Post:Battle of the Crossbows - 5/31/2009 - 23:50:20
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This article is obsolete. The information described here is no longer valid in the game,
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This article is obsolete. The information described here is no longer valid in the game, |
| Battle of the Crossbows · on 5/31/2009 11:50:20 PM | 2591 |
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| When I went through the posts in this folder I found differing opinions on which HX hits better. There were the DSX fans, and then lots of talk about how much better the Dragon was when it came out. The current line seems to be the slurbow hits hardest now. It would be easy to just say the slurbow is best because of the stats and long RT, but I wanted to see how much better, so I thought I'd play around with it. I'm posting the results here in case anyone is interested. There was a museum Dragon and a slurbow on the tables the other day, so I bought them along with a Crossing HX and some aged oak quarrels from the tower shop from Ilaya Taipa. The quarrels app the same as Crossing bolts and both compare identically to capped basilisk arrows as far as damage goes.
A heavy crossbow is a heavy crossbow type weapon. A steel-plated ironwood crossbow with a sculpted Dragon-head cranequin is a heavy crossbow type weapon. A cavalryman's slurbow with a silver-inlaid ironwood stock is a heavy crossbow type weapon. I only have 57 ranks in each XB, so the test creature was rock trolls, which have fairly decent stamina. I shot 100ish times with each HX. I completed each kill, which is why the total shots vary. Each shot was a fully aimed chest shot at melee range against similarly armored targets. I SLEPT during the entire test so as not to rank. Yes, that was the painful part. I didn't monitor creature balance, but I'm hoping it evens out over the course of so many shots. Shot to kill ratio came out this way: CROSSING HX DRAGON SLURBOW Slurbow was the clear winner here. This didn't surprise me given its stats and glowing testimony from many players. What I didn't expect was the Crossing HX to perform as well as the Dragon. I probably should have since it has slightly better stats than the Dragon, but in previous posts you hear so much about how great the Dragon is that I wasn't sure until I ran the tests. The next thing I looked at was the shot result spread: CROSSING HX DRAGON SLURBOW Again the slurbow rules, having far fewer three-shot kills than the other two, and even having a single one-shot, which FYI was an apocalyptic hit. The Dragon had 2 more 2-shot kills than the Crossing HX, but that's still pretty close to graph noise as far as I'm concerned. And the 4-shot kill by the Dragon was underwhelming. Last comparison I did was the hit power on the first and second shots. To determine this I needed the list of hits, which I found in the archery folder. The number values I added, with the value higher as the hit becomes more damaging: 1 Misses I made a list of the first and second shots of each crossbow, whether awesome or vicious or massive or whatever. I totaled how many of each type each crossbow delivered on its first and second hits and multiplied those numbers by the value of each type hit on the chart above. For example, the Crossing HX had 42 first shots. 5 of these were devastating, which has a value of 18 on the chart. 5 x 18 = 90. 3 more of its first shots were demolishing, which has a value of 16 on the chart. 3 x 16 = 48. Adding 90 and 48 we get 138. I continued until I wound up with a single aggregate number representing the weighted total of the various level hits each HX got on its first shot. This was then divided by the number of first shots, in this case 42, to get an average hitting power per first shot. I don't want to post a ton of arithmetic, so these are the summary data showing where each crossbow's first and second hits scored on average on the scale above: CROSSING HX First Shot Hit Power -- 13.33 (awesome) DRAGON First Shot Hit Power -- 13.16 (awesome) SLURBOW First Shot Hit Power -- 14.53 (vicious) The slurbow comes out solidly ahead once more. It seems certain it hits harder than the Dragon. But neither the Crossing HX nor Dragon was a clear winner for second place. Here the Crossing HX seems to do better, but in the earlier test the Dragon seemed to. Honestly they appear to be nearly the same crossbow EXCEPT the Dragon has a reduced RT and a superb description. Their appraisal also tells us they aren't exactly the same, with the Crossing HX apping higher, but the balance difference has to be distinctly minor, possibly by only a single point. The long RT of the slurbow might deter some people from using it. But as others have posted, the idea of plinking over and over again with the same long RT weapon isn't always the way to go. An opening shot with the slurbow followed by a faster weapon is a good tactic. And with shield stance there'll still be a lot of times you can reload and shoot a second time if you wished. Basically any time you're not swarmed. I wanted to test the DSX, but the only DSX I could find had a price tag of 700 plat, which is absurd considering most people seem to think it was upplanted by the Dragon. I realize we're dealing with Monopoly money here, but I still didn't want to fork over that much cash for something I almost assuredly wouldn't keep. | |
| This message was originally posted in Combat - Weapons and Armor (11) \ Crossbows, by URUTU on the play.net forums. | |