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Calculating Overkill Damage
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<blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 7236010" data-attributes="member: 6795602"><p>On example 1:</p><p>Your argument is that a character doing 65 damage in one attack a turn is worse than a character doing 65 attacks worth 1 point of damage each. Consider this: Assume a 50% chance to hit to each attack. Your character that does 65 damage in a single attack has a 50% chance to kill a 64 hp for in round 1. The other doing 65 1 damage attacks has virtually no chance of killing that 64 hp monster in round 1. The first character does 1 overkill damage. The 2nd character does no overkill damage. They both do the same DPR. Which is better in my scenario?</p><p></p><p>The point is that overkill damage predicted the 1 damage per attack character predicted the wrong character to win that contest.</p><p></p><p>I also want to answer the goblin example because its a more real world example. Your calculations aren't what is causing the problem on the goblin example. It's the differences in chance to hit (which shouldn't really impact your overkill calculations any). Why? Because chance to hit is infinitely more important in determining who wins a contest than overkill. You are giving a character a high chance to 1 shot a goblin and a higher chance to hit that goblin. Chance to hit really starts mattering when you get to 1 shot levels. As long as you have sufficient damage to 1-shot something then the driving efficiency factor will be chance to hit.</p><p></p><p>Of course for your goblin example I can just as easily pick an orc where the average GWF not using -5/+10 will likely not kill the orc in 1 hit. However, the GWM using -5/+10 will virtually 1 shot that orc. In which case the opposite would be true. Your overkill damage calculations would yet again fail and DPR would win out.</p><p></p><p>I guess the ultimate point is that for every example you can throw out where your method works better than DPR I can give an example where it works worse. Why? Because we are ultimately dealing with damage distributions and probabilities. Sometimes a method generating greater variance will be better than a method generating lower variance and other times vice versa. What I can say is that while DPR sometimes gets it wrong (as in your goblin example), those times mostly occur when we are talking about killing something in 1 hit. (It's really easy to take a closer look at chance to hit in such cases). </p><p></p><p>One other side point, example which focus on a single damage value aren't very helpful as D&D has damage ranges that generate a bell-like curve pretty quickly. This is why DPR is such a good guide in most cases, because that bell-like distribution of damage centralizes it very well and makes it hard to overcome the central tendencies of such a distribution after just a few attacks.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FrogReaver, post: 7236010, member: 6795602"] On example 1: Your argument is that a character doing 65 damage in one attack a turn is worse than a character doing 65 attacks worth 1 point of damage each. Consider this: Assume a 50% chance to hit to each attack. Your character that does 65 damage in a single attack has a 50% chance to kill a 64 hp for in round 1. The other doing 65 1 damage attacks has virtually no chance of killing that 64 hp monster in round 1. The first character does 1 overkill damage. The 2nd character does no overkill damage. They both do the same DPR. Which is better in my scenario? The point is that overkill damage predicted the 1 damage per attack character predicted the wrong character to win that contest. I also want to answer the goblin example because its a more real world example. Your calculations aren't what is causing the problem on the goblin example. It's the differences in chance to hit (which shouldn't really impact your overkill calculations any). Why? Because chance to hit is infinitely more important in determining who wins a contest than overkill. You are giving a character a high chance to 1 shot a goblin and a higher chance to hit that goblin. Chance to hit really starts mattering when you get to 1 shot levels. As long as you have sufficient damage to 1-shot something then the driving efficiency factor will be chance to hit. Of course for your goblin example I can just as easily pick an orc where the average GWF not using -5/+10 will likely not kill the orc in 1 hit. However, the GWM using -5/+10 will virtually 1 shot that orc. In which case the opposite would be true. Your overkill damage calculations would yet again fail and DPR would win out. I guess the ultimate point is that for every example you can throw out where your method works better than DPR I can give an example where it works worse. Why? Because we are ultimately dealing with damage distributions and probabilities. Sometimes a method generating greater variance will be better than a method generating lower variance and other times vice versa. What I can say is that while DPR sometimes gets it wrong (as in your goblin example), those times mostly occur when we are talking about killing something in 1 hit. (It's really easy to take a closer look at chance to hit in such cases). One other side point, example which focus on a single damage value aren't very helpful as D&D has damage ranges that generate a bell-like curve pretty quickly. This is why DPR is such a good guide in most cases, because that bell-like distribution of damage centralizes it very well and makes it hard to overcome the central tendencies of such a distribution after just a few attacks. [/QUOTE]
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