Carbineer Archive
Thread: A Study of Quickness
First, I want to focus this thread. This thread is not about eating foods or using doctor buffs (though this information does in fact show how useful they are). It is about what is the best stat setup, particularily quickness, for carbineers not using any type of boost. This is relevant because as much as I try, I am never buffed 100% of the time.
Second, let me tell you why and what I did. I see often people asking what the best stat setup for carbineers is. Many people suggest high secondaries and others suggest low secondaries and medic skills. I set out to look at the effect of quickness on action cost and see which is better. Sorry for being a game geek, I am a scientist in real life so it was quite natural of me to think this way about the game. So what did I do. I fired crippleshot using a laser carbine that has an action cost of 46 using as many different combinations of armor and buffs as I could get my hands on over the past few days. Specifically what I did was clear a lair of all creatures and spawns. Then I openned up the character screen, fired crippleshot at the lair and immediately /peace so I could record the number. I would then adjust my quickness and repeat. A graph of my numbers is here along with a page of the actual numbers.
http://webpages.charter.net/mayers/ham.htm
Well...what did I find? First and most surprising is there appears to be a max action cost of 103. Once I hit 159 quickness, my action cost was always 103 no matter how low it went. Very odd. This most certainly is a bug in the code or my character is stat-bugged in some way. I can't tell. But the cap exists...for me. Someone out there may feel free to repeat these experiments and see if this is true.
Next, once you get above 160 quickness, the action cost is equal to:
action cost = -0.074913557 * (quickness) + 114.7164358
Using this formula I can calculate the action cost of crippleshot at various quickness. I also listed how many times you could fire at that level of cost assuming a pool of 900 action that does not regen. In essence, every time quickness goes up 100, the action cost drops by 7. From this, you can determine that it takes a quickness of 1531 to drive your action cost to zero.
Quickness////Action Cost////# of shots from a 900 action pool
300929.8
3508810.2
4008510.6
4508111.1
5007711.6
5507412.2
6007012.9
6506613.6
7006214.5
Clearly this highlights just how awesome doctor buffs and food can be. The big question is,and my goal of doing this, where to put your points? This is an interesting dilema because if you look at my chart, every time you add 100 points to quickness you get an extra shot. On the flip side, if you add 100 points to your action, you get another shot. So, where are your points best spent?
I thought about this for some time I came to the conclusion it depends on your medic skills. I can think of 3 cases...no medic skills, limited medic skills and great medic skills. I'll define great medic skills as the ability to heal yourself to full in 1 heal (you probably need to be using StimCs to do this reliably). Limited medic skills would be where you can heal yourself up to maybe 5-60% from nothing in 1 heal.
No medic skills. I think it is fairly obvious in this case you would want to have a high quickness and also high stamina. This gives you the most bang for your buck since you will have to sit down to regen or rely on a medic in your group (which may or may not be reliable). This is probably where most new characters will be at and thus this is a good setup for a new character. Here you want to minimize your mind, willpower and focus in order to boost health, action and their secondaries. If you do minimize your mind, stay out of PvP.
Great medic skills. In this case, I believe you want your quickness and your other secondary stats minimized in order to maximize your health, action, mind and willpower. As long as you can heal yourself in 1 heal, then you want to be able to heal often and you want a large pool of action to fire from. I think you will only see advanced characters in this category: master medics, doctors, combat medics or people who have dropped alot into medic. This is where I fit myself and I consider myself a very successful carbine user. I have 3030 as my medic skills and tote around StimC with a base heal of 565. I heal myself to full in 1 shot. In essence, I used medic skills to counter HAM costs. Also, I gather tons of hebivore meats to trade to doctors in order to be able to afford to use alot of Stims.
Limited medic skills. This case clearly falls between the two above. Your limited medic skills will only help you limit down time and give you a few more shots when you run out of action. You probably want a few extra points into quickness but not alot.
I do see alot of stat migration questions so hopefully this will address a few of them. I do hope it helps a few people and I hope a person or 2 verifies my numbers. Hopefully HAMs will be lowered and I will have to recollect all this data.
I have killer medical skill (Master Combat Medic) and a single area heal fills my health and action to the top. So sub-stats are given limited pool points, and the main catagories are heavily invested in (950/990) with special focus on the mind stats.
Before I achieved this level of healing greater focus was given to the sub-stats, as regeneration was a primary concern.
Having your data available will help in stat migration for future characters, thanks.
Great work Novamarine!
I would be curious about how stamina effects the action pools rate of regeneration
i.e. would a 100 point increase on stamina make up for a 100 point loss on quickness
based on what I have read on the forums I maxed out my stamina and lowered my quickness as low as it would go and I have been doing alot better ever since. I think this is mostly because it has increased my defensive capabilities (I regen much faster now so I can take more damage) and I havn't noticed any decrease in my offensive capability (perhaps1 or 2 less specials but in my experience this is rarely a problem)
Regarding the max action cost of 103 did you try this with other carbines too? Most weaponsmiths do not put scopes or stocks on the carbines because of the outragious increase in action cost compared to a small increase in damage rating. If this were true it might be a way to squeek out a bunch of extra damage 
bravo nova. and if it makes you feel any better, all of us who post on these forums are (to some extent) game geeks 
i mean, think about it, we are taking time out of our day to discuss a video game with others heh.
i would also like to see the benefit of having high stamina vs high quickness. with my current armor setup, i fire at the action cap (as proposed by nova), and will be migrating what quickness i can afford into stamina, to see if this has a noteworthy impact.
if it does, i'll repost here, if not, i won't
Glad to see people found this info interesting.
I am repeating the same kinds of collection but on stamina now. I have an extra characterthat I can migrate all over and not mess up my main character. Its going to take a few days to finish collecting the data as my pace is limited by stat migration.
I can already make some conclusions based on the first value since thecharacter had a very high stamina but I will wait until I have finished all of the number collection.