Kotor Mechanical Analysis
The game feels designed for one type of character, which is a strength heavy melee jedi. Even if you disagree with that premise, I want to emphasize how little other playstyles matter mechanically. In the next post I want to also look at why this doesn’t really matter and how Bioware did a great job at leading the player to feel like it matters. Let’s look at the stats.
KOTOR has 6 stats:
· Strength – Damage with melee weapons, attack(roll) with melee weapons, and lightsabers if higher than dexterity, and the DC check for the characters Critical Strike ability.
· Dexterity – Defense, attack(roll) with ranged weapons and with lightsabers if greater than strength, reflex saves, and stealth bonus. This stat for defense purposes is also restricted by armor.
· Constitution – Health.
· Intelligence – Skill points, sniper shot DC
· Wisdom – force power DC, force points, medkit healing
· Charisma – force power DC, force points, persuade
The game also has 8 skills that derive from these stats:
· Computer use – uses intelligence modifier, reduced number of computer spikes needed.
· Demolitions – uses intelligence modifier, lets you disarm mines. 20 is always rolled out of combat.
· Stealth – uses dexterity modifier, determines how hard you are to detect using a stealth device
· Awareness – uses wisdom modifier, used to detect mines
· Persuade – uses charisma modifier, affects your chance to persuade NPCs
· Repair – uses intelligence modifier, reduced the number of parts needed to repair
· Security – uses wisdom modifier, used to pick locks
· Treat injury – uses wisdom modifier, affects the amount healed by medkits
The skills are what the game actually checks against, but the game has made some interesting decisions that make it so you don’t need high scores in any skills for the most part.
Computer Use is helpful if you want to skip combat or lessen the difficulty by killing multiple enemies or removing a shield from droid. There is one skill check that this skill is necessary for. On a second playthrough or if you have a good grip on combat already you can safely not use this skill.
Demolitions helps you disarm mines; however, you can just avoid them. And you will probably never use mines yourself. Many times, you can also just soak the mine’s damage and force heal with no issue.
Stealth does not have many uses in the game. It is deactivated when interacting with things, and it grants you a sneak attack bonus, however you also get this bonus for attacking from behind or attacking a stunned enemy.
Awareness – Finds mines.
Persuade – This is probably the weirdest one, persuade comes up a lot, however the minimum number of points can be invested and still have 100% chance for most checks. This is determined by a ratio (rank/(level+5) if It is over .75 you have guaranteed success on all low and medium checks, and a 75% chance of success on hard checks. At level 20, you need 19 persuade to do most checks. If you have extra feats, you can get away with 16.
Repair – Same as computer use, this is used to avoid combat encounters. However, repairing HK-47 fully requires rank 17 in repair. 10 points can be received from equipment, meaning 7 is high enough.
Security – You can bash all locks and it won’t damage what is inside. Can be faster though.
Treat injury – Increases healing of medkits.
What this ends up meaning is that you can honestly get away with putting all points into persuade, and do the rest of the game just fine. Though if you want HK you need to put some points into repair. You will have extra points though so you can pick something for roleplaying or funsies.
Base stats are similar to skills, in that very few are “useful.” You can make a couple of builds work but there is one specific thing that makes ranged/dex builds strange. And that is sniper shot. If you are a dex build, and you know you won’t be using many skills, you will have high dex low int. However, sniper shot stuns with an int check. Critical Strike, the melee equivalent, checks off strength, the stat you’ll be maxing out. So, to be a ranged build you need to put points into a less optimal stat.
This is mirrored by going a force user build. You don’t get force powers until after Taris, so you have to do the entirety of Taris with 2 non-combat focused stats, wisdom and charisma. And to top that off, to do any effective damage as a force user you need to be a dark jedi or have a LOT of wisdom and charisma for more points. Sneak attack can help here, but force choke is also a stun.
DAMAGE ANALYSIS
The most damage you can do in the game is sneak attack melee. Hands down. Melee weapons even do more damage than any other weapon. Lightsabers with Solari+Upari+Heart of the Guardian do 5-38 damage. HOWEVER, this doesn’t account for Critical Strike. Critical Strike doubles the critical threat range of melee attacks. Lightsabers have a range of 2 (19-20), whereas the Baragwin Assault Blade does 6-36, with a critical range of 4. Which makes Master Critical Strike have a range of 10 (11-20) which if it hits, also stuns. This stun gives you sneak attack damage.
Putting all that together, with some force powers and using flurry, you can attack 5 times per turn. (This doesn’t mean you can use Critical Strike 5 times however, that is one attack per round) This data assumed 100% uptime of the stun and does not account for needing to reapply it every 3 turns. Since they would all need to do this, and they all do the same sneak attack damage, it would just reduce the numbers by the same amounts for every weapon. Each weapon had its data gathered using this formula
((IF(CRIT)Random(mindamage,maxdamage)*2, else Random(mindamage,maxdamage)+Random(minsneakattack,maxsneakattack)*attacksPerTurn))
Or check if the attack is a crit, if so, do double damage. Then add sneak attack damage and multiply by attacks per turn.
Yes, this means if the attack is a crit, the whole turn is a crit. I felt this would even out over a million turns. (If not, yell at me and I’ll change the formula.)
For this set of data (roughly 1,048,576 simulated values per weapon) Melee weapons perform the best. It is worth noting that some weapons are from DLC of the Xbox version, however that DLC is restored and included in virtually every release available today.
Ranged weaponry also has a little bit of a surprise. Heavy weapons actually perform on top with the Baragwin Heavy Repeating Blaster. Dual blasters are just barely beaten though, but these statistics assume 2 Cassus Fett Heavy Blasters, which there is only one in the game.
Also, something to consider is that all of the weapons are modifiable. No weapon that cannot be modified comes close to the damages these do. Which can be a little misleading since some modifiable weapons look worse unmodded than some unmodifiable ones.
By a large margin, melee weapons are the highest damage output possible.
Now for the heated debate over Flurry vs Power Attack, I ran some sims for power attack, it generally only changed damage values by about 4 points. The sims assume 100% accuracy though, which power attack would not have. I’d say the choice is situational or virtually identical.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR STATS?
If you’re going for max damage, it does mean that strength is the most effective stat. Force powers are great for support, but do not contribute to damage as much. Force storm does 10-60 damage at max. Though you could use force powers in place of Critical Strike, like Insanity or Stun, but this would mean 0 damage for a turn. However, Insanity does last longer AND has a higher chance to work vs Critical Strike. This sim still assumes a 100% stun duration, so however it is done, there’s always a sneak attack bonus. Also, Critical Strikes stun works if the attack is successful, NOT if it is critical.
With that in mind, for damage, this makes strength and dexterity the two stats worth taking. Constitution is an effective third but not necessary. This means Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma are all much less effective in combat. Especially taking skills into account, and how the game uses those.
This means more than half the game’s character stats mean very little.
2 skills have a use as a PC, and 2 stats. This is not to discredit roleplaying or challenge runs, and it is worth noting that the game can be completed in different ways without a lot of issues. Stat builds notably make a bigger difference. However, skills are more of an illusion (and a very good one!). That being said, you will have more points than you need most of the time and will have at least some other stat or skill above the lowest value.
I want to end on another note though. While this looks at maximum effective damage, it is literally min/maxing stats to be the best possible damage dealer. This is a roleplaying game though, just to reiterate. You do not need to do this to complete the game. Far from it in fact, and you can use your teammates to cover part of this strategy too, such as stunning. So while the skills are somewhat of an illusion for actual effectiveness, they are still great for narrative. Which I want to explore later; how Bioware made the narrative so you FEEL like a space wizard. Arguably a much more important aspect to the game than the system behind the numbers.
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