Yes, I don't see anything wrong with this design choice -- actually I kind of like it. However if the damage ranges are too low, then these abilities will be unattractive regardless of their 'gambling' nature. Reg has a good sample size and the average values seem too low so far.*Kpb321 wrote:Having it be a normal distribution really wouldn't make it feel riskier for the chance at higher damage as you'd very rarely get several high hits in a row or several low hits in a row.....
Most hits seem to be either really big or really small not in the middle.
The distribution is complicated and we don't know the implementation behind it. So we don't know whether the low average damage is intended, or whether it's a bug in how they've coded the abilities. Also, because the variance is so high, it takes a very large sample size to draw any conclusions about the average value. It will be extremely hard to pinpoint the actual average damage with any confidence -- it would be a lot better if they'd tell us the intention for these abilities (avg dmg and distribution), and we could test whether the implementation matches.
* For Steam Vent we expect an average dmg of 22 (assuming that it's determined by a symmetric distribution), but Reg gets 20.63 +/- 0.727, ie there's only a ~5% chance that the actual average damage is 22. For Shadow Slash we expect an average of 21, but Reg gets 20.66 +/- 0.24. Again it's possible but not likely that the average is actually 21.