How do weapon bonuses actually work?

[magritte]

I was assuming that weapons with high physical bonuses were good for characters with high fight, high critical bonuses for characters with high hunt and high magical bonuses for characters with high blast. But I've found a book/weapon with an outlandish critical value (300) and I'm wondering if because it's a book it should be used by a mage. But I don't really want to put Vankan in close combat, but can hunter-type characters use it effectively or do they need a decent magic skill to have it be effective?

What does the numbers really mean? Does it add 300% to your chance of scoring a critical, add 300 to your skill value, +300% to damage when you score a critical, +300 damage when you score a critical? I find the combat system really opaque.

[Jetoilio]

https://bigfingers.fandom.com/wiki/Equipment_(Bastard_Bonds)#Equipment_Traits

Near the bottom of that page are the descriptions of most item bonuses in the game, the main ones are:

Physical
Increases physical damage.

Reach
Increases the strike range outside adjacent squares by that many squares.

Threat
Increases chance of a critical hit.

Critical
Increases the damage of a critical hit.

Wasting
Slowly erodes HP every turn during combat. Can be cancelled out by Regenerate.

Regenerate
Regenerates HP every turn during combat. Can be cancelled out by Wasting.

Lucky
Random rolls for damage dealt will be generated twice, and the best result will be used. (Roll twice, keep the higher roll.) Can be cancelled out by Unlucky.

Unlucky
Random rolls for damage dealt will be generated twice, and the worst result will be used. (Roll twice, keep the lower roll.) Can be cancelled out by Lucky.

RiskStrike
When hitting an enemy with a weapon, that much Risk is added to the target.

RiskSpell
When hitting an enemy with a spell, that much Risk is added to the target.

[magritte]

Thanks. Oh wow, I had TOTALLY misinterpreted threat. A lot of games use that to mean that it increased the chance of opponents attacking you as opposed to your team mate. So the critical 300 item should be given to a character who scores lots of criticals. Is it as good as it sounds?

[Jetoilio]

You can give any character any weapon type without much issue, the only real exception being mages and bows. If you give a mage a bow, they will use the bow instead of magic whenever they're within the bow's range.

If all it does is Critical, no matter what kind of weapon it appears to be, it can benefit anyone. Though you are correct that someone with a higher crit chance (usually from the rogue type's offensive skill) will benefit more. As for how good it is, I would guess it does up the modifier for critical damage to be quite high.

The book you're talking about is Shadow Psalm, so it's also lucky and turns magic into Pox magic. With the right skills a mage can use that to poison enemies (in addition to damaging them) or to make allies harder to hit (in addition to healing them). And of course because it's Lucky they'll tend to do higher damage overall with every attack.