Missile brands broken?

[PowerWyrm]

Bug or feature? I'm currently running an archer that found a randart arrow with slay dragon and +0 to damage. Using a regular 1d4 magic arrow deals 144-156 damage with a x4 might shooter. Using that 1d4 randart arrow to kill a dragon deals 144-160 damage, making it simply a 1d5 arrow. I hope that's a bug, otherwise it makes brands on missiles lame and useless unless I'm missing something (crits?).

[the_sandman]

Brands are always better with higher dice, similar with other (melee) weapons, no? The 2/5 reduction should be countered by the EM bonus you have.

[PowerWyrm]

Brands are always better with higher dice, similar with other (melee) weapons, no? The 2/5 reduction should be countered by the EM bonus you have.

Looking at the description of a 1d5 randart arrow that has slay dragon (with a x4 shooter), it says: "do 164 against all monsters, do 229.6 against dragons". Shooting the arrow against a monster does 156-172. Shooting the arrow against a dragon does 156-180, which is simply making the arrow 1d7 and is very far from the 229.6 average.

I just looked at the code to be sure. From what I see, missile brands have simply been changed to follow the rule of melee brands: only the missile dice gets branded. Brand factors are 1.5 for slay animal/evil, 2 for other slays and brands and 3 for the "kill" brands. Damage is calculated as the missile dice multiplied by a factor of 1.4 for slay (see end of tot_dam_aux_player), plus shooter and ammo to-dam, then multiplied by the shooter's might. So indeed a 1d5 arrow will become 1d7 (1-2-4-5-7). Basically... it's the description that's wrong, not the damage calculation. It should be: "do 164 against all monsters, do 167.2 against dragons". So much for "slaying" the dragons...

From what I see, there are two problems here:

1) Brand factors have been reduced from their original values due to the fact that melee weapons now have higher dice values compared to what they were in the past. For example, common slay factor was x3, now it's x2. Concerning missile dice values, they have lower values now (best is seeker bolt with 3d5, instead of the 4d5 in previous versions), so the reduction is completely off topic. Bringing back the old values from missiles should fix this problem. With the current formula, a slay would have a multiplier of 1.8, which wouldn't be too powerful.

2) EM multiplier from the shooter is not completely applied to the branded dice, it's applied to the rounded down integer result. Shooting a slaying 1d5 arrow with a x4 shooter does 4-28 damage (average 15.2). If the damage applied was the one of a 4d5 arrow with a x1 shooter, it would do 5-28 (average 16.2). Not a big difference, but still one point of damage eaten by rounding. This would be easily fixed by passing the EM factor to the brand calculation fonction and then only multiply the fixed to-dam by the EM factor.

Taking my 1d5 arrow example would yield a better "173.2 against dragons", which is more like it.

[shizuo]

The brand missiles is not lame it just depends on what dice you are using.

[PowerWyrm]

The brand missiles is not lame it just depends on what dice you are using.

Whatever dice you have on your missile (highest would be something like 3d5), the extra damage from brand will be pathetic compared to the overall damage of the shooter. Just need to fix the description which is outdated, and you'll see.