Do us all a favor and don't use a Mausser, please

[______________Nianna]

Ok, I'm going to just come out and say it. Fixers suck!

I'm not sure that the reason they suck is only because they use Mausser Particle Streamers or not, but we need to put an end to the use of this weapon.

Please fixers, stop using this weak gun so you can provide a reasonable amount of offense to a group and stop just wasting space.

Let me clarify that I'm not a fixer, I'm a trader. I don't have any fixer characters. I have never had a fixer character at any point in time.

The Mausser Particle Streamer QL200 can be outdamaged by QL200 weapons of every single weapon class, including *pistol* if you have a critical hit buff or high level scope.

So many people just calculate the average raw damage of a weapon not including skill levels, monster ac, or initiatives and come off with the idea that the Mausser is only slightly underpowered, but this is not the case! Here are my own calculations for various weapons assuming 800 initiative, 800 attack skill, and 2500 or 5000 ac for the monsters and not taking into account any special attacks (the first number is the damage per second vs 2500 ac, the second the damage per second vs 5000 ac):

QL200 Rider Executioner (1h edged) - 183, 147
QL200 Sledgehammer (2h blunt) - 168, 150
QL200 Home Defender (shotgun) - 167, 128
QL200 Nova Flow (assault rifle) - 155, 109
QL188 Type 77a (rifle) - 153, 115
QL200 Mausser (smg) - 124, 86
QL200 PNG Tactical (pistol) - 65, 65

Now add in a 14% critical hit buff:

QL200 Home Defender (shotgun) - 284, 240
QL200 Nova Flow (assault rifle) - 255, 202
QL188 Type 77a (rifle) - 244, 202
QL200 Rider Executioner (1h edged) - 226, 183
QL200 PNG Tactical (pistol) - 205, 187
QL200 Sledgehammer (2hblunt) - 196, 176
QL200 Mausser (smg) - 174, 129

Look, the thing sucks. Don't use it. STOP I SAY!

Ok, you are not as good with other weapons weapon types as SMG and that means you will do lower damage with them. Maybe you'll suck with all of them. Well there's a reason I'm not a fixer and I dont have any fixer chars.

P.S. For anyone trying to read too much into these numbers do realize that not all classes weapon skills will reach the same skill level naturally and they do not have the same amount of buffs available so they don't actually do damage in precisely the ratios these numbers would suggest. For instance you can see that the PNG Tactical Revolver outdamaged the Sledgehammer with a 14% critical hit buff, but in actuality an enforcer will do much more damage with his sledgehammer because he gets to brawl for probably an average of 500 damage every 10 secs or so and his challenger spell and flurry of blows will raise his initiative and hit damage to much higher values than he has at the 800 init 800 skill level. Similarly, the rider executioner will not actually do more damage than the sledgehammer before a critical hit buff because the enforcer using the sledgehammer will be able to use brutal thug to raise his attack skill and his damage higher, whereas there's no corresponding buff for 1h edged/heavy weapons. The 800/800 numbers are just a point I picked out for easy comparison. Still, fixers have less SMG buffs than other classes have for those other weapon types except shotgun, so if anything the numbers above the SMG will be at an even greater advantage than calculated here.

[________________Crin]

I believe that Funcom doesn't expect the Fixer to do much damage firing a gun. I think our lack in damage was to be made up by some other ability. After all, if we could do good damage with a gun, then we would be soldiers. That would also explain why even the new pure SMGs added don't really outdamage the Mausser.

The problem is that the equalizing ability of the Fixer has not been implemented yet. There are many green Fixer friendly skills, Perception, B&E, Disarm trap, Concealment and Vehicles that don't provide enough benefit for the IP investment.

I am guessing that the new super duper cool feature of the Fixer will make use of one or more of these to add to our combat effectiveness. Maybe a new class of Black Market weapons and equipment that require a B&E hack in order to use. I'd love the chance to hot-wire an Omni tank and drive it into battle. Or maybe hack into an automated defense security system and use it for my purposes instead.

[______________Yazule]

those numbers make me laugh, do me a favor, gimme your "raw numbers on a hammer". They just dont add up to what is actual.

Only way to know which weapon is best is raw experimentation.

[___________randomjoe]

yazule they are just comparison numbers, in exactly the same way as my numbers on the fixer board work, it would be a huge pain in the ass to try and calc how much real dmg you do.

[______________Nianna]

Premium Sledgehammer of Doom QL200
Dmg: 1-906(100)
Attack time: 2.01s
Recharge time: 7.0s

Damage is increased by 100% per 400 skill level and attack/recharge rates are decreased by 1 sec per 1000 initiative. That means +200% damage (three times base damage) for the damage and and the attack and recharge time are decreased by 0.8 seconds (although they cannot go below 1.0s), so the weapon will behave like this:

Premium Sledgehammer of Doom QL200 with skill bonus
Dmg: 3-2718(300)
Attack time: 1.21s
Recharge time: 6.2s

AC reduces the maximum damage inflicted by 1 per 10 ac.

For 2500 AC that means 250 reduction of the max damage so your weapon would perform as

Premium Sledgehammer of Doom QL200 with skill bonus vs 2500 AC
Dmg: 3-2468(300)
Attack time: 1.21s
Recharge time: 6.2s

Non-critical hit damage: Min = 3, Max = 2468, Avg = (3+2468)/2 = 1235.5
Critical-hit damage: Always = 2468 + 300 = 2768

Now if we assume no critical hits, which is not precisely accurate, but is not too far off if you are fighting things somewhat higher in level than you as you usually do in a group if you want to gain levels unless you are using a spell like challenger that greatly boosts your skill level, all the damage over time would come from non-critical hit damage. In reality you'd get somewhere in the range of 0-5% critical hits against a reasonably tough monster I think. I don't know the exact number.

Damage per second = 1235.5 / (1.21 + 6.2) = 166.7 = 167

In my original message I said this number was 168, which an error caused by me misreading my spreadsheet. I read the number on my spreadsheet as 167.7 instead of 166.7 resulting in the 168 number which you see in the message.

With the 14% critical hit buff we then need to factor in the critical-hit damage into the calculation. 14% of the hits will be critical hits for 2768 damage, the other 86% of the hits will be for an average of 1235.5 per hit so the combined average is

Damage per hit with 14% crits = 0.14 * 2768 + 0.86 * 1235.5 = 1450.05
Damage per second with 14% crits = 1450.05 / (1.21 + 6.2) = 195.6883 = 196

Quickly the 5000 ac numbers look like this:
Dmg: 3-2218(300)
Min = 3, Max = 2218, Avg = (3+2218)/2 = 1110.5
Crit always = 2218+300 = 2518
Dmg per sec (no crits) = 1110.5/(1.21+6.2) = 149.865 = 150
Dmg per sec (14% crit) = 1110.5 * 0.86 + 2518 * 0.14 = 176.4575 = 176

[___________randomjoe]

nianna give me a tell in game as blizzaro, or post your name here )

[______________Nianna]

Umm my name in the game is Nianna.

I am a level 129 Trader on RK2.

[___________randomjoe]

where did you come up with the 1k init for 1 sec atk/recharge? and how much does the agg bar affect it? have you done testing?

ranged init is something ive been trying to figure out for a long time( and agg bar, still not sure if its % or not)

[Myga]

I believe ranged init subtracts more to delay than 1sec per 1000. And crit is added to maxdamage before atk is multiplied in. And include clip size in your comparison so the type 77a gets down where it belongs in your list .

[______________Nianna]

I achieved the initiative number through a small amount of personal testing using a stopwatch timing the amount of time between blows and found that subtracting about 350 initiative resulted (by using a low light targeting scope) in lowering my swing rate by 0.00206 seconds per point and accounting for inaccuracy in the timing measurement (a user has to press the stopwatch at the right instant) this agreed with what I had previously read on the message board of 1000 init = one second subtracted from init and recharge. I also personally measured and verified that you cannot swing any faster than once every two seconds. I did not specifically measure the amount of that 0.00206 seconds devoted to attack and delay since I was just spot-checking information that I received that was held to be true. I did this with a melee weapon and did not individually measure the effect of ranged and melee init. I will go test it more fully a bit later on since you dispute this. I would like to see what testing you have done that shows any of this is in error, MSag.

As for the aggdef slider, I have tested it with multiple weapons and moving it all the way to defensive adds 2 seconds to the time between swings. Moving it to the center adds 1 second. Most people move this slider all the way to aggressive all the time and in that position the attack time and recharge time are exactly as displayed on your weapon. The further towards def you move the slider the more time you add to your attack and recharge rates. I have tried to measure the amount of time added to the attack cycle and the amount of time added to the recharge cycle of that 2 seconds by using a very slow weapon and it appeared that half is added to attack and half to recharge.

You are entirely right about the clip size. It is not factored in and I have not measured the amount of time it takes to reload various weapons. Most of these weapons have pretty fair clip sizes so the reload isn't that large of a factor but it is for many rifle type weapons like the Type 77a. I have long thought that most rifles do not have sufficient clip size. Agents also may have metaphysicist pets to enhance their damage output or they may turn into martial artists to give themselves and their group members critical hit buffs (which you can see from the numbers increase damage often by 50% or more) which other classes cannot, so no matter how long it takes to reload their clips agents they don't deal anywhere near the least damage, but a non-agent probably wouldn't want to choose one of those 5-shot rifles as his offensive weapon.

[_______________Rypht]

Perhaps this site will be useful to you Nianna, judging by your numbers you are using some other equations than what is shown here.

http://home.austin.rr.com/shakti/weapeval.htm

[______________Nianna]

The guy that wrote that guide doesn't have any idea what he is talking about. He quotes more than one set of numbers then says that they don't agree with what you see on real weapons. He clearly made insufficient effort to determine what the real numbers are or he would know which of the numbers is right or wrong.

I read in there something about 25% extra damage for every 33 skill you increase. Just on its face this is absurd since a person with 400 skill would be doing four times the weapon's stated damage.

[__________starknaked]

It is not true that 1000 in initiative = 1 second. It is more like 5 seconds.

The formula that I have seen, and which seems to work out properly in the game, is that 600 in ranged/melee initiative subtracts 1 second from attack time, and 2 seconds from recharge time. But attack/recharge time cannot go below 1 second/1 second.

If 600 init = 3 seconds, then 2000 init would be about 10 seconds, which is also exactly how the Agent's false profession nano penalty works out. Agents get -2000 to nano init when under false professions, and nanos take 10 seconds longer to cast than they normally would. Although for nano casting I believe it works differently, I believe that initiative only affects the attack time, not the recharge time.

One thing I can tell is that at 450 ranged init, my stigma rifle fired at maximum rate, every 2 seconds (1 second/1 second). Raising my ranged init to 630, by adding a certain Hud device, did nothing, I continued to fire at the exact same rate. The stigma rifle has a firing rate of 1/2.5.

[______________Konril]

I have done some exhaustive tests on ranged initiative, the aggresion slider a few months ago, and I can tell you without doubt that 1000 for 1 second is just plain wrong.

The real picture is that 600 ranged initiative will reduce your attack speed by 1 second, while the same 600 will reduce your recharge speed by 2 seconds. Fighting at less than full aggressive will add 1.0 seconds each to attack and recharge at the center position, and 2.0 seconds for completely defensive. After all calculations, attack and recharge are indiviually capped at 1.0, even if the weapon advertises faster.

But this is rather beside the point.

At the top quality levels, the reason why most Fixers use the Mausser Particle Streamer, is because it is the best pure SMG available, period. Yes, we know that at high level it does less damage than most pistols. Problem is, there is just no alternative that really does better. The new MTI Aleph has promise, except that no-one at all is able to get one above QL 125 (they don't seem to be dropping as mission loot or rewards, SMG kits are just plain broken, which leave the only source being superior weaponsdealers). The Micahel Patriot again has promise, at mid levels, as fire damage can bypass standard leather, kevlar, Omni-Pol and Omni-forest armors, and a few others. Problem is that with the low critical value, you're placing your bets on pure minimum damage against any armor that defends against fire. It's better than other SMGs in certain situations, but the final verdict seems to be thumbs down from most of the fixers who've tried it. The Enriched Uranium Sprayer had promise, except it runs smack dab into the speed cap formulas. It is nothing more than a toy wihtout its advertised speed (0.8 attack, 0.5 recharge). The Slugger has a mimum of 1 damage at all levels, has a very low max-damage, and very low critical, 1-252(42) at QL 200. This, like the Uranium Sprayer, is a toy. The Pistola De Machina had promise for a while, but again it gets severely hanicapped by minimum speed, and doubly handicapped by the full-auto requirement. It's junk that hits max QL at 176, and only does 2-140(73).

The only SMG based weapon I have found so far that performs better than the Mausser at high level is the Suppressor, At QL 200, it does 10-218(450), compared to the 7-342(250) of the Mausser. Although it doesn't look all that great at first, the Suppressor has two things going for it. 1: It checks against Duck-Explosive instead of Dodge-Ranged, which making scoring crits all that easier. 2: Many high level players believe after a certain point, all that matters is the crit. It also has one very serious drawback to it. Namely required 709 Full Auto skill. Frankly, for the IP required, it would be a lot more effective to write off what was spent on MG/SMG as a loss, and train up Shotgun to that level for the Vektor ND DRAGON, or S. A. Secure Home Defender (with the help of a friendly trader).

Oh, and thank you for helping to illustrate what so many Fixers are so mad about. We all have a seriously underpowered choice of weapons, with no actual alternative other than "play soldier" to gain experience.

[___________randomjoe]

shaktis weapeval was impressive for the time, and has reasonable answers from observations taken at the time, but its wrong ) lots of new **** has come to light(as the dude would say) and konril, so by your theory a mausser would be 1/1 with 1200 ranged init on full def?
hmmmm

[____________Ejeckted]

Some time ago I read an interview with one of the devs
that said 1000init(max) removed 1 second from both
attack and recharge, meaning the weapon would effectively
be 2 seconds faster between hits.

this is of course assuming you are not hitting the hard cap
of 0.5 sec for either. and yes, it is true that some weapons
have a lower attack or recharge than 0.5 seconds but that
just allows you to lower the defensive bar and still achieve
max speed.

it was also stated that middle of the agg/def bar was
the neutral point where you would hit according to
weapon stats minus init.skill. also:
full agg = additional 1 sec off attack and recharge
full def = additional 1 sec added to attack and recharge

the 600 number that's floating around was
hacked from the client side animation code
and I personally believe the interview with
the AO dev over Slicer (who apparently
no longer plays AO anyway).


no, sorry, I dont have any links to the interview.
It was a very long time ago and FC now seems
much more reserved about releasing any kind of
useful info like this.
not sure why they dont want thier customers to
understand the rules of thier game.. but.. ::shrug::

[Myga]

Originally posted by Nianna
I achieved the initiative number through a small amount of personal testing using a stopwatch timing the amount of time between blows and found that subtracting about 350 initiative resulted (by using a low light targeting scope) in lowering my swing rate by 0.00206 seconds per point and accounting for inaccuracy in the timing measurement (a user has to press the stopwatch at the right instant) this agreed with what I had previously read on the message board of 1000 init = one second subtracted from init and recharge. I also personally measured and verified that you cannot swing any faster than once every two seconds. I did not specifically measure the amount of that 0.00206 seconds devoted to attack and delay since I was just spot-checking information that I received that was held to be true. I did this with a melee weapon and did not individually measure the effect of ranged and melee init. I will go test it more fully a bit later on since you dispute this. I would like to see what testing you have done that shows any of this is in error, MSag.

As for the aggdef slider, I have tested it with multiple weapons and moving it all the way to defensive adds 2 seconds to the time between swings. Moving it to the center adds 1 second. Most people move this slider all the way to aggressive all the time and in that position the attack time and recharge time are exactly as displayed on your weapon. The further towards def you move the slider the more time you add to your attack and recharge rates. I have tried to measure the amount of time added to the attack cycle and the amount of time added to the recharge cycle of that 2 seconds by using a very slow weapon and it appeared that half is added to attack and half to recharge.

You are entirely right about the clip size. It is not factored in and I have not measured the amount of time it takes to reload various weapons. Most of these weapons have pretty fair clip sizes so the reload isn't that large of a factor but it is for many rifle type weapons like the Type 77a. I have long thought that most rifles do not have sufficient clip size. Agents also may have metaphysicist pets to enhance their damage output or they may turn into martial artists to give themselves and their group members critical hit buffs (which you can see from the numbers increase damage often by 50% or more) which other classes cannot, so no matter how long it takes to reload their clips agents they don't deal anywhere near the least damage, but a non-agent probably wouldn't want to choose one of those 5-shot rifles as his offensive weapon.

I havent done any testing other than this: my home defender (2.3/2.5) fires pretty much exactly around every 2 sec for me now with full aggro and 450ranged init. I can also tell you that from what I see, when I get a doc debuff on me (like rapid pulsy, -1150 or so ranged ini) my attack time goes up alot more than 1 sec while the recharge time stays constant. This is on the client side tho, watching the attack bar. One of the more annoying aspects of this game is that alot of things seem to work differently client and server side, so not always 100% sure what I see is actual case.

As for your point about agents having crit buffs, well how many 100+ ppl do you see solo. And in groups, how much of the time does the members have crit buff? If you got agent or MA in group you will have crit buffs, then the 77a will suck compared to almost everything else. A shotgun like home defender deals almost twice the damage over time in my experience (60levels with OET and 15 with home defender). Its not terribly hard to get crit buff if you solo either, by just asking a nearby MA. Anyways if you want to tell fixers to not use maussers what about stigma wielding agents? MP pets are most likely getting removed for agents btw, according to what Cz has hinted.

[__________starknaked]

CZ has hinted that they >might< be removed. It is also highly possible that agents could instead be limited just to 1 pet, or just to the heal pet, or some such thing.

[______________Yazule]

Originally posted by Nianna
Premium Sledgehammer of Doom QL200
Dmg: 1-906(100)
Attack time: 2.01s
Recharge time: 7.0s

Damage is increased by 100% per 400 skill level and attack/recharge rates are decreased by 1 sec per 1000 initiative. That means +200% damage (three times base damage) for the damage and and the attack and recharge time are decreased by 0.8 seconds (although they cannot go below 1.0s), so the weapon will behave like this:

Premium Sledgehammer of Doom QL200 with skill bonus
Dmg: 3-2718(300)
Attack time: 1.21s
Recharge time: 6.2s

AC reduces the maximum damage inflicted by 1 per 10 ac.

For 2500 AC that means 250 reduction of the max damage so your weapon would perform as

Premium Sledgehammer of Doom QL200 with skill bonus vs 2500 AC
Dmg: 3-2468(300)
Attack time: 1.21s
Recharge time: 6.2s

Non-critical hit damage: Min = 3, Max = 2468, Avg = (3+2468)/2 = 1235.5
Critical-hit damage: Always = 2468 + 300 = 2768

Now if we assume no critical hits, which is not precisely accurate, but is not too far off if you are fighting things somewhat higher in level than you as you usually do in a group if you want to gain levels unless you are using a spell like challenger that greatly boosts your skill level, all the damage over time would come from non-critical hit damage. In reality you'd get somewhere in the range of 0-5% critical hits against a reasonably tough monster I think. I don't know the exact number.

Damage per second = 1235.5 / (1.21 + 6.2) = 166.7 = 167

In my original message I said this number was 168, which an error caused by me misreading my spreadsheet. I read the number on my spreadsheet as 167.7 instead of 166.7 resulting in the 168 number which you see in the message.

With the 14% critical hit buff we then need to factor in the critical-hit damage into the calculation. 14% of the hits will be critical hits for 2768 damage, the other 86% of the hits will be for an average of 1235.5 per hit so the combined average is

Damage per hit with 14% crits = 0.14 * 2768 + 0.86 * 1235.5 = 1450.05
Damage per second with 14% crits = 1450.05 / (1.21 + 6.2) = 195.6883 = 196

Quickly the 5000 ac numbers look like this:
Dmg: 3-2218(300)
Min = 3, Max = 2218, Avg = (3+2218)/2 = 1110.5
Crit always = 2218+300 = 2518
Dmg per sec (no crits) = 1110.5/(1.21+6.2) = 149.865 = 150
Dmg per sec (14% crit) = 1110.5 * 0.86 + 2518 * 0.14 = 176.4575 = 176

1) ac does not really work like that, after extensive beatings on things (people) of different ac's I can tell you that is off, which is the reason why your damage/ time is not right.

2) I hit rarely for 3 ... very rarely, and I crit WAY more than 5% (no crit buff, just 3% base +2% low light) so that throws off your damage with the 14% crits. WITHOUT a crit buff I crit about 25%, no joke, tested.

3) inits are 600 init = -1/-2 attack not 1000 and not just -1

The hammer is a strange beast, after using it for months I am convinced that there is some kind of a crit modifier on it to make "crits/time" "balance" out, hence its superiority to other 2hb weapons. There is also a "super" crit, above and beyond a normal crit, they happen rarely, but DO happen. I will say that your "average noncrit" #'s do look about right to me.

What I am saying is there are factors that we dont even know about, variables for weapons that they dont talk about.

Thing is this, I will agree that a fixer with a mausser is a joke, everyone knows this in pvp, posting #s dont really give an accurate veiw though.

oh, and another thing, MA crit buffs are bugged, they give WAY more % than they are supposed to and it is to be fixed, with a 14% crit buff, I crit about 60-70% with my hammer. No joke.

Using numbers for formula's that are "assumed" the right way to calculate just dont work, otherwise a Katana would be an awsome weapon, now ask around about katana's in the enforcer section and see what they think.

[______________Yazule]

Originally posted by Scumbug
Some time ago I read an interview with one of the devs
that said 1000init(max) removed 1 second from both
attack and recharge, meaning the weapon would effectively
be 2 seconds faster between hits.

this is of course assuming you are not hitting the hard cap
of 0.5 sec for either. and yes, it is true that some weapons
have a lower attack or recharge than 0.5 seconds but that
just allows you to lower the defensive bar and still achieve
max speed.

it was also stated that middle of the agg/def bar was
the neutral point where you would hit according to
weapon stats minus init.skill. also:
full agg = additional 1 sec off attack and recharge
full def = additional 1 sec added to attack and recharge

the 600 number that's floating around was
hacked from the client side animation code
and I personally believe the interview with
the AO dev over Slicer (who apparently
no longer plays AO anyway).


no, sorry, I dont have any links to the interview.
It was a very long time ago and FC now seems
much more reserved about releasing any kind of
useful info like this.
not sure why they dont want thier customers to
understand the rules of thier game.. but.. ::shrug::

I beleive someone that decoded the client more than I beleive a dev's answer. I heard a dev one time say about level restrictions "that way a level 1 character cant whompa to meetmedere and get hit by a 150".

gimme a break... level one? (very rare, can happen but very very rare) .... whoma to meetmedere? pfft. They dont want you to have the numbers, they dont want us to know EXACTLY how the game works, just generalities.

sorry, but when the code is dissimilated from the client, I beleive the numbers put up.

On the enforcer boards I discuss inits, and how I *think* they work, I used a .5/.5 cap for my calc too, but someone told me that 1/1 is the cap. *shrugs* I dont profess to know, just know that people disagreed on that point.