Matt71

I'm playing on PoDT, and when I recuited Eder, I made him a pure rogue (swashbuckler would probably have been a better option, since Gambit and Vanishing Strike are really meh). At first, I played Eder as a ranged dps, but then I respeced him to use him as a melee rogue. Melee has 2 big advantages over ranged: 1) Persistant distraction, so that you get the sneak bonus and the +50% from deathblows on all attacks.That's really awesome and it's a big plus for melee imo. 2) With ranged, your reload time can't go under 3.1s (even if the tootip says the contrary). With melee, recovery time can be as low as 2.1s (it's prolly possible to go even lower), even while wearing some armor (I use fleshmender, which has +20% recovery). Also, melee weapons attack times are significantly lower than those of ranged weapons. All in all, a full melee attack takes much less time than a full ranged attack. Also, Sap is melee only.

I 100% agree with you, mant2si, about power levels. For instance, I just found the Mask of the Grotto Deep (+2 Power Levels for all Poison keyword Abilities) and I have no way to know how that translates in terms of ability efficiency. Guess I could know by doing some testing, but that's not the way it should work. As a side note, graze and -2 pen is -100% damage, not -75%: -0.50 / ( 1 + -0.50) = -1 = -100% Of course this is only true if you already have positive bonuses that total up to at least 100%, otherwise computations are much more messy.

That's very true. As a matter of fact, I was using the word "funnily" in an ironical way , since it doesn't make much sense that a -35% malus can have a very different impact, depending on the build it's applied to. I personnaly don't understand why Obs didn't go with multiplicative modifiers only. In my opinion, this is what makes the more sense. And if they were affraid that it would be possible to stack too many bonuses and reach a stellar overall bonus, a simple fix would just have been to lower some bonuses.

Just one small note about the -35% for dual wielding, since I saw someone asking about that in the "2.1 unique items" thread. -0.35 / ( 1 + -0.35) = (roughly) -0.54. What this means is that, if you have positive damage modifiers that total up (additively) to at least 54% and no other negative damage modifier, then the -35% from dual wielding is in fact exactly the same as a -54% modifier that would be additive with all the other modifiers. As an example, if you have +30% from overpen, +30% from weapon, +12% from might and -35% from dual wielding, then your overall damage modifier is: 30 + 30 + 12 - 54 = 18%. Quite funnily, that way of calculating things (double inversion) implies that the -35% from dual wielding is relatively insignificant for chars that can stack positive modifiers to a very high level (i.e. rogues) while it is much more detrimential to chars that don't stack many positive modifiers.

Hey everyone I've been trying to figure out how damage modifiers are taken into account by the game. I couldn't find any post about this, and the "obvious" answers (either multiplicative or additive stacking) both didn't seem to work. This may not be something new (first post for me here, although I've been lurking around a bit before), but I finally found out that it works very similarly as what is explained in this thread about recovery/reload times: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/98679-mechanics-attack-speed-recovery-time-reload-time/ Basically: The game adds all positive modifiers. Lets call P that sum. Then, for each negative modifier, the game computes mod/(1+mod). Let's call that result N(mod) Then the game adds P and all of the N(mod). Lets call S the sum. then: If S>0: final_coef = S+1 else: final_coef = 1/(1-S) Real damage is obtained by multiplying the base damage by final_coef. For instance, let's say you have 10 base damage, +15% from might, +55% from sneak, and two maluses, M1=-25%, M2=-50% P = 0.15 + 0.55 = 0.7 N(M1) = -0.25 / (1 + -0.25) = -0.33... N(M2)= -0.50 / (1 + -0.50) = -1 S = 0.7 + -0.33 + -1 = -0.63 final_coef = 1 / (1 - -0.63) = 1 / 1.63 Real damage = 10 * (1 / 1.63) = 10 / 1.63 = roughly 6 One interesting conclusion of those calcultations is that a might bonus isn't really important if you have other important bonuses from other sources. Let's say you have a rogue with +50% from sneak and +50% from devastating blows, a might bonus on top of that won't add much to damage (especially since you prolly also have bonuses from the weapon and possibly from the skill). However, a might malus has a much bigger impact on final damage. Edit: If you can manage to have S > 0, then might (bonus or malus) will have little impact on your damage output. This is even more true if you can get S > 1 or, even better, S > 2. The only situation where might can have a significant impact on you damage output is if S is close to 0. Let's consider an example to illustrate this. Example : Rogue attacking, base damage = 20, +55% from sneak, +45% from weapon, +50% from deathblows, +200% from devastating blow. if might = 10: P = 3.5, no malus, S = 3.5, final_coef = 4.5, real damage = 90 if might = 17: P = 3.71, no malus, S = 3.71, final_coef = 4.71, real damage = 94.2 (that's only a 4.7% damage increase) if might = 3: P = 3.5, N = -0.21/0.79 = -0.2658, S = 3.2342, final_coef = 4.2342, real damage = 84.7 (that's only 5.9% damage decrease)