That's exactly what I'm doing Lurker. The reason I posted this thread was to see if the actual formulae had been discovered and generally agreed on, I can see from the posts that it most certainly hasn't :)

I suppose I can live without getting all the magic numbers right for now.

K.

I think this is a case where statistical analysis could probably produce a very close approximation..

Grab some parsed logs (got a few friends who regularly parse and analyze their damage output), plop in all the variables, apply some numerical analysis, and we could probably get a close functional approximation.

Thats if you want to use THEIR way of doing it. Personally, I think it would probably be better to insert some constants into the attack routines determined by a database variable, that way we could just alter a constant factor in the database, and see the resulting affect on combat for balancing purposes. Just tweak it until it was at a reasonable , playable level..