Pistoleer Archive

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Phuobar wrote:

YetiIronFist/Noules: I'll answer your question with another question

Is speed broken in general or only at high end? eg is speed broken at 0, 25, 50, 75?

Now something to consider: Let's use noules formula. A master pistoleer DPS is 1.74 that ofa newbie with zero experience. Now, DPS average only. To consider probability of true damage, one must consider standard deviation also. Let's make fantasy and say the newbie can use a FWG5 50 - 200 at speed 2.0. DPS for newbie is 125; master pistoleer, 218. The standard deviation is around 63%. So what this mean is roughly 5% of the time, the newbie will kill the master pistoleer. Sorry, but this possibility is not very satisfying to me. No newbie should be able to take down a master pistoleer 5% of the time. Now consider the same newbie against a master marksman (163 DPS). Standard deviation remain the same. The newbie will kill the master marksman 1/3 of the time. Definitely not good.

My answer: speed the way it currently work right now work fine until the skill goes past 75 (read BH dabbler, rifleman). Since it work great up until some limit, just cap it at that artificial limit.

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I'll address all the concerns I saw on this thread here.

First, I specifically mentioned that my proposed equation is linear in speed to DPS. Obviously it's not linear in speed to delay.

Second, even if +74 turns out to be insufficient, the new equation provides a simple way to balance. Just add more speed as necessary. What it does get rid of is problems with players taking BH pistol 1-2 and suddenly seeing their DPS skyrocket. As long as the DPS to speed is linear, you can balance to one point (like master pistoleer) and still be reasonably certain that nothing breaks horribly. As it is now, you have to consider every single point because adding +10 points to speed when you have +90 speed is vastly different from adding +10 points to speed when you have +0 speed.

The reason why I consider this to be superior to any sort of artificial cap is because it creates a discontinuity in the function. You still run into headaches trying to balance all different points of the curve.

I'm not sure why you think the std dev of the DPS for a given fight is 63%, but it's not. I think you're thinking of a standard distribution - we don't know what the damage distribution curve is, however. There's an obvious way to check this: as the number of shots grows unbounded, the likelihood of master pistoleer DPS > novice DPS approaches unity. You are also neglecting another very important aspect that increases with skill - accuracy. This has an enormous effect on the expected DPS. The difference between +0 accuracy and +100 accuracy is 50% in the to-hit chance. Going from (for example) 25% base chance, this represents a 3x increase in DPS.