sugarvalves [1963573] —
Original article
Find out what the recent changes to weapon damage values and the damage bonus formula mean for you.
On Tuesday an announcement was made that two significant changes had been made to weapon damage. Let's look at what these changes are, how they work, and how they'll come to affect you when you go shooty shooty bang bang.
Weapon Damage
The first change is pretty simple to explain. All weapons have a Damage rating, and this rating plays a part in determining how effective your attack will be versus your opponent. All of the weapons in Torn City have now had their Damage rating amended to conform to a new standard. Before we tell you what that means, let's see which weapons have been affected the most.
Melee weapons appear to be the most affected, with Tasers hit hardest having lost 78.07% of their damage multiplier. They are closely followed by the Pillow, which is down by 70%, and the Cricket Bat, which is 68.91% down. The biggest increase out of any weapon type was made to the Rusty Sword, whose damage modifier has grown by 120%. Dual Axes, Hammer, Scimitars, and Samurai Swords have all been boosted by 4.48%.
Of the Temporaries, Snowballs have received a nerf of 88.64%, which is the biggest damage modifier drop out of any weapon - Scrooge will not be happy! Bricks are next up with a reduction of 47.96%, followed by Trouts at 33.33% - this will make it harder to complete Duke's Red Faced mission which requires you to make a finishing hit with a trout. Stick Grenades have received the largest gain with a 7.54% increase, and Molotovs are close behind in third thanks to a gain of 6.52%.
Flare Guns and Blowguns are the most affected Secondary Weapon, losing 28-30% of their damage modifier value. The Luger, Beretta M9, Taurus, Springfield 1911, Slingshot, and the Ruger have also received nerfs of around 25%. There are a few big buffs to certain notable Secondaries, though, with the Type 98 Anti Tank (formerly the Anti Tank) rising by 8.94%, and the RPG Launcher gaining by 8.3%.
The Primary Weapon with the biggest nerf to its weapon modifier is the TMP with a 22.61% drop. The Thompson and the MP40 are next up with falls of 18.92% and 18.86% respectively, closely followed by the Skorpion, Benelli M1 Tactical, Sawed-Off Shotgun, and the MP5k, each of which fell by 16-19%. When it comes to buffs, the Minigun and Nock Gun win out with gains of just over 7%. The dual primaries cover the next few slots, with Dual Uzis, TMPs, MP5s, and P90s adding 4-5% of weapon mod damage.
One final note regarding nature's own weapons; Fists have received no change, whereas Kicking is down by 36%.
View the full table on the Damage Revamp Wiki
The Calculation
These changes in weapon damage can be more accurately described as changes in a weapon's damage modifier value. When we calculate the results of an attack we base it on many things, including your battle stats, which body part you hit, et cetera. A weapon's damage modifier forms part of this calculation.
It used to be that weapon damage modifiers used a mix of internal and non-visible values. This is no longer the case. The weapon damage value you see is multiplicative, meaning that when it is applied to the damage value it simply multiplies it by the amount shown. This means you can compare weapons by damage easily.
If a weapon has a 64 damage rating it will increase your attack's damage 64 times more than a weapon with 1 damage, or 16 times more than a weapon with 4 damage. And so on and so forth.
Further Modifiers
Once the initial damage calculation has been made, weapon bonus modifiers are then applied to this value through the use of a percentage buff. The values of this buff depends on which damage bonus modifiers you have. There are various damage bonus modifiers that can affect your final damage value, such as company specials, weapon mods, ammunition type, and education courses.
We have now changed the calculation which applies these bonuses to make it more intuitive and balanced, and this is a more impactful update than our changes to weapon damage values. The old formula applied all weapon bonus modifiers separately and at different points of the calculation, using a mixture of additive, multiplicative, and logarithmic functions to do so. This is how it looked.
Larger Link. Image courtesy of Proxima.
Don't quite understand it? That's fine, we've binned this formula and massively simplified the new one, so just pretend it never existed. Under the new formula, weapon mods, weapon xp, company specials, and every other bonus modifier are added together in one simple calculation.
Larger Link. Image courtesy of Proxima.
To summarise the process in full, we begin by calculating a damage value based on your weapon and stats. Then, we take all of your damage bonuses and add them together, giving us a nice round figure. This figure is then applied as a percentage to boost your total to a final damage value. Easy peasy, right?
Nope. It took me f***ing ages to get this right, and I had help!
Why Should I Care?
The most obvious result of this change is that it is now much easier (kinda) for regular players to figure out how much a company special, education bonus, or weapon damage rating affects the outcome. This change also makes all modifiers equally important, which wasn't the case before.
Because the old formula was a disordered mix of additive, multiplicative, and logarithmic calculations, the importance of any one bonus was determined by its location in the formula. Now, all bonus modifiers are made equal by virtue of the fact that they are added together at the same point.
How much these changes affect you personally depends on a number of things, including which weapons and mods you use, which upgrades you've put merits into, and which company specials you are influenced by.
Which Modifiers Suck Then?
The rejigged formula benefits some damage bonuses while negatively impacting others. Most of the Education specials have received a huge buff. Previously, only the Bachelor of Self Defense 100% fist bonus was applied as described, but now the attacking buffs provided by educations do exactly as they say percentage-wise. The Ancient Japanese History course is particularly useful under the new formula, as it makes Kodachi and Dual Samurai Swords significantly more powerful.
Weapon Experience is also now more powerful. It originally gave you approximately 2-3% more damage at most for the most commonly used weapons. It now tops out at a max of 10%. Another positive change has come to the Property Shooting Range buff of 2%. The value for this buff remains the same, but it now actually works, having previously been broken under the old formula.
A few modifiers have been negatively affected by these changes. Weapon Mastery Merits have received a nerf, with each upgrade worth only 1% instead of the original 2.5%. Faction Damage has received a minor nerf, as have mods and company specials.
I Can't Be Arsed With All This
Don't worry, you don't have to be. While the left brain gang love working out s**t like this during their secret statistical orgies, the rest of us can just use our eye-parts to look at a thing instead. Which thing? This thing.
Note: Andyman has pointed out that gaining 36% from a weapon is impossible. This image was taking during testing, where anything is possible, even magic.
That is a tooltip that you can activate by hovering over the Damage value on the attacking page. The modifiers currently affecting your damage output (and those of your opponent) are displayed as a list of neat little percentage values. So if you get kicked out of your faction for drunkenly calling your leader a mayonnaise-loving horse fondler, you can calculate precisely how much damage that's going to cost you in your next fight.
Tell Me More, Newspaper Man
With a total of 119 weapons seeing their damage modifier nerfed and just 41 either improved or left alone, you may be wondering why such a change was necessary, and whether this will have a negative impact on attacking. The best explanation came from Vladar in the Committee thread.
"Basically if you don’t nerf a lot of the low end weapons, most things end up really compacted damage wise. If we wanted to use most of the 0-100 scale the low end was going to have to get worse because of the way damage worked before."
"Most weapons are never going to be the best or useful other than weapon experience / finishing hits no matter what we do anyway - BUT - with the advent of weapon bonuses there will be all sorts of niche uses for even the crappiest of weapons."
Also, as Proxima pointed out in his GD thread, the damage values for all weapons now range between their base and base +5. This means that some weapons may actually do more damage than before, even if their damage modifier has been slightly reduced from their previous value.
Overall, Proxima feels that players with everything maxed out won't notice much of a change due to this update. He feels the worst affected are players with a low or average number of total awards, particularly those in an unfinished mastery branch, or who have invested in mastery but without the combat bachelor unlocked for XP.
Thank you to Proxima, Vladar, Chedburn, and Bogie for their assistance with this article.
tl;dr: Damage values and calculations have been changed, but only minor differences will be noticed
Weapon Damage
The first change is pretty simple to explain. All weapons have a Damage rating, and this rating plays a part in determining how effective your attack will be versus your opponent. All of the weapons in Torn City have now had their Damage rating amended to conform to a new standard. Before we tell you what that means, let's see which weapons have been affected the most.
Melee weapons appear to be the most affected, with Tasers hit hardest having lost 78.07% of their damage multiplier. They are closely followed by the Pillow, which is down by 70%, and the Cricket Bat, which is 68.91% down. The biggest increase out of any weapon type was made to the Rusty Sword, whose damage modifier has grown by 120%. Dual Axes, Hammer, Scimitars, and Samurai Swords have all been boosted by 4.48%.
Of the Temporaries, Snowballs have received a nerf of 88.64%, which is the biggest damage modifier drop out of any weapon - Scrooge will not be happy! Bricks are next up with a reduction of 47.96%, followed by Trouts at 33.33% - this will make it harder to complete Duke's Red Faced mission which requires you to make a finishing hit with a trout. Stick Grenades have received the largest gain with a 7.54% increase, and Molotovs are close behind in third thanks to a gain of 6.52%.
Flare Guns and Blowguns are the most affected Secondary Weapon, losing 28-30% of their damage modifier value. The Luger, Beretta M9, Taurus, Springfield 1911, Slingshot, and the Ruger have also received nerfs of around 25%. There are a few big buffs to certain notable Secondaries, though, with the Type 98 Anti Tank (formerly the Anti Tank) rising by 8.94%, and the RPG Launcher gaining by 8.3%.
The Primary Weapon with the biggest nerf to its weapon modifier is the TMP with a 22.61% drop. The Thompson and the MP40 are next up with falls of 18.92% and 18.86% respectively, closely followed by the Skorpion, Benelli M1 Tactical, Sawed-Off Shotgun, and the MP5k, each of which fell by 16-19%. When it comes to buffs, the Minigun and Nock Gun win out with gains of just over 7%. The dual primaries cover the next few slots, with Dual Uzis, TMPs, MP5s, and P90s adding 4-5% of weapon mod damage.
One final note regarding nature's own weapons; Fists have received no change, whereas Kicking is down by 36%.
View the full table on the Damage Revamp Wiki
The Calculation
These changes in weapon damage can be more accurately described as changes in a weapon's damage modifier value. When we calculate the results of an attack we base it on many things, including your battle stats, which body part you hit, et cetera. A weapon's damage modifier forms part of this calculation.
It used to be that weapon damage modifiers used a mix of internal and non-visible values. This is no longer the case. The weapon damage value you see is multiplicative, meaning that when it is applied to the damage value it simply multiplies it by the amount shown. This means you can compare weapons by damage easily.
If a weapon has a 64 damage rating it will increase your attack's damage 64 times more than a weapon with 1 damage, or 16 times more than a weapon with 4 damage. And so on and so forth.
Further Modifiers
Once the initial damage calculation has been made, weapon bonus modifiers are then applied to this value through the use of a percentage buff. The values of this buff depends on which damage bonus modifiers you have. There are various damage bonus modifiers that can affect your final damage value, such as company specials, weapon mods, ammunition type, and education courses.
We have now changed the calculation which applies these bonuses to make it more intuitive and balanced, and this is a more impactful update than our changes to weapon damage values. The old formula applied all weapon bonus modifiers separately and at different points of the calculation, using a mixture of additive, multiplicative, and logarithmic functions to do so. This is how it looked.
Larger Link. Image courtesy of Proxima.
Don't quite understand it? That's fine, we've binned this formula and massively simplified the new one, so just pretend it never existed. Under the new formula, weapon mods, weapon xp, company specials, and every other bonus modifier are added together in one simple calculation.
Larger Link. Image courtesy of Proxima.
To summarise the process in full, we begin by calculating a damage value based on your weapon and stats. Then, we take all of your damage bonuses and add them together, giving us a nice round figure. This figure is then applied as a percentage to boost your total to a final damage value. Easy peasy, right?
Nope. It took me f***ing ages to get this right, and I had help!
Why Should I Care?
The most obvious result of this change is that it is now much easier (kinda) for regular players to figure out how much a company special, education bonus, or weapon damage rating affects the outcome. This change also makes all modifiers equally important, which wasn't the case before.
Because the old formula was a disordered mix of additive, multiplicative, and logarithmic calculations, the importance of any one bonus was determined by its location in the formula. Now, all bonus modifiers are made equal by virtue of the fact that they are added together at the same point.
How much these changes affect you personally depends on a number of things, including which weapons and mods you use, which upgrades you've put merits into, and which company specials you are influenced by.
Which Modifiers Suck Then?
The rejigged formula benefits some damage bonuses while negatively impacting others. Most of the Education specials have received a huge buff. Previously, only the Bachelor of Self Defense 100% fist bonus was applied as described, but now the attacking buffs provided by educations do exactly as they say percentage-wise. The Ancient Japanese History course is particularly useful under the new formula, as it makes Kodachi and Dual Samurai Swords significantly more powerful.
Weapon Experience is also now more powerful. It originally gave you approximately 2-3% more damage at most for the most commonly used weapons. It now tops out at a max of 10%. Another positive change has come to the Property Shooting Range buff of 2%. The value for this buff remains the same, but it now actually works, having previously been broken under the old formula.
A few modifiers have been negatively affected by these changes. Weapon Mastery Merits have received a nerf, with each upgrade worth only 1% instead of the original 2.5%. Faction Damage has received a minor nerf, as have mods and company specials.
I Can't Be Arsed With All This
Don't worry, you don't have to be. While the left brain gang love working out s**t like this during their secret statistical orgies, the rest of us can just use our eye-parts to look at a thing instead. Which thing? This thing.
Note: Andyman has pointed out that gaining 36% from a weapon is impossible. This image was taking during testing, where anything is possible, even magic.
That is a tooltip that you can activate by hovering over the Damage value on the attacking page. The modifiers currently affecting your damage output (and those of your opponent) are displayed as a list of neat little percentage values. So if you get kicked out of your faction for drunkenly calling your leader a mayonnaise-loving horse fondler, you can calculate precisely how much damage that's going to cost you in your next fight.
Tell Me More, Newspaper Man
With a total of 119 weapons seeing their damage modifier nerfed and just 41 either improved or left alone, you may be wondering why such a change was necessary, and whether this will have a negative impact on attacking. The best explanation came from Vladar in the Committee thread.
"Basically if you don’t nerf a lot of the low end weapons, most things end up really compacted damage wise. If we wanted to use most of the 0-100 scale the low end was going to have to get worse because of the way damage worked before."
"Most weapons are never going to be the best or useful other than weapon experience / finishing hits no matter what we do anyway - BUT - with the advent of weapon bonuses there will be all sorts of niche uses for even the crappiest of weapons."
Also, as Proxima pointed out in his GD thread, the damage values for all weapons now range between their base and base +5. This means that some weapons may actually do more damage than before, even if their damage modifier has been slightly reduced from their previous value.
Overall, Proxima feels that players with everything maxed out won't notice much of a change due to this update. He feels the worst affected are players with a low or average number of total awards, particularly those in an unfinished mastery branch, or who have invested in mastery but without the combat bachelor unlocked for XP.
Thank you to Proxima, Vladar, Chedburn, and Bogie for their assistance with this article.
tl;dr: Damage values and calculations have been changed, but only minor differences will be noticed
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