Yes, indeed, those factors are missing. As for calculating the factors, unfortunately I didn't manage to arrive to a single meaningful numberNMS wrote:I'm working on my own analysis of weapon balance. I think something important that's missing from digdug's graph is that there are factors other than raw DPS that affect how good a weapon is:
- First is damage tier. I believe George balanced with the assumption that going up a damage tier is equivalent to doubling damage. There's no perfectly accurate way to account for this because of the weirdness of the damage adjustment curves and the fact that it's more relevant against medium to high level armors and less or not relevant against low level armors, shields and compartments. But against armors of comparable level, going up a damage tier will often improve the effective damage by a factor of 1.67 or 2.5, so this seems like a reasonable adjustment.
- Ammo usage makes a weapon more expensive and less convenient, so they get more damage to compensate. This might be a factor of 2.
- Omnidirectional (and maybe tracking) weapons have a much better hit rate, so they have less damage for their level. Maybe 1/2.
With these assumptions, it appears that going up a level should improve adjusted DPS by a factor of 1.7.
I've only analyzed the non-launcher weapons in stdWeapons.xml up to level 7 so far, but nearly all of them are within about half a level of where they should be.
Also, a trend line isn't mathematically sound unless all the weapons of a given level have the same x value.
But I'm looking forward to see your calculations
Following up what Shrike wanted, I made a couple more graphs by plotting WMD. I hope they are going to be useful:
- the size of the spheres are the WMD values.
