How do pointy things work (Weapons, stats, confusion)

[Aelana]

I am still confused about weapon flags and damage stats. I know it has been answered before, but I still have issues.

Special Effect: All Tease Damage you deal is converted to Pheromone Damage instead.

That's good. Right? Maybe? Possibly? I am not sure, so I post a shit ton of questions here. Any clarification is appreciated.

So, what about weapon flags:

Light: I actually understand this, you can dual wield 2 light ones.
Two-Handed: opposite of above, you can't have anything in the offhand with it.
Bladed: ITS A BLADE! Ok, cool. Does it do anything else?
Thrown: Does this remove the accuracy penalty against flying enemies?
Ranged: Fairly simple at first. Bow'n Arrow, can hit flying stuff, can use ranger abilities. Good choice if you are struggling against harpies. But what makes me want to use Bow'n Arrow besides that? Does it produce less threat? Currently it feels like a choice which makes sense for thiefs/warriors, because the other classes have access to ranged spells and do not hit as hard. Like, not really worth it for my charmer.
Heavy: Seems to penalize my initiative. So if I have 2 weapons with equal damage, and one with the [heavy] flag, the heavy one would be strictly worse, right?

CATALYST:
Ok this is a big one. You can cast spells without a catalyst. They tend to add to spellpower and/or spellattack, but this is not bound to the flag itself. AFAIK the catalyst add something when you crit, right?

Physical Damage types
Here I am lost. I presume there is no special thing behind dmg types like 'Blight' except specific weaknesses of enemies. Right? But then there is also crushing and penetrating. Is there a a reason to favor one over the other? Are some enemies weak to it? If so, how do I find out?

Resolve damage types
I have a faint idea. Some enemies are immune to tease, (and probably also to drug/pheromone tease dmg), but they would not be immune to 'pure' mental damage. So in a sense, mental damage is 'raw' damage that targets resolve damage directly. Right?

Making things worse with combinations
So putting everything together I got confused when playing around with my charmer (eh). I have put everything in Agility, Willpower and Presence, level 5. Its understandable that hitting things hard was not the forté of this character, so I tried charge weapon, comparing 2x daggers, 2x Flaming Daggers, and Shortsword + Offhand Orc Catalyst thing. All three combinations landed similar damage on Leutenant ?Lieve? (the marked mercenary woman with the horse). The only thing that was making sense was the initial AoE of Charged Weapon, the more spellpower I had, the more damage it did. But I was expecting the Flaming Daggers to Out-Damage the normal daggers significantly.

Was this due to the fact, that the flaming daggers do give +5 spellpower, but have a lower physical damage (20) compared to the normal dagger? Does this mean charge weapon works off of penetrating/crushing damage, and does not affect fire?

Does this in turn mean, that a high strength character benefits more from a weapon with high crushing/penetrating damage? Because attack power increases only that part of the weapon?

 

[Paradox01]

So, what about weapon flags:

Weapons - Corruption of Champions II (smutosaur.us)

But then there is also crushing and penetrating. Is there a a reason to favor one over the other? Are some enemies weak to it? If so, how do I find out?

Either use Sense or if you know what type of armor they're wearing, use the wiki.

If I'm facing an enemy wearing scale armor and I'm carrying a hammer and a sword, I'd gonna use the hammer against it because it does Crushing damage and the scale armor is weak against Crushing damage.

 

[Savin]

Bladed: ITS A BLADE! Ok, cool. Does it do anything else?
Thrown: Does this remove the accuracy penalty against flying enemies?
Ranged: Fairly simple at first. Bow'n Arrow, can hit flying stuff, can use ranger abilities. Good choice if you are struggling against harpies. But what makes me want to use Bow'n Arrow besides that? Does it produce less threat? Currently it feels like a choice which makes sense for thiefs/warriors, because the other classes have access to ranged spells and do not hit as hard. Like, not really worth it for my charmer.
Heavy: Seems to penalize my initiative. So if I have 2 weapons with equal damage, and one with the [heavy] flag, the heavy one would be strictly worse, right?

Bladed - allows weapon to inflicting Bleeding.
Thrown - yes, it does. Also allows you to use Ranged AND Melee-tagged powers. That's the real benne there.
Ranged - Ranged-type powers are what makes ranged weapons good. That and they pretty much all have bonus Evasion on them cuz you're in the backline.
Heavy - yeah it's a penalty tag right now. Plan in future is to make Heavy-tag gear grant bonus Threat to you (and make you start with bonus threat) so you can tank gooder.

CATALYST:
Ok this is a big one. You can cast spells without a catalyst. They tend to add to spellpower and/or spellattack, but this is not bound to the flag itself. AFAIK the catalyst add something when you crit, right?

Catalysts let you use your weapon's bonus stats to the spells you cast.

I presume there is no special thing behind dmg types like 'Blight' except specific weaknesses of enemies. Right? But then there is also crushing and penetrating. Is there a a reason to favor one over the other? Are some enemies weak to it? If so, how do I find out?

Right. You can use the Sense command to figure out enemies' strengths and weaknesses wrt damage types.

Does this mean charge weapon works off of penetrating/crushing damage, and does not affect fire?

Charge weapon just adds Holy damage to the weapon, like its description says.

But I was expecting the Flaming Daggers to Out-Damage the normal daggers significantly.

Why? It does 5 whole damage more than the normal daggers (20 phys + 15 fire vs. 30 phys)

Does this in turn mean, that a high strength character benefits more from a weapon with high crushing/penetrating damage? Because attack power increases only that part of the weapon?

Attack Power scales off the entire damage of the weapon.

 

[Aelana]

Bladed - allows weapon to inflicting Bleeding.
Thrown - yes, it does. Also allows you to use Ranged AND Melee-tagged powers. That's the real benne there.

Intriguing, thanks

Oh, so catalysts like the blade staff, who give bonus to crit, affect spells. Got it.

Charge weapon just adds Holy damage to the weapon, like its description says.
...

Why? It (Fire Dagger) does 5 whole damage more than the normal daggers (20 phys + 15 fire vs. 30 phys)

Yeah that's why I was surprised to see no pretty similar damage numbers. I was also expecting more damage from charged weapon, because each give +5 to spellpower, and I assumed the additional holy damage would scale off of that. But the damage increase of charged weapon was too small to be worth it in my case.

I read that people were running around as charged weapon paladins, so there must be something I was doing wrong.

I currently don't have a char to test it out, but how does dual wield work in that case? Is it like DnD 5e, where the charged weapon conceptually only affects the right-hand weapon? Or does dual wielding get the charged weapon bonus twice, one for each weapon?

 

[Savin]

but how does dual wield work in that case? Is it like DnD 5e, where the charged weapon conceptually only affects the right-hand weapon? Or does dual wielding get the charged weapon bonus twice, one for each weapon?

Dual weapon attacks don't actually make two attacks; your one attack gets 50% of the stats of your off-hand attack.

 

[Paradox01]

IIRC, as of right now only the primary weapon's bonus/special attacks/effects proc but the devs are going to change it so that special weapons in the off hand also proc.

EDIT: This is what I was thinking of.

 

[Aelana]

Oh, I missed that, thanks. I was not expecting that for Dual Wield.

 

[zagzig]

Piggybacking off this thread, I vaguely remember reading something that having a single one handed weapon and nothing in your off-hand gave you some kind of bonus. Is that real or did I imagine that?

 

[Paradox01]

Is that real or did I imagine that?

The latter, AFAIK. There's not even a "One-Handed" tag for weapons.

 

[Savin]

Piggybacking off this thread, I vaguely remember reading something that having a single one handed weapon and nothing in your off-hand gave you some kind of bonus. Is that real or did I imagine that?

You might be thinking of Pillars of Eternity, which I definitely did not steal like 70% of the combat system from.

 

[Zira52]

WHat is RAW damage?

 

[Savin]

WHat is RAW damage?

My guy this thread hasn't been used in 2 years, don't necro.

RAW damage is irresistible, untyped damage.

 

[Shrike675]

Mmmmm, irresistible RAW.