A:EftP - Bug - Flawless shot does less damage than normal shot

[avok]

Hi

 

I have an archer that has a lot of throwing weapon skills and dex. He can deal around 30 - 100 with iron javelin (for example) right now. But the flawless shot battle discipline always reads 20 - 60 damage? Does not matter what ranged weapon I have equiped, different javelins or long bow. The flawless shot description says it has to add damage? The well aimed blow works properly increasing damage a lot over what the equped melee weapon normally deals.

 

Is that a bug in the game?

[ShieTar]

20 to 60 would seem strange, it should be 20 to 100. Which Version of the Game are you playing?

 

In any way, Flawless Shot works strangely. It takes the number of Damage Dice for your Bows Skill (Never Thrown Weapons), adds your Dexterity and annother 7, and then does this number of d5 in Damage. Since Bows are only d3 (but usually +10 or +20, and with some damage-dice of their own) this skill can start doing a lot of damage at very high Dex/Bows Values, but for the early game and thrown weapons users, it is indeed very useless.

 

And when you finaly have a lot of dice in this skill, you also have access to better battle disciplines, so it remains forever useless.

[Jerakeen]

Yeah, the missile disciplines are pretty useless. Slarty improved them in his mod, and Jeff was cribbing some ideas from that, so hopefully they'll be better in Crystal Souls.

[Mea Tulpa]

Actually, there is a very real bug (feature?) with battle discipline damage: they are improved by weapon bonus and Dexterity, but NOT by Bows or Thrown Weapons skill. This is sort of a function of how the engine works unfortunately.

 

It's been a long time but I think there may have been an issue specifically with Flawless Shot too, like accidentally reading Strength instead of Dexterity or something. Or maybe it was a tooltip damage only thing. I forget though.

[Randomizer]

I do remember that some battle disciplines do less damage than a normal attack, but I figured that was because you got a bonus effect instead.

[ShieTar]

Actually, there is a very real bug (feature?) with battle discipline damage: they are improved by weapon bonus and Dexterity, but NOT by Bows or Thrown Weapons skill. This is sort of a function of how the engine works unfortunately.

 

It's been a long time but I think there may have been an issue specifically with Flawless Shot too, like accidentally reading Strength instead of Dexterity or something. Or maybe it was a tooltip damage only thing. I forget though.

 

Well, I checked it with the Steam/Windows Version yesterday - Flawless shot and Blinding Shot both use Dex + Bows Skill, but are completely unaffected by whatever ranged weapon you equip. So with 40 Dex and 20 Bows Skill, you get 67D5 (201 average) damage out of Flawless shot and 67D6 (235 average) Damage from Blinding Shot.

 

Which of course is still less than you get out of two normal attacks with the first expidition bow, which should end up at 2*85D3 = 340 average Damage. So Adrenaline Rush remains the best option to deal damage.

 

Thats as long as the tooltips are accurate. Never tested that.

[Mea Tulpa]

The tooltips are NOT always accurate. There are many examples of inaccurate damage (or other stat) estimates in SW games.

 

That said, this appears to have changed in v1.01, so both my notes and your observation may be correct:

http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/16664-avernum-escape-from-the-pit-version-101-released/

 

(Note that the release notes are incomplete, since v1.01 also involved changes in training cost on the Mac version)