IvoL
Dominant
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2005
- Posts
- 416
- Location
- The Netherlands
- Society
- Natural Born Killers
- Avatar Name
- Peregrine IvoL Falcon
Background:
Since so little real data was available on the effect of Skill Modification Enhancers, I decided to do some investigation into the subject myself.
Common sense (and the item name) suggests that Skill Mod Enhancers must somehow increase your effectiveness at using a weapon, as if to raise your HA and/or CHA, much like a Damage Enhancer does for the damage.
The Item Description ingame literally says: "This enhancer adjusts your profession level for a weapon."
When adding an enhancer to a weapon I only saw a minimal effect: the minimum damage increased only by 0.1~0.2, the HA and CHA didn't appear to change although both do change colour (in the item details, after the enhancer has been added), suggesting they are affected. Over the course of my testing I did notice an increase in HA with enhancers where the HA without remained the same.
My expectation was that the damage distrubution might be skewed positively when adding a skill mod enhancer, so the effective, avarage damage does increase more than 0.1 or 0.2.
Setup:
The setup I used was my Tier 1.1 that gradually went up to 1.3 Large Thorifoid Battle Mace, with and without Weapon Skill Modification Enhancer I.
I hunted Armaxes alone, and always stuck to the same area, West of Mino.
I have done fifteen runs with, and fifteen runs without enhancers, each run consisting of 151 hits: so the entire sample base spans 4530 hits in 30 runs.
The first run was a run without enhancers, the second one with, the third one without, etc.
This way I could make sure that skill increase effects only influenced the results relatively little.
Data and analysis:
The results presented below have been analysed in several ways:
Results:
Over the course of doing the runs (several weeks), my minimum damage increased as did my HA, both with and without enhancers. And I even noticed a higher over run 11 and twelve, the HA with enhancers went up by 0.1, and the minimum damage by 0.2: the numbers without enhancers didn't change (yet).
The results per run, presented in graphs:
The results based on the entire data set (table):
All data available on request, but for the sake of readability left out.
And the histogram of the entire dataset:
Conclusion and discussion:
The graphs and totals paint an unnerving picture: in two out of three attributes portrayed the use of the skill modification enhancer has a negative effect: the average damage inflicted (ignoring misses) is slightly higher (0.08%); but the missrate is so much higher with enhancer than without (2.4%) that this difference is no longer visible when the two attributes are "combined" into the equivalent weapon potential used...that shows a 0.3% lower score with than without enhancer.
As one can see, the results per run do vary quite a lot, but pay attention to the scale as they differ significantly. The max deviation of the avarage in avg damage is ~4% in both cases; but the missrates vary really a lot, the deviation of the avarage is 30~40%!; for the equivalent weapon use the deviation comes to 7~10%.
That in itself is the weak point in this whole analysis: I have not yet (by a long shot) taken an infinite number of samples, and we all know that only for that number we can "really" say something...so we need more data!!
The histogram does prove my initial expectation wrong, it seems unlikely that a huge number of (extra) samples would change this: the distributions a identical, save for the minimum damage.
In both cases the damage distribution is uniform.
So the only effect that the Skill Mod Enhancers have is in the minimum damage (and/or HA, but I think this comes down to one and the same thing).
Strangely enough this effect is lost in the much higher difference in hit/missratio...and this is something I don't understand myself: I always believed that a higher HA also meant fewer misses...
(The large variation on the hit/missratio may colour this picture though.)
I'm looking forward to seeing similar experiments with (much) more data
Since so little real data was available on the effect of Skill Modification Enhancers, I decided to do some investigation into the subject myself.
Common sense (and the item name) suggests that Skill Mod Enhancers must somehow increase your effectiveness at using a weapon, as if to raise your HA and/or CHA, much like a Damage Enhancer does for the damage.
The Item Description ingame literally says: "This enhancer adjusts your profession level for a weapon."
When adding an enhancer to a weapon I only saw a minimal effect: the minimum damage increased only by 0.1~0.2, the HA and CHA didn't appear to change although both do change colour (in the item details, after the enhancer has been added), suggesting they are affected. Over the course of my testing I did notice an increase in HA with enhancers where the HA without remained the same.
My expectation was that the damage distrubution might be skewed positively when adding a skill mod enhancer, so the effective, avarage damage does increase more than 0.1 or 0.2.
Setup:
The setup I used was my Tier 1.1 that gradually went up to 1.3 Large Thorifoid Battle Mace, with and without Weapon Skill Modification Enhancer I.
I hunted Armaxes alone, and always stuck to the same area, West of Mino.
I have done fifteen runs with, and fifteen runs without enhancers, each run consisting of 151 hits: so the entire sample base spans 4530 hits in 30 runs.
The first run was a run without enhancers, the second one with, the third one without, etc.
This way I could make sure that skill increase effects only influenced the results relatively little.
Data and analysis:
The results presented below have been analysed in several ways:
- on a per run basis, calculating several parameters after every run, based on that run alone; this way my (gradual) skill increase is visible in the results, both with and without enhancers
- altogether, simply putting all samples in two big bowles and calculating the same parameters based on all of them, the last run being based on a higher skill than the first one; I have also plotted all the results in one big histogram, so as to compare the two distributions
- minimum and maximum damage before and after each run
- HA and CHA before and after each run
- damages done during each run (each run being a set of 151 numbers, ranging from 0 for a miss to twice the max dmg for a crit)
- number of hits, misses and crits and based on that the missrate and critrate
- the average regular hit (excluding misses and crits)
- the average hit (excluding misses only)
- the average critical hit
- the average of all hits (including critical hits and misses)
- something I've called the "use of weapon potential", a percentage: basically the sum of all damages divided by the max theoretical damage possible (for one run this means adding all the damages and dividing this by 151 * the max weapon damage)
- multiplying this latter number by the max damage gives you the "equivalent potential used", this is the total average damage one does with a weapon (including the crits and misses)
Results:
Over the course of doing the runs (several weeks), my minimum damage increased as did my HA, both with and without enhancers. And I even noticed a higher over run 11 and twelve, the HA with enhancers went up by 0.1, and the minimum damage by 0.2: the numbers without enhancers didn't change (yet).
The results per run, presented in graphs:
The results based on the entire data set (table):
Code:
no enh. s.md.enh.I delta
# hits 1928 1920 -0,41%
# misses 337 345 +2,37%
# crits 25 20 -20,0%
hit/miss ratio 85,1% 84,8% -0,41%
crit/hit ratio 1,3% 1,0% -19,7%
avg min dmg 49,4 49,6 +0,41%
avg dmg 99,1 99,1 +0,08%
weap pot used 58,2% 58,0% -0,34%
eq pot dmg 84,3 84,0 -0,34%And the histogram of the entire dataset:
Conclusion and discussion:
The graphs and totals paint an unnerving picture: in two out of three attributes portrayed the use of the skill modification enhancer has a negative effect: the average damage inflicted (ignoring misses) is slightly higher (0.08%); but the missrate is so much higher with enhancer than without (2.4%) that this difference is no longer visible when the two attributes are "combined" into the equivalent weapon potential used...that shows a 0.3% lower score with than without enhancer.
As one can see, the results per run do vary quite a lot, but pay attention to the scale as they differ significantly. The max deviation of the avarage in avg damage is ~4% in both cases; but the missrates vary really a lot, the deviation of the avarage is 30~40%!; for the equivalent weapon use the deviation comes to 7~10%.
That in itself is the weak point in this whole analysis: I have not yet (by a long shot) taken an infinite number of samples, and we all know that only for that number we can "really" say something...so we need more data!!
The histogram does prove my initial expectation wrong, it seems unlikely that a huge number of (extra) samples would change this: the distributions a identical, save for the minimum damage.
In both cases the damage distribution is uniform.
So the only effect that the Skill Mod Enhancers have is in the minimum damage (and/or HA, but I think this comes down to one and the same thing).
Strangely enough this effect is lost in the much higher difference in hit/missratio...and this is something I don't understand myself: I always believed that a higher HA also meant fewer misses...
(The large variation on the hit/missratio may colour this picture though.)
I'm looking forward to seeing similar experiments with (much) more data
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