RPG MAKER 2000: WEAPONS AND SKILLS WITH A COMBINATION OF WEAPON AND MAGIC ATTRIBUTES

While working on something for a collaborative RM2k project, I discovered an interesting quirk in the damage calculations regarding the way in which the game accounts for attacks that use elements that are both weapon and magic type. I've never seen this discussed anywhere else, so I believe that I'm the first to notice it. If anyone here still uses this ancient engine, this may be of some use to you. We've already used it to great effect in our game.

Here's a quick copy/paste from what I posted elsewhere:

We all know that when a move has two magic attributes, the most effective takes priority. The same is also true when a move has two weapon attributes. But when you use a combination of weapon and magic attributes, things get weird. Here are my experiments with applying a weapon and magic attribute to a weapon and changing their effectiveness. (For the ones where the difference was slight, I used a zero-variance skill with the same two attributes for accuracy.)

Now, that last result was really an eye-opener. Up until that point, the results had been weird, unpredictable and inconsistent. But at least they had been consistent in the sense that in every case, one of the attributes had clearly been prioritised while the other was ignored. In that last case, the two attributes seemed to have both been taken into account somehow. At first I thought I might have made a mistake, but after testing several more times, the result was definite. A move with a 99%WPN/200%MAG combination was DEFINITELY doing slightly less damage than a move with a 100%WPN/200%MAG combination (which was certainly doing exactly double the damage of a 100%WPN/100%MAG combination). This is solid evidence that the move is in fact taking the weaker attribute into account when calculating the damage, which is completely unheard of in RM2k. I don't even know what to think at this point.

But if I'd thought that was weird, I was absolutely blown away by the next result.

I really don't know what to say. Again, I tested it multiple times and checked everything; there was no mistake. This was utterly bizarre.
With one weapon and one magic attribute, the game was doing exactly what we'd always wanted it to do with two magic attributes - it was taking both into account.


More testing was in order.

Now this was really weird. Aside from the fact that a 50% attribute and a 200% attribute were combining for 100% damage, there was a tiny disparity between the results from WPN50%/MAG200% and MAG50%/WPN200%. I figured it was just a fluke, but I tried it with several different damage values - it was always one point less. Didn't really know what to make of this. Then suddenly, it hit me.

This is how the game calculates the damage: First, it multiplies the base damage by the weapon attribute's multiplier. Then, after that, it multiplies it by the magical attribute's multiplier. This explains why, when using a weapon attribute of 100%, it always just took the magic attribute's multiplier - it started off at 100% (the weapon attribute), then just multiplied it by the magic attribute. 100% of the magic attribute naturally results in the same value as the magic attribute. Likewise, it makes sense why using a weapon attribute of 0% would mean that everything always do no damage regardless of how high the magic multiplier was. Once the number has been reduced to 0, it's going to remain as 0 however much you multiply it.

It also explains the disparity in the previous example. It's because I was using odd numbers as the base damage. Let's use 135 as an example. If you half 135, you get 67.5, which RM2k rounds to 67. If you then double that, you get 134 - it's one point off. Whereas if you just double 135 to get 270, and then half that again, you get back to 135. This explains every result.

So, to summarise: When a weapon/skill uses two attributes, one of which is a weapon attribute and one of which is a magic attribute, the multiplier on the weapon attribute is applied first, followed by the multiplier on the magic attribute.

After further testing, which I won't bore you with the details of, I concluded that: When a weapon/skill uses a combination of weapon and magic attributes where there is more than one weapon and/or magic attribute, the most effective weapon attribute and the most effective magic attribute are taken into account, while all others are ignored.

I see...I wasn't aware of that, since I've only ever seriously used RM2k. Wish I'd known about that, because then I could have applied it to 2k much earlier on.