More Venom!

Today I spent most of the cycles testing various configurations of en-venomed attacks. Everything from 1x-Per-Round (Stinger) to 2x-Per-Round (Poisoned claws) to long-range (Breathe Mustard Gas). I used the same toxin for everything as a level-set.

Here's what I've learned:

• Indeed, taking a toxin gas against high-armor/low Damage Point targets wipes them out. However, the high-armor guys using the mustard gas are still fighting people (for the most part) with conventional attacks and do very well there. Armor is still king in that scenario.
• The "draws blood" requirement is, in fact, pretty rare. Over a 3-4 round fight even having a powerful toxin-carrier attack doesn't help that much. I'm not 100% sure why but the PEN damage values came out about where they are for non-envenomed attacks. I think this is because by the time you are doing enough damage to draw blood 40% of the time you are already doing enough damage to win the fight with your PEN attack--so the toxin on top is "just gravy." I examined the fights in strong debug and determined that they did seem to be working.
• High DP helps a lot against Mustard Gas (and is less effective against the stinger since the stinger does a lot of PEN damage). The win %'s against the high DP guys were like 1-4% while being 88% against all-armor attackers. This is one of those cases where the "average" is fine but the actual components of the average are not. I'm not yet sure what to do about this either. An attack that is very good against many opponents and useless against others is not gearing up for good gaming ...

What Does This All Mean?

Well, it means that I'm going to have to apply some philosophy in pricing chemical attacks. The simulator proves that against our herd their value can be normalized--but I have to carefully consider the ramifications of cheap toxin attacks and where I'd want to see those exist.

-Marco