Arrow Meaning on Equipment

[LilRedAlchemist]

Im sure someone has answered this before and I'm just now searching correctly but what does the arrow then number mean on various equipment items?

Example
carbide battle axe ->8 (heart)1d4+1
steel battle axe ->7 (heart)1d3+1
stun rod ->6 (heart)1d2

I understand the 1d4 as roll a single d4 dice add one to the results

[glass zebra]

Press F1 at the start to get a basic explanation for the combat mechanics (it does says this in the first popup when you enter the game world).

The first number is PV (penetration value) that gets rolled against enemy AV (armour value). The result is how well you get through the enemy armour and it comes out as a "numbers of penetrations". Those are the amount that damage 1d4+1 damage dice is rolled. 3 penetrations = 3*1d4+1. 0 penetrations and you don't do normal weapon damage at all.

If the numbers are the same, you get a penetration about 80% of the time. For every 2 PV more, you get about another. The game has other stuff that is balanced towards "80% of the time", like the base DV being 6, rolled against a D20.

Normal physical armour against mundane attacks works basically additive in this game. Get it high enough and normal attacks can bounce off of you, get your PV low enough and your attacks will bounce of enemies.

[LilRedAlchemist]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Press F1 at the start to get a basic explanation for the combat mechanics (it does says this in the first popup when you enter the game world).

The first number is PV (penetration value) that gets rolled against enemy AV (armour value). The result is how well you get through the enemy armour and it comes out as a "numbers of penetrations". Those are the amount that damage 1d4+1 damage dice is rolled. 3 penetrations = 3*1d4+1. 0 penetrations and you don't do normal weapon damage at all.

If the numbers are the same, you get a penetration about 80% of the time. For every 2 PV more, you get about another. The game has other stuff that is balanced towards "80% of the time", like the base DV being 6, rolled against a D20.

Normal physical armour against mundane attacks works basically additive in this game. Get it high enough and normal attacks can bounce off of you, get your PV low enough and your attacks will bounce of enemies.

ohh I misunderstood, I read penetration value to only apply to pointy things as in more likely to make you bleed not like in general against AV.

Thank you

[glass zebra]

Bleeding is mostly a short blade thing and majorly irrelevant after early game. It is still nice, since it is passive, but most bleeding damage in the game does not scale in vanilla. PV and AV are really just the basics on how almost all weapon damage in the game works and pretty important.

[I blame Earthshaker]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Bleeding is mostly a short blade thing and majorly irrelevant after early game. It is still nice, since it is passive, but most bleeding damage in the game does not scale in vanilla.

Bleeding is only mostly useful for stacking debuffs for short blade shank ability after early game. Is also marginally useful if the thing bleeding bleeds something expensive (gems, basically; but by then player shouldn't be having money issues so it's not that useful). Be cool for some high level stuff to bleed an expensive liquid or something... Or I guess the devs could make bleeding a better mechanic by having the bleeding damage have compound growth based on the number of bleed stacks and have the shank ability do something else instead!

[glass zebra]

Using shank often lowers you dps though, unless you only have 2 dagges and no elemental mods on them, since you lose all offhands attacks when using it (which is at least 1.5 with 2 normal hands and no wrist blades and full dual wield). The strength of short blade builds is the really high attack number per turn.

I think gems also only "bleed" on direct damage, but warm static and oil have their own uses outside of money.

The worst part is really that it makes short blade crits rather bad. I could live with blood letter staying low, since it scales with agi for stacks anyway and is just some cheap passive, but the crits for short blades are just so meaningless so quickly in comparison to e.g. sword and axe which both scale with weapon powers (and cudgel scaling with enemy power kinda).

I made some mod that just makes bleeding scale very slightly with weapon tier / creature tier if natural weapon. I noticed it increases bleed resources by a ton (since you get less 0 rolls), which might be one reason why they decided against that. I also tuned it down a lot after getting shredded in Bethesda Susa from the glow wights.. lost like 1/4 of my hp from the bleeding alone after they were dead and that was with only +1 max dmg per tier.

Edit: also noticed this has become offtopic. Sorry OP for spam.