Maximising Ice Cold Tease Damage

[ham]

The ice cold perk allows for the lower your libido, the higher your tease damage. Easy enough.

With this in mind, is it best to wear clothes that boost sexiness or resolve?

Resolve boosting clothes lower your libido even further (boosting tease damage and protecting you from lust gain), whereas sexy clothes are... sexy.

 

[TheShepard256]

Short answer: Resolve doesn't actually decrease Libido, it's just that increasing Resolve necessarily means decreasing Sexiness, resulting in an overall lower Libido. Sexiness is also more important than Libido for damage from Tease attacks, so more Sexiness always means more tease damage.

Spoiler: Long answer

Background stuff: base tease damage = 10 + (Tease Skill)/4 + Sexiness. With Ice Cold, Tease Skill = 100 - Libido; without, it's = Libido. Tease Skill is also capped at 100, and increases the chance that your own Tease attacks will hit. Each point of Sexiness increases Libido by 1, thus decreasing Tease Skill with Ice Cold and increasing it without. The maximum possible Sexiness is 22 (11 from clothes + 3 from Widow's Kiss + 1 from Rudimentary Revolver + 7 from Allure), and Steele can have up to 49 Libido without losing Ice Cold (50 or more results in losing it, though dropping below that results in regaining it).

Substituting these in means that with Ice Cold, base tease damage = 35 - (base Libido)/4 + Sexiness x 3/4. As such, minimum base tease damage is 19 (49 base Libido, -5 Sexiness from Musk Repellant) and the maximum is 41.5 (0 base Libido, 22 Sexiness).
Without Ice Cold, minimum base tease damage is 5 (0 base Libido, -5 Sexiness -> Tease Skill = Libido = 0), increasing to 17.5 (55 base Libido, -5 Sexiness for a total of 50 Libido) if Steele started with Ice Cold. Either way, max base tease damage is 57 (100 base Libido, 22 Sexiness -> Tease Skill = 100).
With 0 Sexiness, minimum base tease damage is 10 and the maximum is 35 whether or not you have Ice Cold.

Steele's Libido doesn't actually affect the amount of lust damage they take or the accuracy of enemy lust-based attacks, though their Willpower (which is increased by Resolve) reduces both damage and accuracy.

So, in terms of damage, +Sexiness is always better than +Resolve; however, with Ice Cold, +Sexiness equipment will actually reduce the accuracy of your Tease attacks, and the increase in tease damage is less than it would be without Ice Cold. The main draw of Ice Cold is that it allows you to have low lust gains over time (from both the perk itself and the low Libido it synergises with) while still being able to do decent damage with Tease attacks. If you want to maximise the damage of your Tease attacks, you should probably pick a different starting perk so you don't waste Ice Cold's benefits.

 

[ham]

Short answer: Resolve doesn't actually decrease Libido, it's just that increasing Resolve necessarily means decreasing Sexiness, resulting in an overall lower Libido. Sexiness is also more important than Libido for damage from Tease attacks, so more Sexiness always means more tease damage.

Spoiler: Long answer

Background stuff: base tease damage = 10 + (Tease Skill)/4 + Sexiness. With Ice Cold, Tease Skill = 100 - Libido; without, it's = Libido. Tease Skill is also capped at 100, and increases the chance that your own Tease attacks will hit. Each point of Sexiness increases Libido by 1, thus decreasing Tease Skill with Ice Cold and increasing it without. The maximum possible Sexiness is 22 (11 from clothes + 3 from Widow's Kiss + 1 from Rudimentary Revolver + 7 from Allure), and Steele can have up to 49 Libido without losing Ice Cold (50 or more results in losing it, though dropping below that results in regaining it).

Substituting these in means that with Ice Cold, base tease damage = 35 - (base Libido)/4 + Sexiness x 3/4. As such, minimum base tease damage is 19 (49 base Libido, -5 Sexiness from Musk Repellant) and the maximum is 41.5 (0 base Libido, 22 Sexiness).
Without Ice Cold, minimum base tease damage is 5 (0 base Libido, -5 Sexiness -> Tease Skill = Libido = 0), increasing to 17.5 (55 base Libido, -5 Sexiness for a total of 50 Libido) if Steele started with Ice Cold. Either way, max base tease damage is 57 (100 base Libido, 22 Sexiness -> Tease Skill = 100).
With 0 Sexiness, minimum base tease damage is 10 and the maximum is 35 whether or not you have Ice Cold.

Steele's Libido doesn't actually affect the amount of lust damage they take or the accuracy of enemy lust-based attacks, though their Willpower (which is increased by Resolve) reduces both damage and accuracy.

So, in terms of damage, +Sexiness is always better than +Resolve; however, with Ice Cold, +Sexiness equipment will actually reduce the accuracy of your Tease attacks, and the increase in tease damage is less than it would be without Ice Cold. The main draw of Ice Cold is that it allows you to have low lust gains over time (from both the perk itself and the low Libido it synergises with) while still being able to do decent damage with Tease attacks. If you want to maximise the damage of your Tease attacks, you should probably pick a different starting perk so you don't waste Ice Cold's benefits.

Thanks, that's perfect!