An idea on how to fix player damage in sailing combat.

[candid coral]

Sailing combat is in a place where many players do not enjoy having their damage nerfed heavily.
As it stands, you are averaging 23.75% and rarely ever seeing your actual max hit. (https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Ship_combat#Regular_weapons)

My solution to this is to have cannons give advantage on the roll as well as increasing the damage modifier. This would mean that in order to have your damage matter, you need to engage with the cannon system in ship combat. With the ava's cannon being polled and succeeded, we can start to rely on actually using cannonballs.
What would this look like?

2) Roll 1d100 and multiply the player damage```
This alone fulfills the need for cannons to be more impactful since they are going to be slamming the enemy for potential 90's at the highest level.  It also increases the player's base damage against the enemy, making them hit for an average of 50% instead of 23.75%. Yes, they enemies also have doubled hp, but this also acts as a 5.26% increase in damage (half of 50% is 25%).  This should help mitigate the feeling of hitting low.
```3) Firing a cannon at an enemy will give players advantage on the roll table```  
Just by firing any cannonball, you are jumping from dealing 50% to 66% as well as seeing your max hit twice as often.
```4) The tier of cannonball will increase player damage done```
This means that something like a bronze cannonball might only increase your damage by say 10%, while a rune cannonball will potentially increase your damage by 100%. At this rate, firing a rune cannonball will mean you are dealing your average damage and might mean that under incredibly rare circumstances, you can hit double your maximum hit.  This could be rationalized as the cannons opening up weak spots and softening up the enemies.

The goal here is to show levers we can pull and make it feel better while still incentivizing actually using the cannon and high tier cannonballs.

Extra thoughts:
Jagex want the cannon to be used as part of the power fantasy of sailing. This means it should hit hard, just as hard as the player. Any kind of update that is going to increase player damage is going to necessarily increase mob HP in order to account for this.

There's no way players are going to be incentivized to fire their cannon without it in some way modifying player damage or being a significant part of it.
Just being "more damage" is kind of boring.

An alternative to the suggestion above would be to have player damage roll normally without any brackets, and cannons could also increase player damage or giving them advantage on their damage rolls. This could end up being a stacking debuff against the enemy, for each cannonball, up to a maximum. This way players would be hitting thier max hit more often. Just like mining for skilling tools, the number of advantage rolls could be based off the tier of the cannonball.

[sturdy current]

Based on your suggestions here, you seem like you’re not aware that Jagex has already polled major changes to sailing combat which were announced at the winter summit.