first guide here: http://forums.d2jsp.org/index.php?showtopic=30489317&f=272

In this thread I will clear up misconceptions about monster defense, your defense, critical strikes and weapon range, including heavy weapons.
I won't make huge graphs because that's not what math is about, I will provide up to 2 example and then explain why it happens and what that means in general. Plus, graphs generally don't tell the whole story because the data is contrived.

• Weapon range vs defense

*defense is simply subtracted from your weapon's damage roll to determine how much you deal to the monster
So theres a thread up about this right now, here I will show you what the results mean and extrapolate all possible consequences.
Take an axe that does 7-8 damage and a sword that does 1-14.
Then against any armor with defense between 1 and 13, the sword will end up doing more average damage.
Why? Well let's look at a 5 defense monster as an example.
Every hit with the axe will lose 5 damage from this defense, so your possible rolls go from 7,8 to 2,3. So from 7.5 average damage to 2.5 average damage, which is what you would expect as it is 5 lower from the defense.
With a sword you go from 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 to 0,0,0,0,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. but wait, this means you went from 7.5 average to 3.2.
Why did you do more? because in this case, the monster's defense altough it was 5 the whole time, it's average USE was not 5 the whole time. You undercut it and thus reduced it's performance on low rolls. So in the end a sword will outperform an axe because of this.

• Heavy weapons vs light weapons and defense

For every attack you make with a heavy weapon, you could have made two with a light weapon.
Now consider a sword with 1-5 and a longsword with 2-10.
Given 10 hits with the longsword you would have ten hits, the sword would have twenty. So the sword has to match itself up to defense twice as often. This results in more damage being dealt by the longsword because it doesn't have to subtract defense as many times.
To see what happens with weapon range let's try a 1-5 vs 2-10 vs 3 defense
1,2,3,4,5 + 1,2,3,4,5 becomes 0,0,0,1,2 + 0,0,0,1,2 so 6 average becomes 1.2 average
2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 becomes 0,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 so from 6 average to 3.1 average
which in this case is even more of an advantage.
The only thing you would be losing out on is mods that happen per attack everytime, like LpA.
Things like critical strike will be examined shortly.

• What you can do to maximize your defense

Well we've seen that you can gain the upper hand dealing damage when you are able to undercut the monster's defense
let's consider this example, a monster does 1-5 damage and you can have an armor that always does 2 defense, or you can have a 1-3 defense
case 2 defense:
1 vs 2 = 0
2 vs 2 = 0
3 vs 2 = 1
4 vs 2 = 2
5 vs 2 = 3
so average damage you take is 1.2
case 1-3 defense:
1 vs 1 = 0, 1 vs 2 = 0, 1 vs 3 = 0
2 vs 1 = 1, 2 vs 2 = 0, 2 vs 3 = 0
3 vs 1 = 2, 3 vs 2 = 1, 3 vs 3 = 0
4 vs 1 = 3, 4 vs 2 = 2, 4 vs 3 = 1
5 vs 1 = 4, 5 vs 2 = 3, 5 vs 3 = 2
so you take an average of 1.2667 damage
This happens because you are creating larger possible undercuts for the monster.
To conclude this section, armors with more consistent defense, even though the average is the same, are better.
But if it comes down to choosing between consistency or higher average, you should go with higher average.

• Critical strikes when taking defense and weapon type into consideration

Critical strikes ignore defense. That is a fact.
so what does this mean for us? well the first thing you might think of is, hey, swords lose their advantage right?
Well that's false.
Consider a 10% chance to crit and that you don't care what the crit multiplier is (you can ignore the multiplier because average stays average because defense doesn't occur so it is preserved)
Then out of 100 hits, your sword will do it's adjusted average for 90 of them, let's call this Y, and for 10 hits it will do X.
So now for the axe, we know it's 90 regular hits will do less damage than Y because of what was said before. Now considering average is preserved for crits, it's ten crit hits will have the same average as X.
So the sword retains it's advantage and the axe doesn't really catch up.

But you want to know the best part?
This means dex benefits axe users more than it does sword users.
note, this is not to say that axes will do more damage than swords when you add crits, but just that the % that crits contribute to your total damage is larger for axes. Swords still retain their advantage

So to conclude, I hope that red part thoroughly embarasses many of you.
Any constructive feedback is appreciated, as well as if you find a mistake don't be afraid to point it out here, it will only make me work harder next time
Also, if there are any more questions you may have feel free to post them, by this I don't mean asking me for the critical strike formulas or anything that requires extensive testing since I don't have that time.
But anything about mechanics or what might be better in a certain situation, I can usually deduce a good answer without needing to do any testing. As I have done here with the crit thing, it works without knowing the crit formula

Nice guide I'll be linking to this often

If anyone does want some feasible formulas for dex and crit strike I found these to be GENERALLY accurate.

Ladder Slasher melee damage formula:

Chance of critical hit = attacker's dexterity / (500 + attacker's dexterity) + 0.2 per point of critical strike
CritMultiplier = 200% + 1% per point of attacker's dexterity - 1% per point of defender's dexterity
Maximum CritMultiplier = 300% dmg, Minimum critmultiplier = 100% dmg
Normal attack damage = (0.95+ attacker's strength / 100) x base weapon damage - defense
Critical hit damage = (0.95 + attacker's strength / 100) x base weapon damage x CritMultiplier
* base weapon damage is weapon damage shown with 0 strength, average damage = 5.5 x weapon tier

Found here

http://forums.d2jsp.org/user.php?i=535197

I don't like that % to crit formula
we did one test run and proved that it was a whole 5% off, when it's the difference between 13 and 18% that's too big to be content with

what about one hits`?

if u can onehit a monster with ur axe and with sword u need sometimes 1 hit sometimes 2 i guess the axe is better than.

oh ya, I was gonna do that
1 sec

You can one hit monsters with an axe O.o

I stop one hitting monsters after level 5

get some good gear



another interesting thing would be

you have 10axe prof / 0 sword prof

u can buy 100ee axe / 100ee sword same tier


This post was edited by feinfuehl on May 11 2009 05:06pm

• Wasted damage from weapon overkill (aplicable to charms also)
  

ok so you have an axe 5-6 and a sword 1-10
then the monster has some life, you don't care what it is unless it's 1-10 because any hits you do to it otherwise will bring it to 1-10 range eventually
so then it's in 1-10, heres a chart of what happens (here I needed it because it's easier to compute and you guys probably wouldn't trust me otherwise)
I'm not going to bother with the formatting because that would be insane



so average of 1.5 hits for the axe, 1.59 for the sword
so what I gather from this, if you think you aren't going to be hitting many 0's if you had a sword, use an axe instead because they have a slight advantage with overkill

is there a list u can see how much average life/armor/dmg a mob has?
Because if the mob would have 1defense average @ lvl 1 the axe would be better.
And if u do extreme high dmg maybe u can neglact the fact that u get -1 dmg per hit if u do average damage 100 and the mob has 1 defence.

It is interesting and much better then the statistics Autismn made but its still not perfect.