A question about weapons

[_Joe___]

I've edited this question based on Solidsnake's answer, which provided better wording for game mechanics - but the content is the same.

Just bought the game, having a good time. Got a little gold, thought I'd buy a weapon upgrade. My hunter's in the village, comparing a spear he found vs. a heavy bow he could buy. The spear does 11 damage, the heavy bow 10. Both rely on awareness, but the spear makes three awareness checks at 85% and the heavy bow four. [Apparently the number of circles with the attribute pictures in them are the number of checks the item makes. Someone correct me on this if I'm wrong. ]For the purpose of my question, let's ignore the other modifiers like armor vs. snipe or whatever.

What's better, 3 awareness checks or 4 awareness checks? What should I want? A different weapon - the rusty knife - makes 1 check against stamina for its damage, does that mean every time I roll 1 success I get full damage with the weapon? Don't I want to always get full damage? If the damages are similar between the spear and the heavy bow wouldn't I want the 3 checks against awareness instead of four because it has better odds for getting a perfect roll? If anyone better understands this mechanic please let me know. Thanks!

[Solidsnake]

You have a stat tab that you can open up next to your inventory button that shows you what each stat does. Essentially your stats determine your rolls. For example, if you have 85 awareness and a spear that has 4 awareness rolls, then for each roll you have an 85% on success rate on each roll unless it's usually a special ability for the weapon. Then in that case, you will lose a bit of accuracy depending on what it is.

[_Joe___]

In the above example then, the spear with three awareness rolls has a better chance at landing a perfect result than the heavy bow with four awareness rolls. Since perfect results do max damage plus occasionally some tacked on benefit, wouldn't it be better to equip something with fewer rolls? Or, perhaps in other words, is it better to try to get perfect results and max damage all the time?

[Obmar]

thats the fun - figure it out!

[_Joe___]

I was figuring it out by asking the question. Sure I don't gain any in-game XP by asking out here, but my party doesn't wipe either. I think I prefer the latter.

[MoshinMonkey]

It can go both ways though. The more rolls you have, the less chance you have for a perfect. On the other hand, the less rolls you have the easier it is to not do any damage. Using the example of the knife with one roll. If you miss it, you do nothing at all.

[_Joe___]

I've had perfect rolls that didn't result in a critical hit, too. I suspect perfection may be a requirement but not the be all end all for critical hits.

But just on the basic element of hitting vs. missing for full damage - and by no means am I going to calculate this out for vertification - yes, if the knife misses with its one stamina check there's no damage. One swing at 85% odds with hits always at a full 10 damage probably generates more DoT than the heavy bow does with four awareness checks at 85% odds because the probability of perfection is less likely. The knife presumably generates 170 damage over 20 swings. The bow would always do less than that, unless I'm missing something.

By the by, if I'm right I think this answers my question. The fewer checks a weapon seems to make the better the odds for getting max damage results. As I've progressed farther in the game I've noticed the cooler the add-on benefit is for a given weapon the more checks for perfection I'd need to achieve the result. Sadly, in order to calculate true probability of a desired effect I'd have to sort out compounded probability checks and I'm not interested in even trying to do that math. Hopefully a smart nerd posted a chart somewhere.