| change is good |
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| change is good |
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But seriously, am I missing something obvious- is there somewhere I can get this kind of information from? I know sometimes these kinds of things get brought up at Q&A's, but I find I have the same disadvantage there, and a lot of the time I hear questions about things that I didn't know existed. (How can I ask a question about damcap, for instance, if I don't know it exists?)
Rufus (append 9 to post 24) mentions that people miss out on the finer points of the combat system, and I can't help but wonder if the reason is that they just don't know about them. Personally, I know how to see the quality, damroll, and stats on a weapon. But I can't fathom how I would ascertain any of its other properties, let alone compare, for example, which parries better (short of performing statistical analysis on combat results while using the weapons, and sorry, I have zero interest in doing that).
Of course, as a mage, what I'd really love would be a way to easily ascertain the damage spells do. The best method I've come up with yet is using judge to find mobs with low hp and seeing if the spell will kill them outright. This is about as boring a statistical analysis as I am willing to engage in. By the way, based on those tests, my flamestrike does at best 15 points less, and on average more than 20 points less than I was told it could do at a recent Q&A (It was Rufus who told me). And this is with 100 mind and having had the spell for 23 levels. I'd even be willing to use a practice on a spell lore skill that gave more detailed information on spells than the help files currently provide, including damage amounts/ ranges, durations, etc. Since I don't have that, if anyone can tell me of a source where I can learn about all these details, it would be much appreciated.
-MUgwump
order homunculus in fairness I should point out if you stagger the mob -laugh alias- when you stagger yourself...you should wake up about the same time. But it seems that this only happens 1 in 10 times or so in my experience.
Cianor.
On the spells thing, though, determining spell damage is one of the easier things to do. If you read the help files on damage spells they say (or should say, I believe they were modified recently) that the mana cost for them is proportional to the amount of damage they do. Up until a few days ago, this was point for point. Just by the way spells work, they need to have an 'initial' mana cost. For dam spells this is small (2 to 4), and a fact that is really negligable. So before, they could be calculated by 'oh, it took 60 mana for that spell, I did 56-58 points of damage.' The change to spells (posted on the welcome board) is that mana cost was to be halved for damage spells. The small initial cost is the same (it's meager 2 to 4 points depending on the spell) but divide your formula above by 2. It cost 32 points, so I'm doing about 56 to 60 points of damage with the spell.
Area affect spells (such as noise) are a little harder to judge. Their initial cost is a tad bit higher, but their damage and mana cost is calculated on every victim it hits.
As far as the numbers I told you in the Q&A, these are the maximum numbers possible, given all the advantages the player can have while casting a spell (victim position, etc) I generally don't tend to include suscepts into that, but those can even do more.
Also, for every spell, even though (with the exception of harm) there is a direct mind-to-damage relation, there are by chances of random roll, often a 1-5 to 1-15 point difference in the amount of damage a spell can do. When I talk about maximums, I add up the highest of all possible numbers, not the average.
Hope that helps.
-Ruf
As for the spell damage, you make it sound so simple I feel almost foolish for asking. Actually, the help files I checked dont indicate the correlation between mana and damage quite that clearly. The data I collected still doesnt show my flamestrike doing quite as much damage as the formula you gave, but as you said there are other factors involved, so Ill call it close enough and leave it at that.
But what I really wanted addressed was the issue I raised in the first paragraph. Not so much in terms of behind the scenes mechanics as in-game functions. I was here over 5 months before I heard of the existence of the clear command, for example. When I find information through word of mouth that doesnt seem available elsewhere, it leaves the impression that theres lots of other things I should know that I dont. Of course, if Id ever had any use at all for the mark command, I might have heard of it, and maybe a few other things too. -ponder-