Looking at Destiny's damage system through weapon comparison (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Monday, December 22, 2014, 09:54 (3865 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Isn't it silly to do this except with max weapons? I'd think comparing two weapons at their max attack value is most useful.

I thought of that and between the fact that Destiny is largely about getting new stuff and how long it would take to upgrade everything I had it seemed sillier to wait until it was all upgraded.

It also completely doesn't account for perks. Some perks are really good and increase damage. Take Hawkmoon for example.

This is by design. I intended to only focus on attack and impact; that quickly expanded to enemy level too, and it happened to also address weapon tier and origin somewhat (part of the reason for the gap was that I wanted to get a legendary weapon since that was the only tier I didn't have), and I ended up testing player level because I forgot to keep it consistent one time and I didn't want to redo those tests (of course, testing it ended up taking more time, but I'm glad I did).
I ordinarily test new upgrades, but I didn't have numbers to compare before, so I can tell you a bit about upgrades now. The last sight on my TLW brings up impact 3%, causing the damage for level 2 enemies to go to 146/438. The first damage increase, which was about 5 attack points, didn't change the damage numbers at all. The "reloading after a kill increases damage" perk on my Regulator increased damage to level 2 enemies quite a bit, I didn't write it down but it seemed like it was about double for base damage and at least one third more for precision damage-- the short amount of time it's effective and the long amount of time the reload takes make it pretty hard to call it practical, though.