Melee combat and how stats affect it?

[SoloranFirebay]

<DIV> <DIV>atm I have a 28 defiler and a 22 assassin, my question is how do stats affect melee damage. At 22 my assassin un buffed has 83 str 71 agi and 65 sta, with 1011hp, and 917 ac. My two weps are Dragoon dagger(5-15, 1.2) and Captains barbed whip(5-15,1.2). And for the life of me i can not figure out what stats do ANYTHING for melee damage, far as i can tell str just lets you carry more, agi makes you hit less, and sta makes you take more hits. But in no way what so ever do i see any difference between me and another 22 assassin who has 42 str 91 agi 63sta. I see that weps give a range that they will melee in, with a high and a low, and i atleast figured that with higher str you would be able to hit on the upper limits more on average than someone with lower str. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>I have a program that logs damage done by me, so as a test me and this other assassin who has the same program went out and for 20 min solo'd greens(forgot to mention that we are using same weps as well) we used absolutly no arts at all, and at the end of 20 min after soloing 12 mobs each our DPS was: me 10.09/sec and him 9.96/sec. there is a 41str difference between us and only .15/s damage diff.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Then as another test we went to oranges, we had a 30 gardian pull lvl 26 mobs, break the encounter so we could hit them and not take agro, again using no arts our dps was: me 9.56/sec him 9.73/sec. Again only a .17/sec difference, this basically is nothing. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>So agian i ask anyone out there to perhaps explain how melee damage is done with stats thrown into the mix? because i am clueless at this point.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Kloak-22 assassin</DIV> <DIV>Neehi-28 defiler</DIV></DIV>

[Micbat]

I wonder what the result of your test would be with styles. Meaning maybe your skills are used in any calculation on tell you start doing styles. I don't know, just a thought.

[khalysta]

<DIV>I've known str plays little part since beta and thats why I always said don't bother to go with high str races thinking you will do more damage.  Supposedly strength is supposed to play more of a role as you progress to 50 but I just don't see how it can matter so little and then be meaningful later on at 50.  If you play with attack you will notice that 2 or 3 strength is ~ 1 atk.  so having high strength gives you marginal attack gains.  Marginal attack gains out of 4-500 ends up to be under 1-2% gain in atk which turns into negligible dps gains.  To do things accurately though you need long parses since a few short ones leaves too much room for error but this game doesnt have the parse mobs that EQLive has so good data will tend to be difficult to find.</DIV>