Demise: Rise of the Ku'tan - Weapon Damage comparisons

Blue Knight
Weapon Damage comparisons
Some wonderful people are doing some testing on how effective different weapons are. We'll add replies to this post as more become available.
Blue Knight
I made an earlier post on being disappointed about the Blade of thunder, and I thought that the Axe of Darkness was a better choice, because of its much higher damage modifier. Well, perhaps that was a bit hasty. I made a test between the Axe of Darkness (AoD), Blade of Thunder (BoT), and Vorpal blade (VB) on the Keeper of the Slayer as a test monster, having a high average HP of 750 (yes, risky I know, my fellow party members lost their heads quite a few times).
Test: Each weapon was used until 30 hits was made. Only clean hits (including the elemental damage) were counted (that is, no backstab or crits hits were included). The BoT and the VB was used together with a Deathen Shield, giving a much higher Defence value, whereas the Attack value was essentially the same with all three. I was testing with a Giant lvl 264 Warrior, AD around 440/470. On average, about 70% of the swings resulted in hits.

And here are the results (in HPs out of 30 hits)

Vorpal blade (A/D 18/12, 1.6, 7 swings, behead, 1 hand)
Max 181
Average 114
Min 63
The VB was beheading in about 50% of the attack rounds

Axe of darkness (21/0, 2.8, 3 swings, freeze, 2 hand)
Max 408
Average 247
Min 145
The AoD was often taking out the Keeper in 2 swings, meaning very high top values when critical hit

Blade of thunder (24/6, 1.8, 4 swings, electrolute, 1 hand)
Max 367
Average 246
Min 137
The BoT had top hit values of 711 with critical hit and 667 with severe

This means that for each round, my char with his 2 extra swings, hitting 70% of the swings, makes around 700 HP damage with the VB, 850 HP with the AoD, and 1050 with BoT. All three have specials that can result in instant deaths (a 700 HP hit almost always have the same result as a behead).

What does this mean? Well, as stated before by Vorlin, the elemental damage is absolutely critical. And surprisingly, the much higher damage modifier of the AoD does not result in anything (other than slightly higher max hits) when compared to the BoT. My earlier observations seemed to be the opposite (see my earlier post on the matter), but I think that resulted from having met large numbers of electricity resistant creatures.

Bottom line is the Blade of Thunder rocks. Yes, yes, I know that Vorlin has said this all the time, I just needed hard facts to believe it . After all, I am a scientist!

/Toke

I think the real problem is that so many of the high end hits don't show for the vast majority of creatures, so unless you do exhaustive tests on some uber-mob it's easy to get a skewed sampling of numbers.
For some truly awesome numbers, sword of flames rocks, but so many creatures have fire resistance (or outright immunity) that I don't use it.

- Vorlin