Pistoleer Archive

I was surprised to see that Body Shot 3 was claimed to do *less* dps than BS2, so I ran a study on Lok. I selected two types of creatures that I could kill without moving or changing posture. I was using a scout blaster 70-143 spd 1.7,at about 50 meters, and remained kneeling throughout. Sometimes the creature reached me and hit me a couple times before it died, but this didnt seem to have any discernible impact on my damage. I would alternate firing BS2 and BS3 on the same creature until dead (since the creatures can be slightly different lvl of difficulty and this might impact damage). Only matching pairs of hits were used, so that there were an equal number of BS2 and BS3 shots in the study.

I also studied the speed at which BS2 and BS3 fire. I averaged 1.65 seconds/shot for BS2, and 2.24 seconds/shot for BS3.

First creature was spined snake recluse, difficulty lvl 14. I killed 24 of these, obtaining a total of 50 matching pairs of hits for BS2/BS3. Average damage for BS2 was 333, and 401 for BS3. In terms of damage per second (dps), this comes to 202 for BS2 and only 179 for BS3.

Second creature was gurnaset, difficulty lvl 15. I killed 15 of those for a total of 81 matching pairs of shots. Average damage for BS2 was 304, and 385 for BS3. In terms of dps, this comes to 185 for BS2 and 172 for BS3.

From this study we can conclude that BS3 does significantly more damage per shot than BS2, an average of 20% and 27% respectively for the two creatures. However, in dps terms, BS3 does *less* dps than BS2, 11% less for the first (weaker) creature and 7% less for the second (stronger) creature. Therefore, BS2 is the better move in terms of dps for these levels of creature (dark blues).

It is questionable, however, whether this conclusion applies to higher level creatures. Note that the dps differential between BS2 and BS3 decreased substantially when i switched creatures, and there was only one level of difficulty difference between the two (14 vs 15). I often hunt lvl 25-30 creatures, and it is not clear that BS2 would necessarily be better than BS3 at considerably higher levels of difficulty. I will try to test this against higher level creatures, but this will be harder because I will have to do things like move, change posture, etc etc. I dont think these things affect damage, but I am not sure of that. Also not sure if armor affects different moves differently.

One last point, in terms of action points used per move, BS3 is considerably better than BS2. I was using 30 action points per BS2 and 34 per BS3, however sinceBS2 is 36% faster, i was actually using 41 action points for BS2 versus every 34 I used with BS3. Since I get incapacitated due to loss of action points more often than the other HAM bars, this is not insignificant.

Camring - Intrepid

Sounds about right. Your first values are right in line with the FAQ data. I wonder if the second round of creatures gave you statistically improbable, but not impossible, variances making BS2 hit lower and BS3 hit higher than average?

Otherwise, your conclusion seems right.It would be interesting if there was something about the creature level that modified this, but I'm doubtful. Would be neat though. As an interesting aside, if the creature level did play a factor, that rate of DPS drop would suggest a level 18 creature would finally draw a higher DPS from BS3. However, this just isn't the case. Perhaps another round against the same creatures to see if you just had a bad run with BS2.

One thing that could be skewing your test result data is the consideration of energy resistance on those creatures. Did the recluse snake have the same energy resist % that the gurnaset did? In order to have a fair assessment between low and high level creatures they would need to have roughly the same energy resist if you are using a scout blaster.

I have never done an actual study by the numbers, but I swear I kill hilevel mobs (baznitches for example) noticeably faster using BS2 than BS3. It simply does more DPS allaround. What I do is I KD the mob three or four times with disarm or PW, then I use the body shots until they are dead. Every time I use this method to kill mobs, BS2 seems to kill faster, with around the same total action cost as BS3.

I would say that fixing BS3 would either entail upping the damage per shot that it does, or making it the same speed as BS2. This would go a long ways toward making our ONLY targeted shot a useful part of our repertoires.

How did you account for misses in your study JN? Are they included as zero damage in the pairs or did you discard pairs in which you missed one or the other shots?

Oirff

i think your observations are just normal statistical variance. Just like how doubletap and stopping shot can have HUGE variances in their damage output.

From what I've seen, attacking higher level creatures has NO effect on your ability to hit them or do damage to them. Higher level creatures tend to have more HAM, higher AR, and better resistances, but that's it from a defensive standpoint.

For example (if you're a rebel), go shoot up an AT-ST. Level 125... you should hit it just as much as you can hit anything else, and the base damage shown in your Combat window should be the same as shooting newbie mobs outside the starport. Of course the numbers floating about the AT-STs head will be realy small because it is AR3 with high resists...

So I would have to say it was just statistical variance. I don't suppose you have standard deviation values for your data sets? It would also be interesting to see how the medians compared vs averages.

JustinianNimue - Oh, and I should have included in my previous post - Great study! I love it when people perform well thought out tests like this. That's some good solid info and I think it shows the basic truth. I just don't agree that the level difference had anything to do with the differences between your data sets

So basically, lead with BS3 for higher dmg(since first shots are no delay) then follow with BS2's.

At least until something is changed.

I was hunting on Lok yesterday and realized that there I was using a scout blaster (marksman weapon) and spamming bodyshot 2 (marksman attack) and wondering ... "why are they nerfing pistoleer again?"

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Madrox wrote:
So basically, lead with BS3 for higher dmg(since first shots are no delay) then follow with BS2's.

At least until something is changed.

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I thought the delay occured after the shot. Thus you'd really want to finish with BS3, which would be almost impossible to predict...

Yep - What SmugglerFlux said. Weapon speed = delay = "reload time"... It's the time till your NEXT shot.

OK answeringa few questions.

1) misses were excluded. This is because misses are a function of "to hit" probability,not a function of damage. Since I shot BS2 and BS3 in sequential pairs, generally if one was a miss, the other was excluded as well. The exception was that if I got a (miss, hit) and later against the same creature got a (hit, miss), i coupled together the hits into a "pair". But since there were relatively few misses that didnt matter much. BTW, I noticed no meaningful difference in the "to hit" probability between BS2 and BS3.

2) all the damage data was done in pairs, so if there was any difference among creatures, it shouldnt affect the BS2 data any different than the BS3 data. Its not as if i shot one creature 10 times with BS2 and a different creature 10 times with BS3 and compared those... that would be incorrect.

2) since posting the orginal post, I took the 50 damage results for BS2 and BS3 against the first creature (snake) and divided by their respective seconds/shot, to get 50 pairs of dps numbers. And I did the same for the 81 pairs of data for the second creature (gurnaset). Here are some statisticalresults:

creature 1: BS2 avg dps = 202, standard deviation ~ 42; BS3 avg dps = 179, std dev ~34; BS2 dps > BS3 dps in 34/50 shots

creature 2: BS2 avg dps = 185, std dev ~34; BS3 avg dps = 172, std dev ~33; BS2 dps > BS3 dps 51/81 shots

3) I will still try to test against a significantly harder creature and try to see if this varies across creature levels or armor levels. But the more I think about it, I suspect that I got a couple of high outliers in the BS2 data against the first creature that pushed up the damage and the standard deviation somewhat, notice that stdev is 42 but the others are all around 33-34.

I am sure that SOE will eventually see that BS3 doesnt seem to damage as much as BS2 and correct this, I only hope they dont do it by nerfing BS2. It wouldnt be the first time I saw that in a mmorpg

Camring

I forgot to add that, if I am reading my statistics tables properly (thats a big IF haha), given that BS2 outdamaged BS3 in terms of dps 34/50 times and 51/81 times, there is only a 5 and 10% chance of this happening even if BS2 and BS3 were supposed to give the *same* damage. Since one would have expected BS3 to give *more* damage, this is pretty solid statistical evidence to refute that BS3 does more damage, and in fact BS2 does more damage...

Camring