Question on weapon damage range

[Ylang]

I'm a bit confused about something. I have only two values with which to specify a weapon's damage range. The AWG says mob levels vary by three either way, but it says nothing about weapons, so I kinda expected to have four values to specify (a bottom-end range and a top-end range).

Say I set the two values to 4 and 8. What is the variation in the bottom-end and top-end of the damage range?

In other words, will this weapon always be average 6, will it be at most average 6, or will it be on average, average 6? And if the latter, what variation can I expect?

I'd hate to create a weapon of a given average, only to find it can pop much bigger than expected.

[kaern]

As I understand it, the range you specify is the highest possible range that the weapon will pop. The game handles the randomness of how low it can pop on its own. You are right, this is different for mob levels where the randomness goes either way.

[Ylang]

Ah, thanks, that helps.

[Tokugawa]

I think weapons can go +/- 1 to the bottom of the range. For instance if you had a weapon range of 4-8 it could pop to 3-8 or 4-8.

Weapon ranges is something that is not very well defined, but usually the most you want to give a weapon is average 7. The exception to this is if the weapon is 2 handed or has some magical property on it. Or is on a huge mob that will take a lot of effort to kill. But then the weapon would be very limited, so it kinda balances out.

-Tokugawa

[lins]

I found a katana today, which was magical. I then talked to someone and he/she said that all weapons are now magically flagged?
I really don't understand why this has been done. Can a God+ explain this?

[Hiro]

Not all weapons (katana, rapier, great hammer, etc) are magically flagged. The chances of having one pop, however, seems to have gone down since the level of randoms was increased a few years back. Most now seem to pop weak magic.

Hiro

[Tokugawa]

I found a katana today, which was magical. I then talked to someone and he/she said that all weapons are now magically flagged?
I really don't understand why this has been done. Can a God+ explain this?

How odd. I thought I had responded to this last night. In any event...

No, all weapons are not magical flagged. Do you mean all random weapons are now magical flagged? That is something I don't know about. But certainly weapons in zones are not automatically made magical. I've no idea how the random code works for weapons and how a magical flag is applied, or not as the case may be.

-Tokugawa

[Ylang]

It would make sense that when randoms were bumped up, fewer non-magical weapons would pop. I haven't done a statistical survey, but not many randoms pop non-magical these days, weapon or otherwise. Most have at least a weak magic flag.

If I were you, I'd repost this as an idea: return random weapons to their original levels. Face it, a +3wis weapon is no more useful than a +1wis weapon, while non-magical random weapons can be very useful indeed.