Percentage of total kills in party...
Sanctuary
Member Posts: 8
Does anyone know of a mod that's essentially a combat log that legitimately shows how much each character has contributed to actually killing something within the group? As it stands, the total kills and by extention total experience value figures are essentially useless. They don't show how much your character actually contributed, only whether or not they landed a killing blow. This could be as low as 1hp, but as long as the enemy dies, regardless of its maximum hit die, it counts towards inflating your value.
I'd been wondering about this for a while now, and then finally decided to test it out after the screenshot of a Shaman with a 40% kill rate, which made no sense to me. They were basically using low damage area of effect spells that tick quite often, so the chance of them "killing" something was rather high, even if the actual overall damage was inconsequential.
I know that damage isn't everything. Early on spells like Sleep are pretty much tide turning for every fight it works on, and later on you'll need dispels, and it also doesn't count the utility of disarming traps or unlocking chests. There are a lot of things that are just as important as damage, but things still need to die, and the stat screen has just been bugging me with its misinformation for a while now is all.
I'd been wondering about this for a while now, and then finally decided to test it out after the screenshot of a Shaman with a 40% kill rate, which made no sense to me. They were basically using low damage area of effect spells that tick quite often, so the chance of them "killing" something was rather high, even if the actual overall damage was inconsequential.
I know that damage isn't everything. Early on spells like Sleep are pretty much tide turning for every fight it works on, and later on you'll need dispels, and it also doesn't count the utility of disarming traps or unlocking chests. There are a lot of things that are just as important as damage, but things still need to die, and the stat screen has just been bugging me with its misinformation for a while now is all.
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Comments
Not sure what you will do with the information though? It's very easy to estimate who does the most damage per round by just crunching the numbers and by that you can estimate who contributes the most to detracted HP on enemies even without the log telling you that.
Of course it could be interresting to see the actual figures rather than estimates though, but I doubt they would show you anything you can't realize yourself; which party member does the most damage.
That's the thing though; I don't always know who is actually doing the most over the course of a game. If it's not someone like Dorn in BG1 or the typical Fighter Kit/Mage, it could be any number of characters/classes, and I don't stare at the log every encounter. Rarely at all in fact. I was mostly curious about how much damage the Assassin was doing when you factor starting each encounter (within reason) with a backstab and then trying to apply poison on each enemy. I'm also not sure if overkill damage is counted in the combat log either, or if the damage it shows won't go over a target's actual maximum or current health.
The game isn't so hard that you would need to plan your groups around "maximum damage" potential or something silly like that, it was just more of a curiosity; as well as being annoyed by the stat screen since it's so meaningless. Plus, it's not even really an "estimate" either since it only counts who landed the killing blow, regardless of how much damage it actually was.
~Lore of the Assassin
*To be fair, I play the Assassin in this run more like a solo character. I park the party with invisibility 10' radius at the entrance/corner of the map, while my Assassin loads up on potions of speed, boots of speed, Arrows of detonation, necklace of missiles, Arrows of biting and then proceed to eliminate all enemies on the screen. LONG LIVE THE ASSASSIN!
Sure, landing the killing blow doesn't tell the whole story but given a large enough sample size it will approximate overall damage contribution.
Small damage increments ticking frequently is actually a disadvantage as it provides several opportunities for a high damage character to jump in and overkill the target.
In your example a 40% contribution from a Shaman is probably more about playstyle than anything else just like the above posters Assassin can get high % simply by limiting the impact of other party members.
Then you also end up having long fights where a character that is excellent at sustained damage ends up dealing 3x - 6x as much as the next highest if the fight is long enough. Doesn't matter. Their contribution is as much as killing a gibberling if they land the killing blow. To take that even further; say you have a group of 6-8 meaty targets, and your best damage dealer does pretty spikey damage (two-handed) and tends to overkill a lot in most cases. So instead, you end up letting them attack a target until it's very low, and then switch to another to get the most out of your attacks per round. Overall, they might have contributed way more than anyone else, but they will more than likely only be counted with the last remaining enemy if they happen to get the killing blow since there's nothing else to switch to.
The in game stat is pretty useless overall. I honestly don't even remember if the original games had that or not either. If they didn't, and this is a new addition, then it's even more frustrating because good combat log parsing has been around for well over a decade now, and even some more modern console games are showing how much damage your character has done overall (not sure if it counts overkill though) as well as how many enemies you've killed.
Personally, I had to use EEKeeper.
One of my few remaining complaints about the new patch is that it essentially broke my custom portraits, making me manually sift through hundreds to get to the one I want, and of course, the problem you mention of using a separate one for the record screen and thumbnail. Hopefully this will get rectified at some point.
To get two portraits you need a two custom BMPs with the same 'name' designation. One followed with an L (Capital letter L)trailer (I like using body shots for this image) and the other with the M trailer(Capital letter M). When you scroll through the custom portrait you'll get to choose the 'L' sized image, after you pick it the game will automatically assign the headshot 'M' sized side-thumbnail image that has the same designation.
examples are xxxxx_L and xxxxx_M, it's important that you don't use a name with more than six(6) characters, because the game will only read the first six(6) characters of the BMP image name, anything longer and the 'M' portrait won't be assigned when you pick a custom portrait.
personally I like cropping and resizing my custom pics larger than the normal image requirements. Instead of doing a 210x330 BMP for my large 'L' sized pic, I will do an approximate scaled image with a max size of 636x1000. The program will scale the image in game. I just think the image looks a little better in HD this way, however, I try to keep the max measurement in my 'M' sized BMP image to 254x400. Any image larger than that for the ' M' sized image and the side thumbnail will look distorted and display image artifacts(little white pixels/specks) The 'L' sized image should never be larger than 652x1024, images which are larger than 1024 can cause the game to crash when you pick them.
Thanks, I tought about using EEKeeper like @jackjack said, but I tried your method and it worked perfectly. What I was doing before was similar to this but without the "_" so my images would be named xxxxxL and xxxxxM, and the sidebar image wouldn't be the right one.
There is a good enough variety of monsters that a Mage isn't going to jump ahead on the kill tally in my experience. More likely than not there contribution will be underrepresented as fireballs will be softening up targets for the party to kill and a mages most important spells don't do damage anyway.
The statistics screen has always been there and it is a tool to provide some feedback, use it for what it is. Not that I'd complain about improvements but it doesn't strike me as that important in the scheme of things.
Another metric would divy up the xp of a monster by its total number of hp. Then, for each point of damage the char dishes, xp/hp would be added to their tally.
These metrics assume that the monster is actually killed. The counts can be buffered and allocated on monster death though.
Mage contributions? Other metrics, probably. Maybe something like some counter for number of monsters incapacatated through sleep/horror/confusion type spells. Perhaps weighted by time.
Other metrics? How about character liability metrics, like counting the amount of damage they have taken.
Buff metrics? These could get crazy. But in principle you should be able to count the hits or saves characters were able to make only through having a buff. You could for instance, if a fighter is able to hit a monster only because of a cleric's buff, give that xp/hit value to the cleric. Similar logic could apply to giving points to a mage which casted haste for the extra attack per round it enables, or breached a PfMW enabling the melee to connect.
I wouldn't expect any of these to make their way to the game, but it can be fun to think about. It would add depth to the experience for many, especially those who treat this game like a science. (Not me, btw, I'm pretty fast and loose)