What Gaming Should Be

As an avid lifelong gamer, I try to describe what has worked well and poorly in games I've played, and in any given gaming scenario, to define how it could best be handled as a result.

Author: reillan

I hate all current PvP games.  So, here's some ideas I had for a great one:

#1: Full loot ... ish

You have the ability to loot your opponent, but this only takes unbound items from them. 

#2: Item binding.

Bound items are merely items that cannot be taken during combat.  These are the items you're wearing and any crafting items you're carrying.  If you equip a new item, the old one becomes unbound, and thus lootable and tradable.

#3: Additional loot and XP from PvP

Enemies count as PvE mobs for loot tables - meaning, you can not only loot your opponent regularly, but you get additional items for that looting.  Perhaps this could be done in a bound form for certain things (ie, take the scalps of your defeated enemies, turn them in for a quest), or an unbound form for item drops.

#4: Combat is wide-open

Whoever deals the final point of damage to something gets the XP (for their entire group) for that kill.  Items are dropped on the ground and you simply have to run over them to pick them all up (this means someone else could grab them, and you'll just have to kill him).

#5: You can accidentally kill people in your own group

And your group loses XP if you do so.

#6: Respawn points are laid out frequently

So you can get right back into the action.

#7: No death penalty

So you can get right back into the action.

#8: Fast transport around the world

Because it sucks having to waste time walking 40 miles just to talk to someone and then walk back.

#9: When you're talking to an NPC, or fighting a named boss for a quest, you cannot be hurt by outside forces.

Because these are important activities that take time, time that might be inhibited by the respawn rate of PCs.

#10: No instancing

Because it sucks, and because people camp the exits, and this sucks, too.

#11: At least one grenade-launcher-style weapon

To take care of the people who will eventually camp anyway.

(This is the third part of a series on Champion Damage.  Please see Part 1 and Part 2)

Part 3: Managing Champion Power for maximum damage-over-time.

Introduction

If you've been keeping up with my series so far, you know that Dual Wielding and using Slow-MH, Fast OH is far superior in short-term combat to any other weapon set up.  But does that damage last for extremely lengthy combat, such as against a high-morale mob?  In this entry, I will examine just that issue.

What I find in this article: If your combat lasts over 1.5 minutes, go with a 2H weapon.  Good use of skills is still key, however, and Hedge is surprisingly one of the best of these.
 

Power over time

One of the great things about being a Champion is our ability to regenerate Power during combat.  In our primary DPS stance, we get a roughly +1200 in-combat power regeneration (ICPR) rate (plus any items we choose to wear that further boost that).  We don't get a high Power pool to start, but because we regenerate so much, we may not need it.

+1200 ICPR roughly comes out to +20 power each and every second during the combat - that means that if we can burn under 20 Power Per Second (PPS) as we deal DPS, we can maintain our power pool indefinitely, and other low PPS values can keep us in the blue for several minutes at a time.  If we can maintain ourselves below 20 PPS, we can even use our power to replenish the power pools of our party each time a mob drops.

As much as I've knocked around 2H weapons so far, they seem best suited for maintaining our power.  With all of the skills in the following chart, power used remains constant regardless of the speed of weapons we wield.  That means we can use our power more efficiently on skills with higher damage.

This chart assumes the same weapons from last time: a 2H Axe that has 3.1 speed, and a 1H Axe with 2.4 speed paired with a 1.7s dagger.

If we just look at these skills and how well we can hold up in a combat, the 2H weapon has a very clear advantage - much cheaper power consumption.  Just comparing averages, we subtract 20 from both averages to show the rate of return from ICPR, and we can see that we should burn 23.84 PPS while using a 2H weapon, 46.29 PPS while DW.  A champion with 2500 Power (and we don't usually bother to keep that much) could expect to last 54s without running out of power while Dual Wielding, but an amazing 105s with a 2H weapon!  In the 51s of time betwee, the DW person could regenerate enough power for another 22s-long burst, but that still means only 76s in combat, with 29s of downtime.

That's 38.16% more up-time when using a 2H weapon over DW.  

Now you may say, "but we'll use food to regenerate power" or "we'll pop second wind to regenerate power" - well yes, you could do that, depending on how fast you can kill stuff.  But while you're popping second wind, the 2H person is using Red Haze or possibly even Heroics.  And your Second Wind is reliant on you killing your target, but if you're in an extremely-long battle, that may be neither possible or desirable.  And what's more, the 2H person could be popping Second Wind, too, and just last through greatly-extended combat sessions that much longer.

But just out of curiousity - how much does food matter?  According to the lorebook ( I don't have the game sitting in front of me now), Superior Rack of Lamb with Mint Sauce provides +148 power every 30 seconds.  That means that a DW who uses it could get 3.2 more seconds out of it, then have to spend 2.8s downtime before the next blip hits.  When it does, he has another 4.4s of power he can burn through before he runs out again.

So yes, food does help.  Potions help.  But much more effective is using a 2H weapon.  Even at its worst, 38.16% up time is greater than 28.32% damage (the max damage differential of  DW/2H calculated in part 2) during combats lasting more than 1.5 minutes.

Effective power management

As you could possibly see from the charts, there are some skills that simply do not make sense in a long-combat setting.  This is especially true of Bracing Attack, Blade Storm, and Relentless Strikes, which are the 3 worst power-eating damage-dealers in our list.  Simply avoiding these skills during long combats will help a lot, but we can also maximize our returns by carefully selecting our skills ahead of time:

1: Pip Generation

Merciful Strikes wins my pick for the best power-management skill for two reasons: first, it's tied with Wild Attack for power consumption; second, because it deals more damage than Wild Attack.  All things considered, if you can pull off this skill, you should.  Yes, it's difficult to use, but the best thing you can do for yourself is to get into the habit of using it when it is available.

If you haven't learned by yet, Wild Attack should be your default PIP generator (excepting Merciful Strike, as described above). Avoid Swift Strike like the plague - if you absolutely need another PIP, and Merciful Strike isn't ready, consider Blade Wall instead.  It'll be more power consumption than your Wild Attack, but less than the other choices.  Of course, if you're already dropping AoEs like crazy, start with your Blade Wall for the additional damage it provides.

2: Skills You May Not Have Considered

Horn of Gondor, that AoE skill that you love because it stuns people but hate because of its long cooldown, is actually one of the best skills you have in terms of power consumption.  If AoE won't hurt you, be prodigious in its use - it turns the Champion into a master of Crowd Control, and good use of CC is what separates good Champs from just OK ones.

Hamstring and Clobber are good choices as well.  They take only one pip to fire, have very low power costs, and have desirable side effects.  Of course, if you've been charged with interrupting this particular mob, only use your Clobber when you're interrupting him.  These skills will not out-DPS your neighboring champ, so use them sparingly, but don't be afraid of them, either.

Rend is bloody brilliant - Armour debuff and bleed for everything nearby.  It doesn't have a high initial damage output, but if you can fire it off early and keep the bleed up, it'll drain everything for you.  And its power cost is still low.

3: The Ultimate Skill You've Never Met: My Case for HEDGE.

You read that right.  I said to use Hedge. Go ahead, get the laughter out of your system.

Hedge is an oft-mocked gem of power management.  This skill only costs 36 power to fire - that means that almost no matter what you're wielding, you actually generate more power than you use during the time it took to fire it!  And, because its damage is not dependent on having a weapon, it doesn't require any fervour, it provides a wound resistance bonus, and it deals a fair amount of damage (it's around the middle of the field for Champ damage), it can be fired at almost any time.

And when you're conserving power, I argue that it should be one of your main skills.

So don't burn that 1st age legendary with tier-6 Hedge cooldown quite so quickly.    You can do a fair amount of DPS with these low-power skills, and if you simply avoid Bracing Attack, Relentless Strike, and Blade Storm, you'll be able to last much, much longer.

(For Part 1 of this series, see http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/reillan/042009/3613_LotRO-Champion-Damage-Part-1)

Part 2: Dual Wielding vs. 2-Handed Weapons

Introduction

There's a lot to be said on the topic of Dual Wielding (DW) vs 2-Handed (2H) weapons.  For the purposes of this posting only, I'll be examining only the issue of DPS.  Some of the other issues that govern the use of both weapons are cost of ownership (it's cheaper to replace a 2H weapon, so at lower levels it can be very important) and power consumption (because 2H weapons are much slower and power is consumed the same regardless of weapon speed, 2H weapons should consume less power in a combat).  

What I will look at, however, are raw damage values and how those relate to DPS, including how Flurry improves such values.  Flurry is one of the most often used arguments by proponents of 2H weaponry, so I'll see if it is as good as they say.

In a future posting, I'll address the issue of power consumption, which in longer battles can be a significant goal.

For those who wish to skip most of this article: I contend that DW is far superior to 2H for burning down mobs.  I did not know just how far superior until I wrote this - I thought surely I would find that the 2H veterans would be correct that proper skill use could equal DPS advantage, but it appears that is not the case.

Skill Damage

2H weapon proponents often say that if MH damage is the most important damage (as I argue in Part 1), and some skills have just as many attacks whether using DW or 2H weapons, then those skills will deal more damage with a 2H weapon and, therefore, proper skill management equals greater DPS.  So, let's test that theory:

(Comparing: 1st Age Champ Axe, 2H, 3.1s vs. 1st Age Champ Axe, 1H, 2.4s + Peerless Dagger)

* Brutal Strikes and Ferocious Strikes receive inexplicably higher bonuses from DW than 2H

So you can see, on average, DW deals 25.38% more DPS than 2H does.  The closest skill is Brutal Strikes, with only a 0.34% increase for DW.  No skill does better with a 2H weapon than DW.  When I add Flurry to the mix, this remains true, although the difference in damage, on average, decreases to 25.09% and Brutal Strikes narrows to a mere 0.11% loss of damage for 2H.  Additionally, for those wondering about how Fervour affects this: the damage difference actually increases, so that the average bonus for DW over 2H is 28.32% with 22% Fervour (15% + 7% from Legacies). This chart does assume that the Champion will take advantage of the bonuses I found in Part 1.  Two 2.4 Axes used instead would be a loss of DPS on 6 of those skills.

The only other argument that may be valid, then, is the argument that because 2H weapons are slower, they will need to have fewer uses of low-damage skills to build Fervour, and thus can deal more damage over the extended life of the combat.  This is an argument that will require a bit more tracking.  Thus, another chart!

(Assume: Popped 3 Fervour and Flurry before combat.  Fervour stance traited for 1 pip every 4s)

Total damage in 20.64s for 2H weapon = 4803.  DPS = 232.70

Total damage in 16.4s for DW = 4640.  DPS = 282.93

I extended out the attacks for the 2H weapon because I wanted to give the 2H people the opportunity to burn more damage - but the fact of the matter is this: DW does 21.6% more damage in combat. 

All I did when selecting skills above is to choose skills with the highest Fervour-to-damage and DPS values.  That means Feral Strikes and Brutal Strikes (which can't be used terribly closely together due to their cooldowns).  The reason why the % for DW is much higher here than for the raw skills is that Feral Strikes deals 40% more DPS in DW mode than 2H mode.  A 2H fan could say "but then you should have chosen skills that were closer in value" - to that I say: I did!  Wild Attack is clearly the best bang-for-your-buck Fervour builder until your target is below 50% health, and then it switches to Merciful Strike.  Swift Strike is only used when you really need a point of Fervour to pull off the next skill (and I used it once for each side).  But all of the big DPS, non-AoE skills receive a huge bonus from DW according to the chart above.  The only thing I could do would be to use only Brutal Strikes (which, you'll note, I used twice on the left, once on the right, while using Feral Strikes twice on the left, thrice on the right).  

The point of all of this is simple: if I can build Fervour faster, I can burn it faster.  And, since I know how to use DW to its greatest efficiency thanks to the information from Part 1, this means I will be able to completely own everything I encounter.

Introduction

This is part 1 of a 278 part series (ok, I don't really know how many parts yet) on damage for Champions in Lord of the Rings Online.  I performed this research in an attempt to calculate the maximum amount of damage a Champion can do in a combat, and thus help newbies and pros alike improve their game.

The information for this posting is based on numbers from Mines of Moria, Book 7, Patch 1.  Because Turbine regularly modifies numbers to balance classes, this information could change.

In part 1, I will present information regarding weapon speeds and Dual Wielding.  This topic has been argued often in the forums, with little definitive research behind it.  In future parts, I will also provide information on whether a 2-handed weapon or dual-wielding is better, Fervour versus Ardour, and power management.

For those without the patience to read this whole article: I prove that you can see approximately an 8.5% increase in DPS if you use a 2.3 weapon in your Main Hand, and a 1.7 weapon in your Off Hand, assuming all other things are equal.  You can potentially see greater returns from slower weapons in the Main Hand, diminishing returns from faster weapons.

Part 1 - Weapon Speeds and Dual Wielding

The theory among the conversations on the Champion forums has long been that when a Champion wields two weapons of different speeds, the speeds average together.  The theory means that if a weapon with a speed of 2.3 (meaning, for the uninitiated, that the weapon attacks every 2.3 seconds) and a weapon with a speed of 1.7 are used together, the speed they will both attack with is 2.0 - the slower weapon will be sped up, while the faster weapon will be slowed down.

My theory is this: since a slower weapon deals more damage in a single hit, if a slower weapon and faster weapon are paired, and the slower weapon is in the Main Hand, then that greater damage will be applied through the additional attacks to result in additional damage.

If a Champion uses only auto attacks and skills that use both hands equally (there aren't any, but for the sake of argument let's say there are), then any difference in speed for the two weapons would be unnoticeable - that is to say, the raw DPS of each individual weapon is all that would matter, and it would matter equally across all weapons regardless of speed.  However, as I mentioned above, there are no skills that treat two weapons equally. 

There are two factors involved in how unequally weapons are treated: The first is the number of main hand and off hand attacks utilized by each skill; The second is bonus damage provided by each skill, which I'll get to shortly.

There are three possible combinations of weapons based on speed: Both weapons can have identical speed, the Main Hand can have a slower speed than the Off Hand, or the Main Hand can have a faster speed than the Off Hand.  My theory is that one of these - specifically, Main Hand slower than Off Hand - is superior to other combinations when determining damage output.

The following chart shows how many Main Hand (MH) and Off Hand (OH) attacks each of the champion's attack skills use (please note: clobber and hedge are left off of this list - the former due to the fact that clobber's damage is not reported in the current patch, and hedge generates identical damage regardless of weapon):

In this list, I colored the 5 skills that have equal numbers of attacks between MH and OH to make it easier to see those skills.  Every one of the other 10 attacks obviously deals more damage from the MH than the OH, due to having more MH attacks than OH attacks.  This means that MH damage is more important than OH damage for at least these skills.

But does that rule play out across all skills, and is the increase significant?  To understand the answer to that, we must also examine how bonus damage from the individual skills is applied in Dual Wielding situations.  There are several rules that govern this interaction:

1. Every skill grants a bonus amount of damage to attacks made with the Main Hand.
2. No skills (with two exceptions) grant bonus damage to attacks made with the Off Hand.
3. Bonus damage is contingent on the speed of the individual weapon in that hand.  This means that a weapon with 2.3 speed will receive the same bonus for that skill regardless of whether it is paired with a 2.4 speed weapon or a 1.7 speed weapon in the other hand.  Where applicable, the other hand receives the bonus specific to its own speed.
4. Bonus damage is also boosted by Fervour and Ardour (when used with a legacy), and reduced by Glory.  It is not increased by racial bonuses.
5. Bonus damage increases as the champion levels up, but does not increase with increased weapon damage.  A level 60 champion will receive the same bonus for Rend regardless of whether he wields a level 1 sword or a level 60 sword.

(The two exceptions to rule #2 are for Brutal Strikes and Ferocious Strikes, and since their exceptions involve extensive discussion, I will answer those separately.)

Because of rule #3, even our green-colored skills in the table above receive at least a small bonus from differing weapon speeds by virtue of the fact that they get a slightly larger amount of bonus damage from being used with a slower Main Hand weapon. 

But first: here's a table showing damage bonuses for 4 weapon speeds:

To explain how this data can be extrapolated into raw damage numbers to prove or disprove my theory, I'd like to analyze just a single skill - Feral Strikes.  I have chosen this one for a reason, and I'll get to that shortly as well.  Let's assume that we're using a fully-loaded 2nd age weapon, so that our DPS is 41.9.  With a 2.3 weapon, that's 96.37 damage per hit; 83.8 with a 2.0 weapon; 71.23 with a 1.7 weapon.  With the Feral Strikes skill, we see that we do:

Now, hopefully, the disparity between speeds makes a bit more sense.  When using different-speed MH and OH weapons, I get more damage bonus in the MH Damage column, but less in the OH damage.  The smaller value in the OH damage column cannot make up for the greater damage in the MH.  In fact, I've just increased my damage over time by 6.1% over using  two 2.3s weapons.  

Now, the reason I chose Feral Strikes is that it's actually slightly BELOW the average for damage increase created in this fashion.  Here's a complete chart showing damage for three dual-wielding situations.

Average DPS increase: 8.52%

Special Exceptions

Relentless Strike deals 150% damage with MH, plus bonus damage, rather than 100% as most other skills do. 

Brutal Strikes and Ferocious Strikes have 105% and 130% damage (respectively) for attacks, and this bonus damage applies to both MH and OH damage.  Because each attack has only one OH attack and two MH attacks, each still receives a benefit from using slow MH, fast OH.  Additionally, both attacks for these skills receive bonus damage contingent upon weapon speed, and that damage is applied specifically to the hand based on the speed - that is to say, if the MH has a speed of 2.3, it receives +39 damage to both MH attacks for Ferocious Strikes, and if the OH has a speed of 1.7, it receives +28 for the single OH attack on this skill.

Fervour et. al. applies to both the base damage and the bonus damage.  Because of this, the difference between differing-speed weapons and identical-speed weapons remains the same % difference.

Flurry is also applied to both equally.  Changing the numbers in my Feral Strikes table to utilize traited Flurry at 20%:

Still a 6.05% increase in DPS.