Monday 27 June 2011

Broken home

The Family Business: A shotgun which fires 8 shots instead of 6, with a 15% damage nerf.

Sounds pretty straightforward.

Until you realise the original shotgun can reload and fire a 7th shot before the Family Business can fire it's 8th.

8 * (1 - 0.15) = 6.8...

Robin Walker, when asked, said "We can't do maths."

Edit: Neither can I.

4 comments:

Jonathan Stickles Fox said...

I accept your conclusion, but not the premise that the shotgun can fire a seventh shot before the Family Business can fire its eighth. Damage is done at the beginning of the firing animation. Both guns take 0.625 seconds to complete their firing animation, and 1 second to complete the animation for reloading exactly one shell.

Both guns will complete their sixth shot simultaneously. The Family Business will fire its seventh shot while the Shotgun begins reloading. 0.625 seconds after firing the seventh shot, the Family Busiess will fire its eighth shot. 0.375 seconds after the Family Business fires its eighth shot, the Shotgun will finish its 1 second reload and fire its seventh shot.

The Shotgun will then be up slightly in damage, but it will have fired a third of a second after the Family Business, and it will a third of a second behind in the reload cycle. This isn't a big problem, since it can make that up easily by reloading two less shells, but it does create a 0.375 second window in which the Family Business is the unambiguously superior weapon. This window is extended in practice since reloading one shell at a time like this is not a good strategy for the Shotgun; your overall DPS increases the more shells you load at once. Optimal play with the Shotgun isn't to try to beat the Family Business at its own game.

So while I agree that the Shotgun is better, it's not quite as clean a case as you make it.

Also, given the quote at the end of your post, I'm obligated to tease you for a maths error: 8 * (1 - 0.15) = 6.80, not 6.85. :)

Andrew Doull said...

Point taken :)

Andrew Doull said...

PS: There's nothing like being wrong on the Internet to get posts on the blog ;)

Jonathan Stickles Fox said...

I remember reading once about a popular blogger who always tried to leave his posts honest but open to objection, and the more controversial or potentially wrong they were, the better. If you say what everyone is thinking and say it as well as anyone, the discussion is already over.