Pistoleer Archive

I'm not very good at introductions (just rambling as you'll soon see), so here is the body of the post:

--------------------------------------------------------------------

All of this was done a couple of weeks ago, and it was at the recent prompting of my guild leader (read: nagging) that i'm making this post to show my results, I hope this helps someone and provides some insight into a way part of the combat system works.

Setup Info:

There are 6 PRIMARY hit locations, 3 Health (Hands, Arms, Chest), 2 Action (Feet, Legs), 1 Mind (Head). The 'arm' location is divided into left and right arms, and each of these is further divided into bicep and bracer locations, but all the arm locations take from the health pool when hit.

The test was performed by a guildmate firing at me steadily (from a kneeling position at 30m with a CDEF Pistol, no powerups or specials used). I was wearing a full suit of bone armor, each labelled for the location it covered equipped with no weapon, and healing when nessecary. The test was done over 1000 shots and any misses (32 of them) were discounted, leaving a total of 1032 shots performed.

I cannot say the following applies to melee attacks as well, but a test will be performed soon in a similar fashion to make sure. Currently this is about how our shots are seperated, not the way in which a melee (most animals) mob damages us.

Yes, I ramble, but heres the info now

--------------------------------------------------------------------

The Theory:

Was as follows (and I remember reading similar on these boards before as well):

All locations have an even chance to be hit (rough 16.6% chance per)
The left and right arm locations count as 1 location (half amounts to left/right).

Giving the following:

50% of shots hit Health (Hand, Arm, Chest)
33% of shots hit Action (Feet, Leg)
17% of shots hit Mind (Head)

--------------------------------------------------------------------

The Results:

1000 shots, 32 misses on top of this (discounted)

LOCATION HITS PERCENT
Head 126 12.6%

Feet 16116.1%
Legs 16016.0%

Hands 106 10.6%
Left Arm 123 12.3%
Left Bicep 38 3.8%
Left Bracer 85 8.5%
Right Arm13413.4%
Right Bicep 47 4.7%
Right Bracer 87 8.7%
Chest190 19.0%

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Conclusions:

As you can see from the results, although locations hit are not entirely even, the theory is sitll fairly close except when it comes to the arms, of which both left and right count as a seperate location entirely meaning there are 7 PRIMARY hit locations and skewing the division of results noticeably.

The actual division is as follows:

55.3% of shots hit Health (Hand, Left Arm, Right Arm, Chest)
32.1% of shots hit Action (Feet, Legs)
12.6% of shots hit Mind (Head)

OR 55% - Health, 32% Action, 13% Mind (to simply)

--------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Personal Addendum:

Make of this what you will, but personally it finally validated to me that Body Shot 2 of all the Pistoleer Specials is currently the best one to use when you want a mob dead fast (doing most damage for exp is different), the working is below for how I decided this, but this part is my personal views, not part of the actual test given above.

Calculations based on the primarily used specials, Double Tap, Stopping Shot, Fan Shot and of course Body Shot 2, and the information from the Pistoleer FAQ, only the end DPS was needed, so the other rows were removed for ease of reading.

Delay Mod 2.4 4.0 2.1 1.8
Dmg Mod 4.0 4.7 2.8 2.1
Dmg/Sec (DPS) 62.3 44.5 50.5 43.8
===========================================
Special Used FS SS DT BS2

This is the chart given showing Fan Shot as the best, but not taking into account the division of hit locations which BS2 does not suffer from as all of its hits target the Health pool. Taking the hit locations into account (using my work above), the following DPS values appear instead assuming you want health targetted (55% of hits):

Original DPS 62.3 44.5 50.5 43.8
Actual DPS 34.3 24.5 27.8 43.8
===========================================
Special Used FS SS DT BS2

An obvious 'winner' now appears when you simply want the target dead quick (BS2 being 27.7% greater than FS, enough to make a noticeable difference on any mobs with a decent amount of HAM).

Okay, enough rambling from me, hope this helps, enjoy!

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Kith

This is a superb post. Excellent work.

I've been meaning to test this myself ... it's not only easy to test, but it's fairly important to know. In my experience, random HAM attacks hit health about 60% of the time and are thus ordinarily far inferior to targeted attacks. Your data verifies that conclusion, without a doubt. Nice sample size (1000) as well.

So does this finally prove that the most effective special we get is in the marksman line?

---

OwariLoren wrote:

So does this finally prove that the most effective special we get is in the marksman line?

---

Very nice work. There's about 2% error on other items, however, I believe. This is pretty clear if you look at the left arm/right arm values (which one would expect to be equal).

More useful I think are seeing which pieces of armor are important. I was surprised by the bracers getting hit more often than the bicep - as I recall, the HAM costs on the bracers are usually much lower than the biceps. This results seem to imply that the bracer and hand pieces might be the most efficient (HAM-wise) way to have some health armor absorption, with torso and biceps being less useful. I may consider investing in good bracers and gloves to deal with flamethrower attacks without losing too much mind stats.

That's a good point Noules. I was thinking about what armor lessons I could draw from his data, and I hadn't thought about the comparative value of gloves/bracers for absorbing health damage from flamethrowers.

The chestpiece isn't altogether bad, though, because of all the targetted health shots that hit the chest. I know that DoTs are ignoring armor right now ... is the same true for TorsoShot, which isn't a DoT-only special? If Torso doesn't ignore armor then I still think that the Chest is the best value overall. If it does, then gloves/bracers make more sense overall in PvP.

DoTs do seem toignore armor (and as a consequence, you don't seem to get the AR bonus either) but I'm not sure if torso shot is a plain DoT or a damage+DoT like flamethrowers. In my particular case, I'm not too worried about the DoTs - the fight for me almost always ends before they become a factor due to my running out of mind or my opponents being dead.But flamethrowers (and LLC) currently have a melee damage type, so riflemen take the 2.5x multiplier damage, making their autoattacks extremely dangerous. Having a few cheap pieces of armor giving me random HAM protection without wrecking my focus is exactly what I'm looking for.

Also, I hadn't realized that the pool shots always hit chest/legs - is that really always the case?

Torso is a damage+DoT, like flamethrowers. It's used a ton in PvP, either as (1) a way to grief you or (2) a way to build up your wounds so you have more downtime, because often in PvP getting the enemy's bars to be as black as possible is the only way to "win".

If damage+DoTs don't ignore armor then the Chestplate is still the best value for the Pistoleer. For us flamethrowers are less of an issue ... we don't have to stop and /aim, so we can keep our distance from them and stay on the move. The real effectiveness of Commandos that I've seen (and I fight alongside two Masters from my PA often) is when they use the revenge TEF, which negates their disadvantages. When you see a revenge TEF flamethrower coming, it's time to put the gloves on. LOL

I can see how things would be different for you as a rifleman, however. Once they fix the "heavy weapons as melee" bug, though, you should be okay. Just /mindshot2 and keep your distance.

From what I've read on the commando forums, the initial flamethrower hit is mitigated by armor and resists, but the DoT portion is not. I'm not sure if torso shot works like this, but it probably does.

From that dev post that Holo made from the combat dev, apparently the heavy weapons doing melee type damage is intentional - to allow melee characters to benefit from toughness, and to take less damage (since they have to get close to do damage). It just screwed rifles as a side effect (cough) although it was mentioned in the same post that they were considering moving it to a ranged damage type.

As a note, commando revenge TEFs don't really affect SLs with pets due to boost morale (from a wound standpoint - still crispy-dead if they hit with their special). Unfortunately, they're fixing the bug which made this possible next patch, so we'll have to start worrying about commandos too.

Excellent post!

I'm kind of glad my guesstimate wasn't so far off.

Good to see test data to back up what we've been reading elsewhere, great post.

Regarding BS and fan shot, the FAQ does not say fan shot is better than BS, no idea where you get that from. RANDOM HAM vs TARGETED POOL. The general understanding was (before your test), that Random HAM shots do 1/2, 1/3, 1/6 to health, action, mind pool. So that means if fan shot is 4.0 damage modifer, on average it does 2.0 health, x action, x mind, average taking down a mob is at 2.0 health damage per untit time. Obviously lower than Body Shot 3's 2.5. Targeted pool shots are always the way to go in PvE, always have been, and we've always known that until you cap BS2 speed (high speed and/or fast weapon), BS3 does less damage, making BS2 the best way to kill a mob, a marksman special attack.