Ultimately, they are probably numbers - that's how the devs set them and how I believe they further balance the weapons. I have a metric ready [that I call K+, for Kill Score] - just need the dataOriginally Posted by RichardOshea Go to original post
While all of the calculations are in a vacuum, and not 1:1 applicable to how they actually play out, having those stats would make the calculations closer than they are now to giving you more accurate projections. I like teasing out the best combos 100x more than I like the Looter aspects of this game - I tolerate those aspects because of how much I like the setting and shooter aspects.
CT: check out Rogue-9 and his videos trying to assess the recoil characteristics of guns in Rainbow Six Siege
But if you apply that logic to every piece of gear, suddenly you have a significant, noticeable difference in performance.Originally Posted by Riflemania Go to original post
Again, this is why this discussion about Fox's and Contractors is happening.
You'd need to perform statistical analysis of a large pool of players with varying skill levels.Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
But for TD2 those stats are pretty pointless, if we strip away all builds and stats and go by pure base weapon damage and handling, a large portion of weapons are already a lot worse in both the damage and handling department.
Because of this the rule of thumb is usually: "if your ability as a player is decent enough, choose whatever weapon that doesn't require a stability or accuracy investment, it's basically wasted damage".
It's kind of sad though, there's a lot of guns that could tie with the best in slot if they did some minor handling tweaks.
There's some exceptions though where handling can be interesting. Braced combined with Unhinged for instance is a nice combo, not BiS, but a good combo nonetheless.
And tbh, as far as weapon balance goes, I've said this many times before on these forums: stop balancing console & PC exactly the same way and balance weapons with the top tier players in mind (for each platform individually) as they usually find ways to make guns work in unintended ways. The latter also plagues plenty of other games. BF4's AEK being a prime example, never intended to be a weapon used efficiently at all ranges, yet the top tier players simply made it work.
Partially wrong on both counts.Originally Posted by RichardOshea Go to original post
There appears to be no difficulty with reload or swap speed. As you've seen for yourself from the spreadsheet that's been mentioned here and that all of us are using, we have exact figures for reload time. (If you're not using this spreadsheet, you're at a massive information disadvantage compared to most of us in this thread.) Swap speed appears to be quantifiable similarly just as a length of time, though I've not seen that in the sheet and haven't bothered to do it myself.
"Stability," as should be clear from various posts above, is not a single stat. It appears that there are probably separate internal stats for vertical and horizontal movement on firing a bullet, and it's obvious that rifles and marksman rifles have different stability characteristics not taken into account in the 0-100% stability bar shown for weapons. It is (sadly) common that developers write independent pieces of code to implement various parts of things like this and don't themselves quantify the final result produced by interactions between them (or even fully understand the interactions), so the developers may not have set up a situation where it's "a breeze" to quantify these things. (Though obviously the computer quantifies everything in the end, based on all its inputs.)
Further, some of the inputs to what we've been discussing here, probably best termed "effective stability," are from the player himself, such as the rate at which you choose to fire your rifle, and the developers don't even know what that is at the time they're programming it; they basically give the player an equation in which he fills in some variables, rather than producing a single number.
Right. But players like Riflemania, with statements such as "it means nothing compared to what's happening in game," appear to be denying that these metrics can ever produce results that will always be true for a particular build. This is not the case. It's a matter of distinguishing between the things where "this is always true, as can be shown numerically" and "this is dependent on the player and cannot be universally quantified."Those calculaions that we can use to describe a build certainly have use but for myself they are just one set of metrics to help build a character.
Except Fox's Prayer doesn't do that. It "override[s] all others" only for a specific type of build when you have certain other combinations of items already in place and, let's not forget, there's a player preference for damage out of cover). In other words it doesn't override all others. (I'm not sure what other item you're talking about, but if it's the one providing damage to health, I'm not in full agreement that it's the only sensible thing to use even in the situations we're discussing.)Originally Posted by Sircowdog1 Go to original post
That would be over-simplifed and a poor design. Fox's Prayer is not such a case. There are plenty of builds where you'd use something else in that slot, skill builds just to pick one really obvious example.I read a thread where someone was legitimately asking if they could dispose of all other pieces of equipment in those slota since they'd never need anything else ever again. How is that anything but an over-simplified system?
It may be that what you're really wanting to say is far from the above, and you just feel that, given all the other variables you have to set up right to make Fox's Prayer clearly the best choice, you feel that there should still be yet more restrictions to be made before Fox's Prayer clearly becomes the correct choice. I'd disagree, given how long it took us to get here and how many other choices there are still in the rest of the loadout. Making this one bit a much easier choice now in certain situations I think is a fair reward for all the work we put in to finding this out.
But were not, the discussion is about Fox's, the dps difference is so small whether you use them or not.....it will not change the game in anyway.Originally Posted by Sircowdog1 Go to original post
Sure. In that you have just agreed with the folks running the numbers here. That should be clear just from looking at us running numbers for different scenarios of "what fraction of our hits are on targets out of cover?" and the like. So the statement above looks like a straw man argument.Originally Posted by RichardOshea Go to original post
And again, you are in agreement with the people here actually running the raw numbers. You seem to be making up something you'd like to argue against rather than discussing the actual subject of this thread.Raw numbers are a bit myopic for my liking.
I, Sircowdog1, LateNiteDelight, Noxious81 and possibly others making similar arguments have never claimed that one should look only at the numbers. What we're saying is that there are some areas that are more easily quantifiable, and by quantifying these we can narrow the overall decision space where we have also to work with the less quantifiable things.
Further, areas that are not currently easily quantifiable may become so through further analysis. So the goal is not just to quantify some stuff, but to figure out what can be quantified and to what degree, and then use this information in our personal efforts to improve our builds, making a reasonable split between using quantification and using other decision-making techniques.
This reads as a classic example of poor analysis: "some things prevent us from producing a fully quantified answer, so therefore we should do no quantitative analysis at all."Originally Posted by Riflemania Go to original post
But as others have pointed out, the range doesn't mean nothing when compared to in game. If build A produces more damage than build B in the range, it will also produce more damage in game if both builds are used in the exact same situation.
If you must choose only between "use only quantitative analysis and use nothing else," and "never do any quantitative analysis at all," the latter is probably a better choice. But limiting your choices to those two options in the first place is a bad choice because you may also do combinations of the two.
Well, I have found plenty of situations in the game where you can get fine quantification of the game on some things. If you've never found these, that's a problem with you, rather than the game. Alternatively, if you're saying that you can't get a final definitive numerical or yes/no answer when including all of the input variables, that's true, but unimportant unless you're taking a bad all-or-none approach to analysis.I have played TD1 + TD2 since launch and over all them years i have done plenty of testing, maybe more testing than i should of and the conclusion i have is that the game is too dodgy to give proper readings.
"My" calculations are right in this game because they are the game's calculations. I'm just telling you what I've experimentally determined about what the game itself is doing.In a ideal world your calculations would be right, but not in this game.
If you believe doing such calculations is not worthwhile, that's a valid opinion, but you are in the wrong thread. That they are worth doing is also a valid opinion, and you dropping into threads to explain to people finding value in something why they should not be finding value in it is neither helpful nor polite.Having Fox's prayer and not having them the dps is miniscule, hardly worth doing calculations for....
We know this. There is no value in you telling us something that we knew and agreed with before you even arrived in this thread.As long as you have a decent build with good synergy and decent stats nothing in the game cannot be beaten if played correctly, no +10 or -10k dps is going to change that.
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Well, no; I wouldn't bother with that. I just want to quantify the stuff I can quantify universally, and then use that to inform my personal decisions about what to use.Originally Posted by Corrupt.be Go to original post
Well, that's a decent rule of thumb for someone who doesn't want to use something more sophisticated, but I am not convinced that it makes a good universal rule if you're willing to do a deeper analysis. Is it really the case that builds using Braced can never be better than builds not using them?But for TD2 those stats are pretty pointless, if we strip away all builds and stats and go by pure base weapon damage and handling, a large portion of weapons are already a lot worse in both the damage and handling department.
Because of this the rule of thumb is usually: "if your ability as a player is decent enough, choose whatever weapon that doesn't require a stability or accuracy investment, it's basically wasted damage".
I do agree that a number of weapons do seem to be just generally inferior in all respects, though, at least in the area of SMGs where I've done comparison across all of them to find ones best for specific purposes. I still don't see what the SMG-9 A2, for example, offers in any area. Though it could be I'm just missing something there. (And there are always the situations where someone finds a particular weapon just "more fun.")
Originally Posted by Sircowdog1 Go to original postHow do you discuss every piece of gear without discussing Fox's?Originally Posted by Riflemania Go to original post
If you're saying that we shouldn't where feasable break down large, complex problems into several smaller simpler problems and solve them individually, you have a terrible approach to problem-solving.
Honestly, you're just being a troll here. It will change the game (that's mathematically proven); you just don't feel that the amount of change is valuable. That's fine, but please go start your own thread to bang on about that, rather than derailing a thread where people are (or were) having an enjoyable discussion....the dps difference is so small whether you use them or not.....it will not change the game in anyway.
It's not even close to a straw man argument as I'm not creating a different version of your argument to then take down using a counter to that falsified argument. I'm simply suggesting that both perspectives would be wrong. And yes I agree that these numbers have a use, but that should have been clear from the outset as I have stated as much more than once now. But where is your data about these less quantifiable aspects to the game? I can guess that 60% of targets are out of cover when I shoot but I wouldn't bet on that and I certainly haven't sat through hours of video tallying up those numbers. I can state that in a given build it takes a given amount of time to reload but I can't tell you how many times I will reload or at what capacity or even how much ammunition a given egagement might use. The list of things that ultimately determine performance, and by that I mean performance throughout a given mission, is rather long and while it may be possible to improve upon the basic analytical methods used to date it has not been done to date so I would not hold my breath waiting for it.Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
Yes, I can use basic weapon damage calculations to decide if a weapon has the potential to do greater damage but I can't use those calculations to determine that it absolutely will cause greater damage without inserting ideals into those equations. That's where I think you're wrong in using the numbers that way. That said, you're free to do what you will and if you find a greater value in them than I do then more power to you but it's not going to alter how I look at this game or how I play it.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what the two perspectives you're talking about are. Why don't you explain them, and quote the messages that introduced them.Originally Posted by RichardOshea Go to original post
You seemed pretty clear when you said:And yes I agree that these numbers have a use, but that should have been clear from the outset....
Originally Posted by RichardOshea Go to original postI don't have it. But I've shown situations where those data do not matter. Whether your shots hit 10% of the time or 100% of the time, in the situations I'm describing you do more damage with Fox's prayer, and replacing Fox's prayer with another red-core item doesn't change how often you hit.But where is your data about these less quantifiable aspects to the game?
Which is fine. Go back and substitute another number for that into the formulae I provided. I showed several examples with both high and low OOC figures, and showed how you generally come out ahead, and gave enough information for you to identify specific pathological situations where you would not.I can guess that 60% of targets are out of cover when I shoot but I wouldn't bet on that....
Well, re-run my formulae to show with what numbers they fail to provide better damage, and make an argument for why you should use those figures.Yes, I can use basic weapon damage calculations to decide if a weapon has the potential to do greater damage but I can't use those calculations to determine that it absolutely will cause greater damage without inserting ideals into those equations. That's where I think you're wrong in using the numbers that way.