Is archer's skill damage affected by weapon damage?

[PhreEkGarden]

I have a 50 enchantress and I know weapon damage affects my spells.

I just made an archer and when I hit level 10 I put on a much stronger weapon(axe), and spell damage didn't increase at all.

Is this normal or is it because I put on a strength weapon?

[Physiologic]

I believe skill damage is influenced by some sort of damage multiplier; at low levels in which your weapon damages are low and your skill levels are low, there wouldn't be much of a multiplier to see any noticeable difference in the skill damage seen.

[BeefyMeat]

I can't imagine they would have weapon damage not factored in at all in skills. A talons skill damage is noticeably lower than a bow or gun for me and the only difference is the weapon damage. Sure, there is a slight Dex jump with the shield, but the DPS is way down.

[Physiologic]

I attempted an analysis on this actually, and there is a different damage multiplier for each type of weapon. Talons, especially - they do more skill damage than they're supposed to when you compare them to guns/bows - but this just proves that each weapon type does different amounts of skill damage.

[Royce]

All classes' skill damage is affected by weapon damage.

I attempted an analysis on this actually, and there is a different damage multiplier for each type of weapon. Talons, especially - they do more skill damage than they're supposed to when you compare them to guns/bows - but this just proves that each weapon type does different amounts of skill damage.

I attempted an analysis as well, and my conclusion was that there's some random factor making it impossible to know exactly how much weapon damage will go to skills for any particular weapon. As for the talons, that is true of 1-handers across the board pretty much. They may contribute less overall than a powerful 2-hander but it is a much larger portion of their damage that is added.

[Physiologic]

All classes' skill damage is affected by weapon damage.


I attempted an analysis as well, and my conclusion was that there's some random factor making it impossible to know exactly how much weapon damage will go to skills for any particular weapon. As for the talons, that is true of 1-handers across the board pretty much. They may contribute less overall than a powerful 2-hander but it is a much larger portion of their damage that is added.

I'm curious - did all 1-handers (not just talons, but swords and everything) end up with the same exact factor, completely different from the 2-hander factors?

So there's only 2 real unknown factors distinct from each other that affects skill damage regarding all weapons?

[Royce]

I'm not sure I saw any exact factors across campaigns, though perhaps for gear within a campaign. I'll take a look at my data, and let you know. I was thinking of reevaluating this anyway since it seems like an interesting problem, and I my plan is to try looking at min, max and average damage separately since I was mainly looking at average before.

[PhreEkGarden]

I just tested this on a level 26 archer.... I tried a bow on with full dex and checked blast shot damage, then respecced and put enough into strength, and the rest into dex... and put on a 2h sword that was 3x the damage of the bow, but my blast shot damage actually went down about 10-15 pts.

Just checked...
Bow dmg is 28-37
Sword is 82-108

Maybe someone else can test this more thoroughly than I did, but from what I saw the damage on the 2h sword did not matter that it was 3x more than the bow, the damage still went down some.

So my question is, what is the point of going a 2h strength weapon on a bird? It seems like your spells won't do as much damage.....

Edit: I'm not really trying to bash warbirds (that is what they are called right?) because I wanted to make a twink and have fun pvping... but I had thought the whole point was that so your spells would do more damage, since you are losing the range of your bow. I would love some clarification on this....

[Echelong]

You can test this by taking off your weapon and checking your skills screen and check the damage done. Then put on a weapon and see the difference. From what I have tested with my mage slower weapons give more skill damage even if their DPS is lower. I did this testing the Limbchopper of destiny, Zuraz Shock lance and Hax of Hate. Zuraz was the slowest but not the best. The best one that gave me more skill damage was the limbchopper then the Zuraz and hax where almost at par with the Hax been second best.

DPS is not all there is in this game since attributes and weapons change how much skill damage you do.

[PhreEkGarden]

I realize DPS isn't the only thing, but I thought weapon damage affected the skill damage. I didn't think about weapon speed affecting it since that should directly relate to damage shouldn't it? Like on my mage, the keepers staff is 1.2 speed, and the gurgox hammer of rift is 1.4 speed and way more damage, but the staff still adds a lot more to your spells than the hammer, because it's an int weapon right? I haven't tested the speed difference in damage with just strength weapons though, so I don't know anything about that... that is interesting though.

I really wasn't concerned with DPS though, just the damage of the weapon, for more damage added to the spells, but obviously that isn't the way it works with birds(since it seems different than mages I think..?)... I'm just trying to figure out how it does work.

[Royce]

I just tested this on a level 26 archer.... I tried a bow on with full dex and checked blast shot damage, then respecced and put enough into strength, and the rest into dex... and put on a 2h sword that was 3x the damage of the bow, but my blast shot damage actually went down about 10-15 pts.

Just checked...
Bow dmg is 28-37
Sword is 82-108

Maybe someone else can test this more thoroughly than I did, but from what I saw the damage on the 2h sword did not matter that it was 3x more than the bow, the damage still went down some.

So my question is, what is the point of going a 2h strength weapon on a bird? It seems like your spells won't do as much damage.....

Edit: I'm not really trying to bash warbirds (that is what they are called right?) because I wanted to make a twink and have fun pvping... but I had thought the whole point was that so your spells would do more damage, since you are losing the range of your bow. I would love some clarification on this....

When you respec and give up Dex your base damage drops a ton, and base damage goes into skill damage too, so you can't really compare two weapons with a respec in between.
As for warbirds, people don't use them for sword damage (though they did back in the pre stat driven skills days). They are build for archer skills in a slightly tougher shell, but with less damage.

[PhreEkGarden]

Hmm yeah i did lose a lot of dex.... i suppose ill just keep leveling him for now since it seems pretty fun. Thanka for the responses.