What do certain item attributes in Dungeon Siege 3 mean?

Question

In Dungeon Siege 3 certain items have enhancements and there is no indication about what they actually do.

I'm specifically curious about these qualities:

• Retribution
• Bloodletting
• Doom
• Warding
• Vampire
• Weakening
• Withering
• Momentum
• Stagger

How are these properties affecting my game play? Other traits are self-explanatory (blocking, agility, armor) but the ones mentioned above have totally eluded me.

Answer 1

These effects are described in the help topics (if you hit esc, then choose Help Topics). Basically they just affect combat damage in various ways. Specifically:

• Retribution: sometimes damages the attacker when you get hit
• Bloodletting: sometimes causes bleeding when you hit enemies
• Doom: increases critical strike damage (I think)
• Warding: I checked this; it provides a chance to stun enemies that hit you.

Sure excited for this game to be out for real though!

Answer 2

Most (not all) of these are worthless in a couple aspects:

1. An effect that has a "low chance" is pretty worthless I'd imagine, since the chance doesn't change. It's not like there is an instant death effect or anything, to which a low chance would still be effective. Also, "low damage" would be bad too. Speaking of which, it's hard to imagine how there is low/moderate/high damage, but at the same time, the amount you have of that effect determines its damage. So I guess if you have 50 of something, but it's defined as "low damage", I guess that means that 50 is more like 10, for instance; it's like a modifier of the amount you have I guess.

2. These descriptions of these effects (along with many other things) don't tell you much at all about exactly how much damage they do, or their duration/chance sometimes. You could have a sword that has 50 lightning damage, but for all we know, that's equal to about 5 DPS at a certain point in the game (which further complicates things). This game does a horrible horrible job at giving you anything more than a vague description. I mean how the hell did the game designers let descriptions like this get by: "Each time Anjali is hit, there is a 3% chance per rank that her attacker will suffer a burning over time effect." A "burning over time effect" means nothing in that wording. Nothing.

So with that said, unless it's one of the 2-3 stats that we know works good (like Vampire), or it's really obvious, just stick with the basic stats.

Answer 3

Press START > HELP TOPICS > STATISTICS "..."

You'll find what you need.