Stats vs Upgrades, which is important? A quick dive, mostly stats. Long read.

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So I was looking over the wiki and saw that at max weapon skill level you do an average of 131% more damage than at zero skill level. I figured it meant you could actually do more than the listed weapon damage at max level. Sweet! I hopped into debug mode on a fresh character to test this out and got some interesting results.

First I thought, 131% of what? What's my baseline? So using a Black metal sword (95 damage), I looked at the listed high and low damage for a character with zero skill. It's 24 – 52 damage. I then averaged them and came up with 38, which is 40% of the 95 listed damage.

Then raised the sword skill by 25 until 100 and recorded the numbers. In summary, you do 40% at 0 skill, 55% at 25 skill, 70% at 50 skill, 85% at 75 skill and 93% at 100 skill. All of these are averages of the low and high damage numbers shown by the weapon listed damage. It's all a percent of the listed damage (95 for the black metal sword).

I then tested polearms and bows and the numbers were consistent. So what does this mean? How important are skills?

To summarize, you start out doing 40% of the weapons listed damage and do 15% more damage every 25 skill levels.

Pretty important once you reach much past bronze and still important there. The kinda bummer is that upgrading your weapon is actually worth less the lower your skill is! Your not doing an extra six damage a hit for each upgrade, but something like 3-4 a hit if your skill level is in the 20s. Something to consider if your struggling and think spending big on a level 4 weapon upgrade is worth it.

The upshot is that the grind from level 75 to 100 is not at all worth it and completely optional. It's because at this point your only pulling up the low number. This is also conveniently the halfway mark in terms of experience needed. Half the journey gets you from 40% damage to 85%, the second half is only from 85% to 93%.

My personal recommendation is to try and keep your main weapon skills at least around 50. Provides solid bonus damage and means that upgrades are better. If your struggling, it might be worth the time to hit up a lower biome for stuff you need and bash some greydwarfs!

The whole point of this was when I noticed my level 1 iron atgier was doing about the same damage as a level 2 bronze mace vs Draugr. My mace skill was much higher but I wanted a good look at the numbers.

Tldr: Weapon stats are important until level 75 then drop off. Your weapon skill affects how much damage your doing per upgrade. If you have low weapon skill consider skipping a high level upgrade and bash some stuff. The 131% damage is just the wiki being worded oddly.