Bow Damage/Quality Clarification

[SirLocke]

Hey all, first post here for me. Been playing the game for about a month now, really enjoying it and am looking into switching from slings to bows for hunting now that I've made some quality 51 bone arrows from recent bear hunts. However, there's a couple things about the bow damage/quality formulas that are a bit unclear and I wasn't able to find any information on them. So here they are:

1) Bow/Arrow Damage Correlation - When calculating the max damage you can do, are the damages from the bow and the arrow used simply added together or is there some more complex relationship between them? As I mentioned, I've got quality 51 arrows and I -believe- (see question number two) that I'll be able to make a quality 39 bow once my bear hide finishes drying for the straps. With that in mind, would the item damage I would use in the archery formula from the wiki be 262 (217 from the bow and 45 from the arrow)?
2) Variable Clarification - I read one post in my search for info on this subject that seemed to suggest that the coefficient used for the square roots in quality formulas is always rounded; is this the end result or in the actual equation? To clarify, take the difference between a quality 39 item and a quality 40 item; in something like the arrow damage formula [20*sqrt(q/10)], the quality 39 item has a sqrt value of 1.97 versus the quality 40 item having a rounded 2. In this scenario, would the damage of the quality 39 item be 20*1.97 and then be rounded down, or would it simply be 20*1 because the square root portion gets rounded down? I'm wondering this because if it is the latter formula, I would be better off waiting until I can make a quality 40 bow over the quality 39 one.

Hope these questions made sense, thanks in advance for any help on this. For reference, I'm currently sitting at 27 perception and 50 marksmanship, which I know is in that range where it's better to keep using a good sling; but honestly, I'd just like to spice up my hunting trips a little and add more variety. :p

[TeckXKnight]

Damage doesn't round as far as I can tell and they consistently hit harder even at minor increases. You can easily test this in a spar without equipment on with an enemy who is moving so you deal 100% damage. This lets you just see your max damage, which you can test with multiple weapon qualities.

Something around that, ya. I didn't bother to do the math for it but that's pretty damn close if not spot on to the maximum damage you can output. Your perception vs. enemy agi is going to be fairly low, so you'll have a huge damage variance though. Expect to do maximum damage very seldom.

[SirLocke]

Excellent, thanks for the info. I didn't realize ranged combat did full damage to moving targets like melee did, so I'll recruit one of my buddies to help me set up a test run to make sure I calculated the max damage right. If the formula handles bow and arrow damage additively like I assume it does, then it looks like I can definitely make the switch to bow. From the way I understand it, assuming that both the bow and the sling quality factors reach the cap of your marksmanship, the bow should take twice as long to aim as the sling. But with the math I was figuring, with the bow and arrow qualities I'll have the average bow damage will be more than 3 times the average sling damage, so it will more than make up for it hopefully.



The only other question now is: Do arrows have a chance of "breaking" when firing them or will you always be able to retrieve arrows after they're shot?

[TeckXKnight]

Ah, it doesn't do full damage actually, I meant a melee test just to prove that weapons in general do have damage increase with each point of quality. Sorry for the confusion.

Your calculations are correct. The sling will consistently be faster but the bow will consistently do considerably more damage. Arrow damage and bow damage add together as well.

Arrows have a chance to break once they hit their target and be lost forever. No biggie though, arrows are cheap to make.

[SirLocke]

Ah, okay. Thanks a ton for the clarification, that clears up all my questions. Knowing that arrows have a chance of breaking, I suppose I better hold off a bit and reserve those bear-bone arrows for just bears and deer until I get to a point where I can get better damage output out of easily-obtainable arrows... If only I had some miracle grow for my tree farm!

[Potjeh]

Rounding down always takes place in the final calculation, not in the quality multiplier. That is, your bow would do floor(base*sqrt(q)) damage rather than base*floor(sqrt(q)).