It would make comparison of different weapons easier for the purpouse of balacing, if the role of the damage percentage was fully understood, so that the damage done by weapons at different percentages would be comparable. To this end, a test was performed using one weapon at a scale of damage percentages, showing that the relationship between actual weapon damage and damage percentage is simple and linear.
Introduction
There has been much debate {1,2 } about the degree of balance (or lack thereof) of the current selection of weapons, specifically in the PvP context. However, the development staff have thus far refused to comment, save some early mentions of "we see no problem with the creed" {could do with a link here, anyone got?}. As such there is a need from comparable data to be collected about each weapon, as was done near the start of 2.2 by a german group {also here}.
Such a task would be made vastly simpler if it was not necessary to ensure all weapons are at the same damage percentage by skilling. the LOMing and such involved would disuade many players from participating and be unduly unfair on the players involved. (Really, KK should do this themselves and maybe let us see the results). To this end, we have then investigated the effect of damage percentage caused by skilling on the actual damage done by a weapon.
Methods
A private eye was equipped with a pain easer and LOMed in rifle-combat to the minimum skill requirements of the weapon. The PE then skilled up rifle combat points to increase damge percentage with each shot taken. Each time skilling was adjusted, the pain easer was holstered and then drawn again (this was found to be necessary from the skill changes to have an effect).
The target was a capped PPU with damage logging on. The PPU remained fully shielded at all times and healed so as to keep all target areas fully green. All shots were made to the chest of the PPU and the damage values for the piercing component of the damage only before resistances were applied has been used. The 3-round-burst nature of the Pain Easer allowed us to monitor and determine there was no random or degredation effect - in every case, all rounds from the burst that hit did the same amount of damage. damage percentage was taken from a freshly drawn show info screen for each level of skilling.
Results
Raw Data
http://cmaster.linxsoft.co.uk/images...agepercent.GIF
The damage percentage was studied between 115% and 154%. Overall, as expected, a strong linear relationship was demonstrated between damage percentage and actual resultant damage, with a correlation coefficent of 0.9967. The variances from the ideal model presented can be laid down largley to the decimals in damage percentage which are not visible in the show info screen.
Conclusion
As would be expected, if the number wwe are show in show info is to have any meaning, the damage percentage is a simple multiplier for the damage dealt out by a gun. This aids comparsion between weapons greatly, as a player can use a selection of weapons in testing, then report back the results along with their damage percentage. This can them be normalised to a chosen value for the sake of comparison.
