monk ratios, primary and offhand choices

[bcbrown]

Ah, that thread wasn't as helpful as I had hoped. Thanks nonetheless.

I read Torven's thread you linked earlier and it was helpful. A couple things jumped out.

Torven has an appropriate attitude towards parsing. I already think he's credible:

Originally Posted by Torven

I produced hundreds (over 2.6 gigs worth) of logs over the last year and parsed them with a custom lua script that I also wrote which output the data in a way that I could easily paste into the spreadsheet. Many of these logs were overnight or even longer. A log generally needs to be several hours long to be useful; obviously the longer it is, the more accurate the estimates that can be derived from it.

Torven says the fact that NPCs only have 20 distinct hit values while players do not is intended, and that the spikes at the min and max hits are intentional:

Originally Posted by Torven

In EverQuest, melee damage rolls are one of twenty possible values. (I assume this is loosely modeled after Dungeons and Dragons somehow) Player characters also get an additional random multiplier on top of the d20 roll most of the time, but both NPCs and PCs will roll a d20 on melee hits. NPC hits that are not mitigated by vie buffs, rune buffs, disciplines, the innate warrior mitigation, or shielding equipment will always roll one of the same twenty possible values.

The probability distribution of rolling one of these twenty values follows a shallow bell curve such that DI10 and DI11 will appear more frequently than other values except for DI1 or DI20 when offense == mitigation. DI1 and DI20 appear the most frequently because the ends of the bell curve are compressed into those intervals. When offense == mitigation, DI1 and DI20 will both parse slightly higher than 15%. I call this the "double 15 point".

So the only potential bug is the spike around the average value that's ~10 percentage points higher than expected, but I don't know if it's worth making the bug report. I'd want an hourlong parse in order to have good enough evidence to make the case the spike is real, and I've got no research showing it's Not Classic.