Melee weapon balance is actually relatively good, at least compared to things like food, mid-game armor and so on. There are exceptions, such as Niten, but overall it’s one of the best balanced parts of the game.
Early game armor also got some attention, but things do start to break once kevlar is considered. Then all balance is thrown out of the window the moment powered armor (true power armor and the rivtech one) appears.
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:10, topic:14241”]This s exactly the kind of thing that you shouldn’t be using to tweak the values, instead make a note to add more armored enemies.
If you balance one side of the equation in isolation, you achieve balance at the cost of variety.[/quote]
DPT is actually a good measure of weapon damage for other reasons: slow weapons tend to deal with encumbrance better (at same base DPT), but are weaker at lower encumbrance, as tend to overkill more and need to be dropped or stashed more often.
Ironically, trying to balance it by adding more armored enemies could easily lead to situation where variety is lost, because everyone needs to be trained in the use of can openers. At the moment, the number of armored enemies is too low, but it matters already (in early game): meeting a zed soldier is a good reason to switch from a knife to a pipe or even a rock. It disappears later on because the armor formula is too flat (katana can easily pierce soldier armor).
Either way, modified DPT is the only viable way (that I’ve seen anyone present so far) of getting the weapon variety actually happen. Letting some weapons be worse (barring obvious “tiers” like aforementioned knife spear vs halberd) would certainly affect weapon variety negatively.
That’s why I linked the wiki page. +1 to-hit is worth roughly 10% increase in DPT there. That’s not a mathematically derived number and thus it’s not rock solid or anything, but it’s a good estimate of “should I pick x over y”.
