For Archers: How weapon types/damages affect skill damage

This is just a rough sketch of what I've found that would affect your skill damage, besides your base damage and amount of DEX you pump into your character (less DEX = less skill damage added). I'm sure there's exceptions to this chart (for instance, dual daggers).

For a full dex lv 56 bird:

http://i56.tinypic.com/213i6pv.jpg

Chart in a nutshell (aka rules of thumb to follow as an archer):

1. Weapons with a WEAPON SPEED OF 1.0 [Guns, Auto-Bows]: Add 118-97 to total weapon damage to get skill damage.
2. Weapons with a WEAPON SPEED OF 0.9 (0.85) [Sunblessed bows, Recurves]: Add 113-92 to total weapon damage to get skill damage.
3. Weapons with a WEAPON SPEED OF 0.6 [Talons, Shivering Black-Ice Crossbow]: Add 137-154 to total weapon damage to get skill damage. This excludes dual daggers.

OR

1. Guns/Bows will add anywhere between 72% to 78% of their damage to skill damage.
2. Talons will add 99% of their damage to skill damage.

There is no single equation relationship that has been derived yet. Only a weapon was equipped during data collection; damage from additional pieces of armor will obviously affect skill damage as well. Ignore the multiplication factor, that turned out to be a complete flop.

Probably will update this over time, or whenever I feel like it again.

Awesome. This explains also why my riot bear sometimes deals more damage than a hammerbirds All O combo.
Anyway, I'm sigging this.

Hi, which of those weapons have procs?

Sunblessed and all Recurve bows carry with it a Blinding Shot proc.

Ok. Reason i asked was because i thought maybe
Weapons with no proc would provide more skill damage comparer to weapons that do proc.

The skill damage increase barely differs between a no proc gun vs. a proc bow, so I think it has to do more with weapon type/speed.

@Physiologic: Nice guide - I'm thinking about doing this for mage when I get more weapons.

For the talons, it may be a good idea to add a single standard wing (I know this does introduce a second variable - which wing; I recommend the one that adds the most skill damage as a baseline). This is because it will give more reflective real world results: birds with talons always carry wings.

I did think about adding the wing for talons but decided against it just so I could examine weapons by themselves. You could say the same thing about helms and armor - birds with talons also always carry armor :p Adding the Cyber/Force Wing adds 11 dex, which adds 2 to damage and 4 to skill damage, which puts the talon's fraction from 99% to 100.5%, which sort of messes up the whole "% fraction" part of the graph.

Also I corrected my graph - talons give 99% of their damage to skill damage, NOT 1%.

I just realized - for an apples for apples comparison so to speak, it may be advisable to compare all of the weapons of one class, like all of the bagmans. Sorry about the thread necro :).

What do you mean all of the bagman's? There is only one Bagman bow :p

I meant by going through the all of these and then testing how much skill damage they added:

Bagman's Gemstone Auto-Bow 145-190 Damage, 1.0 Speed, 10 Dex, 10% Hit, 8% Crit, 10 Armor
Bagman's Gemstone Recurve 154-199 Damage, 0.9 Speed, 10 Dex, 10% Hit, 8% Crit, 5 Armor [Blinding Shot proc]
Bagman's Gem Talon 80-84 Damage, 0.6 Speed, 10 Dex, 10% Hit, 8% Crit
Bagman's Gemstone Dagger 63-64 Damage, 0.4 Speed, 10 Dex, 10% Hit, 8% Crit, 5 Armor [Bleed proc]

Then testing how much skill damage one added relative to the others, such as testing these weapons:


Bagman's Gemstone Recurve 154-199 Damage, 0.9 Speed, 10 Dex, 10% Hit, 8% Crit, 5 Armor [Blinding Shot proc]
Underling's Gemstone Recurve 152-197 Damage, 0.9 Speed, 10 Dex, 10% Hit, 7% Crit, 3 M/s, 5 Armor [Blinding Shot proc]
Henchman's Gemstone Recurve 158-203 Damage, 0.9 Speed, 12 Dex, 8% Hit, 11 Armor [Blinding Shot proc]
Raid Roach's Gemstone Recurve 152-197 Damage, 0.9 Speed, 12 Dex, 12% Hit, 10% Crit, 5 Armor [Blinding Shot proc] [From Trash Heap]

A controlled variable experiment of sorts.

It's not something you have to do of course, but you've been wanting to understand the relationship between weapon vs. skill damage for quite some time. It should give a better idea of their relative standings. I'm thinking about doing it for mage, although with the sets.

Yeah I can do that when I've got the time :p The comparison chart I created was made really quickly and not thorough enough. I believe Royce mentioned he created one (but unpublished) for mages, you might want to ask him if he's finished with his once he is no longer MIA.

Actually, come to think of it, how to daggers and dual daggers stack up in terms of skill damage? Daggers aren't too practical for birds, but for dual-specced dex bears who have better durability, they may be much more viable weapons.

love your posts physio! how much free time to u have? lol thanks for the many tips/guides