weapon ratioFollow

could someone post the formula allakhazam uses to determine its weapon ratios in the item info database? thanks

The formula Allakhazam's currently uses is a decent rule of thumb for calculating weapon efficiency or estimating dps at lower levels. At higher levels, though, the formula becomes far less useful due to damage bonuses on weapons.

The general premise behind a damage bonus is that if you use a big, heavy weapon, it's likely to take longer for each swing and recovery, but it will do more damage per hit. Thus, damage bonuses in EQ scale to weapon delay. Two-hander damage bonus goes up with your level, and also increases as weapon delay goes up. At a given level, the damage bonus on a weapon with delay 40 will be higher than that of a weapon with delay 30, for example.

This only applies for heavy weapons, though, so one-handers are excluded. One-handed bonuses depend purely on your level, regardless of delay.

As you go up in levels, the damage bonus keeps going up and up. Somewhere between level 50 and 55, depending on your choice of weapons, you'll start to do more damage with a two-hander than with a one-hander and shield. This is why at higher levels paladins and shadowknights almost always use two-handers. It takes a truly exceptional one-hander (think Plane of Time drops) to overcome the huge damage bonus on a good two-hander.

In other words, if you use a 10/20 weapon, or a 20/40 weapon, it looks like they should deal the same damage over time. However, the damage bonus on the 20/40 is much higher, so in practice, you'll deal more damage with the 20/40 than with the 10/20.

On the Paladins of Norrath forums, the recommended formula for weapon efficency is:

( (2 * damage) + bonus) / delay

where "damage" the the actual damage number on the weapon, "bonus" is the damage bonus, and "delay" is obviously the delay. The higher the number produced by this formula, the better the weapon is likely to be. This forumla can be used with both one- and two-handed weapons.

On a side note, it's generally acknowledged that dual-wielding a pair of one-handers is still more damage than a two-hander; that's one reason warriors and rangers often use two weapons rather than a single two-hander. The damage bonus also works differently for a weapon in the off-hand, but I forget the details on that.

Not sure how true this is, but I heard the damage delay bonuses begin at 28 delay, at every 5 delay is a higher bonus (30, 35, 40, etc.). Never played melee class beyond 30 so I don't know for sure.