Pistoleer Archive

I've been playing this game for a little over 2 months, and I'm still confused on the exact purpose of the secondary stats.

Everyone seems to know what the primary stats are(Health, Action & Mind). These are the ones that take direct damage and are used up by your special moves. When you run out of these you get incapacitated or killed.

Everyone also seems to know what some of the secondaries are (Constitution, Quickness & Will power). These are directly tied to the regeneration of the H A M stats. You really notice the lack of regeneration when the spice bug has damaged your Constitution & Quickness to 150.

However I'm still a bit confused on the other secondaries (Strength, Quickness and Focus). I've read that these have something to do with affecting the costs of your special moves. Does anyone have any math behind this?

If I understand correctly, as you approach Master Pistoleer, most of your special moves have the same time cost as attacking without a special move. Since this means I'll be using more special moves, it makes me wonder if I take 100 away from my action and give it to my Quickness...will that payoff in the long run?

Well, strength, quickness, and focus are indeed there to reduce the cost of special moves. in fact, that's they only thing they do.

If you had "low" stats of these, and did a special move, you may see a "-40" float over your head doing a special move. If you had higher stats, you may end up with a -36 instead.

Unfortunately, I don't know the formula. I've heard that the floaty-head numbers are actually the sum of all the HAM costs and the color of it is just the highest pool. Dunno really.

This hasn't been tested rigorously, but I believe 10 points of str/quick/focus will reduce HAM cost of a special move from that particular pool by 1 point. All specials do seem to pull from all three pools, depending on the multiplier (based on the special) and the weapon HAM characteristics. The 'floating' number is color-weighted by the HAM difference between client updates; if you lost 100 from just mind, the floating number is blue, if you lost 50 from mind and 50 from health, the floating number is purple, and if you lose 90 from mind and 10 from health, it's a very slightly purplish-tinged blue. So on and so forth.

Is this link reliable ?

http://www.swgcenter.com/info/article.asp?ID=558

Gratdo - I happen to be dabbling in Artisan as well as sampling at the time that I saw this post. I quickly checked the math on the web site you provided and it wasn not accurate for me (about 10% off).

Forgery - I did some testing with this awhile back and was unable to find a formula for determining exactly how the cost stats (SQF) work with pistols, special moves, buffs, and armor. I can tell you that it is not linear and that it varies significantly with the combinations of factors that you're using. At one point I used some spice to buff up my stats, and after increasing one of the cost stats by 500, I only saw a 2 point decrease in the negative number floating over my head. I gave up the experiments after that.

If you want me to link to my thread on this, I'd be happy to... otherwise I'm leaving it buried.

I deal with buffing all day, and I'm somewhat skeptical of their formula. I had been working under the assumption that it was a formula more along the lines of stat/baseline * base activity cost. The linear approach would be nice (eventually leading to a stat cap where it wouldn't matter anymore how much higher you could get it), but their formula scares the crap out of me. If what they listed is correct, it would take a base cost for an activity (which is often unknown) as well as some divisible number to figure out how many points a stat would reduce the cost (in the link, sampling was reduced every 12.5 stat points while dancing was reduced by every 37.5 points). Could you imagine how hard it would be to document that (much les come up with fair costs)? That and some really bad rounding errors on their examples ("-21 / 2 = -10.5 rounded to -10") seem to me an indication that they're trying to come up with linear formulas to non-linear equations. That and it puts a huge burden on the developers to come up with both a cost for each action and a scale at which Str/Quick/Foc all reduce it when they could just come up with a base cost. It would also suggest that I would get to no HAM on a Scout really easily while a Rifleman might never neutralize the HAM cost of a rifle. Seems fishy to me, unless they came up with a different linear reduction scale for pistols and rifles (argh).

The part that's killed me on trying to test this is that they add all the numbers together. That makes it unbelievablely hard to isolate costs from activities where we know the base HAM cost (weapons special HAMs are listed on the weapon). Now that dancer mind buffs are working, maybe surveying will be a good test to use as it only pulls from one stat. That or dancing I suppose.

There's probably a minimum cap on the HAM costs of special moves. Using rifle specials, the 10 focus/1 HAM ratio was very close to what I observed (while on Muon, my HAM cost dropped by about 50 points, and when I am wounded in focus my HAM cost increases by roughly 1 per 10 focus). Riflemen also often use the DLT20a rifle because of the lower mind costs. The mind cost difference between a laser and a DLT20a is from 60 to 29, but I get FAR more than double the number of shots using a DLT20a, which seems to again support the theory that the formula is proportional to(special move * weapon HAM - focus).

One would gather from these comments that if the value of Quickness is so marginal, that you would set it as close to the minimum as possible and redistribute the points to Action & Stamina. Am I reading you correctly? Of those that responded, what do your numbers look like for these 3 stats?

Quite the opposite. Given how special-happy I am, a high quickness is critical for non-buffed combat. 23 base HAM cost for a scout can still wear away a bar with a low quickness.

Well the secondaries are easy the first one(the one right after the health or action or mind) lowers the ham cost. The one below that which i didnt see anyone mention is related toyour regeneration rate.