Sometimes rather than hacking an opponent to death, an adventurer with a
edged weapon and the beheading skill has a chance to cleanly separate their
opponent's head from the body--quickly deciding the outcome of the battle.
The factors for success are nebulous, but wielding a vorpal weapon greatly
increases the chances of beheading. Of course, the biggest factor in
beheadings is luck. Heads will roll!
Beheading with regular weapon attacks can only occur with certain weapons,
and this is only checked for once every 1024 hits for one-handed weapons
and every 512 hits for two-handed weapons (beheading mastery can up to
double these frequencies). These weapons and their behead chances are:
Exotic: 0%
Dagger/polearm: 1%
Sword: 5%
Axe: 25%
These base chances can be increased as follows:
Sharp/vorpal flags: +1%/+5%
Beheading skill: +50%
The shadowclaw stance sets the behead chance to 100%, both with or without
weapons (but will not make a non-beheading weapon such as a flail, capable
of beheading), while the razor claws skill grants a 50% chance while unarmed
and fighting in the default stance.
In addition to beheadings with regular attacks, certain attacks can cause
beheadings as well, typically with much higher chance of success.
The razor claws skill beheads once with every 256 successful rake attacks.
Beheading through assassination is typically done with daggers and ranged
weapons, or unarmed with help of the lethal hands skill (which also
substitutes for the assassination skill in that case). While other weapons
can be used for assassination as well, chances of success are halved.
The chance for assassination to be checked varies from skill to skill, but
in each case the ambush stance doubles it, and assassination mastery can up
to double it again.
When assassination is checked, the chance to assassinate is calculated as:
base_chance = ranged ? (100 + assassination) / 2 : assassination
extra_chance = 50 + anatomy / 4 (+2 if sharp, +10 if vorpal)
chance = (base_chance * extra_chance / 100)%
The frequencies of assassination checks for special attack is given below:
Backstab: 1 in 32
Back Leap: 1 in 32
Aim Head: 1 in 64
Snipe: 1 in 64
Circle: 1 in 128
Paroxysm: 1 in 128
Rupture: 1 in 128
Slash Throat: 1 in 128
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