Doubt about "biting dart" enchanted quality

[Gil_galad_82]

Hello all!
When you attack a bane creature with a ranged weapon with "biting dart" quality you MUST make to separate attack rolls. You may inflict double damage, but " However, your attack goes astray entirely if even only one roll misses".

Ok, this quality gives you the advantage to potentially deal double damage but also compels you to succeed in two attacks!! It's just my impression or it's quite a double edge feature??

Thanks

[zedturtle]

Yeah, I'm pretty shaky on that myself. But, if you've got a high weapon skill you won't be missing too often and doing damage at twice the normal rate. That's pretty powerful in a game that doesn't normally have multiple attacks per round.

[jamesrbrown]

Ok, this quality gives you the advantage to potentially deal double damage but also compels you to succeed in two attacks!!

The potential damage could be even greater than double.

Imagine a Ranger of the North with a Valour rating of 3, the Herald background (Body 8), who is Dour-handed (ranged Damage +1), firing an enchanted great bow (7 Damage) of Elven craftsmanship possessing the Biting dart quality (two ranged attacks, both must hit), using a Númenórean arrow (Damage + Valour rating).

This Ranger's weapon Damage rating is 10 (7 Great bow +3 Valour).
His base Damage rating is 9 (8 Body +1 Dour-handed).

If he were to shoot at a Bane creature and both attacks resulted in extraordinary successes, he would inflict a total of 56 Damage! That is twice the weapon Damage rating + four times the base Damage rating.

Now, it is possible that since only one Númenórean arrow is actually fired, the Ranger would only gain +3 Valour once. Therefore, the total Damage would only be 53. So sad.

Also, if the Edge 10 is achieved on both rolls, would that mean the target would make two Protection rolls to keep from taking a single Wound or could he potentially take two Wounds? I would vote yes! He would need to make a Protection roll for each hit and could potentially take two Wounds. However, I can see how some would feel this is too powerful and since it is only one arrow, vote to make it one Wound. With two Wounds, however, there is the potential to take down adversaries with Great size in one shot.

I think my math is right, but if anyone finds an error in my example, let me know. For that matter, if you can come up with an even potentially greater Damage scenario using Biting dart (besides increasing the Valour of the Ranger in my example), please share.

[Gil_galad_82]

Took your point.
Thanks

[Glorelendil]

I'll try to write a little simulator this weekend to model this. Now I'm curious.

[Glorelendil]

I wrote a really quick and dirty sim. I cycled through skill level 3 to 6, and TNs of 14 to 20, and for each pair simulated 10,000 attacks, then averaged the damage for both a normal attack and if you have Biting Dart. Here are the results (I assumed Body of 5; the numbers vary with different body scores but the relationship stays the same.)

Skill:3, TN:14 normal = 6.8 biting dart = 9.2
Skill:3, TN:15 normal = 6.2 biting dart = 7.5
Skill:3, TN:16 normal = 5.6 biting dart = 5.9
Skill:3, TN:17 normal = 4.8 biting dart = 4.4
Skill:3, TN:18 normal = 4.0 biting dart = 3.1
Skill:3, TN:19 normal = 3.4 biting dart = 2.1
Skill:3, TN:20 normal = 2.8 biting dart = 1.4
Skill:4, TN:14 normal = 8.8 biting dart = 14.8
Skill:4, TN:15 normal = 8.4 biting dart = 13.4
Skill:4, TN:16 normal = 8.1 biting dart = 12.2
Skill:4, TN:17 normal = 7.5 biting dart = 10.8
Skill:4, TN:18 normal = 6.9 biting dart = 8.7
Skill:4, TN:19 normal = 6.3 biting dart = 7.1
Skill:4, TN:20 normal = 5.6 biting dart = 5.5
Skill:5, TN:14 normal = 9.9 biting dart = 17.8
Skill:5, TN:15 normal = 9.7 biting dart = 17.3
Skill:5, TN:16 normal = 9.6 biting dart = 16.8
Skill:5, TN:17 normal = 9.4 biting dart = 16.0
Skill:5, TN:18 normal = 9.2 biting dart = 14.8
Skill:5, TN:19 normal = 8.7 biting dart = 13.5
Skill:5, TN:20 normal = 8.2 biting dart = 11.6
Skill:6, TN:14 normal = 10.7 biting dart = 19.4
Skill:6, TN:15 normal = 10.6 biting dart = 19.4
Skill:6, TN:16 normal = 10.6 biting dart = 19.2
Skill:6, TN:17 normal = 10.6 biting dart = 19.1
Skill:6, TN:18 normal = 10.4 biting dart = 18.3
Skill:6, TN:19 normal = 10.2 biting dart = 17.8
Skill:6, TN:20 normal = 10.0 biting dart = 17.0

As you would expect, the benefit of Biting Dart increases with your chance to hit. So at Skill:3 it's only beneficial against easy targets, but by the time you get to Skill:6 it's pretty much always beneficial.

[zedturtle]

Cool. Thanks for doing that... It seems like it's a really good quality then, and like a lot of the other enchanted qualities, seems to scale very nicely so that more capable characters are getting more out of the quality.

As opposed to D&D style magic items where a +1 sword becomes meaningless after a certain point.

[Arkat]

Sorry about the thread necromancy, but I find myself having the same doubts about biting dart. Right now I'm in the process of creating the magic item index for my campaign and I'm going to go crazy and write up Belthronding for one of the characters. Elven make, bane orcs, sure shot, superior grievious and biting dart would do the trick if it wasn't for the fact that biting dart is almost more of curse than a blessing. Since ranged attacks always have high difficulty due to stance and possibly double shield bonus I imagine the increased whiff factor could easily outweight the mathematical bonus for a player.

So I'm thinking that since this is a bane quality, it wouldn't be too unbalancing to make the blessing enable a second hit roll on any hit.

Or am I wrong here? Will this make the blessing horribly overpowered?

[Glorelendil]

What's the bow skill of the character for whom it is intended?

[Arkat]

At the moment it is 3. What it'll be when he finds it I don't know.