User talk:Tungtn/Physical damage analysis

Hello!

dNethack also gives higher bonuses for higher strength scores: +6 for 19-21, +7 for 22-24, and +8 for 25.

It also doubles the strength bonus for two-handed weapons (possibly through slightly different code, as it was an independent implementation).

Rapiers in dNethack also get 1/2 the usual strength bonus, but add (dex-11)/2 to damage.

UnNetHack and dNethack both also try to reduce the influence of luck on to-hit by reducing the likelihood that a character has max luck. In both games, luckstones only cause luck to time out more slowly, they don't stop it timing out altogether (dNethack got this from UnNetHack, but changes the timeout to be more rapid). Both games also feature (different sets of) enemies that can reduce luck.

I also recently fixed the to-hit bonus for monks making unarmed attacks. There are a few ways to boost unarmed attack damage in dNethack, as well. Most notably, the Gauntlets of Spell Power add silver damage to unarmed attacks, and the Premium Heart makes unarmed attacks do 2x damage (both artifacts are also gauntlets of power).

After reading this series, I'm planning to increase the damage bonus for Expert weapon skill to +5, and lower the damage modifier for Expert two-weapon combat to +0. I may also do something to reduce the strength bonus to attacks during two-weapon combat, but haven't decided what yet.

---Chris (talk) 18:41, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Though this is not directly relevant to physical attack damage, dNethack also attacks the "late game hits will never miss" problem from two different angles:

1) dNethack recently adopted Base Attack Bonus from DnD, which is the rate at which your to-hit bonus increases as your level increases.

• Barbarians, Convicts, Knights, unarmed Monks, Pirates, Samurai, and Valkyries are all full BAB roles (add level to-hit).

• Archeologists, Binders, Cavemen, armed Monks, Nobles, Priests, Rogues, and Rangers are all 3/4 BAB roles (add 3/4 level to-hit).

• Healers, Tourists, and Wizards are all 1/2 BAB roles (add 1/2 level to-hit).

(Fractions are rounded down).

2) dNethack also takes a stab at fixing the AC of late-game monsters:

• -8 AC for the Wizard of Yendor.
• -25 AC for the Riders (Death, Pestilence and Famine).
• -27 AC for Archons and Solars
• -20s to -30s AC for advanced demons:
  • -33 AC for an armed Marilith
  • -23 AC - pit fiend, ancient of ice, balrog
  • -36 AC - shayateen
  • -40 AC - nessian pit fiend, ancient of death
• -20 to -38 AC for the demon princes:
  • -20 AC - Fierna, Daughter Lilith
  • -23 to 30 AC - Bael, Zuggtmoy, Kostchtchie, Baphomet, Yeenoghu, Mammon, Malcanthet, Belial, Leviathan, Mephistopheles, Verier
  • -32 to 38 AC - Juiblex, Mother Lilith, Graz'zt, Baalzebub, Orcus, Crone Lilith, Dispater, Baalphegor, Dagon, Demogorgon
  • -44 AC - Shaktari (armed), -4 unarmed
  • -6 to -66 AC - Pale Night (randomized each turn)
  • -9 to -99 AC - Asmodeus (randomized each turn)

3) dNethack also changes the XP per level curve so that characters can reach level 30 simply from combat XP. This occurs sometime during the descent through gehennom, if the character doesn't drink any potions of gain level.

---Chris (talk) 03:27, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for not replying faster. I'll reply by topic:

Higher strength damage bonuses: Noted.

Double strength damage bonus for two-handed weapons: Noted.

Luck timeout and luck draining attacks in dNetHack and UnNetHack: I remember seeing this mechanic being added to UnNetHack and being uncertain as to whether I liked it or not. First, it adds diversionary busy-work, e.g. in the form of chasing around a randomly-found unicorn to throw identified gems at, or worse, having to backtrack to a unicorn you found on a previous level. Second, it makes the luck management even more important, which puts novice players at an even bigger disadvantage compared to veterans; would I really want to pull this into DynaHack if all it would do is increase the divide between veterans (who find the game too easy because they know all the important things) and novices (who find the game too hard because they don't know any of the important things)? Third, luck draining attacks are nasty, which makes monsters that have them scary, which is generally a good thing, but if it only leads to my first point (backtracking/chasing down unicorns), doesn't it just make them annoying instead? Granted, I've not played UnNetHack recently enough or enough of dNetHack at all to say for certain that this is how it all plays out in practice... have any players commented on how the luck management affects their games?

Fixed to-hit bonuses for unarmed/martial arts: This fix exists in almost every single variant I'm aware of; I think even the leaked NetHack 3.5-trunk has it. It makes virtually no difference in practice in NetHack due to how absurdly high the player's to-hit bonuses go relative to how much monsters push it back, which is partly why I hadn't really brought it up. To-hit in general is its own special kind of mess: I think it's calculated separately at all the points in the code where a hit-or-miss chance needs to occur (I know that at least melee and thrown/fired hit chances have separate but superficially similar code). The more I've looked into all this, the more it feels like to-hit calculations were the place where skill was supposed to matter the most, but the way skill affects it doesn't do nearly enough to make that the case.

+5 for damage for Expert weapon skill: Funny, this was about the number I'd settled on myself, since it'd make most weapons at Expert competitive with high damage weapons at Basic. If Skilled is tweaked, there's a nice symmetry of -5/-2/0/+2/+5 to map to Restricted/Unskilled/Basic/Skilled/Expert that could be the first steps to making skills in general more relevant, which is extremely important because skill level caps are one of the only ways that roles differ substantially from one another.

Change Expert two-weapon damage to +0: If you look closely at the damage tables for two-weapon skill and compare them to the normal weapon skill damage table, you'll notice that they're the same except that two-weapon is 1 point less at each level. I'm tempted to suggest that the two-weapon damage values be changed to the (classic) skill damage table, since its separate existence massively overstates its impact on final damage.

Reduced strength bonus for two-weapon attacks: This is probably the avenue with the most potential for making two-weapon a more interesting tactical decision than the dominant choice it is right now. I played around with fixed modifiers to the strength bonus in my mind, but I couldn't find one I could be happy with: at -6, late game damage is toned back but you'd be doing 1 damage per hit when starting out with two-weapon, which is bad, and halving it just gives it the same +6 bonus that a normal attack has, which does nothing about the damage done by the second attack. Another thought I had was to simply ignore the strength damage modifier for two-weapon attacks: this reduces two-weapon attacks by 12 points, putting it at a -6 point disadvantage compared to using a single weapon. It also creates a nice mechanical progression: no strength modifier for two-weapon, x1 strength modifier for a one-handed weapon, x2 strength modifier for a two-handed weapon.

dNetHack's approaches to "late game hits will never miss" problem: I noticed the Base Attack Bonus change while watching dNetHack's history on GitHub. I'm tempted to make changes along this line myself for DynaHack, but I wasn't sure how much I would modify them: big enough to be noticed, but not enough to be broken (in fact, figuring out the right numbers to change and by how much is why I embarked on this effort to begin with). As for the monsters with mega-high AC, it feels like a topical solution for a broad problem: sure those monsters are hard to hit, but it doesn't do anything for monsters whose AC hasn't been buffed, which is what ultimately affects how damaging each combat option is, especially if skill is to be made more relevant.

Also, I just noticed that you added more (below) while I was writing this all up, so I might have missed some of the newer stuff in this reply.

--Tungtn (talk) 07:03, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Just threw some more nerf bats at stuff (in dNethack):

1) Offhand weapons no longer get bonus damage from strength.

2) Luck now adds +1dLuck to-hit, rather than +Luck

3) The damage bonus for two weapon now runs unskilled: -5, basic: -3, skilled: -1, expert: +0

Also, weapon skills now give +2 damage at skilled and +5 damage at expert.

---Chris (talk) 06:23, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

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DnD has also struggled with the problem of AC vs to-hit over the course of its history, a good summary of the approach that is currently being tried in 5th edition (aka DnD Next) can be found here. The bounded accuracy solution (in brief, removing almost all scaling bonuses from the game) would probably work with vanilla's AC values.

The approach that I'm currently trying out in dNethack doesn't use that idea, though. One thing I've been trying to do is draw a sharper distinction between gehennom, the dungeons, and the endgame dungeons, in terms of the types and difficulties of monsters that show up. So under this system, the fairly sharp divide between demon and angel AC and the AC of everything else is desirable as they are supposed to be noticeably more difficult than everything else. That said, I think most characters can still expect to hit everything all the time[1], so :-/

I think the cumulative effect of the various changes I've made to two weapon combat has been to make it only somewhat better than a two handed weapon, instead of vastly superior as it was before. Since the max damage bonus for two-weapon is now +0, vs +5 for a single weapon, and since two handed weapons get 2x the strength bonus whereas two-weapon combat don't get a strength bonus on their off hand attack (max 8 points), a two weapon combatant needs to find at most 13 additional points of damage to make two weapon combat worth it. The off-hand weapon can be enchanted to +7, leaving just 6 points that must come from other sources. Silver hitting silver-hating is therefore enough to make it worthwhile, and a lot of roles that get a first sac gift are allowed to use that artifact in their off-hands, which is usually also enough to make it worthwhile. Finally, a problem that I just noticed is that there are no silver two handed weapons, meaning that vs silver hating two-weapon combat gives you +21 average damage, if you can find two silver weapons. So, again, :-/

[1] Breakdown of to-hit (30th level, which is to be expected in gehennom):

1/2 BAB: 15 base + 7 enchantment + 5 skill + ~3 ability = ~+30 before luck, which hits the -10 to -20 range without too much trouble and the -20 to -30 less easily.

3/4 BAB: 22 base is +7 above 1/2 BAB, so -17 to -27 easy and -27 to -37 less easily.

Full BAB: 30 base, +15 above 1/2 BAB, so -25 to -35 easy, -35 to -45 hard.

Even if you neglect saccing for luck almost completely, you'll still have +1d6 to +1d9 above those ranges.

-40 is very high for AC, so based on this estimate, only Tourists, Healers, and Wizards will routinely have trouble hitting demons in melee.

The stats assumed here are pretty low, 18 strength gives a +2 bonus all by itself, and dex gives a 1 point bonus for every point above 14 (so the +3 above assumes either 18 str and 15 dex or thereabouts). Gauntlets of dexterity can therefore improve to-hit by up to 5 points.

Rings of increase accuracy can be used to further increase to-hit in a pinch. Tourists in particular can charge up two such rings for when they need to hit stuff.

---Chris (talk) 23:13, 29 October 2014 (UTC) ---Revised Chris (talk) 23:15, 31 October 2014 (UTC)