I noticed that the weapons in Dead Island have prefixes on their names. The ones I've seen so far are:
- Damaging
- Feeble
- Tiring
- Weak
- Flimsy
- Spiteful
- Disabling
In examining the items, it seems that the names are related to the most extreme stats, such as:
Flimsyweapons have very low DurabilityTiringweapons have very high Handling
However, I'm not sure of the pattern for other attributes like Feeble and Spiteful. For example, in the store I see two items, a Spiteful Baseball Bat and a Spiteful Mace. Here is a stat comparison:
Spiteful Baseball Bat Spiteful Mace
Damage 71 64
Force 95 123
Durability 32 33
Handling 70 24
The highest stat for both of them is Force, so why aren't they Disabling? There's a vast difference between their Handling scores and Durability is roughly the same. I don't get it.
What are all the weapon prefixes, and how do they relate to the weapon's attributes?
Best Answer
There are a lot of prefixes and even more questions about them and their meaning. Some have only been seen in pre-release info or screeshots and some effects have not been well documented. There's a fairly good list on the Dead Island wiki and while it's a bit unreadable, the weapon mod FAQ lists the prefixes under the associated mods. Neither of these consider mods unique to one weapon as adding a prefix for the most part. If you can follow the association of the prefixes to the mods, the Dead Island wikia has some more detailed effect information. The accuracy of any of these sources is somewhat dubious for the effects so it may take some digging into the games' files for something more conclusive.
As you know, the game takes a base items and then adds prefixes after to modify characteristics. The game uses a weighted random algorithm with the item level as the base value to generate items and it is possible for items to have multiple prefixes. There are also prefixes from weapon mods that can be added and others of unknown origin.
I'll transcribe the known prefixes (107 at present) and their believed effects, ordering the generated prefixes according to the game's data file and I'll add whether I believe the descriptor is positive or negative:
There are still a lot of unknowns pertaining to the prefixes. I've seen the burning prefix shown in screenshots, but I'm not sure if they've actually been found and exist within the game or if they were part of the pre-release screens. It is listed on the wiki so I added it, but information on these is scarce. There's also the question of effects on handling as few of these seem to provide their clear effects on it as the critical mods seem to reduce handling and the tiring prefix has been described as doing this as well, but the effect is hard to corroborate.