Act V Barb merc damage - doubled for 1H?

Jan 3, 2007
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Hello everyone,

I have to pick your brains on this topic because I couldn't find a definite answer on the internet.

There are sources which state, that damage for 1-handed swords is doubled for Act V mercs:

The Amazon basin on Act V mercs:
The weapon damage of one-handed swords is doubled (this includes Minimum Damage and Maximum Damage bonuses, but excludes Damage + like that of the Grief Rune Word). [1] Two-handed swords apply their Two-Hand Damage.

BUT! The Amazon basin also states this on the general merc site:
They can wield one-handed and two-handed swords but they cannot dual-wield two one-handed swords. So, get them a big 2-handed sword. They do the listed damage for both 1 hand and 2 hand swords, so the 2 handers will almost always win out. Life leech, FHR, resistances, etc are also good. They're about the same as A2 mercs except for the weapon differences. Lawbringer has become somewhat popular because of the ctc Decrepify.

There is also this thread on the old forums, but no one confirmed which formula is actually used for damage calculation, although @GalaXyHaXz suggested through testing, that they do even more than double damage...
GalaXyHaXz said:
It's a good thing you brought this up. I've actually heard of this years ago when I played on Bnet. Someone told me they used a Headstriker on their Act V merc and they said it does the most damage. I thought they were full of it.

So without digging through the code, I performed a test case to see if this is really true.

Merc - Act V level 79
Weapon - Plain Conquest sword/Balrog Blade (same speed)
Monster - Hell cow

Cows are set to have a fixed life of 3000. The swords are set to always do their average damage (45 for conquest, 86 for balrog). The merc's stats were fixed as well. Therefore, every hit dealed out the exact same damage on a monster with the same life.

Balrog Blade - 7 hits average, occasionally 6
Conquest Sword - 5 hits average, occasionally 4

After testing against multiple hoards, the results always checked out. Looks like the verdict, in this test would prove that 1 handed weapons indeed do more damage!

Does anyone have a definite answer to this?
 
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I don't have the goods to deliver on a definite citation at the moment. I'll try and remember to sort through my bookmarks later today. But I looked into this a while back and was 100% convinced that they do double dmg with 1 handers.

Also easy-ish to test. Could time him one on one vs something a few times. Though it looks like galaxy already did that for us. Not sure how his test implies more than double dmg though.

I've seen a video of the a5 merc solo'ing every superunique in the game on p8 with an upped eth headstriker :p. Which is the highest dmg weapon for him, assuming the whole double dmg 1 handed thing is true.
 
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Check out the first spoiler in this link:
Fruit debugged this for 1.07 but if there's reports of it being the case for later patches it's reasonable to assume that it was never changed.
 
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Sigh. If this is true, I may have made the mistake of making legend swords the defacto base for all my barb mercs' lawbringers.. 😑
 
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@Luhkoh , @art_vandelay, that is interesting. Thank you for the resources! :love:

So it is actually more than double the damage (well, probably...)

I was alternating between Strength Falcata and Honor Zweihander with my Random Tournament character, and my gut feeling was, that Honor did more damage, but I usually trust statistics and empirical data more than gut feeling...now if someone had a spreadsheet to calculate merc damage, that would be sweet! :p
 
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@saracen85 haha yep true. But at least in this case we're comparing "barely any dmg" to "barely any dmg" :p.
But in all seriousness, any eth elite sword works great for lawbringer in my experience. That barb + decrep is just op. You all will have to let me know whether cryptic sword or conquest sword is best though. Too lazy to run the ias calc ;).
 
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