Now that we have access to very detailed weapon stats, I've spent a lot of time weighing ob, pb, bash, and damage variance. In general, we can all agree that more dice for a given maximum damage is better, because it lowers your variance and shifts your mean damage upwards. But how much does that actually matter?
Recently, I've been playing a jagged with 4d10 damage over WSL's 6d6 damage, and it's felt very strong. I should be expecting to see some low damage shots to balance out those big hits though right? Yes, and no. We lose some of the minor differences from damage messages being in a range, but honing and master damage also add variance which levels out the curve. It's not just a shift upwards in damage.
If you go to anydice.com and input the below code, you can see how the curves shift to the right, but also how the 6d6 curve flattens out.
Code: Select all
output 6d6 named "6d6"
output 6d6 + d4 + d4 + d5 +d5 named "6d6M"
output 4d10 named "4d10"
output 4d10 + d4 + d4 + d5 +d5 named "4d10M"
The next question for me was how do I quantify this? It was too clunky to try and add up each rolls % around the mean on anydice, so I did some very dirty research and tried to apply it correctly. Dice rolls follow a normal distribution curve centered around the mean, so we should be able to calculate the variance, which gives us a standard deviation. Then we can multiply that standard deviation and either subtract or add it to the mean to find our damage range for a given confidence value.
Below is a spreadsheet link for various weapons that I've been considering,
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
The X-Sigma drop down box allows me to select the confidence range, as given in the table on the right. What this means is that if I select X-sigma = 1, 68% of my damage with a master honed Jagged will be between 26.7-39.2. Compare that with 27.1-36.9 for the WSL. What does this mean? Honestly, I'm not sure. On average, I'll do slightly more damage with a jagged, but will see more 27s and more 38s. I decided to add one more table at the bottom of 2h longs to look at this differently.
With the damage threshold table, I select my minimum damage and maximum damage, then the table tells me the % chance of going below minimum threshold damage or above maximum threshold damage. My Jagged will go below 24 damage 2.5% more than my WSL. However, it will also go above 40 damage 8% more. We have to be careful here, because it would be easy to say, Jagged goes below 24 damage 50% more than WSL, and goes above 40 damage 150% more often.
How you value and view these numbers will play a large part in your analysis. If I change the threshold to 28 min and 35 max, the Jagged and WSL have almost the same sub 28 chance, but the Jagged will hit above 35 damage 37.5% of the time, compared to 27% of the time with WSL. Is this proof that I should continue playing Jagged? Again, I'm not sure, but I'll probably keep running Jagged for that little extra damage and because they're pretty easy to get with everyone writing them off.
Good luck, have fun, and don't forget to hone your weapons.