Weapon Ratios

[fastboy21]

its really not very complicated. if you can't trust the ratios and math to predict to what your dps should be then you need to parse. the more you parse the more data. the more variables you control for the cleaner your data will be. you may also take into account that depending on class, level, skills, stats that certain weapons will produce different results due to the attack/damage formulas changing for a character as they progress. you may also want to control for whether your are tanking or not (reposte damage, etc.).

generally speaking, when i am parsing i am generally only looking for my pure melee dps when I am not tanking. I do not care about holding aggro, I do not care about reposte damage, etc. My "benchmark" figure is just pure auto-attack on a mob while somone else is holding aggro. Obviously, in real EQ, there is more to take into account, but I use pure dps as my standard to compare weapon setup for my own information.

as stated above, the more attacks you are making the tighter the spread on your data will be. with less attacks the bigger the spread. averages are still averages, but the consistancy will be more reliable with faster weapons. Example, I know fighting any golem in CoM with my regular weapon setup on my 50 war (sarnak warhammer and troc skean) I can basicly go afk and come back a minute later to find a dead golem. When I equip my ogguk cleaver, I might not always win the same fight, regardless of my expected average DPS...I might win big too. The very slow (and potentially heavy damage) attacks create a very very big chance that I might win big or die if I go afk.

the short of it is, that if you want to play the min/max numbers game (and many people don't---in fact, many group mates will HATE if you are parsing them while you fight) then you need to parse. if it makes the game less magical for you to reverse engineer the combat formulas then don't do it. some folks find playing with data to be a fun part of the game though.