Ranged weapons change

[Ryme]

Combat has been changed a bit, especially ranged weapons.

*Ranged weapons do not benefit from any strength bonus.

*However, with increasing reflexes you'll begin to get multiple attacks per round. Each attack has its own chance to hit/miss so you may hit a lot, miss a lot, or something in between.

* The maximum number of attacks is capped at 8, when you've got very high reflexes (920). So it's a pretty broad range.

* If you hit multiple times, the first hit does full damage for the weapon power, and subsequent hits do a little less than full. (I feel a little odd about this complexity, but it seemed to balance the damage best against ranged weapons.)

* Elemental damage is still only applied once, even if you hit multiple times.

* There are now three types of item bonuses that affect normal damage: +melee damage (which is melee only), +ranged damage (ranged only, obviously), and +weapon damage (affects your weapon whether it's ranged or melee)

* For melee weapons, the calculation has been tweaked a touch to do slightly more damage as your strength increases.

[MagiNinjA]

Hehehe, awesome.

[Ryme]

Also regarding this multiple hits concept, +1 hit might be an interesting enchantment.

It's virtually guaranteed to show up sooner or later.

And does +x% hit rate affect all hits? Equally?

Yep. Each to-hit roll is exactly the same as all the others, and the bonus helps with all of them.

[Cristiona]

Aww... I was hoping for multiple lines...

You attack ... You hit the foe! You hit 8 times for 65 +8 damage.

Of course, the rail gun's still pretty awesome:

You attack ... You hit the foe! You hit 8 times for 210 +10 +10 +8 damage.

[Cristiona]

Double post for gleet justice!

There are two types of weapons: ranged and melee. Currently, other than the style of attack, there isn't a significant difference between the two types, but this is likely subject to change.

Yeah...

[Ryme]

I knew someone was going to throw the manual at me ... and then I forgot to change it. Fixed.

[Cristiona]

I threw the manual at you a week ago!

[Cristiona]

Just to clarify, as it seems a common question, when you see something like "You hit 8 times for 65 +8 damage", that's a total of 73 damage, not 528, right?

[Satan]

Correct. Damage ranges radically based on the number of hits, and it took several attacks to kill one of the row vs. wade enemies, who would've otherwise been killed in 1-2 attacks if it was multiplied by the number of hits.

[Cristiona]

I've heard this from other players too.

[Ryme]

The actual damage calculation is essentially identical to the previous equation -- with a melee weapon the range can vary a lot, too. I'll check to make sure there isn't a bug, but I'd be more inclined to suspect RNG.

[Cristiona]

Um... before this, they were exactly the same as melee...

[Satan]

Well, it's essentially ~8 attacks (or however many your reflexes allow). So, for those of us who can't always get a good hit chance, ranged might be a better choice, since we have 8 chances to get a hit in, as opposed to the all or nothing single melee attacks. I would guess that the chance of each hit is probably calculated a bit differently than a regular melee hit, but perhaps not.