PC A18 Knife advice

[Aldranon]

I'll mostly agree, but a good pistol isn't half bad for blood moons. Plenty of stagger power, decent damage. And AGI overall is the tree I'd use if I Had to do "running outside" horde nights. There's no need to, sure, but it's a whole lot of fun Might want to prep your area to have a couple Parkour-climbable ledges for short rests.

My Respect to you, good sir!

 

[meganoth]

Nice. Shoddy is better than I did I wasn't sure how to report this, probably as a "Description error", since 50% decap would be insane if implemented
Btw, since you mentioned stealth for the knife testing, I'll just point out that you can turn off the AI via numpad * to help testing. The zombies will stand still in their idle animation, but react to damage pretty normally. Not sure if that effects ANYthing other than their movement, who knows what is spaghetti'od with the AI code, but I'd say it's safer than modding for testing.

Oh, that would help immensly with testing knife if it is ever neccessary.

Edit:

I just read Gazz's response.. as I kinda expected, but doesn't make the tooltip any less horrible ...

But the explanation isn't quite enough as I killed every single Marlene with a single headshot. Since I damaged for 100% of the zombies HPs I still would have to see 50% decaps.

EDIT: Except if decap chance does only take base damage into account!

 

[theFlu]

Yeah, had the same thought, got stuck between hijacking this thread even further, testing it a little more myself or making a new thread for us, but yeah - it likely does work from base damage.

In fact, I was a little confused at first with this, but that also explains this.

Since the last patch seems to have broken the numpad 0 stats display (I just get some font errors for it now), I had to tune a magnum to kill a zombie Boe on near-exact one body shot.

With that, I got identical head pop and leg pop percentage, even though the head damage should be double. This confused me a little until => yeah, they likely use the same base damage.

Now, the pop rate was I think 7/25 or so, with an unspecced magnum (as in, 1/10 AGI, 0/5 pistols), so ... who knows. Maybe my test world is getting a little old

 

[meganoth]

Now, the pop rate was I think 7/25 or so, with an unspecced magnum (as in, 1/10 AGI, 0/5 pistols), so ... who knows. Maybe my test world is getting a little old

If we assume 1/10 agi means 5% (i.e. everyone has this chance without perking. xml suggests this may be the case) and 10/10 agi means 50% probability and my pistol got about the same result then that would mean your magnums base damage has to be 10 times as my pistols base damage. Something is still strange here.

EDIT: But if we assume 1/10 agi is already 10% chance it might work. 5 times the damage is somewhat close to the actual damage values.

 

[beHypE]

Focusing into Agility, is hard mode IMO. You got nothing for BM and you got a narrow range to be OP in POI's.
I respect the player who deliberately goes into Agility just for those reasons. I don't do it, it would just annoy me.

Well, bows / crossbow are fun to me, but I agree the knives just suck.

I mean, the whole concept of bleeding is terrible in a game like this. There's no viable reason why you'd let a zombie alive thinking "he'll just bleed out anyways". He's either alone and you can secure the kill instantly, or he isn't and then even though he's dying in 5 seconds he's still part of the horde and might hit you. It works in games like diablo where getting hit doesn't matter because you regen so fast, but not as a squeeshy AGI build in a game like 7 days.

Uniqueness and usefulness of the weapons is my biggest gripe with this A18. Why use blades when they provide no decent bonus, when you have hammers that add useful knockdown % ? Why use a shotgun when it has no niche even close combat, when an AK does everything better in every way ?

I really think TFP needs to rethink how dismemberment works as a whole, and how the various debuffs are of any use. If knives had the highest (and I mean, by far) dismemberment chance of all the weapons, they would have a niche. If shotguns had insane AOE damage/spread or less reload penalty, they would have a niche.

I'm not even talking about the stun baton... it's the exact same problem, why stun a zombie when another weapon flat out kills it ?

 

[Whorhay]

Gazz's response makes no sense except in that, yes, decap working like a player would expect would make fast low damage weapons advantageous in one specific way. What does "per fight" possibly mean when you're talking about a 50% chance to do something? Is that supposed to mean that before you even fire a shot the game has determined that your fight with that zombie will or will not end from a decapitation? Even as dumb as that would be it wouldn't match the test results unless the RNG is just really bad and needs a much larger sample size. Additionally why would we care if we get a decap purely as a cosmetic affect when the zombie is dead anyways.

 

[theFlu]

What does "per fight" possibly mean when you're talking about a 50% chance to do something?

It means something like:

Whenever you kill an enemy, from 100% to 0 with the weapon type in question, you have a 50% chance of dismemberment during the fight.

"Per swing chance" is calculated somehow, straightforward would be to divide the health of the enemy by the damage caused by one swing. This won't in reality end up with the 50% chance, but it's somewhat close.

=> So if it takes 10 swings to the body to kill an enemy, each swing would have 50%/10 = 5% chance to remove a limb (if you hit a limb that can be removed).

Does it make sense? Sure, for a game mechanic. The tooltip in that wording is just straight out misleading to the point of uselessness. The current implementation is better than what the tooltip suggests it would be - the bone knife would be the strongest weapon in the game.

Is that supposed to mean that before you even fire a shot the game has determined that your fight with that zombie will or will not end from a decapitation?

Well, not really, but then again you wouldn't know the difference. Pseudorandom systems can usually be made to repeat the same sequence from a seed value, so basically all "random results" are decided ahead of time if the seed is set just once. But it's not programmed to decide that ahead of time (it wouldn't even know if you ever do hit a head, or how many times and so forth)

 

[beHypE]

I'm intrigued but confused, what's the actual current implementation ? I always thought each weapon had a different base value, say for example a club 10%, and a sledge 20%, which would be multiplied by the tooltip, and rolled each strike. So if you had a sledge with the level 5 perk, you'd essentially have a 20*1.5 = 30% chance of dismemberment per strike. And I assumed power strike may or may not have some internal modifier that influenced the base value.

 

[theFlu]

Since we've already derailed this thread completely, I'll try to sum up my current understanding. (I'll stick to knives as example in honor of the thread... )

The chance for dismemberment per ENEMY is the chance given at the weapon's respective Attribute. AGI for knives, PER for rifles etc. AGI 1/10 gives 5%, 10/10 gives 50%.

Per ENEMY means, if you stab a biker with a lot of (max) health, your chance per HIT is lower than when stabbing a weaker zombie, say, the cheerleader. It'll take more hits to kill the biker, so you get more chances, so each individual chance has to be lowered to reach the same chances per enemy.

How is the chance per swing calculated? I don't know, exactly. The numbers we've come up with in testing indicate it is roughly

( damage_per_normal_hit / Zombie_max_health ) * Chance_gained_from_AGI.

(ex. 200 health on a zombie, 40 damage on the machete, 50% from 10 AGI =>40 / 200 * 0.50 = 0.10 = 10% per hit. Even if you hit the head, doing triple damage, it's still 10%)

It may well be something more mathematically correct (that formula won't land on the exact given percentage), but that conveys the intuitive idea.

Note that since this relies on damage_per_normal_hit, the chance per hit improves with machetes over hunting knives (over bone knives). Sledges doing the most damage per hit, will have the best chance per swing (given equal values of relevant Attributes). This will FEEL like a better chance in game play.

Each zombie has it's own individual resistance, which will lower the chance some.

That's about all I'm pretty confident about right now, plenty of things to for me figure out still:

- why was I getting a ton of dismemberments on a magnum with 1/10 AGI - do weapons still have their individual chances as well, maybe?

- does armor play a role - you can reduce enemy armor by several means, will that effect your chances?

- is it decided by: base weapon damage, +mods, +skills, +buffs, +whatever else

- etc...

 

[Nucleus24]

Since we've already derailed this thread completely, I'll try to sum up my current understanding. (I'll stick to knives as example in honor of the thread... )
The chance for dismemberment per ENEMY is the chance given at the weapon's respective Attribute. AGI for knives, PER for rifles etc. AGI 1/10 gives 5%, 10/10 gives 50%.

Per ENEMY means, if you stab a biker with a lot of (max) health, your chance per HIT is lower than when stabbing a weaker zombie, say, the cheerleader. It'll take more hits to kill the biker, so you get more chances, so each individual chance has to be lowered to reach the same chances per enemy.

How is the chance per swing calculated? I don't know, exactly. The numbers we've come up with in testing indicate it is roughly

( damage_per_normal_hit / Zombie_max_health ) * Chance_gained_from_AGI.

(ex. 200 health on a zombie, 40 damage on the machete, 50% from 10 AGI =>40 / 200 * 0.50 = 0.10 = 10% per hit. Even if you hit the head, doing triple damage, it's still 10%)

It may well be something more mathematically correct (that formula won't land on the exact given percentage), but that conveys the intuitive idea.

Note that since this relies on damage_per_normal_hit, the chance per hit improves with machetes over hunting knives (over bone knives). Sledges doing the most damage per hit, will have the best chance per swing (given equal values of relevant Attributes). This will FEEL like a better chance in game play.

Each zombie has it's own individual resistance, which will lower the chance some.

That's about all I'm pretty confident about right now, plenty of things to for me figure out still:

- why was I getting a ton of dismemberments on a magnum with 1/10 AGI - do weapons still have their individual chances as well, maybe?

- does armor play a role - you can reduce enemy armor by several means, will that effect your chances?

- is it decided by: base weapon damage, +mods, +skills, +buffs, +whatever else

- etc...

This is a perfect example of over-engineering something to make it worse.

How about, instead of however the system works now(which we still really don't understand at all), dismember chance skills improved the base dismember chance of a weapon. Up to say 300%?

Slow blades have a default chance of like 15%, fast knives have like 10%, other things have similar but blade perks don't help them. Certain mods could increase base dismember chance by 50%.

"tough" zombies reduce dismember chance by 10%, irradiated reduce it by 10%, feral reduce it by 10%.

So a fully skilled machete with a dismember mod would have a (15 + 300% + 50%) 52.5% chance to dismember weak enemies per hit, and only a 22.5% chance to dismember a tough, feral, irradiated zombie per hit.

It's simple, easy to understand, easy to balance, and the numbers don't require a spreadsheet to understand what they mean.

 

[theFlu]

This is a perfect example of over-engineering something to make it worse.
<snip>

I kinda agree. I'd mostly hope they'd work the numbers into an understandable form into the UI. That might indeed need an easier-to-explain system
Maybe make dismemberment rare enough to not matter too much and make it relatively stable between enemy types. As in, give an actual 5% max chance (or 15%, no more) for a knife, but keep it constant between weaks and strongs, so you'll feel awesome popping a head when it counts - on the tough ones. You'll know what to expect and not just feel overall gimped against the tougher ones.