Damage calculator

[Holy_Diver]

Dont mean to derail things but some input is better than none.

"What worries me is the player doesn't know if their weapon is having any effect."

Usually a monsters hit animation indicates this, you could have 3 animations depending on how you hit... First one would be a short wince, second would be a wince with a step back, third would be as devastating as you want and could stagger the opponent back thus giving you the option of rushing or retreating.

Well I am not referring to hypotheticals here--I try to make that clear if that is the case. I meant with plain vanilla SOM you always stun the monster. And with this damage formula, there are good odds you'll be hitting for 0 if your attack power is below the damage window. But with SOM the damage is always rounded up to 1 if it isn't exactly 0. I think actually that all of the affinities are summed together before that rounding happens.

I actually don't think KF2 works this way. Because there would be a lot of stories of people trying to kill the Giant Kraken but not succeeding if so. Unless that is its HP is actually low enough that each hit is taking off exactly 1 hp regardless before it goes down (which is very possible too)

Anyway I basically agree that this is probably not an ideal formula for most games going forward.


PS: I honestly didn't mean for this thread to turn this way. Or I didn't want it to go beyond sussing out the damage formula itself. If you want to recommend anything here, I would just like to ask what variables should be provided to the formula? I will probably call this Attack variable HP and the armor variable AP. I can see the sum of all of the affinities being useful (both divided by category and altogether) and having access to the counters is a no brainer...

Strength and Magic bonuses will be separate formulas. And I am pretty sure if the affinity is 0 it won't be considered for bonuses or damage.

And before I call it quits. Per that Void system. I have the sneaking feeling that instead of the physical affinities being presented to the player as percentiles, if any it will be the magical affinities that will be so. The system still works the same, but this is because I reckon the magical affinities won't change. But I can easily see the physical affinities changing based on the swing ID. So you'd have to present a range like 0-10, and that wouldn't work well with percentiles. Plus there are likely to be fewer physical affinities, so players can more easily appraise the weapon if the raw power is a function of those affinities...

Another consideration is if we chose to represent one of the affinities as percentiles (you don't have to do this but it seems likely as it saves the player from doing a lot of work in their head) then the affinity group that is not percentiles almost definitely has to have its Void affinity visible. My guess is that usually the aVoid affinity would be called Magic and it would represent a magical component of a weapon's attack that cannot normally be defended against. You'd probably want it to be boosted by the Magic stat somehow (whereas the other physicals would be boosted by Strength)

I think it will still be hidden by default though, as many games would probably opt to just not use the aVoid affinity.