A6 - Quick Strike Analysis (WARNING: NUMBERS INSIDE)

[Lilith]

In this topic, Slarty posted a big chart of how different skills compare in terms of damage added per skill point spent. In another topic, we had a little dispute about how useful Quick Strike is. So I did the obvious thing and made up a little spreadsheet of my own. The results are interesting, to say the least.

 

The chart below compares Quick Strike assuming that all points in Quick Strike are from skill point investment, Quick Strike with all points still from skill point investment but one +AP item thrown into the mix, Quick Strike with no +AP item but 6 points of bonus QS from equipment, and Quick Strike with no +AP item but 9 points of bonus QS from equipment.

 

Code:

% Increase in Expected Average Total DamagePer Skill Point Spent on a Given Skill IncreaseSkill	QS alone	QS + 1 AP	QS + 6 QS	QS + 9 QS-----	----		----		----		----1	0.04 		1.63 		n/a 		n/a2	0.13 		1.54	 	n/a 		n/a3	0.16 		1.09 		n/a 		n/a4	0.22 		1.03 		n/a 		n/a5	0.23 		0.78	 	n/a 		n/a6	0.28 		0.73	 	n/a 		n/a7	0.27 		0.56 		0.54 		n/a8	0.31 		0.52 		0.63 		n/a9	0.30 		0.41 		0.53 		n/a10	0.34 		0.38 		0.59 		0.7911	0.33		0.30		0.53 		0.8812	0.36 		0.27 		0.58 		0.7213	0.35		0.21		0.52 		0.7814	0.38 		0.18	 	0.56 		0.6815	0.36		0.14		0.52 		0.7316	0.39 		0.11 		0.55 		0.6517	0.38		0.08		0.52 		0.6918	0.40 		0.06 		0.55 		0.6319	0.38		0.03		0.51 		0.6620	0.40 		0.01 		0.54		0.61

 

Notes and observations follow below:

 

1) Simplifying assumption: 9 AP is no better than 8, and 11 AP is no better than 10. 11 actually is slightly better than 10 if you’re using items or Adrenaline Rush, but we can disregard that for the sake of these figures.

 

2) The added damage percentages have already been halved to take into account the effect of Haste. If for some reason you don’t haste before every fight, Quick Strike is twice as useful. Quick Strike is less useful in fights where you use a Rod of Alacrity or Speed Burst scroll, but not useless, since having 15 AP (10 + 5 from the speed burst) gives you a chance of a triple attack with haste. For the sake of these figures we're considering the situation with haste but no speed burst. We are also disregarding stunning and other situations that can reduce available AP.

 

3) Because your chance of getting a second action with no +AP items is proportional to the square of your Quick Strike skill, Quick Strike actually increases in value-for-skill-points as you raise it, even when you take into account the increasing skill point cost. No other skill does this!

 

4) With a +AP item, QS is less pathological but no less dramatic: the first few points are good value, and then its effectiveness begins to drop off sharply as you’re already getting 10 AP most of the time.

 

5) Raising QS to 20 gets you an average of +0.33% damage per skill point - which is already pretty close to respectable, if not great. The trouble is that without a +AP item, you have to get QS pretty high before you start approaching that average, since the first few points are nearly useless. This means the best time to invest in Quick Strike is probably in Tenevra, when you can make Knowledge Brews and get a bunch of skill points to spend at once.

 

6) Because QS with no +AP items becomes more useful the higher it gets, QS suddenly becomes good value if you already have a few points of QS from equipment.

 

7) There’s no reason not to have a few points of QS from equipment: the Gloves of the Hammer and Lightning Girdle are arguably the best items of their type in the game for a fighter, the Flowing Silk Cloak has the highest defensive rating of any cloak and also boosts Parry, and the Lightning Ring boosts Parry and Quick Action. This gets you 6 points of free QS with no real downside.

 

8) With the Airy Greaves and Fungal Bow, it’s possible to get a +9 bonus to Quick Strike with little downside, which means that putting further skill points into QS is now one of the better investments you can make. Most of the other stat-boosting bows are of limited use to a fighter, and while the Airy Greaves aren't the strongest greaves in the game, greaves in general aren't so good as to make using a different pair compelling. (The best greaves in the game, the Ceremonial Leggings and Blasted Greaves, belong on spellcasters, not fighters.) I've disregarded the +2 bonus from the Molten Halberd for this analysis because it's not really endgame-quality equipment, although it's perfectly reasonable to use in the midgame if you have a pole user with high QS.

 

9) A second character can get a +3 bonus to QS with the Mauler’s Ring and a second pair of Gloves of the Hammer. This is pretty decent if that character already has a single +AP item, although the Avenger's Ring may be more useful overall.

 

Final conclusions:

 

C1) Given reasonable assumptions about equipment and training, Quick Strike (even with no +AP items) is ultimately better value than Anatomy or Lethal Blow, and easier to unlock (since you'll probably be meeting the Dexterity requirement to unlock Parry anyway).

 

C2) In a standard party of two fighters and two spellcasters, it’s perfectly viable to get everyone up to 10 AP in most rounds by the end of the game:

 

Character 1 wears no +AP items but loads up on 9 points of QS items and gets QS up to 20 with skill points.

 

Character 2 wears the Mercuric Plate and raises QS to about 10 with a combination of skill points and items. This character is the weak link: he will have 10 AP 75% of the time. Getting QS to 20 if you already have a +AP item is absolutely not worth it.

 

Character 3 wears the Quicksilver Bulwark and Mercuric Chain (or Mercuric Leather, if you really need those extra 2.5 pounds of weight allowance).

 

Character 4 wears the Cryos Spear and Quicksilver Sandals.

 

Characters 3 and 4 will need some +Strength gear to wear everything they want to. If you put the Ceremonial Leggings on #3 and the Talisman of Might on #4 it shouldn’t be too hard to kit them out in decent equipment.

[Slawbug]

*nod nod*

 

I think it's actually slightly easier than that. There is plenty of mercuric armor available. I guess you have to compare at some point whether or not the loss of skills from putting the Q Sandals on a fighter and not putting the Robe of the Magi on a spellcaster is great enough to make up the skill point cost in investing in a second PC's Quick Strike. I'm not sure that it is -- the ROTM is nice but not really necessary, likewise for the best shoes, and a few points of STR are cheaper than a lot of QS.

 

It may actually be more worthwhile for spellcasters -- I've just reached Mertis in my game and I've already run out of things to invest in for them. Spellcraft and M/P Spells start growing quickly and since both have traits attached, there is a serious case of diminishing returns for investing in them. I've also found that 6 Int and 10 ME is more than adequate to keep my energy topped off... the problem, of course, is that spellcasters are the PCs you probably want to have *predictable* second actions on, and also the PCs that it's easier to fit +AP items on.

 

My inclination then would be to give one fighter a bunch of bought QS and all the QS items, as you suggest above, and to fit the other three characters with 2 +AP items each -- sandals plus armor on a second fighter, and spear or bulwark plus armor on the spellcasters. You can get a free Mercuric Leather relatively early on, so the initial points invested in QS can still be useful when you buy them.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Psychosnow Emanation

*nod nod*

I think it's actually slightly easier than that. There is plenty of mercuric armor available. I guess you have to compare at some point whether or not the loss of skills from putting the Q Sandals on a fighter and not putting the Robe of the Magi on a spellcaster is great enough to make up the skill point cost in investing in a second PC's Quick Strike. I'm not sure that it is -- the ROTM is nice but not really necessary, likewise for the best shoes, and a few points of STR are cheaper than a lot of QS.

That's also an option, yes. I really hate investing skill points in Strength for spellcasters, but that's more of a mental block than anything.

The Robe of the Magi is more useful for its defensive benefits than for the Spellcraft bonus. Heck, you could quite reasonably have a spellcaster put a couple more points in Strength and wear the Radiant Plate. At the end of the game when your fighters have 80-90% armour, having to protect one mage at the back who takes three times as much damage as everyone else is sort of lame.

Quote:

It may actually be more worthwhile for spellcasters -- I've just reached Mertis in my game and I've already run out of things to invest in for them. Spellcraft and M/P Spells start growing quickly and since both have traits attached, there is a serious case of diminishing returns for investing in them. I've also found that 6 Int and 10 ME is more than adequate to keep my energy topped off... the problem, of course, is that spellcasters are the PCs you probably want to have *predictable* second actions on, and also the PCs that it's easier to fit +AP items on.

Yeah, the difference between two spells per round and one is really a big deal sometimes, since spellcasters' actions are important for much more than damage-per-round. All the +AP items except the Mercuric Plate are a pretty poor fit for front-line fighters, too.

I guess you could have one fighter with Quicksilver Sandals and moderate QS, one fighter with Mercuric Plate and moderate QS, one spellcaster with Mercuric Chain/Quicksilver Bulwark and one spellcaster with Mercuric Leather/Cryos Spear. But the Mercuric Leather really sucks.

As far as skill point investment goes, you can literally never have too much Endurance, especially if you plan to kill Melanchion. He does enormous amounts of fire damage to the entire party every round, enough to one-shot everyone who doesn't have at least 300 HP and 75% fire resistance -- and that's with invulnerability. Also, he gives you a death curse which there's no way to block short of just surviving the damage: this requires 350+ HP, 75%+ energy resistance and invulnerability, and even that isn't a guarantee.

You can kinda sorta exploit your way through him using the Slow spell: he's surprisingly vulnerable to it, on account of the fact that his script sets his level to 2 for some reason. But if he gets a turn, watch out.

Quote:

My inclination then would be to give one fighter a bunch of bought QS and all the QS items, as you suggest above, and to fit the other three characters with 2 +AP items each -- sandals plus armor on a second fighter, and spear or bulwark plus armor on the spellcasters. You can get a free Mercuric Leather relatively early on, so the initial points invested in QS can still be useful when you buy them.

This is another option. The sandals-plus-armour fighter had better be set up with some good defensive gear in his other slots, though.

[Slawbug]

If it really becomes necessary, you can also invest more in Hardiness -- at even moderate levels it provides better protection than any non-body armor. A lack of Gazerskin Sandals is not going to kill anyone.

 

Another boon would be to craft a second Quicksilver Bulwark and use that (plus a defensive weapon) instead of the Cryos Spear.

[Randomizer]

Quote:

The Robe of the Magi is more useful for its defensive benefits than for the Spellcraft bonus. Heck, you could quite reasonably have a spellcaster put a couple more points in Strength and wear the Radiant Plate. At the end of the game when your fighters have 80-90% armour, having to protect one mage at the back who takes three times as much damage as everyone else is sort of lame.

Having a spellcaster with high armor makes sense because anything that survives an area of effect attack will now turn on the caster. I found on normal a caster in robes was taking too much damage per round even using an invulnerable potion. But even on torment once the physical armor was above 80% and resistances were above 70% the need to heal was reduced to the point that regeneration covered most of it.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Psychosnow Emanation

Another boon would be to craft a second Quicksilver Bulwark and use that (plus a defensive weapon) instead of the Cryos Spear.

That's certainly an option. Two drawbacks:

1) You need a bunch more Strength to use it.

2) You need the most high-demand crafting resources in the game. You only get seven Demon's Biles and five Eyestalks at most. You'll likely want to spend 2-3 (maybe even 4) Demon's Biles on Gloves of the Hammer, 2 more on Gazerskin Sandals, 1 on the Jade Halberd if you have a pole user, and probably 1 on a Runed Helm assuming you have two spellcasters. Focusing Crystals are also in limited enough supply that you can't be frivolous about how you use them; I only had 4 left by the end of the game. Mind you, you don't need the Jade Halberd if you don't have a pole user, and the Runed Helm is a marginal enough benefit over the Cap of Thoughts that you don't strictly need that either, but the point is that it's really easy to run out of demon's bile.

It's a pity the game mechanics are set up so as to make none of the other shields worth using over the Quicksilver Bulwark in the late game, because some of them are pretty neat.

[VCH]

Hardiness is sweet. I had it at ~13 on all of my characters. My spell casters wearing robes and minimal heavy armour were ~ 82% armour.

[Slawbug]

Originally Posted By: Thuryl

It's a pity the game mechanics are set up so as to make none of the other shields worth using over the Quicksilver Bulwark in the late game, because some of them are pretty neat.

Yes. Avernum 6 has, I think, the most balanced game mechanics of any game Jeff has ever released. There are no broken skills, almost every skill is useful, and specialization and generalization can both be useful. But there are still some weak links. Equipment is one -- most is useless, with a small trickle of minor upgrades going through the whole game.

*sighs and goes back to fantastizing about a Gladius sequel*