Alright, now I’m home
Why does a boost in accuracy doesn’t seem to affect all weapons equally ?
Let me just start by saying that I have absolutely no numbers for what I’m about to say: a lot of people have tried to dissect the maths behind accuracy, recoil etc… but it’s much harder to do than with damage, which gives you a number with every shot you take. Accuracy just gives you a bigger or smaller reticle and a number between 1 and 100. So this will be REALLY broad.
1: The difference between accuracy and spread
Specifically when discussing multi-pellet weapons like shotguns (but also the Maggie and Skullmasher) the 2 have a very different effect, and it’s clearer which is which when you have a gun that has a very good value for one and very poor value for the other.
Accuracy is the odds that your shot will go in a particular spot within the reticle. If your gun has low accuracy, the reticle will be big and your shot could go anywhere within it. There are actually 2 accuracy values: Min and Max accuracy. Min accuracy is how accurate your gun can be: if you have taken no shots yet, this is the base value. Max accuracy is just how wide can that reticle go. Guns with good max accuracy are great for prolonged shooting as they will not get too inaccurate overall. Jakobs guns in general tend to have GREAT min accurace, but very poor MAX accuracy (as well as high recoil)
Weapons get less accurate when you shoot, that’s the effect of recoil when shooting from the hip: the reticle gets bigger and the shots have a wider range of possible place they could go to. Guns with a lot of recoil will very quickly go from accurate to very inacurate within just a few shots. Unless something affects this, no shots will go out of the reticle. Of course, since the reticle is fixed, the width of the “possibility cone” will widen with distance, but no shot should exit it, unless the gun has SPREAD.
Spread is the tendency of shots to get away from ONE ANOTHER within the confines of the limits imposed by accuracy. Shoot from the hip with a Skullmasher and you will understand what this means:
The Skullmasher has poor accuracy after a couple of shots (because it has a lot of recoil), but the spread isn’t affected by this, so your 6 pellets will stay just as tightly grouped … but that group could be centered anywhere within the reticle. Inversely, the Triquetra has reasonable accuracy, but a very wide (and fixed) spread. Shots WILL go out of the reticle when you shoot the Triquetra, but the epicenter of that pattern will always be within the limits imposed by accuracy. If you could somehow give the triquetra 100% accuracy, it would still spread out, but it would always spread out by the same amount in all directions from one shot to the other. Again, I have no clue how that works mathematically, but most accuracy boosts (but not all) will ALSO tighten the spread on guns. Note that spread is a function of time, not distance, so anything that improves bullet speed will make the spread tighter too.
Now, I have no idea how the maths are made, but there are diminishing returns to accuracy boosts as well as an asymptotic ceiling at 100
(Warning, contains numbers I pulled out of my butt)
Let’s say we get a 30% accuracy bonus:
A weapon with horrible accuracy will always have horrible accuracy, no matter how you cut it (if it had 15, it might go to 19 because the bonus has very little to multiply to begin with)
A weapon with great accuracy will gain very little from an accuracy boost (as the formula seems to taper off as we approach 100) (if it had 92, it might go to 95 because you’re working with diminishing returns near 100)
And weapons that benefit the most seems to be those who’s accuracy hover around 40-60 (at 40, the same accuracy boost would make it go to about 65 since the value is both big enough to be decently multiplied, and small enough that it’s not approaching the ceiling)
So you will not really see a lot of improvement by increasing the accuracy of the maggie (which starts at 86 or something like that) … but you will see an impact on the Triquetra… Still, the spread of the Triquetra is bad, and the one on the Maggie is good, so even with a BIG boost to accuracy, the Maggie will still probably shoot straighter.
This is a really poor explanation, I know but without any numbers I can only try to convey the “feel” of what tinkering with accuracy has taught me.
So, Should I use a jakobs relic that improves accuracy or that reduces recoil ?
If you intend to shoot once or to wait between shots: Accuracy
If you intend to shoot more than once in a row: recoil (because after the first shot, the one with lower recoil will probably already be more accurate than the other one for the second shot)
