Ham Bat is really really bad, it's way worse than Fetid and is even worse than Frostbrand, the range is lackluster and the damage is bad
- Ham Bat is a lot worse than Fetid and Frostbrand(which I consider pretty "meh" in the first place), feels more novelty than anything, the droprate isn't too bad at 4%, but is also more rare than Fetid or Frostbrand, or even Beam Sword
Ham Bat with tier 3 food and 3 sanguine minions kill master destroyer in 35 seconds, while Fetid Baghnakhs only in 19, same loadout based on melee Titanium armor
Fetid Baghnakhs is, almost without a doubt, the worst possible basis for comparison for any where any item should fall in balance.
Baghnakhs are brokenly powerful. Even after I heavily nerfed it's potential upscaling, it's RAW DPS far outstrips any other pre-Mech melee weapon. The weapon honestly should have been nerfed far more than it was, and though it sets an ostensible "ceiling" on melee damage, it should never be treated as the standard.
This is not to say that Ham Bat may not need buffs. But it needs to be compared against other weapons akin to it. I see Frostbrand being thrown around a lot; this is a good choice. I specifically used Beam Sword as part of my consideration. I had the intent that Ham Bat should be doing more "contact DPS" under optimal conditions than Beam Sword, but less DPS when taking perfect-beam use into account. I believe that metric is still accurate, though it may simply be that it should be doing more damage entirely, even taking the projectiles into account. I'll be running some numbers around this.
Believe it or not, at one point in development, I was under the misunderstanding that a Life Drain effect was INTENDED for Ham Bat, and I began re-evaluating it for such. It was only later I found out that the healing effect was meant for Bat Bat (which . . . I'll get back to that), and so there was no such effect added. Have any of you guys looked into Ham Bat's Well Fed systems at all? Some of it's balancing was based on players optimizing around it and using it at it's best tier, where it gains a fairly decent amount of DPS.
However, I'm not opposed to investigating having it grant Life Drain buff on use, nor am I against a damage/use time buff, but the question is how much. I'll also need to clear a Life Drain buff for approval (a simple stat buff requires less authorization, I can just make the change).
I'll also say this: ideally, Ham Bat should not be putting Excalibur to shame. I know that that may be a low bar (and other weapons may have done so already), but part of my trying to remedy the issues of old is trying to at least begin respecting the issue of tier discrepancies that have been here for many years, and not continuing to make the same mistakes. And if I HAVE to make a mistake, I would rather have another pre-HM sword that is not meta, than add another weapon to the pile of weapons that make the post-mech tier non-viable.
So in closing on that subject: If we implement a Life Drain effect, it'll come at the cost of less stat buffs for Ham Bat. If we don't, I'll probably be able to leverage more stat buffs overall.
Am interested to hear ballpark DPS estimates, in addition to the ones already provided, which I've taken notes on.