In Draw Steel, martial characters (minus the Null but including the Troubadour) pick out a Kit, which defines the kind of gear they're using, and also gives them something of a theme or vibe. Any of these classes can be a heavily-armored Mountain wielding a massive weapon, or a ranged Sniper, shooting foes from afar with their bow, or a bare-knuckle-boxing Pugilist.
I love this largely for flavor reasons: not all Shadows need to be the classic "dark leather armor with a hood" Rogue-like vibe: you can be a heavy-armor-wearing phantom knight or a wanderer fighting with a simple stick.
But I wanted to look at the mechanical benefits of these various kits, and specifically the damage bonuses.
Now, there's enough complexity here that I don't know that any kit's bonuses will always be the most optimal for a given class. You might pick different signature abilities and heroic abilities that favor one over the other.
As such, we're going to have to narrow our focus significantly to find out what bonuses are the best for us, and that means picking a class and some abilities.
The class that keeps calling out to me is the Shadow, because while I think I tend to project a kind and affable attitude toward my friends, there's always been that little edgelord lurking in the depths of my subconscious. Truth be told, what I really love is playing a "dark aesthetic but kind and heroic" character, but that's fine, because mechanically we're really focusing more on the former half of that.
Generally speaking, damage bonuses from Kits come in the following forms:
+1s to every tier result on both ranged and melee attacks
+1s to every tier result on just melee attacks (these kits tend to come with additional non-damage features).
+2s to every tier result in either ranged or melee attacks (often without any other damage bonus)
+4s to the tier 3 result of either ranged or melee attacks (there are more of these for melee, I think Sniper is the only one for ranged options).
So, what this tells us is that there's a reward for specializing: naturally, if zero in on, say, melee attacks, you'll get a bigger damage boost if you take a kit that only benefits melee. But it does mean that you'll be losing out on damage when you make ranged attacks (every class can do a ranged free strike if they don't have any ranged abilities).
Truthfully, the real thing I wanted to look at was the +4s for tier 3 results. Given that the tiers have fixed target numbers, my understanding is that as we level up, and our primary characteristics go up, we'll naturally start hitting tier 3 results more often (and tier 1 results less often). I actually believe tier 2s remain the same if we don't have an edge or bane, because the peak of our average die result always results in a tier 2 (with +2 to our stat, a natural 11 gives us a 13, and with +5 to our stat, a natural 11 gives us 16).
As such, I suspect that these broad damage bonuses will benefit us more in early levels, while the tier-3-boosters will start to pick up value when we get to higher levels.
In an earlier post, I figured out the likelihood of each roll on the d10s. There's a 10% chance to roll an 11, and each value up and down from that is 1% lower (so 10 and 12 are both 9%, and eventually 2 and 20 are both just 1%).
So, let's figure out the average damage boost that these things give us when we're adding different amounts to our power roll.
Luckily, the 2/2/2 and 1/1/1 bonuses are the same regardless of what we roll. These are always going to give us 2 or 1 extra damage.
It's the tier 3 boosters that we need to do some math to figure out:
At level 1, we're adding 2 to our power roll. That means that, without edges or banes, we get a tier 3 result on a roll of 15 or higher. The chance of rolling a 15 is 6%, and then adding the 5%, 4%, 3%, 2%, and 1% of rolling any value higher than that gives us 21%.
If we're getting +4 to our damage 21% of the time, that means that we're getting an average of .84 extra damage - clearly not as good as even a +1 across the board.
However!
Edges and Banes are a thing. Especially when we're talking about a Shadow, who can pretty easily slip into concealment, you can often get an edge with a maneuver on your turn. By adding two to our power roll, we're effectively moving the threshold on which we get that tier 3 result down by 2, to only 13. That adds 15% to our chance to get it, putting us at a 36%. Thus, that becomes 1.44 extra damage. We're still not beating the +2 kits, but we're catching up.
If we have a double edge, things are probably going to take off considerably. Now, to get a tier 3 result, we need only roll a natural 10, because this way, every total of 12 or higher is a tier 3. Rolling a 9 or lower is a 36% chance, meaning we've got a 64% chance to get a tier 3 result. That means an average bonus of 2.56, meaning that in scenarios where we have a double edge, this kit bonus is giving us the best damage boost even at level 1.
But that is something of a best-case scenario, of course.
As you level up (I believe at the first level of each Echelon of Play) your primary characteristic(s) go(es) up. Meaning, in the case of our Shadow, our Agility - though we can also increase our Intuition, Reason, or Presence if we're going with a kit like Warrior Priest, Battlemind, or Spell Sword, whose signature abilities can't use Agility. That means we'll eventually get a +3, a +4, and at level 10, a +5 to the characteristics we're using for our abilities' power rolls.
As I said before, I suspect that this will start to favor the +4 to tier 3 bonus kits more and more as we gain levels.
At +3, our chance to roll a tier 3 result without other bonuses or penalties is now going to go up by 7%, because that's the chance we roll a natural 14. Thus, we go from a 21% chance to a 28% chance. That 4 damage bonus times that likelihood is now 1.12, meaning we're now edging out the +1 bonus kits.
At +4, we've basically already done the math, because having a +4 to our characteristic is essentially the same as having an edge with a +2. Thus, with our 36% chance, we're getting an average of 1.44.
At +5, which we only reach at level 10, we're now getting this result on a 12 or higher, adding a full 9% to our likelihood, so that's 45% of the time, meaning we're talking 1.8 extra damage. This is the same as if we were level 4-6 (with our +3 to the roll) and getting an edge.
Thus, in a vacuum, without edges or banes, we're not quite catching up with the +2 bonuses. However, again, edges and banes can make the difference here.
Jumping back to 3rd echelon, when we have a +4, an edge effectively makes that a +6, which means a tier 3 result on a roll of 11 or lower, adding a full 10% to our chance to do so. That means 55%, giving us an average damage boost of 2.2. If we can get a double edge, we're going to get a tier 3 result on a roll of 8 or higher, meaning 79% of the time, so that bonus is 3.16.
A 10th level character with an edge on their roll is also getting it now on a natural 9, which means adding another 9% to our tier 3 likelihood, or 64% total, giving us an average damage boost of 2.56. If we get a double edge, we're talking about getting a tier 3 result 85% of the time, for an average bonus damage of 3.4.
So, to sum up:
Double Edge: the +4 bonus damage is always best.
Edge: +2s remain best on average until level 7, when the +4 bonus becomes likely enough to overcome it.
No Edge: +2s are always the highest damage option.
Now, let's reintroduce some nuance:
Depending on party composition and the way that each character plays, you might find you're getting edges all the time. If you can consistently get double edges, a +4 kit like the Mountain, Panther, Sniper, etc., will be great. Your own class might have plenty of ways to get edges as well.
Against monsters that inflict banes, naturally these +4 kits are going to suffer more than others.
Also, each of these kits come with far more than just damage boosts: you might only occasionally get that cool +4 bonus from your Panther kit, but the mobility and stability you gain from it could be well worth it.
Likewise, a kit that boosts the damage of both melee and ranged attacks might wind up being more effective overall if you want to use a lot of both kinds of abilities (many Shadow abilities can be either ranged or melee, so if you go Cloak and Dagger and fling an endless supply of throwing knives, that's cool too.)
Once again, I haven't actually had a chance to play this game yet, and so questions of how balanced it is remain to be explored, but I do get a sense that you should be able to build a character around a concept and vibe and it should be fairly effective. I think any of these kits is probably going to feel cool to use. But I also think that a real min-maxxer might consider holding off on using these +4 kits until they get to higher levels, when the bonus becomes more likely to come into play.
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