Thread:Great Mara/@comment-30904509-20180908003712/@comment-30904509-20180908023924

Oh yeah, and penguin_knight also proves that all of his power values and formulas check out with in-game testing. Theoretically the only way to "objectively verify" this would be to perform the same test without any errors and video yourself doing so, but as someone with over 60 hours in SMTIV I can confirm at the very least that the damage outputs I have seen line up with the formulas and damage values penguin_knight lists.

For example: the Wiki list page describes Stun Needle and Myriad Arrows as "weak," but describes Tathlum Shot as "medium" damage. This may match up with the ingame blurbs, but it is a misleading description. Tathlum Shot will deal only slightly more damage than the single guaranteed hit of Stun Needles. If the 'base power' stats were displayed, it might be more easy for readers to realize that fact, because Tathlum Shot has a base power of 135 versus Stun Needles with 235; for multi-hit moves the base power describes average hits, which for Stun Needles is (1+3)/2 or 2. So to find the power "per shot," we divide 235 by 2 and we can see that it is 117.5, which is very close to Tathlum Shot.

Considering that Stun Needles is actually available significantly (~10 levels) earlier in the game and has a very high chance to apply a useful status effect (bind), I would personally consider this contrast to be very useful information when deciding what demons to fuse and what skills to learn via whisper events.