Weaponsmith Archive

Hello to all Weaponsmiths!

Wondering about the best and preferred techniques to using experimentation points. How do you all go about it - one point at a time, several, several on different attributes at once (this always increases the risk, but what are the benefits of it?)? What have you all found to be most efficient?

Talk among yourselves! Go...

Thanks!

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I usually start off with 5 at a time, but that's just me.

Why? Why five at a time? I'm curious to know the advantage in doing so. Is it just to speed up the boring process? To reduce the amount of times you could possibly get the dreaded "moderate success" result?

Tell me more...Thanks Bro!

If you're going for the best possible outcome, then the best way to experiment is as many as possible, every time. The reason is this: Suppose you have 8 possible boxes to fill with your 10 experimentation points (which should take all 10 . If you use as many as possible, great successes will only require you to experiment this item twice to finish it. Yes, using one point at a time will make the moderates sting less, but it's likely that even one moderate out of 10 will make the item insufficient, and you'd probably want to do another anyway. So if you're going for all greats or better, it's more likely that you'll get 2 in a row instead of 10

grrr....anyway

the incomplete sence in the middle should end: "8 boxes(which should require all 10points to fill)"

Another reason this is a better method is time. Every time an item is experimented, no matter how many points are used, the complexity goes up by 1. The higher an items complexity the longer it takes to finish, whether you're using a tool, or a factory. Say an item started at complexity 15. Experimenting twice will make this go up to 17, whereas 10 times makes this go up to 25. This makes a huge difference in the amount of time this item will need to finish, and if you're mass producing them, it also takes precious factory time, not to mention power and maintainance.

Wow, great info sabacc1000! I should've figured that out -the complexity vs factory completion time/costs - but I didn't! Thanks!

If I'm not mistaken, in my experience, using all my points in shot (ie, filling the tree of boxes for one click of 'experiment') often yeilds the ever more bland 'good success'. Therefore, I figured that using 2 points at time more often yeilds the 'great success'. Any truth to this assumption?

What about putting points into multiple attribute boxes at a time (ie, a few in damage, a few in efficiency) - why does this increase the risk of the experiment and what are the positive payoffs for taking said risk?

Keep the info coming - thanks!

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It's been my experience that usingone point at a time generally produces better results (especially weapon speed) than any other combination if the resources you're using are less than ideal. If the resources are almost perfect, there's usually no difference in how you apply the points. You'll hit the max for that weapon regardless of how the points are applied. The differences occur when you're using lesser resources when more variables come into play. It's hard to quantify but it seems that by using one point, you benefit from "rounding" that's done on the backend using stats that aren't visible to us. For example, a speed of 5.777 using 8 points + 2 on a Laser Rifle will result in a final speed of 5.8. Using one point at a time, more often than not, you'll push the speed to 5.711 which results in a final speed of 5.7. Those figures are purely speculation but that's the only reason I can think of that causes me to consistently see better stats using fewer points at a time.

Maya