How durable is DURABLE_MELEE?

Does DURABLE_MELEE make a weapon more durable smashing windows and corpses?

edit:

Both katana and fire axe are DURABLE_MELEE, are they durable to the same extent?

If they both have the same flag, they are the same durability. And i would assume it makes it less likely to “Be damaged by the force of the blow” in all situations that can appear.

Thanks! I thought axe was more durable than katana. I saw pattern that didn’t exist.

Durable means that the chance to damage the item is 1/4 of the usual one.
The chance decreases with your melee skill (not damage type, just pure melee) and dexterity, but increases with strength.
Then it is divided by item’s chipping resistance, which depends on the best (most chip-resistant) material the item has.

So the axe and katana should have identical resistances.

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:4, topic:13767”]Durable means that the chance to damage the item is 1/4 of the usual one.
The chance decreases with your melee skill (not damage type, just pure melee) and dexterity, but increases with strength.
Then it is divided by item’s chipping resistance, which depends on the best (most chip-resistant) material the item has.

So the axe and katana should have identical resistances.[/quote]

Cool - nice to see what actually goes into it (I had guessed on the str thing).

Does the same logic apply to damage when blocking with an item? That is, does higher strength increase the chance of the item being damaged when it is used to block? If so, might I humbly suggest that it not, as it makes no sense?

Thanks for the insight! My katana is broken, but I forged other swords!

It does. Currently the chance to damage an item does not depend on how it is used - a block is equivalent to attack and all attacks are equivalent to each other.
Doesn’t matter if you’re trying to dull your katana against tank’s plating or blocking a zed child’s punch.

I guess the strength scaling is supposed to account for stronger strikes. If we want realism here, someone would have to throw away the strength thing (extra strength doesn’t help much with slicing weapons so it shouldn’t cause them to break), apply chip damage multipliers on strikes against armored enemies, apply chip damage multipliers based on amount of blocked damage, split DURABLE_MELEE into DURABLE_STRIKE and DURABLE_BLOCK (or even into values not hardcoded into flags) and possibly rework bashing terrain multipliers too.
But it’s a relatively minor thing, since weapon wear doesn’t matter much for as long as repairs are easy.

Hard to disagree on that.