appropriate dex and str?

I don't know about the tuning down (I began play recently...I'm sure someone more expert will answer you), but I have learnt a powerful command: 'I'nspect. it gives away all the info on blows on a particular weapon you can desire

[Derakon]

v4 doesn't handle +blows properly yet, to my knowledge. Properly, a +blows weapon should probably get an increase to its finesse multiplier instead. For example, if you had +200 to finesse:

A normal Dagger would get 80% of that, so you'd get .8 * 2.00 = 1.6 blows/round

A Dagger of Finesse +2 would get 100%, so you'd get 1 * 2.00 = 2 blows/round.

Or if you had 400 finesse, you'd get 3.2 and 4 blows per round with those same weapons, respectively.

[Magnate]

v4 doesn't handle +blows properly yet, to my knowledge. Properly, a +blows weapon should probably get an increase to its finesse multiplier instead. For example, if you had +200 to finesse:

A normal Dagger would get 80% of that, so you'd get .8 * 2.00 = 1.6 blows/round

A Dagger of Finesse +2 would get 100%, so you'd get 1 * 2.00 = 2 blows/round.

Or if you had 400 finesse, you'd get 3.2 and 4 blows per round with those same weapons, respectively.

Well, since all weapons have a +finesse modifier in place of the old to-hit modifier, I think it would be good to make OF_BLOWS mean something different. My aim has always been to made it modify the energy-per-blow requirement downwards - but that was before the fin/prow changes. Since blows are now dependent on *total* finesse, I'm not sure that having a weapon flag modify that afterwards is a good idea. It could be better simply to remove OF_BLOWS altogether. I don't usually suggest removing stuff, but I can't see a way of making it meaningful.

@OP: sorry, this is one of the many loose ends yet to be tied up in v4. Derakon is patiently waiting for me to do what I said I would do following his changes - I will do it RSN. At the moment just ignore +blows altogether.

[Estie]

To adress the state that +blows is (was) more valuable to casters, it should multiply the max finesse rather than add a constant. Would rounding be an issue ?

I think power wise, this would be ok - as long as multiplication is a mod that only appears on weapons; other items "of finesse" might add a constant, but only weapons ("of finesse" ?) multiply.

[Derakon]

Well, since all weapons have a +finesse modifier in place of the old to-hit modifier, I think it would be good to make OF_BLOWS mean something different. My aim has always been to made it modify the energy-per-blow requirement downwards - but that was before the fin/prow changes. Since blows are now dependent on *total* finesse, I'm not sure that having a weapon flag modify that afterwards is a good idea. It could be better simply to remove OF_BLOWS altogether. I don't usually suggest removing stuff, but I can't see a way of making it meaningful.

I don't see why it'd be a bad thing to have an affix that increases the finesse multiplier on your weapon. Or the prowess multiplier. It'd be basically equivalent to the Extra Might affix on bows. You can't exactly replicate the effect by just giving +finesse, because the multiplier makes every source of finesse you have more effective. A Dagger of Finesse +20% basically means you get 20% more blows than you usually do. And a Dagger of Prowess +20% does 20% more damage per blow than usual. That seems like a nicely-scaling alternative to the old weapons of Extra Blows, to the extent that we could make finesse and prowess multiplier modifier affixes show up quite early without being unbalancing.

[d_m]

So the big difference would be that you couldn't increase blows (or damage) without also affecting other things like to-hit/crits/etc right? That's what we're talking about?

[Old Coach]

If it could be done like Derakon suggests, then I would be all for it. A 20% increase to finesse would scale nicely with depth as your base stats and weapon stats increase. Also, an extra-rare affix of 40% (?) at great depth would be pretty exciting. I know this might all change as the system is tweaked, but it seems robust.

[Magnate]

If it could be done like Derakon suggests, then I would be all for it. A 20% increase to finesse would scale nicely with depth as your base stats and weapon stats increase. Also, an extra-rare affix of 40% (?) at great depth would be pretty exciting. I know this might all change as the system is tweaked, but it seems robust.

Yeah, not sure why I didn't think of that. It is indeed a nice solution - so we replace OF_BLOWS with OF_FIN and OF_PROW.

@d_m: yes, at the moment finesse affects all of blows, to-hit and crits. But prowess affects damage in a huge way (both crits and non-critical damage), so the idea is that they're equally important.