The great Debate.

[Sylanaris]

As a CM, I avoid Alacrity as much as possible.

 

Since this is all theorycraft, I dare to say Crit/Surge will be more PvP oriented and Power goes to PvE...

 

Mostly because PvE is about efficiency.. you don't want to over-heal, and in PvP you are crossing your fingers to get some Crit to save your buddy

 

But to be honest either Power or Crit/Surge will work in the long run

 

P.S.: Mark my words ladies and gentlemen. "Absorption" will dissapear and be replaced by Surge. It's one less stat and allows fewer "wasted" gear =)

Edited January 4, 2012 by Sylanaris

[bigcfromrbc]

I just hit 40, and what flashpoints I've done there's not been an issue. Though I mostly pvp aside from questing as I level.

[Chaos_FTW]

So from what I've read on this thread (and in other threads):

 

AIM(to 100% hit)>CRIT>SURGE>POWER>ALACRITY

 

I just wish there was a way to test these...

[Wheelieguy]

So from what I've read on this thread (and in other threads):

 

AIM(to 100% hit)>CRIT>SURGE>POWER>ALACRITY

 

I just wish there was a way to test these...

 

 

Not exactly Aim has no cap what you are thinking about is accuracy and nobody has the confired cap as of yet, the 100% does not factor in any boss defense. While there are debates on power over crit I am currently looking at it like this. Power has a better scaling per point than crit at about 4.3 rating per 1 damage. Crit has a 28 rating per 1%. Now 6.5 damage is way less usefull to gunnery compared to 1% crit when, then you can factor in Surges amazing scaling and crit looks even better.

 

However power coefficients are the unknown factor in its worth and until we have them we cant say for certain whether or not it is worse than crit. All we do know is that crit is a the main factor in the gunnery dps system. Until we find them I personaly will be running crit and surge above power if only for the procs and ammo regen.

[JLapp]

I played around with some numbers I pulled from the mouse over on the character screen and I got:

 

(Combat medic values...I don't have anything for your DPS people).

 

1 point of power = 0.17 increase in healing bonus.

1 point of crit = 0.04265% increase in crit chance.

1 point of surge = 0.14864% increase in crit multiplier.

 

 

My take-away on long term sustained healing (i.e. at such a point that the variance from crit chances doesn't matter):

-Crits are maximized when surge is about 3.5 times your crit chance (Don't forget to adjust for 15% healing crit bonus through skill points).

-I believe that Power's value quickly diminishes*

 

 

*I don't really know the exact impact that power has on heals (whether it is just added to all heals, or has some cast time adjustment) but using the percent increase in healing bonus as a proxy, if you have 100% surge, you only need about 400 healing bonus to get to the point where power and crit provide an equal overall healing increase. As aim improves healing, power becomes less and less valuable.

 

 

That is just my interpretation of things. There is certainly a lot I don't know about this and just trying to add something to the discussion.

Edited January 5, 2012 by JLapp

[Daeson]

Thanks for working out the numbers. Currently one of my officers is working out a basic sim to try and start getting an idea of what input gives what throughput for stats and gains. I'll update the thread when he gets the sims working.

[JLapp]

1 point of power = 0.17 increase in healing bonus.

1 point of crit = 0.04265% increase in crit chance.

1 point of surge = 0.14864% increase in crit multiplier.

 

So crit chance is far from linear. I upgraded a couple pieces with a little more crit (not a lot) and overall impact of each crit point was 0.034%. So as you stack a lot of crit you do see diminishing returns.

[vayman]

It's an interesting thread, even if it's hypothetical.

 

Personally, I went with Power first. I prefer a steady stream of bonus damage, and fill the role of emergency healer in my squad.

 

I do not often pull aggro away from my tank and seem to do good damage at my current level (35).

 

That said, wouldn't it make more sense for me to stack up the critical when I'm solo? I neither am healing nor trying to help my tank. (My companion is not a tank).

 

My plan is to stay with power until 50, then build a second suit for critical and see how they compare.

 

On the topic of alacrity, this thread has convinced me to stay away from it, even with my emergency healing.

[yinten]

I am going full assault with some fall off in to gunnery mainly to grab the -1 ammo to charged bolts. At first i was stacking POWER cause of the DOT like nature of the tree and coming from WoW DOTs dont crit... Well in this game they do so around level 30 or so i started stacking accuracy and crit and have noticed a pretty great gain in damage.

 

Cant wait for combat logs, I would love to see if my rotation is worth a damn. Looking at the way the trees are built some rotation are almost a no brainer.

[Scotfo]

Just wanted to express my thanks to Daeson for starting one of the most rational and constructive Theorycrafting-ish threads I've seen so far. People seem to be approaching the subject in a much more intelligent way then compared to most similar threads I've seen. Nobody seems to going off the handle trying to pass off their theory's as fact and the majority of items discussed here can be backed up with sources (Primarily ToRHead). Can't wait to see what this thread produces when we get access to more information!

[MadMalag]

While playing last night one of my loading screen reminders showed that at 101+% to hit you begin subtracting from you're target's defense chance.

 

I'm not sure the average character's (npc and pc) but that means to hit my toon a to hit of 105% is needed.

[Daeson]

Hit chance is the one stat that most pisses me off currently, running a bunch of false emps and HM's last night, I had in the coarse of two hours around 10 misses per zone, or about 40 misses for the whole night. That's not a alot when you count trash.

 

So far,I've herd.

105

110

115

 

As for the hate that will come, as much as bioware runs around about their amazing tool tips, would it really be a pain to do what blizzard did and give us that tab that said, ok, against a raid mob you'll still miss x% of the time, that window was a god send for changing gear out and reforging.

 

Bioware UI, why you no gusta?

[MadMalag]

As for the hate that will come, as much as bioware runs around about their amazing tool tips, would it really be a pain to do what blizzard did and give us that tab that said, ok, against a raid mob you'll still miss x% of the time, that window was a god send for changing gear out and reforging.

 

Bioware UI, why you no gusta?

 

I know what you mean. At the end of my tenure as a (eternally) MM hunter I got heavy into the formulas for accuracy and damage and was very glad to know what my bench mark was.

 

It really depends on how the defense percentage of the mobs are. To be safe I'll be aiming for at least 110% as I hit 50.

[Daeson]

So as the raid went tonight, I well, I misses,parred/dflected on 4/5 bosses, about once each. With out a log to back it up, what I saw watching the pretty crits, is that, at my 95% chance, **** don't miss. I've got to belive the only reason we could stack acc, is for the -% to deff, so now we need to determine...whats that do.

[LordKivlov]

Every stat has diminishing returns as you've discovered. Ideally you want to balance all of them to get the most benefit (probably intentional since all the gear is pretty spread out for what it gives).

[RevenantZeroTwo]

I noticed somebody earlier in the thread mentioned 1.5 sec as the GCD? s this accurate? It seemed more like 1 sec to me but with the occasional server lag it was hard to tell. With that being said, as a medic, I'm going to try and get Advanced Medical Probe, with First Responder up, down to the GCD. I noticed the devs seemed to put a lot of Alacrity on healer gear so I'm hoping that they're not tricking us with a worthies stat. After that I imagine enough crit to keep First Responder up and then whatever combination of Surge and Power is most effective at that level of crit.

 

Unfortunately these are just preliminary thoughts, hopefully I'll be able to run some numbers this weekend and post the results.

[LordKivlov]

The reason it's a healer stat and not a dps stat is because DPS need slow abilities to maintain 4th tier of ammo regen. Casting faster won't do a whole lot other than run you into the 3rd tier much quicker. Healers need it because there can be the 'oh ****' moments when you need your heal to drop just that .2 seconds faster to keep your target alive.

 

Either 1.5 is the GCD and Alacrity lowers it (Since every ability is 1.5 at the lowest) or it's 1 second and you won't ever reach 33% activation speed from your gear because of diminishing returns. So either way you look at it, it's still the same.

Edited January 7, 2012 by LordKivlov

[Suspirium]

The reason it's a healer stat and not a dps stat is because DPS need slow abilities to maintain 4th tier of ammo regen. Casting faster won't do a whole lot other than run you into the 3rd tier much quicker. Healers need it because there can be the 'oh ****' moments when you need your heal to drop just that .2 seconds faster to keep your target alive.

 

Either 1.5 is the GCD and Alacrity lowers it (Since every ability is 1.5 at the lowest) or it's 1 second and you won't ever reach 33% activation speed from your gear because of diminishing returns. So either way you look at it, it's still the same.

 

the reason your theory fails badly is because you assume every single one of us will do only pve.

[LordKivlov]

the reason your theory fails badly is because you assume every single one of us will do only pve.

 

I only heal in PvP so I don't know where this is coming from?

[EthicsGradient]

Basically alacrity is nice for pvp, ok for pve healing and avoid like the plague for gunnery pve

[Daeson]

Update in the next few days as it gets compiled. But looking at a vacuum of 100 base damage over 100 hits.

 

It may appear that our stat priority will be Aim>Crit>power>surge.

[ArchangelLBC]

Given surge's natural synergy with crit, I would wonder at that but then I've noticed with mods at least that the choice is very rarely the choice between power and surge but rather power and crit hit and accuracy rating as almost all the mods I've seen offer the same amount of either power or crit with accompanying surge rating (with some offering more surge than power/crit i.e. 14 crit 23 surge and some doing the opposite with 21 crit and 10 surge).

 

 

I've been trying to theory craft this in my head the past few days and the problem I keep coming up against is exactly what power is doing vis a vis bonus dmg. What I mean is the game says that more powerful attacks (like, I dunno, grav round and demo round) get a larger multiplier of the bonus damage, and for that matter I'm not sure if the bonus dmg just works as a flat (bonus damage)*(attack modifier) added directly onto the attack after all other things are taken into consideration (e.g. damage reduction from the mobs armor and crit multiplier if you crit) or if the bonus damage is added first and then those other multipliers are put into place. It makes a difference.

 

For example, at first I thought along the lines of

 

"Well if two commandos are doing a base damage of 1000 with a 100% crit multiplier, and commando 1 has enough power to do 50 extra damage per hit, then commando 2 who has stacked crit only has to crit 1 extra time out of 20, that is have 5% more crit rate, to equal that damage"

 

 

With the numbers obviously chosen for the ease of calculation, but then I quickly hit upon the snag of not knowing exactly what the game is doing with power. Yes I know that bonus damage is added directly to weapon damage but is that all that's happening? The game is kinda fuzzy (again with the whole more powerful attacks have a larger modifier).

 

As a mathematician I'm way too lazy to go out and start shooting various mobs naked and writing down results by hand to get actual data to come to a better understanding but if someone can do that or point me in the direction then it actually shouldn't be too hard to a priori crunch out some hard numbers.

 

Regardless, in the course of all this thinking, it occurred to me that of course the higher base damage you do, and the higher your surge rating, the less that bonus damage seemed to matter(in terms of damage added to what you'd already do). What I mean is that with a 50% Crit multiplier and 1000 base damage, each crit adds "only" 500 damage. With a 70% Crit multiplier (which minus a few decimal places is my current amount) and 1200 base damage each crit adds 840 damage, and in the case of Demo Round and Full Auto its an extra 1200 damage since both of those abilities get 30% added to their crit multipliers(or is it 30% more damage on top of the crit? Either way you get 2400 demo rounds). This would seem to imply Surge > Power until you do the thing I normally do and realize that you're being stupid because of course power is exactly what drives up base damage, no matter what else it may or may not do. But again power vs surge seems almost moot to me at the moment since most things I look at in terms of gear are about crit vs power.

 

 

Anyway, if I can get a straight answer on how much damage x amount power would actually add (its already been stated in this thread how much power it takes to get 1 bonus damage), it wouldn't be hard at all to come up with an equation which would state how much higher your crit rate would need to be before the extra crits did more damage than the extra power and vice versa all other things being equal, because once crit is giving more damage than power all on its own, the considerations about ammo regen and even deadly cannon become kinda moot. Until they do though its still an open question (i.e. power doesn't necessarily win if you have strictly less crit) since deadly cannon and ammo regen still play a hefty part in your thinking at that point.

 

 

TL;DR: Been kicking this around in my head for a few days and had to spew forth my 2 cents of theory crafting, I wouldn't blame you for smiling, nodding, telling me I'm a good boy and completely ignoring me.

Edited January 8, 2012 by ArchangelLBC

[Natuli]

<snip>

Anyway, if I can get a straight answer on how much damage x amount power would actually add (its already been stated in this thread how much power it takes to get 1 bonus damage), it wouldn't be hard at all to come up with an equation which would state how much higher your crit rate would need to be before the extra crits did more damage than the extra power and vice versa all other things being equal, because once crit is giving more damage than power all on its own, the considerations about ammo regen and even deadly cannon become kinda moot. Until they do though its still an open question (i.e. power doesn't necessarily win if you have strictly less crit) since deadly cannon and ammo regen still play a hefty part in your thinking at that point.

 

 

TL;DR: Been kicking this around in my head for a few days and had to spew forth my 2 cents of theory crafting, I wouldn't blame you for smiling, nodding, telling me I'm a good boy and completely ignoring me.

 

So basically what we would need is a level 50 commando. To strip naked write down all the tooltips on his abilities and do the same when fully geared. As then you would have the damage range without power and the damage range with x amount of power. Or am i mistaken somewhere? Unfortunately i am not level 50 so can't provide then numbers yet.

 

Also as a medic crit vs. power should be even more fuzzy in my opinion due to the ammo components coming in without crit. If it takes me 2 medical probes to heal somebody for 2000 health or i got a 50% chance that only takes me 1. That is a big game changer as it reserves ammo for when the going gets though, but i digress.

[Vaspyre]

As a merc, given that we are identical I personally go for aim crit and surge. alacrity is a bad idea for us unless were heal spec. Aim is a no brainer, most of our skills work off crit and surge gives us those big numbers. Iv crit heatseekers in pvp at 40 for over 3500. Accuracy is another good stat but imo is bottom of the other 3.

 

I like not having combat logs, the whole min maxing causes more problems imo.

 

thats my 2 credits.

[ArchangelLBC]

So basically what we would need is a level 50 commando. To strip naked write down all the tooltips on his abilities and do the same when fully geared. As then you would have the damage range without power and the damage range with x amount of power. Or am i mistaken somewhere? Unfortunately i am not level 50 so can't provide then numbers yet.

 

Also as a medic crit vs. power should be even more fuzzy in my opinion due to the ammo components coming in without crit. If it takes me 2 medical probes to heal somebody for 2000 health or i got a 50% chance that only takes me 1. That is a big game changer as it reserves ammo for when the going gets though, but i digress.

 

 

 

Well no what we would need is a level 50 commando to strip naked and engage mobs and record their damage, then deck out in power and do it again and then compare, just so we can get an idea of how much power is actually adding. Your idea isn't a bad one actually though as an interim measure and wouldn't be too hard to do as long as you have power mods and credits to burn to switch them out so there's a consideration. Would at least put us in the ball park