Newsfiend
01-15-2010, 07:10 PM
I was writing this as a response to a PM, but I figured it would do more good to post where everyone can see it.
The target for that weapon (and the beastlord weapon) is a ratio of 2.89. Even if you value elemental damage at 1/3rd of a point (which is lower than our testing indicates), it's a ratio of 2.877 vs. the beastlord at 2.894. The .017 difference is well within our standard margin for error on ratios, and given both the damage focus and the best case ratio of 2.947, I felt it placed the weapon where it should have been in the first place.
The reason the beastlord and monk weapons have the same target ratio (but still the highest among the various weapons) is because the ratio superiority belongs to hand to hand weapons, not specifically to monk weapons*. Monks do more damage with the same weapon than beastlords. When we got the weapons back from art, the beastlord's weapon looked more like a piercing weapon than a hand to hand, so I changed its type. I didn't lower the ratio because that was part of the initial plan and it seemed unfair to penalize beastlords because an artist interpreted my description differently than I thought he would.
This isn't representative of some grand plan to remove hand to hand ratio superiority. If this were a normal weapon we'd have just added beastlords to the standard hand to hand weapons in the tier and no one would notice. We tried to make each of the evolving weapons unique and so there are differences between them.
The lack of endurance on all of the pure melee weapons is a bug. I leave it off while adjusting stats and then add it in later, but on these weapons it got lost in the shuffle. The bug didn't make it into my queue until we were in design lock for the last patch so the fix couldn't be added to the January patch. It's coming in the next full patch.
*It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist of the standard.
More... (http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m?topic_id=160020&post_id=2380859#2380859)
The target for that weapon (and the beastlord weapon) is a ratio of 2.89. Even if you value elemental damage at 1/3rd of a point (which is lower than our testing indicates), it's a ratio of 2.877 vs. the beastlord at 2.894. The .017 difference is well within our standard margin for error on ratios, and given both the damage focus and the best case ratio of 2.947, I felt it placed the weapon where it should have been in the first place.
The reason the beastlord and monk weapons have the same target ratio (but still the highest among the various weapons) is because the ratio superiority belongs to hand to hand weapons, not specifically to monk weapons*. Monks do more damage with the same weapon than beastlords. When we got the weapons back from art, the beastlord's weapon looked more like a piercing weapon than a hand to hand, so I changed its type. I didn't lower the ratio because that was part of the initial plan and it seemed unfair to penalize beastlords because an artist interpreted my description differently than I thought he would.
This isn't representative of some grand plan to remove hand to hand ratio superiority. If this were a normal weapon we'd have just added beastlords to the standard hand to hand weapons in the tier and no one would notice. We tried to make each of the evolving weapons unique and so there are differences between them.
The lack of endurance on all of the pure melee weapons is a bug. I leave it off while adjusting stats and then add it in later, but on these weapons it got lost in the shuffle. The bug didn't make it into my queue until we were in design lock for the last patch so the fix couldn't be added to the January patch. It's coming in the next full patch.
*It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist of the standard.
More... (http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m?topic_id=160020&post_id=2380859#2380859)