Akos

Heavier damage weapons should receive a greater benefit from percent-based modifiers, while quicker weapons should receive a greater benefit from additional damage. What do I mean by that? So if we have something that modifiers damage by a 1.2 modifier, or in other words increases the damage by 20%, the higher base damage of two-handed weapons is going to receive a greater numerical benefit from the modification than a lower base damage dagger or sword might. To use actual examples, a Greatsword has an average damage of 19, a Sword 15, and a Dagger 10.5 average damage. Increasing all those numbers by 20% would result in: 19 * 1.2 = 22.8 damage, or a 3.8 damage increase 15 * 1.2 = 18 damage, or a 3 damage increase 10.5 * 1.2 = 12.6 damage, or a 2.1 damage increase As you can see, multiplication and division have a greater impact the higher your base damage is to begin with and thus naturally favor heavier hitting weapons and broadening the gap between the amount of damage that the various weapon options will do. On the other hand, adding damage to the base will favor quicker weapons as the amount of damage being added can be added more quickly on quicker weapons. The amount of damage added is the same regardless of which weapon you put it on, so the only other variable left to factor is that of speed. So to use an example: Weapon 1 does 20 damage, and makes an attack every 5 seconds Weapon 2 does 8 damage, and makes an attack every 2 seconds Their DPS should be exactly the same at 4 damage per second, or 240 damage every 60 second interval. However, let's go ahead and simply add another 5 damage to both. In Pillars of Eternity this would be the same as enchanting a weapon, or perhaps taking a talent or ability that reduces enemy Damage Reduction. Weapon 1 does 20+5 damage, and makes an attack every 5 seconds for 5 damage per second. Weapon 2 does 8+5 damage, and makes an attack every 2 seconds for 6.5 damage per second. In other words (20+5) / 2 = 5 (8+5) / 2 = 6.5 As expected, the extra 5 damage benefits the quicker weapon more than it does the the slower weapon even though their initial damage per second was exactly the same. The more damage I add the more dramatic this difference will become, and even if the slower weapon has an initially higher base damage than the faster weapon adding enough damage to both weapons will eventually over-come it. For example: Weapon 1 does 40+100 damage, and makes an attack every 5 seconds for 28 damage per second. Weapon 2 does 8+100 damage, and makes an attack every 2 seconds for 54 damage per second. Even though I doubled the amount of base damage weapon 1 does, adding such an extreme amount of damage to both weapons still dramatically favors the faster weapon. Granted, that isn't necessarily the order of operations Pillars of Eternity follows; it might calculate added damage first and then apply multipliers at the end, which would give an example like this: Weapon 1 does (20+100) damage, and receives a 100% bonus to final damage. Its modified per hit is 240 damage, and if it makes an attack every 5 seconds it will do 48 damage per second. Weapon 2 does (8+100) damage, and receives a 100% bonus to final damage. Its modified damage per hit is 216 damage, and if it makes an attack every 2 seconds it will do 108 damage per second. Hopefully you are starting to see that you shouldn't take the vanilla attributes as a signal that something is more powerful than something else; it really is an end result of what you can do to modify those numbers that gets you through the door towards optimizing final damage. How many options do I have for multiplying damage vs adding damage, what are the speed variables for weapons, how often can I hit the enemy and is the added accuracy more valuable to me than something else or is the added damage worth sacrificing something that might offer more powerful damage mitigation? I bring this up because I had noticed a trend on this forum while trying to gather data that dual wielding was an inferior style to two-handed weapons, and as I became more familiar with the methods available for increasing damage in Pillars of Eternity, my understanding of damage formulas naturally began to challenge this collective wisdom. The only piece of information I'm still missing (and why I'm in this thread to begin with) is how quickly weapons can apply their damage as this information is critical for me to start plugging in all the modifiers and summations to start figuring out how to optimize damage for various weapon types. So... How about them frames?

My observations from beating the first two wolves in the game senselessly, over and over again (Sorry PETA), with the main character and Calisca at 10 Dexterity: 'Slow' Weapons (Greatsword, in my testing) have a noticeable amount of delay before and after the red numbers appear that makes the weapon slower than a one handed, 'average' speed variant (Sword, in my testing). The recovery appears to be about the same amount of time as the 'average' speed weapon, but because the animation is lengthier on 'slow' weapon the 'average' weapon was able to apply damage more frequently. 'Average' and 'fast' weapons (Sword and Dagger, in my testing) appear to have exactly the same animation time; having my character and Calisca hit a wolf at exactly the same time had their red numbers appearing on top of one another with their respective recovery bars starting at roughly same time. The 'fast' weapon's recovery speed was noticeably faster than the 'average' weapon. This seems to conflict slightly with the data provided by Sensuki, but makes sense given the weapon descriptions in the game. If there wasn't something that made two-handed weapons slower they would have numerically been best melee-weapon in the game without argument. Two-Handed Style would out perform Two-Weapon Style at around 84 frames (or the second time a Greatsword hits) with Two-Weapon style not being able to do anything to close the gap, which would have been an egregious example of poor balancing. Unfortunately, I don't have video recording software installed on this computer to get an accurate count on the frames of animation currently being used in the game. I'd be interested in that information if anyone else has accurate numbers. -- For giggles I set my Dexterity to 999 resulting in a +2970% action speed bonus. I can safely confirm then that Dexterity absolutely has an affect on both the animation and recovery speed of an attack as my main character was doing damage faster than the game could play an animation, resulting in near-instant death of both wolves with my character twitching very rapidly. Similarly, lowering my Dexterity to 1 resulting in a -27% action speed malus had a slight affect on both the animation and recovery speed of an average attack weapon; Calisca was hitting slightly sooner than my character when attacks were initiated at the same time. Unfortunately I have no methods of making myself attack any slower that early in the game. I'm under the impression, then, that Two Weapon Fighting likely does have an affect on both the recovery and animation speed of weapons, but I would need to test it to be certain. I can't imagine they've coded for different types of weapon speed adjustments, but I could be wrong.

It's not like your companions were really doing anything with their skill points anyway; why not just give everyone in your party a decent stealth stat? Around 5 seems to be good enough for them to be close enough so that your Rogue isn't by himself when the fight starts. Around 5 is also good enough to carry your party around an enemy without them becoming alerted to your presence if you just want to sneak by sometimes. Once they're at 5 you can go back to pumping whatever it is companions do with skill points.

I'm supposing that 'x' button is my best bet, but it does require very specific timing. I really would have liked a basic AI option to "hold your ground" though. Maybe a future patch or mod will do something to that effect. You definitely want to let them advance, rather than try to correct their movement backwards as this often procs an attack of opportunity (or disengagement attack, as it's called in this game). Characters auto-pathing into traps after they've been established as traps was a bit annoying to me as well. I would have hoped the pathfinding would have been slightly more intelligent as to mark those areas as places not to stand in once discovered unless I'm specifically trying to set off the trap by sending a character into the red-zone. I suppose having to guide each character through a mine-field individually gives it a sort of realistic tension.

Simply; I am trying to enclose enemies in a door way so that my two front-liners can keep enemies from maneuvering to my back-line where the squishy mages and archers are. My issue is that my front-line keeps trying to move forward to engage new enemies rather than sit tight and let the enemies come to them. Worse, enemies keep getting attacks of opportunity on my front-line because they insist on fidgeting around. So my question then; Is there a way to tell my team to stand still rather than constantly trying to advance? I've turned on 'Disable Auto-Attacks' but it doesn't seem to take affect at very close proximity.