Pistoleer Archive

Executive summary: I tested Body Shot 2 and Body Shot 3 using a high end pistol vs. lairs, and came to the conclustion that BS2 still does a lot less damage per second. In other worse, no different than what we've been saying all along.

Intro: Well, I remembered Jaegen's original tests of BS2 vs BS3 were conducted with a CDEF pistol. And I began to think that maybe with a higher level character, or a different gun, that the variances might change, and BS3 might look better. So I tried to create a situation where BS3 might look good, even before hitting the speed cap.

Base stats: I was using my "lair gun", a Scout blaster with 85-174 damage, 1.7sec speed (it had been damage sliced). My pistol speed mod is +48. HAM cost is rated at 23.

According to the multipliers on the FAQ, the attack speed for BS2 for me should should be 1.7 x 1.8 x 0.52, or 1.59sec. BS3's speed should be 1.7 x 2.4 x 0.52, or 2.5sec.

Methodology: I was attacking large Rebel bases (after killing all the defenders). I stood about 10m away, and simply spammed BS2 or BS3 as much as possible until I ran out of action points. When I was done, I was able to look at the combat spam log, see the start and stop times (the error messages told me when I stopped doing the specials), and then copied over all the damage numbers into Excel.

Observations: Looking at timestamps in combat spam, BS2 seemed to alternate between firing every second, and every other second. This would match up with a 1.5 second theoretical speed. BS3 seemed to mainly fire every 2 seconds, and once in a while every 3 seconds. This seems to be a tad faster than the theoretical 2.5 second speed, but it's close enough for government work.

BS2 Results:

• 108 shots fired


• 167s elapsed time (2.8 min)


• average speed: 1.55 sec


• 41,990 damage dealt


• avg dmg per shot: 388.8


• damage per sec: 251.4


• HAM cost per shot: 24


• HAM cost per second : 15.5


• DPS per Ham per second: 16.2

BS3 Results:

• 134 shots fired


• 308sec elapsed time (5.1 min)


• average speed: 2.30 sec


• 62,976 damage dealt


• avg dmg per shot: 470


• damage per sec: 204


• HAM cost per shot: 28


• HAM cost per second: 12.2


• DPS per HAM per sec: 16.7

Conclusions:

BS2 still does more damage per sec than BS2 even with a pretty good pistol and carried by a pretty good pistoleer.

Using DPS per HAM per sec as a rough gauge of "spammable efficiency", we see that the two special moves are pretty similar. However, since BS2 would get the target killed faster, it's still generally the weapon of choice.

Looks like BS3 is still only potentiallly useful once you hit the 1.0 second speed cap.

PS - I've been considering testing stopping shot vs. Fan shot vs lairs in a similar fashion, since it seems that stopping shot does a better job of killing the lair quickly without draining my action pool so bad. However, the tests are pretty boring, so I may not get around to them.

1.7 * 2.4 * 0.52is about 2.1, not 2.5. Also, I'd guess the 'real' delay multiplier is 2.5, rather than 2.4.

This isn't really a surprise...just confirms what's already known. Also, the HAM issue isn't clear because it's influenced by your stats. Since focus stats seem to help by the same raw amount on a per-shot basis, if you had extremely low quickness you might find BS3 to be more HAM efficient. Measuring HAM costs on a given shot should be pretty simple since you have all the information there, and there is no variation on HAM usage. Best guess is that HAM usage is weapon HAM * HAM multiplier (style dependent) - (focus stat)/10. This seems to break down at low HAM costs, however.

Yeah noules, thanks for the math correction onthe "theoretical" speed for BS3 really being just over2.1. math is hard. I even used a calculator for that and still got it wrong

As as for HAM costs. You're right that they're character depending. But unless you're talking about 1000 point buffs, quickness changes aren't going to affect the math too much.

If you want easier computation, let me know.

The easiest computation is to turn on log /log. In your star war dir, there's a profiles\UserName\Galaxy sub-folder with your character name_chatlog.txt.

Install perl on your machine and I can write youa perl script to do the calculation for you.

Let me know and I'll work with you.