[trevius]

From testing on my own server and speaking with people from other servers including Zebuxoruk and PEQ, I have found that special melee attacks are doing MUCH higher damage than they should be. This includes attacks like backstab, monk special kicks, bow ranged damage, and probably more that I have not had reports on yet. All of these attacks are landing for about double what they should be.

For example; my level 60 rogue with a 19 damage dagger is able to backstab for up to 1000 damage (non crit). And backstabs seem to land very often and are often double hits. While backstabs are landing that high, that same rogue is only landing normal hits in the mid 100s. I haven't tested monk kicks, but I imagine they are similar. The reports I have had from rangers was on a high end ranger on my server who said from parsing their DPS, they were getting around 350 DPS with their melee attacks. If that same ranger switched to using ranged attacks with a bow of lesser quality than their melee weapons, they were logging 600+ DPS with just using /autofire and no discs or haste.

I think lowering the damage on these attacks by 1/3 would be a very safe change, but IMO they could be lowered by as far as 1/2 to be about right. Of course, if there is something that is causing them to not factor in AC, probably just adding them in to all other attacks so they do factor AC would resolve the problems.