Introduction

DAoC Decay

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DAoC Decay

DAoC Items

Figure 1

Figure 2

Equipable DAoC items degrade with use. Use of an item is defined as actually being struck for armor and actually hitting a target for weapons. After some number of uses your item will loose a condition point (figure 1). This condition point may be repaired by a smith NPC, or a player with tradeskills in the same craft as your weapon/armor. When you repair a piece of equipment the durability (figure 2) goes down.

THE DURABLITY DISPLAY FOR ITEMS DOES NOT SHOW DURABLITY OVER 100; IT IS NOT A PERCENTAGE. This is a known bug, and has been in game since release. Don't /appeal this in game, as you'll do nothing but clog their bug system. If you really want this changed send a Herald Feedback form. Trust me though, if this was an easy fix it would have been done years ago.

The display bug for durability is mainly responsible for the lack of understanding of item decay, as most people see their items stay at one hundred "percent" durability, and suddenly quickly fall in durability.

From my testing it seems that all items have a base durability of one hundred, with two extra points for each quality percentage over 85%. So a 86% quality item has 102 durability points, and a masterpiece item has 130 durability points.

Durability Loss

Figure 3 (click for larger view)

Repairing an item looses durablity equil to the amount of condition restored, plus one extra durability point. This extra durability point seems trivial at first, but in fact if an item is only repaired at 99% condition half of the durability loss will be "extra" durability for which the user never used the item. In addition, AT CONITIONS VALUES OF 90% AND BELLOW THE ITEM WILL LOOSE CONDITION AT TWICE THE RATE OF CONDITION LOSS FROM 100% TO 91%. In example, if at 100-91% condition a sword degraded a con point after four successful hits, at 90-70% condition it would degrade one con point in two successful hits. Thus 90-70% takes the same number of uses as 100-90%. Figure 3 (larger view) shows a graph of a one hundred durability object's life when repaired at some constant condition level. Life is measured in number of times the item dropped condition, as adverse to loosing durability from the "extra point" repair penalty. It is clear from the graph the worse case local minimum is when constantly repaired at 99% condition. The item will only be usable for the time it takes it to drop 50 condition points. Whereas the local max at 90% the item will survive 90.9 condition point drops. Below 90% condition drops off quicker, and thus item life is impacted adversely (NOTE: the graph dots after 90% occur at twice the time frequency of the dots before 90%).

Durability Display

It is worth noting a second time that durability loss on high quality items will not be immediately noticeable. If you wish to examine durability loss you must first make sure the item in question is below 100 durability points, so that you may see the con+1 durability fall off.