notes on v1.10 (beta) Assassin Blade skills

[Crystalion]

Blade Sentinel has listed in skills.txt, under the column 'passivestat1': 'tohit', and under 'passivecalc1': 'lvl*5'. So another benefit to pumping Blade Sentinel is to get a boost to AR. Neither of the other Blade skills have any such bonus listed.

Of course, I have no real idea how much of a benefit it gives. If a level 20 Blade Sentinel is giving +100 AR, big deal. But if it is giving +100%, that could be quite nice. Or it could do something completely different, for all I know.

I finally got around to thinking about this again because of some Great Race investigations I'm doing. I took at look at what you describe and also the monstats.txt entry for the "blade creeper". Cain help me, I'll be damned if I can figure it out from that.

So I did some testing PvP. Given characters of equal or roughly equal level I first convinced myself that massively changing the victim's DR (defense rating) seemed to affect how often Blade Sentinel hits. I had more trouble seeing any difference by changing the attacker's AR.

So I took a breather and ran the tests with Blade Fury which clearly shows roughly the expected relationship of hitting/missing based on changed both the defender's DR and attacker's AR.

I scratched my head a bit pondering the possibility that Blade Sentinel *doesn't* get attacker AR but nonetheless hits quite often. I believe therein lies the answer. The results I'm seeing (wide range of measurement error, alas) are consistant with the idea that BS has poor AR (i.e. not benefiting from attacker's AR) but nonetheless hits pretty often because it tries, tries, and tries again.

Ah, but you protest: "if it is trying so often, then why doesn't it hit like crazy when the defender has almost no DR?!"

My answer to this would be to suggest that it remembers the last target attempted, and will not attempt to hit that same target "too soon" again.

This is all armchair speculation based on the results I saw. However, probing the theory by creating a new victim, a level 33 Amazon with slvl 10 decoy (no dodge, evade or avoid skill), and running the BS through the Amazon and decoy (and back) generated a greater number of hits (on the Amazon herself, as opposed to without a decoy), as the theory would predict.

In other words, Blade Sentinel really is, as I once remarked, a "poor grrl's whirlwind".

To further test this line of thinking, I gathered a small cloud of weenie monsters to me and let loose a BS... as expected, it can easily drop large numbers of them in an eyeblink. (Certainly "large numbers" w.r.t. the limited number of hits it will ever do over several seconds PvP vs. a "defenseless" target). An especially good test of this would be vs. a blinded clump of ghost type monsters, where you knew how many times a BS would have to hit them individually to explain the damage dealt--the theory suggests that since they overlap that a "short throw" BS might hit them all repeatedly fairly quickly.

To those of you wondering what this line of testing has to do with the Great Race, I will, at this time, be coy, and merely mention that BS is a clvl 6 skill, and the twink word of the hour is: "Envy". B)