Firetooth Crossbow, as semiticgod mentions above, sets APR at 5 with Scorcher ammo, getting 20 APR with iHaste or Whirlwind attack. This bypasses the limited APR of classes and is about as brutal as you might expect. +2 Specialisation +5 Crossbow +2 Gloves means instant and easy 162 DPR for any character with 2 pips in crossbows, and I'm doubtless skipping several parts of the damage in that. For Archer, that's sustained 414 DPR or so, sustained damage, again, probably skipping a D8 or so.
afaik, the Archer kit does not confer bonus to crossbow..? Or is it just no GM?
Nope, Archer kits allows GM in short bows, longbows, and crossbows as well as specialization in slings and darts. The accuracy and damage bonuses apply to all missile weapons regardless of proficiency, even throwing daggers and axes.
You may be thinking of the fact that elves get +1 THAC0 to Shortbows and Longbows, but not Crossbows. Ultimately, this doesn't matter. It matters for about the first 3 levels if you start with crossbow, but beyond that it's irrelevant.
In your list of DPR without/with haste the Archer w/ Tuigan Shortbow has the same DPR with and without haste but that's incorrect. Haste does increase ApR from 5 to 6, overcoming the unhasted limit.
Thank you for creating this thread, and sorry for "resurrecting" it so long after it has been inactive. I've seen this post linked several times in the last years, and I would like to chime in. I've not crunched all the numbers yet, but I'm reviewing the first "tier" of characters, the archers/kensai at level 9, and to me, the numbers don't line up. The difference is not huge, mind you, but I'm looking for the exact number because, as I'll mention later, I've made an application with a damage calculator, and want to check if I did some mistake here or there in the code of the tool. So I want some hand crafted number (preferably not done by me) and compare it to the results of the app.
Let me review the numbers (again, just for the first group, at 300k experience):
20 or 19 Dexterity give +3 to ranged to-hit roll.
20 Strength give +8 to damage (it also gives +3 to hit, but irrelevant on a ranged discussion)
Kensai/9 and Archer/9 both give +3 to hit and +3 to damage.
Tuigan Bow gives +1 to hit and +1 to damage with one extra attack (starts at 3 instead of 2)
The Army Scythe (aka Light Crossbow of Speed) gives +1 to hit and +1 to damage as well, and one extra attack also (but it starts at 2, not 3, because it's a crossbow).
Arrows +1 deal 1d6+1 damage and +1 to hit.
Bolts +1 deal 1d8+1 damage, and +1 to hit.
Due to Grand Mastery, both Kensai and Archer gain +1 attack per round.
Due to the 7th level, both Kensai and Archer gain +0.5 attack per round.
The OP doesn't explicitly say it, but I'm assuming the "best case scenario", which is that the enemy is as easy to hit as possible, so you are expected to hit 95% of the time (because critical misses, of course).
That means the expected average damage is (average damage per hit)*APR*0.95.
So this are the totals that I get for the level 9 Archer with Tuigan Bow and +1 arrows:
As you can see, none of the numbers match 100% what @SomeSort wrote (although are not crazy different). The only number that I seem to understand where it comes from is the 80.5 damage of the Kensai, as that's the damage on hit times 3.5 APR. My total is the same, but multiplied by 0.95 to assume the 5% of critical misses.
Now, as you can see, this is a bit of a pain to write by hand, right? If you make a small mistake here, or if you want to tweak the numbers, is tedious.
But the worst part is that you don't really know how good you are doing if you want to compare builds with different to-hit number for a given AC of the enemy. What if want to compare weapons with better chance to hit, but worse damage bonuses? Yes, that's possible and people ask about it.
Well, in that case, you need a damage calculator, preferably one that charts different AC values. I've written that program, and I'm readying the 0.2 release with some new features.
This is a comparison chart of the above character builds:
And in case you want to know about the Elven Court Bow vs The Ripper linked above, I compared those two as well.
Let me know if this is useful, and stay tuned if you want more. :-)
@suy unfortunately the arrow+1 in bg2 only deals 1d6 damage. Yes it should deal 1d6+1 like in bg1 but they nerfed it for balance reasons (idk but i read in forum before). If everything works as in bg1 and pnp adnd2e the bows should gain also the bonus damage from their enchantment level, so the strong arm should deal +6 damage. But if you not using mods the bonus damage is not exists.
Thanks for the correction, @danacm. With it, now my numbers align, so I'm relieved. Though SomeSort's numbers are for the average damage of a perfect round (no failure on the to hit roll). One is supposed to fail 5% of the time at least, so the max average damage that you'll see on the charts is 5% less, then decrease 5% points each AC improvement of the enemy, of course.
Here is the updated chart for the first group, now including the Halfling Fighter with Arla's Dragonbane.
And I'll make the other groups of characters as soon as possible, though I'm a bit uncertain how to weigh in the projectiles that do damage on a failed save.
On that critical miss adjustment ... critical hits are also a thing. Many enemies have crit protection, but more don't. Ranged attacks will always crit on a 20 unless a warrior uses a round of Critical Strike/Smite or they have the Archer's Eyes amulet equipped (SoD required, found in BG2EE at the Underdark exit).
All of the options shown are pure physical, so crits on a 20 exactly compensate for critical misses in terms of average damage. Or, on the AC-based chart, they push everything up one notch.
Good point. The application supports toggling the critical hit protection, and you can choose the critical hit percentage to whatever range you want (because of the different items in SoD that increase critical hit chance, and the weapon styles, but also thinking on mods that might add something else). I also support Critical Strike, luck, max damage (Kai/Righteous Magic), and a few other things. I don't support yet setting the chance of critical miss (found one mod that allows to lower it, so you could never fail a blow even without Critical Strike), so that's hardcoded to 1. I'll review the code to see if I get the proper result. Thank you for the feedback!
@suy unfortunately the arrow+1 in bg2 only deals 1d6 damage. Yes it should deal 1d6+1 like in bg1 but they nerfed it for balance reasons (idk but i read in forum before). If everything works as in bg1 and pnp adnd2e the bows should gain also the bonus damage from their enchantment level, so the strong arm should deal +6 damage. But if you not using mods the bonus damage is not exists.
I wonder if this is why, in my EET build, some arrows don't stack on top of others despite having the same description...
As an aside, I think it was silly that the arrows were nerfed. What's the point of calling something a +1 arrow if it isn't? It's not like archery doesn't become almost pointless by the end of ToB anyway.
@suy unfortunately the arrow+1 in bg2 only deals 1d6 damage. Yes it should deal 1d6+1 like in bg1 but they nerfed it for balance reasons (idk but i read in forum before). If everything works as in bg1 and pnp adnd2e the bows should gain also the bonus damage from their enchantment level, so the strong arm should deal +6 damage. But if you not using mods the bonus damage is not exists.
I wonder if this is why, in my EET build, some arrows don't stack on top of others despite having the same description...
As an aside, I think it was silly that the arrows were nerfed. What's the point of calling something a +1 arrow if it isn't? It's not like archery doesn't become almost pointless by the end of ToB anyway.
Is it balanced to almost defuncioning backstab late game (almost every plot enemy immune to it) ?
I think the archer seemed too strong with right equipment (hell the devs not know well their own game, what is the point of +5 longbows without +4-5 enchanted arrows ?) but they not playtested it i think. If the arrows and bows gain the bonus damage that will compensate the lack of strength damage.
+5dmg from bow, +2-3 from arrow (+1d6 elemental) and +5 profs and the archer class bonuses.
All of the options shown are pure physical, so crits on a 20 exactly compensate for critical misses in terms of average damage. Or, on the AC-based chart, they push everything up one notch.
I want to thank you again, @jmerry, for mentioning this, and the way you phrased. That led to finding out myself the first big bug on the calculation that went under my radar (hence, why I did not post a screenshot of the damage with critical hits dealing double damage), and how you worded it made me figure out a better way to calculate things. I've been looking into it slowly this days, as time permitted, and I've been able to fix it, at the time that I made a lot of automated tests to check the results for correctness. There might be still be issues, but here is the chart that is the followup of the previous. It's the same setup on the attacker as the previous, but now the critical hits do double damage. As you said, the damage against the worst armor class is the numbers from the OP because on the average calculation the double damage on a 20 compensates the absence of damage on a 1.
I think the archer seemed too strong with right equipment (hell the devs not know well their own game, what is the point of +5 longbows without +4-5 enchanted arrows ?) but they not playtested it i think. If the arrows and bows gain the bonus damage that will compensate the lack of strength damage.
That's one of the reasons why I thought that having this kind of calculator was fairly necessary. I've seen so many mods changing kits for I don't know which reasons exactly, and measuring them against what.
I'm designing a simple mod to rebalance the Monk class to have a more linear progression, and it's a ton of work to make it balanced with other classes. Some kits getting "+1 each 3 levels" doesn't make much sense when gaining 3 levels in BG1 is half the game, and a blink of the eye in ToB. Plenty of things were not the greatest decisions, of course. We are noticing it because we are doing orders of magnitude more playtest than the original testers, and we have better tools, means of communication, etc.
I'm designing a simple mod to rebalance the Monk class to have a more linear progression, and it's a ton of work to make it balanced with other classes. Some kits getting "+1 each 3 levels" doesn't make much sense when gaining 3 levels in BG1 is half the game, and a blink of the eye in ToB. Plenty of things were not the greatest decisions, of course. We are noticing it because we are doing orders of magnitude more playtest than the original testers, and we have better tools, means of communication, etc.
But there is no class balance in the setting, never was in the pnp adnd2e ruleset nor the bg1-bg2 rules.
Some kits getting "+1 each 3 levels" doesn't make much sense when gaining 3 levels in BG1 is half the game, and a blink of the eye in ToB.
The Monk example is a good one. They're monsters in ToB but fall over to a sneeze early on; in SoA, they can't even hit some enemies for the longest time because of their weird weapon progression.
Problems like that have been a concern for years when making new mods - and it's further exacerbated by things like LoB, which change some fundamental metrics in ways that screw with balance (e.g. spells like Sleep that care about HP and are therefore useless in LoB; or Dispel Magic which cares about levels). But if you change things to work under one metric, they're suddenly out of whack in another - and the fact that everyone has different preferences and expectations isn't helping.
Ranged attackers suffer from similar problems, just with a different progression curve. They're early peakers, to the point where BG1 is almost trivialized by classes like Archer. But at ToB endgame, the lack of competitive gear starts kicking in, and they are overshadowed by other options. To many people that's still fine, though, because different stages of the game carry different levels of importance for people. To me, for example, ToB is less of a concern than early/mid-SoA simply because you have ALL the options at the end of the saga, whereas you're much more confined in what you can do earlier on; to have a silver bullet like Archer around to tear things up at certain stages of the game is a trade-off I'm more than willing to take. But that's entirely subjective - so how do you plan content around that, without things going out of hand?
Tools like this help plot a curve of progression, and that's helpful in and of itself; I've done something comparable (though nowhere near this sophisticated) with other weapon progressions when optimizing group composition. I see this as a personal guide much more so than some 'ideal' balance goal - it helps me see how things are likely to go relative to other options, and then I can decide based around that; and the choice isn't always the one that comes out highest at the end of the line. Far from it. But it's easy to just go "well this weapon deals X damage per hit and this one deals Y damage per hit, so clearly X is better" whenever lists and rankings are invoked - which is a gross oversimplification, and often more harmful than helpful in finding YOUR personal enjoyment optimization.
I kind of love that the saga plays very differently depending on your class choice and party composition. And this post above is a great example of this. You can just as easily throw in Wizard versus Fighter as an example as well. Fighter is going to do very very well at the start of BG1, whereas a protagonist Wizard can be quite a challenge to keep alive. By the end of the saga, you can make your wizard nearly invulnerable as well as being the key combat damage dealer. While the fighter gets good late game options, they pale in comparison. And this is a big part of why the saga has such tremendous replay value.
If everything scaled the same for every class and party combo, that wouldn't be the case.
Yes kuo toan bolts should do more damage if I remember correctly, I am bot at home to test these days. And talking of slings the more damaging are Everard, expensive, and Seeking, cheap to buy, equipped with the best enchanted bullets you can find, not Arvoreen or Erinne that are available only later in the game.
Kuo-toan bolts deal 2d6 damage and save or stun (4 rounds). Which is not more damage than the lightning bolts' 1d8 + 4d4 (save for half). It may be better - stunning enemies is obviously fantastic - but it's not more damage unless the enemy is immune or highly resistant to lightning. Even if they make the save.
They're also something you can't just buy, and the supply is limited; you can only get them from kuo-toan enemies, which only appear in a few places:
- The Underdark. They're fairly common here, with an encounter in the main area, a side area devoted to them, and a lone enemy in another side area. Their ruin area has two spawn points that reset, allowing you to potentially farm the bolts over time.
- The cave in the forest outside Suldanesselar. Two groups of them that don't reset.
- Watcher's Keep. One encounter in level 2 if you go there at low level or with a small party, one encounter at the globe machine in level 5.
- Abazigal's lair. One of the sections features kuo-toa and water elementals.
Kuo-toa are at least kind enough to carry a lot of the bolts; most of them have thirty or forty, and you can take whatever they don't fire at you.
Comments
No idea why i've been faffing about the last 18 years thinking otherwise. Oh well!
Thank you for creating this thread, and sorry for "resurrecting" it so long after it has been inactive. I've seen this post linked several times in the last years, and I would like to chime in. I've not crunched all the numbers yet, but I'm reviewing the first "tier" of characters, the archers/kensai at level 9, and to me, the numbers don't line up. The difference is not huge, mind you, but I'm looking for the exact number because, as I'll mention later, I've made an application with a damage calculator, and want to check if I did some mistake here or there in the code of the tool. So I want some hand crafted number (preferably not done by me) and compare it to the results of the app.
Let me review the numbers (again, just for the first group, at 300k experience):
So this are the totals that I get for the level 9 Archer with Tuigan Bow and +1 arrows:
And the level 9 Archer with The Army Scythe and +1 bolts:
And the level 9 Kensai with Boomerang Dagger:
As you can see, none of the numbers match 100% what @SomeSort wrote (although are not crazy different). The only number that I seem to understand where it comes from is the 80.5 damage of the Kensai, as that's the damage on hit times 3.5 APR. My total is the same, but multiplied by 0.95 to assume the 5% of critical misses.
Now, as you can see, this is a bit of a pain to write by hand, right? If you make a small mistake here, or if you want to tweak the numbers, is tedious.
But the worst part is that you don't really know how good you are doing if you want to compare builds with different to-hit number for a given AC of the enemy. What if want to compare weapons with better chance to hit, but worse damage bonuses? Yes, that's possible and people ask about it.
Well, in that case, you need a damage calculator, preferably one that charts different AC values. I've written that program, and I'm readying the 0.2 release with some new features.
This is a comparison chart of the above character builds:
And in case you want to know about the Elven Court Bow vs The Ripper linked above, I compared those two as well.
Let me know if this is useful, and stay tuned if you want more. :-)
Here is the updated chart for the first group, now including the Halfling Fighter with Arla's Dragonbane.
And I'll make the other groups of characters as soon as possible, though I'm a bit uncertain how to weigh in the projectiles that do damage on a failed save.
All of the options shown are pure physical, so crits on a 20 exactly compensate for critical misses in terms of average damage. Or, on the AC-based chart, they push everything up one notch.
I wonder if this is why, in my EET build, some arrows don't stack on top of others despite having the same description...
As an aside, I think it was silly that the arrows were nerfed. What's the point of calling something a +1 arrow if it isn't? It's not like archery doesn't become almost pointless by the end of ToB anyway.
Is it balanced to almost defuncioning backstab late game (almost every plot enemy immune to it) ?
I think the archer seemed too strong with right equipment (hell the devs not know well their own game, what is the point of +5 longbows without +4-5 enchanted arrows ?) but they not playtested it i think. If the arrows and bows gain the bonus damage that will compensate the lack of strength damage.
+5dmg from bow, +2-3 from arrow (+1d6 elemental) and +5 profs and the archer class bonuses.
I want to thank you again, @jmerry, for mentioning this, and the way you phrased. That led to finding out myself the first big bug on the calculation that went under my radar (hence, why I did not post a screenshot of the damage with critical hits dealing double damage), and how you worded it made me figure out a better way to calculate things. I've been looking into it slowly this days, as time permitted, and I've been able to fix it, at the time that I made a lot of automated tests to check the results for correctness. There might be still be issues, but here is the chart that is the followup of the previous. It's the same setup on the attacker as the previous, but now the critical hits do double damage. As you said, the damage against the worst armor class is the numbers from the OP because on the average calculation the double damage on a 20 compensates the absence of damage on a 1.
That's one of the reasons why I thought that having this kind of calculator was fairly necessary. I've seen so many mods changing kits for I don't know which reasons exactly, and measuring them against what.
I'm designing a simple mod to rebalance the Monk class to have a more linear progression, and it's a ton of work to make it balanced with other classes. Some kits getting "+1 each 3 levels" doesn't make much sense when gaining 3 levels in BG1 is half the game, and a blink of the eye in ToB. Plenty of things were not the greatest decisions, of course. We are noticing it because we are doing orders of magnitude more playtest than the original testers, and we have better tools, means of communication, etc.
Problems like that have been a concern for years when making new mods - and it's further exacerbated by things like LoB, which change some fundamental metrics in ways that screw with balance (e.g. spells like Sleep that care about HP and are therefore useless in LoB; or Dispel Magic which cares about levels). But if you change things to work under one metric, they're suddenly out of whack in another - and the fact that everyone has different preferences and expectations isn't helping.
Ranged attackers suffer from similar problems, just with a different progression curve. They're early peakers, to the point where BG1 is almost trivialized by classes like Archer. But at ToB endgame, the lack of competitive gear starts kicking in, and they are overshadowed by other options. To many people that's still fine, though, because different stages of the game carry different levels of importance for people. To me, for example, ToB is less of a concern than early/mid-SoA simply because you have ALL the options at the end of the saga, whereas you're much more confined in what you can do earlier on; to have a silver bullet like Archer around to tear things up at certain stages of the game is a trade-off I'm more than willing to take. But that's entirely subjective - so how do you plan content around that, without things going out of hand?
Tools like this help plot a curve of progression, and that's helpful in and of itself; I've done something comparable (though nowhere near this sophisticated) with other weapon progressions when optimizing group composition. I see this as a personal guide much more so than some 'ideal' balance goal - it helps me see how things are likely to go relative to other options, and then I can decide based around that; and the choice isn't always the one that comes out highest at the end of the line. Far from it. But it's easy to just go "well this weapon deals X damage per hit and this one deals Y damage per hit, so clearly X is better" whenever lists and rankings are invoked - which is a gross oversimplification, and often more harmful than helpful in finding YOUR personal enjoyment optimization.
If everything scaled the same for every class and party combo, that wouldn't be the case.
Thanks for a great post!
They're also something you can't just buy, and the supply is limited; you can only get them from kuo-toan enemies, which only appear in a few places:
- The Underdark. They're fairly common here, with an encounter in the main area, a side area devoted to them, and a lone enemy in another side area. Their ruin area has two spawn points that reset, allowing you to potentially farm the bolts over time.
- The cave in the forest outside Suldanesselar. Two groups of them that don't reset.
- Watcher's Keep. One encounter in level 2 if you go there at low level or with a small party, one encounter at the globe machine in level 5.
- Abazigal's lair. One of the sections features kuo-toa and water elementals.
Kuo-toa are at least kind enough to carry a lot of the bolts; most of them have thirty or forty, and you can take whatever they don't fire at you.