Okay, so recently a few of us have been throwing around the numbers when forging kata weapons, because of the apparent difficulty in forging a kata weapon with one stat at max. While there seem to be a lot(RELATIVELY!) of max speed shofa/nekai(?) in existence, I haven't heard a single report of a max speed chain/tahto. The highest that I am aware of is Revan's chain with a speed stat of 218. So let's take a closer look.

I believe a base shofa or nekai has stats of 95/95/95, whereas a base chain or tahto has stats of 190/190/190. A 1h kata weapon takes 15 forges, and a 2h kata weapon takes 30, with each forge distributing 1 stat at random to either damage, prec, or speed. In order to max a stat out, therefore, a kata weapon requires the random assigner to hit one statistic for every single forge. For a 2h weapon, there are twice as many forge attempts required. These numbers equate to the following.

1 in every 14,348,907 shofa/nekai forged will have a max stat.
1 in every ~205,891,132,000,000 chains/tahto forged will have a max stat.

Obviously, this doesn't seem to quite work. No-one would have a max stat shofa/nekai if that was the correct ratio. Bring on the Mallet of Forging. Without one, you will probably never forge a max stat kata weapon. The forging hammer reduces the time for each FORGE by half, and it causes each FORGE to distribute 2x the stats. So now, a shofa/nekai takes 7-8 (I will assume 8 from now on) forges, and a chain/tahto takes 15. Let's look at the numbers again.

1 in every 6561 shofa/nekai forged with a Mallet of Forging will have a max stat.
1 in every 14,348,907 chains/tahto forged with a Mallet of Forging will have a max stat.

Now, the ratio for the shofa/nekai has come into a far more reasonable range. An average forge of a shofa/nekai with a forging mallet takes 12-13 seconds, giving a rate of 277/hour. So now it takes 24 hours of forging to have a stastical chance to create a max stat shofa/nekai.

The ratio for a chain/tahto has now become the original ratio for a shofa/nekai. An average forge of a chain/tahto with a forging mallet takes 34 seconds, giving a rate of 106/hour. To forge a chain/tahto with a max stat, it would require roughly 135,367 man hours. This is a figure compounded not only by the vastly larger ratio, but also by the small rate per hour.

Given than shofa/nekai are one handed, you will need to forge two. So this now takes approximately 48 hours of forging. For the tahto/chain, you only need one. This means that to equip a monk with max stat shofa/nekai is 2820 times easier than equipping a monk with a max stat tahto/chain.

I think the timeframe for the shofa/nekai is optimal, given that the monk will often have a preference for -which- stat is max, thus meaning that the chance must be divided by three (possibly tripling the length to equip a 1h monk to 144 forging hours.)

Solution: Make each forge attempt on a tahto/chain add 2 stats (4 with a Mallet of Forging). I do not know how easy or hard this is code-wise. It will either be quite easy or very difficult, I imagine. This will compound to mean that each tahto/chain requires 7-8 (presumably 8) forge attempts to create, giving it the same chance to occur as a shofa/nekai. The only issue then left is that you only need to forge one tahto/chain, whereas you need to forge two shofa/nekai. In theory this would then make tahto/chains easier to forge than their 1h companions. I'm not sure if this is too much of an issue, nor can I think of a way to easily put them exactly level.

Summary: Forging 2h monk weapons that have one stat at 220 is statistically very, very unlikely. Forging 1h monk weapons with one stat at 110 (the equivalent) is far more likely. To fix this, make each FORGE attempt on a 2h monk weapon add two stats per forge (important: four when using with a Mallet of Forging).

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If there are any mathematicians out and about, please feel free to check my numbers. I am relatively confident with them, but I am quite prone to mistakes at the moment because I am getting very little sleep.

Already gone over this, unfortunately, it's not like it'll change much, the way you described to fix it is what I'd think would be best, but eh, maybe it'll change when forging gets a look at it.

I'm not much of a mathematician myself, but it seems to me that when you throw in any degree of randomness, your statistical results can vary wildly. In other words, while it takes a long while to get that max stat, I think this summary is exaggerating it just a bit.

Shouldn't this be in Ideas rather than Common Grounds?

I submitted this as a bug a while ago as well.

I've since been experimenting with a pair of chains when I forge. I've forged one to 214 easily enough, and then went for a 218, and haven't gotten it since, so I've dropped the minimum back to 216. I'm going to swap between the two when I decide to forge and see how high I can get it, and how long it takes.

Basically, I've made a set of 110/110 shofa in a fraction of the time I spent forging for a 218 chain. Seeing as the monk weapons are city/commune specific, it seems problematic to me. I suppose, at least the "natural opponents" are in the same boat as one another in this regard, but, still.

It's different than forging for knights, that's for certain. The fixed sum of stats, the narrow range of possible stats, and the fact that all monks want speed for all situations means that there is always going to be an optimal outcome- 110 or 220. The fact that the optimal outcome for shofa/nekai is far far easier to obtain than for the two-handed weapons is definitely an issue.

I don't really feel that I can exaggerate the numbers if they are simply the statistics. However, I understand that you will not in reality get 1 max stat weapon per the exact chance. It could be that you it takes more, or less, forges than is likely.

You can exaggerate the numbers if your results aren't taking into account the formula (which is unknown to the general population) and the particular random number generator used. At the very least, the statistics should be generated from empirical testing over enough iterations to smooth out the anomalies. Your post seems to simply extrapolate from the simplest components of the process to come up with the most extreme limits.

By no means am I saying that Forging does not need some fixes desperately. I'm simply saying I disagree with the statistical value of this thread so far.

wouldn't it take the same amount of time to forge 2 nekai as it does to forge 1 chain. Or if each nekai take 8 forges with the mallet wouldn't It take longer?

Alright, the points you raise seem valid enough. It's difficult to accurately say whether or not you are right without knowing exactly how Forging works. We do not know this, so we both can only go on the data provided by actually forging, and number crunching.

However, I don't think that you can dismiss the sentiment of this thread out of hand. It seems to be a widely recognised fact that forging a 220-stat tahto or chain is a near impossibility, given that no blacksmiths have reported doing so (highest known is 218, owned by Revan, and reportedly forged over a 6 IRL month period by Shikha ). However, there are multiple one-handed monk weapons with a stat at the 110 level. This alone should highlight the disparity between the forging of 1h and 2h kata weapons with one stat at maximum and the others at minimum.

You could create two nekai in the amount of time it takes to create one chain. However, if you are aiming for certain statistics, the chance of a high-stat chain is lesser than a chance of a high-stat nekai. This is where the disparity is born, and it is why forging one two-handed monk weapon for a combatant will take longer than forging two one-handed monk weapons.

Krin, think of it like this.

A kata weapon is a set of three cans. When I forge, I drop marbles into these cans randomly, until I run out of marbles. I want all the marbles to drop into the "speed" can.

With shofa and nekai, lets say I have 10 marbles. I drop them in randomly, and if they don't all wind up in the can labeled "speed", I dump them out, pick them up, and start over until they do. I have to do this twice, once for each weapon.

With chains and staves, I have 20 marbles. I also have to drop them in randomly, and start over if they don't all wind up in the can labeled "speed". I only have to do this once.

So, what situation would you prefer? Only having to get 10 consecutive marbles into the speed can, but twice, or having to put 20 consecutive marbles into the speed can? You can see how much more difficult it becomes to get 20 in a row to randomly hit a 1/3'd chance each where you want it, as opposed to 10 in a row.

What a mallet does, it lets me drop two marbles at the same time, which means I only have to drop 5 times into the "speed" can for nekai, and 10 times into the "speed" can for chains/staves. In the case of our kata weapons, this takes the chance for nekai/shofa from "statistically retarded" to "entirely doable", but in the case of chains/staves it merely takes it from "Probability of Clay Aikens not being gay" to "statistically retarded".

That wasn't my intent, but when I went back up and read my last paragraph, I realized it didn't come out right. I completely agree with the sentiment that Forging in general is broken. It's a real problem, and for whatever reasons, the Admins just don't like any of the proposed solutions.

RE-EDIT: Ilyarin's numbers appear to be correct. Nevermind!

not sure on another note is the speed of a 2 handed chain divided? or do they attack faster.

The focus of this thread is on forging a particular weapon, not on the effect of the stats themselves. However, two 110 speed shofa/nekai weapons are equivalent in speed to one 220 tahto/chain.

EDIT: NVM.

RE-EDIT: Something more constructive. If the admin were willing to fix forging in regards to kata weapons, they would have fixed forging in regards to everything else a long time ago.

We're not really dealing with the same animal here. Kata weapons are unique in that their stats always sum to the same amount, and their range of stats is narrow compared to knight weapons. However, more importantly, the issue here is the equivalent of, say, if it were easier to forge a pair of 180/xx/180 broadswords than a 360/xx/180 claymore. Only, not just harder, but dramatically more difficult to the point that perfect broads could be had in two days or so, but the claymore would happen almost never.

This is compounded by the fact that monk guilds have their one weapon chosen for them. I've made perfect shofa, I know a good portion of the Nekotai was running around with perfect 110s extremely shortly after their guild opened. Compare that to Celest and Mag- out of the both of them, the closest anyone has to "perfect" is Revans 218 that took Shikha six months (dunno how frequently forging though) to make.

All we really need is for chains and tahtos to work on the same probabilities as Shofa/Nekai. Doubling the amount they would add per forge would do this quite simply, and, at least from an outsiders perspective, seems a much less daunting fix than trying to overhaul the mess of forging entirely.

The thing is the admin just don't seem to care.

I was just getting at if the speed is equal then yea. I think they both should have a bit better chance at making it perfect. But because nekotai require two the amount of tries for 1 chain shouldn't = 1 nekai.