Sonic Flares and UAC Gear Test

[Jason13828]

Hi Everyone,

Several weeks back on Discord Ashraam and myself (Alexyar) got into a discussion about how sonic weapons and UAC gear interact when it comes to flare rates. He, along with many other people on the Discord and in forum posts, continue to advocate for a sonic weapon and regular non-flaring handwraps because there is no change in sonic flare rate just for wearing non-flaring handwraps (or even specific flaring handwraps such as KO).

My advice, ever since seeing the PC forum post from SpiffyJr about OTHER flare types being negatively impacted by the UAC gear you wear (handwraps), took this to mean our own Sonic flares would be impacted as well. I had never done any testing and any testing done to discount this (Ashraam's testing) seemed flawed. He challenged me to do my own testing so I decided to take him up on it.

So to start - my test was going to be simple. I would find a critter I could hit all the time with jab. I would do 2 tests and then match the # of hits for each test. My wife used a program/language called R to do the analysis and create the graph/table.

The conditions: Test 1 - sonic cestus NO handwraps - 75 air lore ranks. Test 2 - sonic cestus and 4x non-blessed handwraps - 75 air lore ranks.
All hits that ended in a death prior to the flare were removed from count (as that did not present a flare opportunity). All other hits (jabs only counted) that landed counted as a flare opportunity.

The total amount of hits analyzed was 330 for each test.

The results:

Test 1 - Sonic flare triggered 26.28% of hits while the lore flare triggered 27.30%
Test 2 - Sonic flare triggered 13.24% of hits while the lore flare triggered 13.24%
9538 Why is this so tiny??

The surprising results of this test is the reduction in the sonic lore flare which was always said to be independent of the main flare. But it appears this gets negatively impacted as well per the formula Finros confirmed in 2013 (1-in-N pieces of equipment).

I will send the code used as well as the two source logs that provided the data or figure out some way to put them up. Right now I can't seem to figure out the attachment feature as everytime I "upload" it the file doesn't appear. Please let me know if you see anything that looks off and want to discuss.

[Ragz]

The surprising results of this test is the reduction in the sonic lore flare which was always said to be independent of the main flare. But it appears this gets negatively impacted as well per the formula Finros confirmed in 2013 (1-in-N pieces of equipment).

I always understood this phraseology to mean that it can flare by itself or with the normal flare, so its behavior is "independent of the main flare [activating]."

Looks good to me! Thanks for taking the time to produce the data.

[kutter]

Ok, maybe it is because I have not had enough coffee yet but I am seriously befuddled by what you mean when you say a lore flare.

As far as the rest of the testing, I still would not give up 7 enchant handwraps, that you get on every hit, for a few more flares.

Ignore me, it is too early, now I know what you meant by two different flares, but second part is still true for me at least.

[Jason13828]

That is fair, Kutter.

Everyone will have a personal choice to make. My goal in putting this out was to allow people to make a more informed decision on how they want to equip their character. For so long people have been given the impression that they are not hurting their sonic flares by wearing non-flaring handwraps. At least now they (if the data is accurate, and I think it is) shows that they have a decision to make.

For me...having an extra UAF (when I don't have a hard time hitting things anyways) is not worth cutting my extremely powerful flares in half (or more because my air lore flare also gets demolished). I actually rely on the sonic flares to do most of the killing. I don't care if I'm hitting the creature for 1 damage or 10...I want as many flare opportunities as possible with my 1 second attacks.

[kutter]

My UAC alt is a wizard so he needs all the UAF help he can get so he uses 7X hand and foot wraps and his footwraps have disruption flares, he does not use a weapon with the MM penalty and all. He mostly kicks stuff to death in 1 sec attacks. But I can see how an older bard would not have any trouble generating UAF and willing to trade some for more flares. But if you have 75 air lore then you should be real close or at 75 in MnE, so it is a completely different circumstance for a younger bard, like my friends who is still in her 20's

It looks like with the handwraps on sonic flares go from their normal awesomeness to what every other flare does, about one in 7, plus or minus since your sample may be a little small.

Ok, so, what are the stats then for sonic flares if you have flaring handwraps and a sonic weapon, do the sonic flares drop to even less, do the handwraps even flare?. My friends bard uses a disruption flaring handwraps and a sonic weapon, now I am wondering if that is the best setup for her, truthfully I have never payed that close of attention to it.

[Jason13828]

Since your wizard is relying on 1sec kicks to kill...that is a different situation entirely. My bard relies on 1 second punches strictly to trigger the sonic flares. I do wear good UAC boots (not flaring though but not that is just a coincidence they should have no impact on your sonic weapon flaring).

I do not know what happens when you add a flaring weapon to flaring handwraps and UAC jab/punch. My pure guess is you simply see each flare half as often as you would without the other flaring item. So the TOTAL flare rate MIGHT be close to the 20-25% flare rate but you are only getting your sonic flares 1/2 the time and the handwrap flare the other 1/2. Unless you have an awesome handwrap flare (blink/KO MAYBE but I severely doubt it) it seems like an ultimate loss.

[kutter]

Oh great, now I am going to have to do some testing with her bard, and I hate testing. More to follow....

[gilchristr]

Thanks for sharing the results of your test!

[Maerit]

I would say it depends on the gear at your disposal.

If you have plain gear + sonic weapon, the sonic weapon alone will be more powerful vs non-undead targets.

If you have script flaring gear + sonic weapon, it'll depend on the script flares:

1. removed because Blink doesn't work with UAC.
2. KO Flares > Sonic Flares - they actually flare as often or more often than sonic flares, and have impressive kill ratios. I would not sacrifice these.
3. T3 Parasite flares are pretty strong, so I'd put those in a category worthy of keeping equipped. Less tier parasite might not be worth the downgrade to sonic flare rates.
4. Bubble flares are an interesting question - do you sacrifice your sonic flare rate to keep a damage padding bonus active? I would suggest bubble flares are worth it.

Then you start talking about weighting. UCS isn't really compatible with crit weighting, so even if you had +20 CER crit weighting, it might not be that useful since UCS attacks tend to be crit capped based on tier. However, if you had +20 CER damage weighting, that might be worth keeping active since you're adding +20 to every jab/punch/grapple, which can definitely add up quickly with 1s attacks. Again, subjective based on analysis of damage returns, but weighting might make having gloves equipped worth it as long as the weighting level is meaningful.

I would not sacrifice the flare rate for standard flares. If only the primary flare was being halved on the cestus, I might call it a wash, but since both the primary and secondary sonic flare is halved that sounds worse (and possibly a bug that should be brought to GM attention).

This basically means the majority of bards with your common gear (basic enchanted w/ flares) would benefit most from using straight Sonic weaponry (cestus most likely) with no gloves equipped. They can maximize the value of gloves by using 7x gloves vs undead, and putting the sonic weapon away, but that requires maintaining a bless, and the sonic weapon is 2x permablessed. This just means you can be more efficient by not bothering with blessing gloves, but it would be stronger to use the blessed gloves vs undead.

I don't think it's ever been suggested that any other profession besides Bard and Paladin equip a weapon unless you have something amazing to equip. Warmages should NOT sacrifice MM for a tiny boost to UAF, that will actually lower your chance to hit more dramatically and cause you to do worse damage at well. Rogues/Monks don't benefit from equipped weapons though they do have better skills to overcome the penalties (mastery CMANs). Either way, there's no reason to use a weapon for UCS unless it's a sonic weapon, or a bonded 1625 paladin weapon since the negatives far out-weigh the positives.


Overall, good analysis and interesting results to show that sonic weapons flare more than 20%.

[kutter]

Ok, so I did not bother with flaring only handwraps since it seems like that number is pretty well known. But for flaring handwraps with sung weapon I counted 284 total attacks and got 38 sonic flares, 20 lore flares, and 29 disruption flares.

So Sonic flares 13.3%, lore flares 7%, and disruption flares 10%. Not sure what that means, but there is some data. The sonic flares seem to track exactly with the other data, but it appears, anecdotally anyhow, that there is a reduction in lore flares that is more than made up by the disruption flares.

Quite interestingly too was I never got a triple flare, lots of doubles but never a triple, but that may be a function of the small sample size.

[kutter]

I would say it depends on the gear at your disposal.

If you have plain gear + sonic weapon, the sonic weapon alone will be more powerful vs non-undead targets.

If you have script flaring gear + sonic weapon, it'll depend on the script flares:

1. Blink Flares > everything you could possibly imagine. Even for a bard, I suggest this would be worth sacrificing some flare rate on the sonic weapon (despite being restricted to MnE spells).
2. KO Flares > Sonic Flares - they actually flare as often or more often than sonic flares, and have impressive kill ratios. I would not sacrifice these.
3. T3 Parasite flares are pretty strong, so I'd put those in a category worthy of keeping equipped. Less tier parasite might not be worth the downgrade to sonic flare rates.
4. Bubble flares are an interesting question - do you sacrifice your sonic flare rate to keep a damage padding bonus active? I would suggest bubble flares are worth it.

Then you start talking about weighting. UCS isn't really compatible with crit weighting, so even if you had +20 CER crit weighting, it might not be that useful since UCS attacks tend to be crit capped based on tier. However, if you had +20 CER damage weighting, that might be worth keeping active since you're adding +20 to every jab/punch/grapple, which can definitely add up quickly with 1s attacks. Again, subjective based on analysis of damage returns, but weighting might make having gloves equipped worth it as long as the weighting level is meaningful.

I would not sacrifice the flare rate for standard flares. If only the primary flare was being halved on the cestus, I might call it a wash, but since both the primary and secondary sonic flare is halved that sounds worse (and possibly a bug that should be brought to GM attention).

This basically means the majority of bards with your common gear (basic enchanted w/ flares) would benefit most from using straight Sonic weaponry (cestus most likely) with no gloves equipped. They can maximize the value of gloves by using 7x gloves vs undead, and putting the sonic weapon away, but that requires maintaining a bless, and the sonic weapon is 2x permablessed. This just means you can be more efficient by not bothering with blessing gloves, but it would be stronger to use the blessed gloves vs undead.

I don't think it's ever been suggested that any other profession besides Bard and Paladin equip a weapon unless you have something amazing to equip. Warmages should NOT sacrifice MM for a tiny boost to UAF, that will actually lower your chance to hit more dramatically and cause you to do worse damage at well. Rogues/Monks don't benefit from equipped weapons though they do have better skills to overcome the penalties (mastery CMANs). Either way, there's no reason to use a weapon for UCS unless it's a sonic weapon, or a bonded 1625 paladin weapon since the negatives far out-weigh the positives.


Overall, good analysis and interesting results to show that sonic weapons flare more than 20%.

I would agree with all of that for any build except for a wizard and a post tonis bard, and maybe not even the bard since he will tier up easily if not using tonis. A wizard needs all the help he can get as far as UAF and weighting goes since they do not tier up as readily. My wizards handwraps and footwraps are fairly crit weighted and his footwraps are disruption flaring and he benefits from the weighting since it takes him so many hits to kill. Maybe I should have gone with damage weighting in hindsight, I still wonder over that at times. My wizard also equips a tiger-claw but it is enhancive, adding either 6 or 8 to brawling, but it does not impact him much since he almost exclusively uses kicks.

[zephyrii]

So does scripted flares like knockout, blink, etc all also drop to half flare rate?

[Maerit]

I would agree with all of that for any build except for a wizard and a post tonis bard, and maybe not even the bard since he will tier up easily if not using tonis. A wizard needs all the help he can get as far as UAF and weighting goes since they do not tier up as readily. My wizards handwraps and footwraps are fairly crit weighted and his footwraps are disruption flaring and he benefits from the weighting since it takes him so many hits to kill. Maybe I should have gone with damage weighting in hindsight, I still wonder over that at times. My wizard also equips a tiger-claw but it is enhancive, adding either 6 or 8 to brawling, but it does not impact him much since he almost exclusively uses kicks.

You need to get rid of the tiger claw. I costs you 10MM. If the weapon doesn't add 3x the UAF you're losing in MM, it's not worth it.

MM is factored into your chance to hit as well as improving your crit modifier. I promise you'll actually do better without having that weapon equipped. I raised a UAC warmage from level 0-100 with no difficulty and never once held a weapon. He's still kicking ass with UAC 12mil post cap. Drop the weapon, get your brawling and AGI/STR from worn enhancives.

Also, you should be tiering up and kicks have the lowest tier up chance. When I parse my logs probably 75% of my attacks are hand based, even though kick is my tier 3 attack. If you're opening with kicks, you're going to tier up incredibly slowly, and you will waste 3-4 seconds of attacking. Since UCS attacks are crit capped at lower tiers, you won't do damage as quickly. Look at it like this:

Kick spam damage - 40/60/60/60/60/100 dead.
Tier-up via jab damage 1/20/80/100/160 dead.

That's faster. It looks slower initially, but it's faster. I'm usually able to kill non-plate targets in 3-4 hits with tiering up using JAB or PUNCH. If it's a plate target, or non-corp undead, it might take 5-6 attacks instead.

[Maerit]

So does scripted flares like knockout, blink, etc all also drop to half flare rate?

What the OPs investigation points out is that wearing UAC gloves automatically halves the flare rate of sonic weapons without any properties on them. So in short, yes, if you have scripted flaring UAC gloves, you cut the sonic flare rate in halve. However, most scripted flares are worth that sacrifice since only a few are compatible with UCS.

PS - just remembered that blink flares are NOT compatible with UCS. You would have to ATTACK to get blink to activate, so not a viable script flare for comparison.

[Maerit]

@Jason - did you perform testing with flaring gloves? I'm curious if they further reduce the flare rate beyond just wearing gloves. CAT B + CAT B / 2 vs CAT B + Gloves + CAT B / 3.

[kutter]

You need to get rid of the tiger claw. I costs you 10MM. If the weapon doesn't add 3x the UAF you're losing in MM, it's not worth it.

MM is factored into your chance to hit as well as improving your crit modifier. I promise you'll actually do better without having that weapon equipped. I raised a UAC warmage from level 0-100 with no difficulty and never once held a weapon. He's still kicking ass with UAC 12mil post cap. Drop the weapon, get your brawling and AGI/STR from worn enhancives.

Also, you should be tiering up and kicks have the lowest tier up chance. When I parse my logs probably 75% of my attacks are hand based, even though kick is my tier 3 attack. If you're opening with kicks, you're going to tier up incredibly slowly, and you will waste 3-4 seconds of attacking. Since UCS attacks are crit capped at lower tiers, you won't do damage as quickly. Look at it like this:

Kick spam damage - 40/60/60/60/60/100 dead.
Tier-up via jab damage 1/20/80/100/160 dead.

That's faster. It looks slower initially, but it's faster. I'm usually able to kill non-plate targets in 3-4 hits with tiering up using JAB or PUNCH. If it's a plate target, or non-corp undead, it might take 5-6 attacks instead.

Fair enough, I can try it and see how I feel about it, but I gave away my flaring handwraps so might have to work on that.

So I think we covered every scenario short of just flaring handwraps and we know that is about 15% so if a bard does not need the extra UAF then they are way better off singing a weapon since even a sung weapon with flaring handwraps does not seem as good by almost half.

[Jason13828]

@Maerit I didn't. The whole reason I did the test was to refute the claim that non-flaring handwraps impacted flaring of the Sonic weapon. I'll see if my wife is willing to help with some more testing. I don't have access to any non-standard flares either (such as KO).

[Maerit]

@Maerit I didn't. The whole reason I did the test was to refute the claim that non-flaring handwraps impacted flaring of the Sonic weapon. I'll see if my wife is willing to help with some more testing. I don't have access to any non-standard flares either (such as KO).

I would suspect that script flares aren't doing anything to your flare rates, only having the gloves equipped. However, CAT B flares might mess with the flare rate even further because they are competing with each other. Standard flares are 20%, so you shouldn't see anything more than 10% on the glove flares, but hopefully still get the same 13+% flare chance on sonic weapon + 2ndary flare. That would be my assumption, but it could be that both the gloves AND the CAT B flares are messing with the sonic flare rate - which would likely be a bug.

Same goes for blessing the gloves. You don't even need to get flaring gloves to test, but could get a cleric to toss a holy water flaring bless on them. You could also use 0x gloves with eblade.

It can be fun (albeit not as mechanically advantageous) to have all those flares equipped. I had this at one point with some KO/Earth flaring gloves + sonic cestus and T5 ensorcell, and had all flares kick off on a single jab. The flares did a combined 86 damage with a 1 point damage jab.