A note about Bloodlust

[mpnorman10]

There was concern expressed a while back about the Bloodlust sword missing to much when first obtained due to the expert difficulty and berserk penalties.

I am doing an MDP run in Arnika, have just picked up the sword and am closely monitoring its performance.

Roughly, just by observation, about 25% to 33% of the swings are hitting and doing damage. Because there are two swings that is roughly 50-67% chance that at least one swing per round of combat hits, and for considerable damage. Note that these observations (anecdotal evidence - small sample size) included a Level 9 slime and a Level 9 Rebel Spirit.

Edit: The numbers 50%-67% were incorrectly calculated and this was fixed in posts that follow. It is actually more like 44%-56%, given the assumption of 1 out of 4 to 1 out of 3 swings resulting in a penetrating hit that does damage and 2 swings (due to the bonus swing that Bloodlust gives).

The key to this excellent performance (for this early in the game) is the allocation of Attribute and Skill points at creation and level-up. Those allocations are as per the MDP guide and here is the example Bard with Bloodlust I have been observing.

Level 8 Male Mook Bard:

Attributes: Strength-> 85, Intelligence-> 50, Piety-> 25, Vitality-> 50, Dexterity-> 90, Speed-> 45, Senses-> 65

Skills: Close Combat-> 30, Ranged Combat-> 2, Dual Weapons-> 0, Artifacts-> 29, Mythology-> 14, Communication-> 18, Sword-> 38, Dagger-> 0, Staff & Wand-> 0, Shield-> 7, Bow-> 3, Throwing & Sling-> 0, Locks & Traps-> 29, Music-> 23, Pickpocket-> 0

AR is 30, To Hit is +9 and To Damage is 70%

My tentative conclusion (just IMO) is that if the player intends to have one of their characters use Bloodlust and that is prepared by pushing the appropriate (again, IMO) attributes and fighting skills at creation and level-up, then there is no reason to delay the equipping of Bloodlust with its inherent Berserk capability (and penalty) even when playing expert difficulty.

Note in the above there are several skills that received zero skill points at level-up but are coming along nicely, IMO, including Artifacts, Mythology and Shield Skills.

Also Music at 23 (+5 boost at creation but 0 points at any level-up) is coming along very nicely, IMO. Piercing Pipes is powerful in battle, but not overly so.

[vysionier]

Personally I think all of those work better than bloodlust, but that is not based on logic, rather just preference. I hate cursed weapons. Of those weapons though, only fang and bloodlust can be used by a bard, gadgeteer, or rogue.

The other weapons (muramasa, ivory, and mauler) I think ivory and mauler are top notch, but muramasa is less impressive.

All this is only subjective based on my personal experience. A more objective approach might be in order to know for sure.

[magnus]

Bloodlust’s accuracy is indeed poor when you first obtain it. I usually have a Rogue with maxed STR and DEX which helps. Rogue’s insane scaling with that weapon almost feels like cheating.

[Zergs]

İlk olarak randompeasant12351 tarafından gönderildi:

Bloodlust’s accuracy is indeed poor when you first obtain it. I usually have a Rogue with maxed STR and DEX which helps. Rogue’s insane scaling with that weapon almost feels like cheating.

I still need to try this. I've basically never used a Rogue other than Myles,

[mpnorman10]

Zergs, those are, indeed, excellent swords.

Remember, the Bard and Gadgeteer are powerful in so many kinds of party primarily because of their instruments and Gadgets. With a sword and shield they are also great front line characters.

Bloodlust comes early, without holding off on levels it can be obtained as early as about Level 6. Yes, it is cursed with all the drawbacks of that, but that cursed status does not get in the way of either Instruments or Gadgets of the Bard or Gadgeteer, respectively.

For the MDP example that has both (and specialized casters), Bloodlust and Fang are typically, at least for my games, available earlier than the other excellent swords you mentioned.

The weapons for such a party are limited, but the best ones they can use are pretty darn excellent, specifically:

Bard: Still with Bloodlust throughout the game
Gadgeteer: Fang or *Light* Sword if it becomes available
Priest: Mauler
Alchemist: Staff of Doom

The first three can wear a shield throughout the game while the Alchemist can wear one (with a Shillelah, for example, equipped) until there are decent two-handed Staves, like the Ebon Staff or Staff of Doom for example. The Bard and Gadgeteer use of those late game swords is limited, but when there are characters in the party to use them they are terrific.

For parties other than an MDP like that there are other excellent swords in the later game as you point out, and Enchanted Broadswords and the Demonsblade from Cierdan's crypt are decent middle game swords until then.

İlk olarak Zergs tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak randompeasant12351 tarafından gönderildi:

Bloodlust’s accuracy is indeed poor when you first obtain it. I usually have a Rogue with maxed STR and DEX which helps. Rogue’s insane scaling with that weapon almost feels like cheating.

I still need to try this. I've basically never used a Rogue other than Myles,

Yes, the point of this thread was to show that even when the chance of a penetrating hit doing damage is as low as 25% per swing, the extra swing makes the chances of a damaging hit with at least one of the two swings (toward the beginning of the game when one attack and one swing is all characters get) is not bad at all (more like roughly 1 out of 2, well 44%).

[magnus]

Rogues are great. They’re a good character for Throwing and Artifacts, and a max STR Rogue with Bloodlust outdamages a Giant Sword Fighter IIRC.

[magnus]

Do the extra swings, even if misses, count towards raising Sword / Close Combat? If true, that’s another plus in Bloodlust’s favor. I don’t know if you mentioned that, I may have missed it.

[Zergs]

İlk olarak randompeasant12351 tarafından gönderildi:

Do the extra swings, even if misses, count towards raising Sword / Close Combat? If true, that’s another plus in Bloodlust’s favor. I don’t know if you mentioned that, I may have missed it.

Yes, but there's some upper limit. I know that misses do give a skill roll, but there is some upper limit to how many skill rolls you can get in a single round. Let's say you have a super high level character with 3/3 attacks/swings--if two of those 9 attacks are hits, and the other 7 are misses, you'll get the same amount of skill ups as if you only had two attacks and both of them hit. If you have two attacks and they both miss, you will get skillup chances but it'll be less than if they were hits.

[vysionier]

İlk olarak Zergs tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak randompeasant12351 tarafından gönderildi:

Do the extra swings, even if misses, count towards raising Sword / Close Combat? If true, that’s another plus in Bloodlust’s favor. I don’t know if you mentioned that, I may have missed it.

Yes, but there's some upper limit. I know that misses do give a skill roll, but there is some upper limit to how many skill rolls you can get in a single round. Let's say you have a super high level character with 3/3 attacks/swings--if two of those 9 attacks are hits, and the other 7 are misses, you'll get the same amount of skill ups as if you only had two attacks and both of them hit. If you have two attacks and they both miss, you will get skillup chances but it'll be less than if they were hits.

Do you know how the max number of skill gains are calculated? From what you are saying it seems like the highest skill gain for two attacks out of the entire round are counted. So if you hit 2 out of 12 times and it hit for double damage for instance you’d get 8 skill points. If you missed 12 times you’d get 2 if you hit 12 times you’d get 6 for the benefits of two successful hits. Am I interpreting that correctly?

[Zergs]

Short answer: I don't know.

I just know that there's a cap on total # of skill rolls per round for physical attacks. If you have 50 attacks in a round, you won't get 200 skill rolls. I think it caps at ~8 no matter what, but I don't exactly what the upper limit is. It might be 9 for all I know. I haven't tested it with a 3/3 character or a 2/2 character with a weapon like the Tripleshot that gives a bunch of bonus swings. For that character the cap might be 9 or 10 rolls for all I know, but I'll bet that the cap won't be 20. It'll be a lot lower.

Also, when I say skill rolls, I mean the total of weapon skill, CC/RC, and dual-wield. Critical Strike, Shield, and Stealth are rolled at different times during the combat round so they don't take away skill gains from the first 3 skills. I didn't test Power Strike and Iron Skin so I don't know how they interact with the above skills.

The best thing you can do is install Peddroelm's testing script and see the rolls for yourself. I couldn't figure out an exact pattern, but maybe if others start looking at the raw data we'll find patterns that I didn't see.

[vysionier]

Yeah good point. I’ve been putting off installing it but I’d probably answer a lot of questions if I did so. I’m just afraid my ocd tendencies will take over and I’ll want to test _everything_

[Zergs]

Ha

I am sitting here rooting for your OCD to take over so we get a lot more juicy details on the game mechanics to discuss :)

[vysionier]

TBH, it’ll probably happen. I’ve always wondered how the game distributed skill gain experience on complex skills like dual wielding.

[mpnorman10]

İlk olarak Zergs tarafından gönderildi:

I just know that there's a cap on total # of skill rolls per round for physical attacks.

Thanks for bringing this forth. Can I ask, please, how you found out about the cap? It sounds like you know it exists but not much more. There was some recent disassembly in this area of skill increases (as well as Peddroelm's research), but nobody was looking for or asking about a cap.

It is also interesting to see when, if the cap is about 8 or 9 rolls per round of combat, when the cap comes into play and matters. Is there any cap on the battle as a whole or just per round?

By the time a Fighter gets 3 attacks and 3 swings per attack, misses are very few and mostly irrelevant. The Bard (with Bloodlust) will never get 3 attacks in a normal game but by the middle game, not even the late middle game there are 2 attacks for as many as 4 swings each or a max of 8 versus the Fighter max of 9 swings in 3 attacks. When the Bard first gets as many as 8 swings in two attacks there are still a significant number of misses.

It sounds like the cap will also limit the skill increase increments possible from hits, or are just misses impacted by the cap?

Overall, most of the misses are early in the game, with that rate of missing potentially reducing fast as relevant attributes and skills continue to rise through use and level-up allocations.

It would be good if we can determine the impact of this cap to see if it might impact weapon and style of play decisions, as well as when the Fighter's optional berserk mode is activated.

[Zergs]

I installed Peddroelm's combat log script, so I can see every skillup chance as it's getting made. I "know" it exists from observation but I've only run one (albeit long) play session on it. It's possible someone could mod in a weapon with +50 swings and get 200 skillup rolls per round by using it, but I don't think it's likely. You or Vys can install the script yourself and make your own observations.

I am 100% sure there is no per-battle cap on most skill gains (perhaps Mythology is an exception). I ran some very long battles and I know both from the script and empirical evidence that you can get dozens of skill gains in a single battle.

The cap affects the total number of skill check chances, combining misses and hits. I don't know how they're weighted against each other. I know Peddroelm / Kaymarciy have said that hits provide 4x the skillup chances as misses, but it looks to me like there's some upper limit from watching the combat log in real time. For example, if a character with 2/2 attacks/swings lands four successful blows in a round, that character does not appear to be getting 16 skillup rolls at the end of the round.

Regarding the play impact, we already know one aspect of it--we know that dual-wield consumes some of the skillup chances that you get each round, and doesn't give you enough extra skillup rolls to compensate for that. People have observed that empirically as well as using the logging script.

---

I really want other people to install this script and generate their own results. I am not 100% confident about what is going on with this cap. It just looks to me like there is one, but it would be nice if someone else can generate the same results.

[mpnorman10]

Thank you, Zergs.

Then your discovery of the cap is from direct observation, which in my book makes the discovery of the cap highly reliable. Thank you for doing that research.

I am also laughing because all we needed was another mechanic of the game that discourages dual weapons. As if they were not already a challenge to use effectively in this game .

About running the script myself I tend to not use anything with the vanilla game at all, part of ensuring that any observations or tests I run are repeatable by any user. It is not a matter of shirking responsibility, or at least I believe it is not. That means I have no right to dispute any findings from using the script with the vanilla, but I have no disputes with what players have been reporting while using it, anyway. Instead I appreciate that you took the time to use the script and also took a step back after diligently making all of those observations using the script and realized that there must be some sort of cap in effect. We are richer for your observations. I also deeply appreciate that Peddroelm created it.

I have a list of W8 projects as long as my arm and I have recently made a commitment to doing some testing under certain conditions. I also like to play some other games and am experimenting with some new ones. I am trying to share some of those details we feel might be of value to players and hopefully players feel I am doing my share of helping new or returning players.

I deeply appreciate the many other players, such as yourself, who are also contributing.