Weapon Choice

[kuniqs]

a - you deal from 2x to 5x normal damage
b - you deal from 3x to 6x normal damage

dude, u no program?

[Soirana]

a - you deal from 2x to 5x normal damage
b - you deal from 3x to 6x normal damage

dude, u no program?

for reference posts 15 and 16 in particular.

dude, still same old mistakes?

[Phoobnahr]

who uses 2h in this game?

Barbarians who get Vanquisher as a crowning gift

[sylph]

And although I know this will derail the thread could someone please explain to me the dynamics of: (a) critical hits,

I know this has been addressed, but I'll try to tackle it fairly comprehensively, for the sake of the forum search function in future.

* Puts her teacher's hat on *
[note - edited per soirana's comments, for the sake of future searches, thanks!)
A 'critical hit' doubles the base damage (ie before protection) of an attack. Say you have a sword that deals 1D10+2 damage, and you roll a 6 on your D10, you'll be doing 8 damage. If the goblin you're hitting has a PV of 5, that results in 3 damage to the goblin.
If you roll a crit, you'll instead deal 16 damage, which will remove 11hp from the goblin.
When you score a hit, the 'you hit the goblin' messaged is changed. For missiles, it's 'you exactly hit the goblin'. For melee, it's 'you hit the goblin with full force'.
Base chance for crit seems to be something around 1/20 (5%). This is further increased by up to an additional 20% with the 'find weakness' skill. This chance is halved for ranged attacks.
Ranged critical hits have a few additional rules. The most important of which are that they actually do x2, x3, x4 or x5 damage, instead of just double.

(b) slaying

Slaying weapons gaurantee a critical hit against a certain monster type. Additionally, slaying weapons add *another* x1 damage to missile attacks, meaning a slaying melee weapon with always crit it's target monster group for double damage, and a slaying missile weapon will always crit it's target monster group for x3, x4, x5 or x6 damage.

(c) find weakness

Find weakness simply increases your crit chance. Make no mistake, this can be *hugely* important, and makes completing the game with a non-spellcasting character vastly easier. Without find weakness, characters often have to rely on special equipment (slaying ammo, artifact weapons, penetrating weapons or phase daggers etc). With find weakness, you can literally just throw rocks at the ACW or a steel golem, and wait for the crits to kick in.
Note that many weapons feature a kind of 'built in' find weakness. Any weapon that 'increases your chances of scoring a critical hit in melee' (certain artifacts, not all of which are weapons, including the cat ring, bracers of war etc) will give you a further increase in crit chance. It seems that these are applied multiplicatively, not additively. That means that if your crit chance is 50%, and you get a +50% crit chance, you'll finish on 75% crit chance, not 100%.

and (d) how they all interact. Are the effects additive? Do they react with PV differently?

Mostly explained in this post, but take note that none of them penetrate PV or have any 'special' interaction with PV, other than the obvious fact that when you're doing 30 damage and the monsters on the level average 25pv, dealing double base damage results in a *lot* more than double the health removal.

It's also important to mention that blessed weapons deal +1.5x damage to demons and undead, which includes many of the most challenging monsters in the game. This *does* stack exactly as expected with critting. Rolling a 6 on that blessed 1D10+2 longsword results in 8*1.5=12 damage to a skeleton, or 24 if it crits.

Final strange point, since you mentioned PV specifically - weapons that *do* penetrate PV, while not mentioned here, do so in a fairly quirky manner. A weapon 'of penetration' really does ignore PV, but only when used in melee. A phase dagger works when thrown, but doesn't really ignore PV, it simply add's the monster's PV to it's own base damage. This is important when factoring in blessed vs undead and demons, because if a greater moloch has 100pv, the phase dagger get's +100 base damage, which then goes through the blessed bonus of x1.5. I'm unsure whether the phase dagger effect also works on crits. I see no reason why not, but I've not tested it nor heard it confirmed or denied. This is a testing opportunity that you can consider your homework assignment for the week.

[grobblewobble]

* Puts her teacher's hat on *
[..]
Note that many weapons feature a kind of 'built in' find weakness. Any weapon that 'increases your chances of scoring a critical hit in melee' (certain artifacts, not all of which are weapons, including the cat ring, bracers of war etc) will give you a further increase in crit chance.

Miss! * raises finger * I need a pee How much is that, for the rapier of the needle?

A phase dagger works when thrown

It does? That's kind of awesome.

The way phase daggers work seems like a bug to me, though. It's weird that it multiplies the PV damage bonus.

[Soirana]

.
* Puts her teacher's hat on *

Nothing like to pee in teacher's hat.

Ranged critical hits have a few additional rules. The most important of which are that they actually do x3, x4 or x5 damage, instead of just double.

Slaying weapons guarantee a critical hit against a certain monster type. Additionally, slaying weapons add *another* x1 damage to missile attacks, meaning a slaying melee weapon with always crit it's target monster group for double damage, and a slaying missile weapon will always crit it's for x4, x5 or x6 damage.

Nah, x3, x4, x5, x6. And missile not missile weapon, whether Sun's messenger using normal arrows do from x2 to x5, or x3 to x6 has never been tested to my knowledge.

A phase dagger works when thrown, but doesn't really ignore PV, it simply add's the monster's PV to it's own base damage. This is important when factoring in blessed vs undead and demons

Phase daggers do not give 1.5 vs demons, they follow different presumably buggy route.

[Tannis]

I cleared D50 with a duelist equipped with rapier of the needle and melee'd everything to death.

http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread...he-Gate-in-p18

It's an end game weapon, but it's in the lower tier of end game weapons. Executor or kinslayer are better. Hell, I'd probably take skullcrusher over it. But those weapons don't have one thing the rapier does.... it's stylish.

[sylph]

Thanks Soirana! Post edited!

[kuniqs]

What is the deal with melee crits doing only 2x damage? Is this a bug or something? Is it fixed in 1.2.x?
I remember the Guidebook of Forbidden Knowledge stating that melee crits do 2x, 3x etc. damage. That's from scanning the executable.

edit: Is there an adom version with cheat mode on? I wish to do tests on 1.1.1 and 1.2.x, but I only have the outdated 1.0.0 version with unlimited wand of wishing.

[JellySlayer]

What is the deal with melee crits doing only 2x damage? Is this a bug or something? Is it fixed in 1.2.x?
I remember the Guidebook of Forbidden Knowledge stating that melee crits do 2x, 3x etc. damage. That's from scanning the executable.

edit: Is there an adom version with cheat mode on? I wish to do tests on 1.1.1 and 1.2.x, but I only have the outdated 1.0.0 version with unlimited wand of wishing.

You can turn on exploration mode in 1.2.x, which I think gives you some things to play with. I'm sure if you look around the forums here a bit, you can probably find a download to ADOMBot for 1.1.1 as well.

Melee crits are definitely 2x in 1.2+ and missile crits are 2-5x (3-6x if slaying). I've never seen any indication that this was a bug.