Comparison of Love Halberd and Tomoe for samurai

I allocated way too much time this weekend to putzing around with spreadsheets, but let's just finish this off, shall we? Here's an example of doing a fairly simple comparison of a 7-hit Love Halberd with a 5-hit Tomoe, which is based on ideas presented in a prior comparison of weapons for warrior. In particular, I utilize the concepts of "expected number of rounds to clear 100 TP" and "expected number of hits to clear 100 TP" to make the arithmetic more tractable.

I didn't see any (good) hypothetical comparison of Tomoe 5-hit versus Love Halberd 7-hit for samurai (using Penta Thrust), so I thought I could do this really fast because I already set up the "black box" (this mess of a spreadsheet) to spit out an answer.

Calculating average time to 100 TP

Weapon	Average no. of rounds	Average no. of hits		Average time (s)
Love Halberd	3.959	6.488		26.131
Tomoe	3.774	4.123		30.197

This is the easiest step as the assumptions are reasonable if idealized, such as 95% hit rate, 15% double attack rate, and starting with some initial TP from the previous weapon skill.

Calculating average damage to 100 TP (including weapon skill damage)

Weapon	AA "base" damage	WS "base" damage	Average AA damage	Average WS damage	Total damage
Love Halberd	70	110	454.179	650.335	1104.515
Tomoe	96	136	395.890	822.614	1218.505

Again, there are more simple assumptions, like using Penta Thrust immediately after attaining 100 TP, using the same fSTR throughout, and assuming an average pDIF of 1. Using the expected values from the previous table, the average auto-attack and WS damage can be calculated.

Also, average WS damage is based on an average return of 5.035 hits.

Did I account for the effect of Meditate? Assuming Meditate recast is 150 seconds, we can assume all the TP goes to one WS and incorporate that damage into one cycle of AA and WS damage. For example, a "Meditate WS" is about 0.174 of a full WS in one cycle for Love Halberd, 0.201 for Tomoe, which makes sense as Meditate will benefit "slower-to-WS" weapons relatively more (Tomoe being slower).

Damage per second

Weapon	AA proportion of total damage	DPS	Relative efficiency
Love Halberd	.411	42.267	+4.75%
Tomoe	.324	40.351	---

Time for a reality check. Is it really possible for Tomoe auto-attack damage to account for only about 33% of total damage? I would have to see some parser output to validate these calculations. If you ignore Meditate, the proportions increase to .451 and .366. I will update this post when I can track down some parser output.

Even accounting for Meditate, Love Halberd comes out ahead on paper by almost 5%. Whether that 5% is worth expending virtue stones in a merit party is another issue altogether. You can't really argue differences in hit rate (if you want hit rate to drop below 95%) since the only real difference would be whatever is used in the ammo slot. As for attack differences, who knows how DEX +7 would compare to attack +5 and whatever's in the ammo slot.

Of course, the major issue, at least to me, is whether DA really stacks with virtue weapons. I've been assuming it does. Even if it doesn't though, Love Halberd is still slightly more efficient.