Since the Antigua and Crystal lines could soon be switched from split to pure damage, I thought it would be a good time to go over how this damage is calculated once again since it isn't done in the manner one would assume. A while ago I wrote about the relationship of damage between various split/pure swords, particularly looking at Acheron vs Final Flourish. It was all speculation based on some brief observations. I was satisfied with my findings and I didn't bother to look into it further.
To summarize, pure damage weapons only have a slightly larger damage bonus compared to split damage weapons. But they do have the huge penalties for being pure. Let's take a look at the "old" split damage RSS at Depth 14:
F = Fiend, U = Undead, etc. Second line is percent change compared to neutral
F.. U.. B/C G/S
120 102 75 50
60% 36% -- 66%
So against Undead, which are weak to elemental and neutral to piercing, it has a 36% bonus. Making the HUGE assumption that the damage is actually split half elemental and half piercing, that means the elemental portion has a bonus of 72% as shown below:
37.5 + 1.72*37.5 = 102 Undead Damage
Now for the "new" RSS which its pure damage at Depth 14:
F.. B.. G/U C/S
126 109 78 18
62% 40% --- 23%
So the damage calculation for Beasts is 1.4*78 = 109. Why is the bonus for piercing now 40%? Wasn't it 72% in the split damage bomb just a moment ago? The damage to Beasts should be 134 not 109 if the bonus remained the same. Not only that, but the penalty for being pure is now 23% to Constructs/Slimes, which is what we would actually expect when compared to the penalty from the split damage RSS.
I'm at a loss as to why this happens. If I had to guess I would say that it might have something to do with the way monster defense works rather than some sort of unfair bonuses being purposely applied to pure weapons. The result though is unfortunate, a pure weapon is only slightly better than a split weapon vs its intended target. Against unintended foes, it does much worse.
Note that the base damage of the RSS might have been raised slightly, in this case about 4%, or it might just be the result of the way defense is calculated for split vs pure, who knows.
Errrr, there is no monster family that is neutral to both piercing and elemental. I mean, there is only three types of damage and the monster has either no, some or major resistance against respective damage type.
Try assuming that there is no such a thing as bonuses (i.e. the orange numbers that people take as bonus damage) and instead start with pure piercing weapons - assume that it does 100% of its potential damage against beasts and fiends and take that as starting point, then you can slowly crunch down specialised/normal weapons and then in the end finally the specialised/specialised ones. Oh, and. Assume that no monsters have normal defense