Dragon Warrior 2 - Lua Scripting - Dodge Chances

One other thing that I've wondered in Dragon Warrior 2 is dodge chances: raw chance, with Surround up, and does the Clothes Hiding actually do anything? Here is the script I used to test (Dragon Warrior 2 Dodge Chance Lua).

First up is the chance of just a raw dodge:

Raw dodge chance

The chances are pretty low, and with some margin of error, seem to be in line with the general accepted 1/64 dodge chance. 

Here is an important one, the chance of being hit with the enemy Surrounded (in this case I used the Light Sword): 

A Surrounded Cyclops

Surround in this game gives an additional 25% chance to dodge an enemy attack. This is pretty low and they even adjusted this rate higher in later games to be more effective, to 50% or more.  It makes Surround a pretty useless spell, except for in a few select cases. 

Now for equipping Clothes Hiding:

Hero with Clothes Hiding equipped

This is the most surprising result.  Clothes Hiding seems to give an additional 12.5% (or 1/8) to dodge an enemy attack.  I was thinking this was much lower, and it might make getting a set of Clothes Hiding a good option at some point in the speedrun. 

And to be complete, I did one more test, combining Surround and Clothes Hiding: 

Cyclops Surrounded and Hero with Clothes Hiding

The effects of both seem to stack, giving close to the combined dodge chance of both Surround and Clothes Hiding. 

Dragon Warrior 4 - Lua Scripting - The Demon Hammer

I've been curious for awhile now, but couldn't find any documented information on the Demon Hammer in Dragon Warrior 4.  The only thing that I did know is that it gives +70 attack and it is a cursed item.  In Dragon Quest 5 DS the Demon Hammer, or Hela's Hammer, has a 50/50% chance to critical or miss, and is extremely useful in the speedrun.  So in looking for better methods to hunt Metal Babbles, I wanted to find out what it really does in DW4.

In Bizhawk, I ran this script (DW4 Demon Hammer Lua) to test it.  I ran the test with Ragnar equipped with the Demon Hammer against a single Rhinoband. The results:

Ragnar fighting for science.

So after 10000+ trials it turns out he critical chance for the Demon Hammer in this game is only 33%, which has been a common theme in testing things in Dragon Warrior 4. So far we have found that you have a 33% chance to hit a Metal (Slime/Babble/King) enemy and 33% chance to put any enemy to sleep with a hit from the Sword of Lethargy.

Whether this hit rate is useful or not remains to be seen though. Getting the Demon Hammer early for the Metal Babble grind is a bit risky, as it is located in the middle of the Colossus.  And at that point, it would make sense to try to get all the way to the Dire Palace for the return point, and be done with the Colossus before the grind. But getting through at around level 15 though is another matter.

However, the potential to save time with it is still there, equip it onto Ragnar for the Metal Babble grind and then remove the curse afterwards. A downside, however, is that Ragnar will be much less effective against the other random encounters you see in the Royal Crypt while grinding.  Getting the Metal Babble Sword for Ragnar still might be the better option here, even with the huge amount of time it takes to pick it up. More testing is needed, as always.

Dragon Warrior 2 - Lua Scripting - Targeted Chances

I've been writing and running some Lua script tests lately, thanks to TheCowness as I took most of the work from him.  I've been using them to test specific chances of things happening in various Dragon Warrior games.  

Here is one that I ran on for Dragon Warrior 2 (script here).  This script loads a preset state over and over and records the chances that either Middenhall, Cannock, or Moonbrooke are targeted in battle. 

The results:

From what I already knew from speedrunning this game, I was fairly confident that it was an equal chance for each character to be targeted.  This just confirms my suspicions and helps my sanity for whenever I see Moonbrook targeted and killed during the grind segment.  I might double check this for a couple more enemies, but I'm pretty sure that this holds throughout the game.