Weapon master

[Doppel]

Hey!

Is weaponmaster really important if you skill only one proficiency?
I played for a while with 120 points in polearm because i considered to make a hybrid. But after I spent the rest in it (140 points), i really can't feel a difference.

[rustyspoon]

Weaponmaster is only important if you:

1. Are a hybrid
2. Are ranged
3. Duel with a long maul

[Bjord]

Uhm, rustyspoon got the last part completely wrong. It is very useful and not only if you "duel with a long maul"(slowest melee weapon in the game).

If you want to be flexible in combat you really want wpf, but if you're cav you can make it with only 100-110 polewpf and put the rest in something else.

That being said, if you are infantry you want as much as possible.

[Casimir]

As far as I rememberer WPF also has a direct effect on the amount of damage that your weapon does, not only its attack speed.  At 100 WPF the stats shown on your weapon are 'True' of what effect it has ingame.  Less than 100 WPF your player will swing the weapon slower and do less damage than displayed on the stats and over 100 these stats will increase.

As such WPF can become very important, but going over 150 becomes overly expensive and fairly redundant.

[rustyspoon]

Uhm, rustyspoon got the last part completely wrong. It is very useful and not only if you "duel with a long maul"(slowest melee weapon in the game).

If you want to be flexible in combat you really want wpf, but if you're cav you can make it with only 100-110 polewpf and put the rest in something else.

That being said, if you are infantry you want as much as possible.

Nope. You can still spam the shit out of people even with no WM and good footwork. Hell, on all my builds after armor reduction I only have 94 wpf and I still spam the hell out of people. Athletics is far, far more important than WPF for infantry. Also, past a certain point it doesn't do much for damage. The difference between 94 wpf and 150 wpf is about 3 points of damage. Better off investing that in more PS.

As far as swing speed goes, the difference between using 0 WM and 9 WM is you'll swing your weapon .06 seconds faster. Yep, good use of points alright.

The return on WM is so terrible, it's only really worth it in my first 2 examples and the 3rd is just for shits and giggles.

[Corwin]

I found that investing only 3 points in WM works OK for me. It gets you about 130 wpf, and allows more interesting lvl 30 builds, such as 18/24, 24/18 and my favorite -  30/12.

[Vibe]

I found that investing only 3 points in WM works OK for me. It gets you about 130 wpf, and allows more interesting lvl 30 builds, such as 18/24, 24/18 and my favorite -  30/12.

Yep, I have 3WM - 130 WPF myself and it works just fine. Maxing IF was way more worth it.

[oprah_winfrey]

As it stands, WM is the least important skill. It almost acts as a plug...ok i maxed out ps and ath, time to pump IF, ok thats maxed I guess I will put the last 3 in WM.

[CrazyCracka420]

Hybrids and archers should probably be maxing WM.  If I was melee with only one WPF skill, then I'd probably invest 2 or 3 points into WM to get me to the 130ish mark (so after armor you're still above 100, and depending on how much weight, still well above 100). 

[Phazey]

I seem to notice a distinct difference between say ~130 wpf and the ~145 wpf i use on most of my builds. There is less of a difference between ~145 and ~154 though. Could be placebo, who knows.

As someone who uses spamming a lot, i tend to max out WM to ensure i have maximal spamming potential.

Footwork is key, ofcourse. But so is swing speed. Every time i'd fail at spamming someone, i'd be thinking it was the lower weapon mastery. 

[Kafein]

I seem to notice a distinct difference between say ~130 wpf and the ~145 wpf i use on most of my builds. There is less of a difference between ~145 and ~154 though. Could be placebo, who knows.

As someone who uses spamming a lot, i tend to max out WM to ensure i have maximal spamming potential.

Footwork is key, ofcourse. But so is swing speed. Every time i'd fail at spamming someone, i'd be thinking it was the lower weapon mastery. 

Filthy phazh !

Tbh I really like having a lot of WM. It only becomes meh over 4 or 5 WM for one melee prof.


Also keep in mind that wpf is more important when using slow weapons. It has very limited effect on very high speed weapons. I know that from some technical thread, but I don't remember what the reason was exactly.

[Phazey]

It's over a year old, but i don't think the WPF system has been changed since then. Has it?

(click to show/hide)

I have conducted some testing on the effects of weapon proficiency and agility on weapon attack speed. The basic test was conducted by recording the number of two-handed polearm thrusts that could be executed within 60 seconds. I preformed the tests with a number of polearms of different weapon speed and with different polearm proficiencies. All of the reported values were taken from the averages of 3 individual time trials conducted at each condition. The following plot shows the time per thrust verses polearm proficiency. I have also noted the agility that the testing character possessed at the time of the trial.

(click to show/hide)

visitors can't see pics , please register or login

The most obvious feature of this data is the linear relationship between  time per attack and proficiency. The slope of each weapon line gives the reduction in time per attack per point of proficiency while the y-axis intercept of each weapon line gives the time per attack with 1 proficiency (technically 0 proficiency but the difference is inconsequential given the small slopes.) The time per attack at 1 proficiency has a linear relationship with weapon speed as seen in the following figure:
 

(click to show/hide)

visitors can't see pics , please register or login

The slopes of each weapon line are such that 100 proficiency results in a ~6.5% reduction in time per attack relative to the 1 proficiency time per attack. Therefore, weapon proficiency has a greater absolute reduction in the time per attack for slower weapons than for faster weapons. Additionally, these results show that agility has no observable impact on the time per attack for a weapon as there is not a significant change in the slope of time per attack verses proficiency between the different agility test conditions.

To put this in perspective, a level 30 character with 3 agility, no weapon master, and 110 polearm proficiency would attack ~5% slower than a level 30 character with 27 agility, 9 weapon master, and 180 polearm proficiency if both characters were to use a speed 94 polearm. The absolute difference in time per attack between these two characters would be ~0.06 seconds. This is significantly less than the 12% difference in attack speed one would expect if agility was providing the purported 0.5% reduction in attack speed per point and the difference of 70 proficiency was ignored.

Another interesting result was that all of the polearm attack animations (thrust, overhand, and slashes) take the same amount of time to execute completely. However, this does not necessarily mean that the time between releasing an attack and landing an effective hit is the same for all of the polearm attack animations.

It's this thread http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,2531.msg42737.html

Anyways, he says:  To put this in perspective, a level 30 character with 3 agility, no weapon master, and 110 polearm proficiency would attack ~5% slower than a level 30 character with 27 agility, 9 weapon master, and 180 polearm proficiency if both characters were to use a speed 94 polearm

So from 110 to 180 -> a 70 WPF difference causes about a 5% difference in swing speeds. That would be 14 points of WPF for every 1 % of swing speed.

From this, i'm guessing for a 100 speed weapon, the difference between ~130 WPF and ~153 WPF  (WM3 or WM6) is probably close to 1%. Yet that might just make the 0.10 second difference you need to spam someone.

I really don't know, never did any real research and most of my guestimations are based on feeling and are therefore highly unreliable. I cannot rule out that is a placebo effect and purely psychological.

[Doppel]

Thanks to all for your answers so far 

[Elmokki]

I didn't see the exact damage formula, but anyway:

0 wpf (purely theoretical since minimum is 1) results in 85% damage done. Each 100 wpf points add 15% to that, so basically 100 wpf is 100%, 150 wpf is 107.5%, 200 wpf is 115% and so on. The first 100 wpf or so are cheap enough to get that it's probably worth it in many cases (compared to 2 points of power strike being roughly the same, though exact absolute power isn't comparable as easily as saying 2 PS is 16% damage)

Armor also reduces your wpf. I'm not sure if it affects weapon damage / swing speed, but I assume so. Yet if you consider the bonuses wpf grants neglible, it's probably still not worth it to stack huge wpf, since it's seriously very expensive use for stat points.

Basically as has been said before, don't take more than a couple of points of WM unless you are ranged or going for multiple profiencies. There are some extreme cases when wm beats converting to strength and getting ps may be worse. One of those is obviously when you don't have 7 points to get 3 str and 1 ps and you absolutely want damage no matter how neglible the boost is. You could also consider a level 30 18/18 player who has 0 wm and precisely 7 spare points. He'd get ~5.4% extra damage from 3 str and ps (1.48 -> 1.56 multiplier increase) and 3/5 points of static damage from strength. 6 wm would net about 50 wpf. From 110 wpf to 160 wpf the damage boost would be 7.4% (1.015 ->  1.09 multiplier increase). In this case the extra wpf will definitely win. Do note that these are both VERY extremely low benefit investments, I mean, 6 points for 7.4% damage or 7 points for 5.4% damage, 3/5 points of static damage and a few hp? It might be worth using those to get riding or shields or something instead (or it might not, depends on you!)

So yeah, rule of the thumb is, if you have 0 wm, it probably isn't worth it to raise strength just for a level of PS. If you have more extra points, getting an extra level of IF too probably makes it easily worth it though.

Oh yeah, and WaltF4 could be more or less wrong too, which would make my assumption that WM is pretty crap usually false.
EDIT: Also, yes, faster swings is more dps if you're whacking a dummy, but against a player you have to judge if faster swings scores you more hits or if it's worth it to just get more damage so those hits you DO get through hurt more. Regardless of that what also matters is how big the swings actually are, because if you kill someone with two hits anyway, getting +50% damage is pretty worthless as it'll STILL take two hits. That's pretty stupid assumption too due to speed bonuses and varying armor/IF levels anyway though.

Swing speeds don't vary that much anyway between most of the interesting cases, ie 111 wpf vs whatever you can get with WM compared to other options.

[Phazey]

I find it very interesting that Elmokki has a well reasoned out way of deciding on how much WPF / WM you should take... but it only seems to look at the damage you deal.
For me, the deciding factor in choosing WM5 or WM6 is not the extra damage, but the extra swing speed.

That said, he is probably right. The consensus seems to be that weapon mastery is worth it up to WM3, but after that... meh.