[Discuss] Item Level calculation, flawed?

[_Enio_]

[Since] the Game Discussion forums dont have a proper discussion thread it seems General fits the best.

I will quote some wow related lines since they have a comparable system implemented and it is flawless.


Whats the use of item level? WoWwiki (http://www.wowwiki.com/Item_level) describes it: "The item level is a rather important property of every item. It has two main functions — reflect the item's usefulness and at the same time determine the minimum level a character must have in order to use it"
Further described "[...] Blizzard uses a formula to calculate item level from the item's stats."
So to recap, item level describes the power of an item in wow. Each item has a fixed amount of budget it uses on stats, each stat has a special weight.
Be it DPS, mana, const whatever, each stat consumes from the budget.
Item level is directly related to this budget. This makes alot of sense to me.



Now lets take a look on Regnum's item level calculation.

Lucky boxes give you exatly your character level's item level weapons and armours. I bought some on amun to check and noticed that NGD only takes the fixed values into acount for calculating item level.

There is no difference in item level for
1. difference in () damage
2. difference in Normal, special, magical, epic type
3. difference in amount of boni
4. Sockets


Q1: Is Regnum's Item level any more then a breakdown of base stats vs equippable level?
Q2: It obviously does not reflect the actual stat budget (read: power), what use does it have for us?
Q3: How can it be improved to serve us users as a guideline to read an items power?
Q4: If it is also meant to help in balancing concerns and calculations, will it be misleading NGD to not take into account the weapons secondary stats?

Appreciate your thoughts,
Regards

[tikinho]

Does it matter?
Questions are stupid enough to go to ask NGD poll...

[_Enio_]

Does it matter?
Questions are stupid enough to go to ask NGD poll...

Well if it doesnt matter whats the whole point of implementing it?

I think a 2nd item level, or rather a 2ndary stats level on weapons would be useful..

[Narzoul]

Take a look at my research thread: http://regnumonlinegame.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72093

Short recap regarding item levels:

First off, research was based on merchant items as well as hundreds of random loot. The same calculations don't seem to apply to most of the "unique" superboss loot - they clearly use some different formulas or perhaps were simply set by hand to some arbitrary value. (See some notes on further posts in the linked thread.)

Armor level calculation should be fully accurate, at least I haven't found any items that didn't match so far. The calculation is based on the base armor points of the armor, as well as part of the bonus in parentheses - the part which comes from item material (see linked thread for details).

I assume that weapons use a similar calculation but I still couldn't find an exact match. I described some pretty accurate calculation for melee weapons in the given thread. In principle it's similar to armor levels, except that instead of armor points you use the average base damage of the weapon. Of course, weapon speed and range also play a part. I did limited research on ranged weapons but they seem to follow similar calculations, you just need to fiddle with some constants.

As for jewellery, chilko already confirmed that their level requirements were set by hand to arbitrary values. The new "item level" that they show are just some garbage value that should be ignored, and not based on the stats of the jewellery in any way.

All in all, yeah, the formulas are strange and not entirely in harmony with the actual "power" of items... a lot of seemingly important factors are completely ignored, such as parts of the bonus damage/armor points in parentheses, or the special/magical/epic stat bonuses, Even the stats that are used seem to have rather strange multipliers or combinations sometimes... I can't tell if they're intentionally like that or not. I guess only NGD could answer that, or perhaps not even them...

See this post and the next one by chilko: http://regnumonlinegame.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1253041#post1253041