I care about this, of course, but the opportunities to study it is too limited, and will undoubtedly require crafting a lot of stuff. You might want to work at finding the exact mathematics for a 1* weapon, try out your hypothesis on a 2* weapon eventually and then move on to confirm your suspicions for 3*, 4* and 5*.

It will be hard to avoid all heat until one little ember at the end. Those embers just fly toward you in the heat of battle (wink). I guess that you can just abandon the level if the heating has gone awry.

I've actually been working on that recently. My main question is the increments in which heat affects your weaponry damage.

Another question for Zeddy since he has the SK scientific procedures figured out. I'm gathering data to see how each level of heat affects weaponry (defense if I can figure that stuff out too). Would it be okay for me to use just the first attack of a sword and measure it each level or would it be better to measure every hit including charge attacks in every tier/stratum?

Bit late, sorry. I already started. I'm gathering every bit of data though, including with DB med, assuming that's the most powerful I can get. There's already some rather interesting, for lack of a better word, quirks coming up. If anyone has unheated or half-heated weaponry I'd be grateful for the damage it does against the various punching bags in all of the GTH tiers.

Ah, yes, I've got halfway an answer to that at this point. Let's examine Brandish damage at T3 GTH more closely.

265 versus weak.
198 versus neutral.

265 - 198 = 67.

Remember, that Brandishes do split damage. If we simply split up the neutral damage, we'll see exactly why there is an inconsistency:

198 / 2 = 99.

Remember that in T3 GTH, the bags have 61 weak defence and 122 neutral defence. Each damage part of Brandish is lower than 122 and is therefore reduced in a manner that's not linear anymore. (I have yet to figure out the exact formula.

The tricky part is figuring out what the true damage of a Brandish is because of this. After all, we can't get an accurate reading since the normal part of the brandish will always be doing less than 122 damage. However, since we know that the normal damage part of the Brandish is 99 damage, we can simply remove it:

265 - 99 = 166.

That's the amount of elemental damage our brandish hit is doing. It's above 61 (which is how much elemental defence a construct bag has), and as such, we can just add that defence to get raw damage.

166 + 61 = 227

227 elemental damage +
227 normal damage =
454 total damage

Enemy defence does not change with your weapon's heat level. Each split part of Brandish simple does less than 122 damage, and which is the treshold where defence stops acting linearly. Look at the difference between neutral and weak damage for the charge attack; it's 61 at every level.

...I now have have a headache...

No, the defense doesn't change just for levels 5 and 10. Zeddy is correct. Damage does change. With each heat level (refer to my chart) but the amount of change fluctuates semi-consistently if you look at the strict difference between each level. Sometimes the change is 2 or 4 then it goes down a couple of points before the rate of change increases again.

Also, the hottest (for lack of a better term) levels are FSC and RJP. ICMF doesn't cut it. FSC should allow you to heat a weapon in less than 13 or so runs, given that you need to forge between levels. Heating just isn't the same anymore.

Brandish explosions are below the treshold. I don't know exactly why the unresisted damage (I assume you were testing these on lost souls?) doesn't noticably increase between levels 1 and 2, but I'm assuming it's something like the total going from 130.6 to 131.4 for each part between levels. I notice in your chart that damage increase for heat levels start low and then ramp up exponentially.

Split damage means the weapon's damage is split into two parts, and those two parts, except for being added together in the end, act completely independently. One part of 131-ish damage is normal, and is reduced by 130 defence (assuming this is depth 24 we're talking about). The other part of 131 elemental damage is reduced by 65 defence, which puts it just barely above the treshold.

Still, part of it is below. Therefore, shenanigans.

Stop turning SK into a matimatical equaltion, enjoy the game, its a game, not chemistry lab...

No offence, just saying...

I'm done. I collected the damage done by a Glacius in every tier Guild Training Hall. T1 and T2 values remain the same throughout the heating process. T3 values do change, and enough to make it worth heating, although I would heat it anyways for the CTR:Med. It seems that obtaining heat crystals is actually a process worth doing. I have yet to crack the formula but by plotting the data on a graph, it does have a definite exponential-type curve.

Oh yeah. here is the big one with everything and here is the simplified version for easier reading. It's already been posted somewhere up there.

@Zeddy
Right. I used your formula which you are right is wrong, if that makes any sense, and I did use numbers below the threshold, another major sin. That MAGIC/BLUNT SWORD thing you have confused me for a bit but I do believe I understand it now. What's interesting when I plotted the graph is that it didn't just shift the line upwards when there was less defense involved. The curve itself increased. Vertical stretch. It's pretty clear.

@Xwert
For me, it's the game inside the game that I can play outside the game. I get bored often and so I have a bunch of data written down to analyze in the middle of class. Cracking stuff like this is tough but it sure beats staring out the window most of the time. Kinda fun too.

My links are now clickable. They are no longer shameful.

Zeddy, Bopp and Autofire the tree officil (mad) scientist.