Which stat should I prioritize? Crit vs power vs Surge vs expertise

[Highsis]

Could anyone give me a good notion of priority and their proportion? Do I focus on one of them, or is it better to raise them equally? I swapped my power crystal with expertise crystal, and I regret doing so. My damage got so low that I can't even kill a healer on wz these days,

[aluisi]

Could anyone give me a good notion of priority and their proportion? Do I focus on one of them, or is it better to raise them equally? I swapped my power crystal with expertise crystal, and I regret doing so. My damage got so low that I can't even kill a healer on wz these days,

 

PvE

1. Strength is your main stat

2. Power

3. Crit

Surge ups the amount of damage a crit does so higher crit mean your critting more often. If you stack surge over crit then you are nerfing your self if your not critting surge wont do anything for you.

 

PvP

1. Strength

2. Expertise increases the amount of damage and healing you do as well as reduces the amount of damage you take in PvP combat. The higher the Expertise the more damage you will dish out but you don't want to sacrifice your other stats for this. Gear itemization is self explanatory if you look at the PvP gear . If your gearing out orange items Then put Ex in the same slots it was in PvP gear so crystal and so on. Then gear out your main stat and a mix of power and crit.

 

Depending on your spec you should stack heavy on one then the other. So for Annihilation spec since it deals with bleeds effects and long term DPS stack power over crit but dont ignore crit all together. For Carnage spec since it deals with burst dps stack more on the crit side then power. Power ups all your dmg abilities so dont ignore but stack more crit then power.

 

Since PvP fights are so quick staking surge in my opinion is pointless.

[Yescek]

PvE

1. Strength is your main stat

2. Power

3. Crit

Surge ups the amount of damage a crit does so higher crit mean your critting more often. If you stack surge over crit then you are nerfing your self if your not critting surge wont do anything for you.

 

PvP

1. Strength

2. Expertise increases the amount of damage and healing you do as well as reduces the amount of damage you take in PvP combat. The higher the Expertise the more damage you will dish out but you don't want to sacrifice your other stats for this. Gear itemization is self explanatory if you look at the PvP gear . If your gearing out orange items Then put Ex in the same slots it was in PvP gear so crystal and so on. Then gear out your main stat and a mix of power and crit.

 

Depending on your spec you should stack heavy on one then the other. So for Annihilation spec since it deals with bleeds effects and long term DPS stack power over crit but dont ignore crit all together. For Carnage spec since it deals with burst dps stack more on the crit side then power. Power ups all your dmg abilities so dont ignore but stack more crit then power.

 

Since PvP fights are so quick staking surge in my opinion is pointless.

 

I would 100% agree with your PvE list. However, your explanations of what to stack for each spec are backwards. For Carnage, our main DPS bursts are already auto-crits via talents so crit is nearly pointless. I know the DoTs will auto-crit in Berserk in Annihilation, but you won't have it up 100% of the time. (More like 75%-85%)

 

For those resons, i'd swap em. Crit for Annihilation, Power if not.

[Houdii]

PvP

 

2. Expertise increases the amount of damage and healing you do as well as reduces the amount of damage you take in PvP combat. The higher the Expertise the more damage you will dish out but you don't want to sacrifice your other stats for this. Gear itemization is self explanatory if you look at the PvP gear . If your gearing out orange items Then put Ex in the same slots it was in PvP gear so crystal and so on. Then gear out your main stat and a mix of power and crit.

 

Wrong, unless you have a full war hero set the stat itemization on BM gear is horrible and you can do more damage by dropping expertise for more useful enhancements/orange belt/wrists etc..

[Angelfeeties]

Wrong, unless you have a full war hero set the stat itemization on BM gear is horrible and you can do more damage by dropping expertise for more useful enhancements/orange belt/wrists etc..

 

 

Stat itemization on full BM really isn't too horrible. You can wear full BM and then swap out the boots and leg enhancements with the old power/surge enhancements that we used to use. At that point you're sitting at a comfortable accuracy amount (I personally hate dropping below 100% physical accuracy, even as Annihilation, wiffing Annihilates and Ruptures are devastating), surge capped at 73-74%, and have roughly 320ish power and crit rating. To be honest, you could have a lot worse. You're also maintaining max expertise, minus 50 (which is about .6% damage, .3% DR, etc. by that point. That exact gear set would work well with either Annihilation or Carnage, but it may be a tad accuracy heavy for Rage. Once you start ripping out any more mods or enhancements passed just 1 or 2, your really starting to lose that needed survivability and probably not gaining enough damage to outweigh the loss of expertise.

 

To be honest, once you're surge capped you really don't have many good choices for Enhancements. Crit/Surge is a waste of surge, Power/Surge the same, your only other choices are Accuracy/Crit and Accuracy/Power, which BM is loaded with. BM isn't as horrible as people make it out to be, provided you do only the above modifications to boots/legs and use the entire set.

 

Though, once you pick up your War Hero weapons, you can swap the old BM weapons enhancements over to your boots and legs to maintain max expertise and still be surge capped (WH weapons both have surge). That's the point i'm at now.

[nexium-]

Yeah. Edited August 10, 2012 by nexium-

[Houdii]

Wrong, you should never purely drop expertise like that, you can switch out a few enhancements or mods, but not using the BM bracers & armbands is a severe gimp if you bother doing the math.

 

Do maths all you like but you're wrong.

 

Everyone who tells me about how magical expertise is has never tested using less of it.

 

Stack whatever stats you like but I guarantee I hit harder than you.

[Zaboolina]

Could anyone give me a good notion of priority and their proportion? Do I focus on one of them, or is it better to raise them equally? I swapped my power crystal with expertise crystal, and I regret doing so. My damage got so low that I can't even kill a healer on wz these days,

 

LOL every1 here seems to know whats good for u, but no1 can agree

[Houdii]

Well he can either listen to people with some amazing "maths" which we have yet to see or a person who sunk millions of credits into switching in and out mods/enhs with/without expertise to test which was stronger.

 

Test it yourself by all means but when I switched out expertise my bonus damage got higher by over 100 and surge increased almost 15% which is quite amazing for a class built on critting a lot.

 

Still yet to see other maras/sents post hits as big as mine with expertise in stock BM gear.

 

Remember expertise increases the damage you do, so if you're stacking accuracy which does nothing for your actual damage but take place of stats that do, the expertise isn't going to have anything spectacular to increase no matter hoe much you have.

[PenoNation]

Where are you "posting hits" that are supposed to impress us? Pre-1.2, it was a good idea to wear a mix of Rakata and BM gear, but post-1.2, that strategy has pretty much gone by the wayside, thanks to upping the Expertise 'soft cap'.

[Houdii]

Where are you "posting hits" that are supposed to impress us? Pre-1.2, it was a good idea to wear a mix of Rakata and BM gear, but post-1.2, that strategy has pretty much gone by the wayside, thanks to upping the Expertise 'soft cap'.

 

Because from a pure damage point of view there are huge amounts of wasted stats on the BM gear and by replacing the mods/enhs that contain accuracy with power/surge etc you can boost your damage by more than the measly 2-3% worth of expertise you're losing.

 

Until WH gear where you can have amazing stats with expertise, you will do more damage in BM gear by dropping expertise for secondary stats.

 

If you haven't tested it which you obviously haven't then what are you basing your opinion on? Really I'd like to know..

[PenoNation]

Because from a pure damage point of view there are huge amounts of wasted stats on the BM gear and by replacing the mods/enhs that contain accuracy with power/surge etc you can boost your damage by more than the measly 2-3% worth of expertise you're losing.

 

Until WH gear where you can have amazing stats with expertise, you will do more damage in BM gear by dropping expertise for secondary stats.

 

If you haven't tested it which you obviously haven't then what are you basing your opinion on? Really I'd like to know..

I am basing my opinion on my experiences as a Valor rank 83 Marauder. If you have some raw data that supports your theory, I'd be interested to see it. As it is now, it seems all talk. Pre-1.2, I replaced several of my BM mods with Champion mods due to the poor itemization. I'd wear my Rakata bracer/belt/boots along with my BM gear. However, as I said, with the change to the Expertise soft cap, I feel it is better to stack Expertise now. Perhaps I am wrong, but until I see the hard data to support one over the other, I'll stick with full BM & War Hero gear.

[Angelfeeties]

Because from a pure damage point of view there are huge amounts of wasted stats on the BM gear and by replacing the mods/enhs that contain accuracy with power/surge etc you can boost your damage by more than the measly 2-3% worth of expertise you're losing.

 

Until WH gear where you can have amazing stats with expertise, you will do more damage in BM gear by dropping expertise for secondary stats.

 

If you haven't tested it which you obviously haven't then what are you basing your opinion on? Really I'd like to know..

 

 

You're missing the point Houdii. If you're wearing full BM, than you're sitting at 65% surge. Replace the Boot and Leg enhancements with Power/Surge, and you're at 73% Surge. After that point, swapping out any other enhancements or mods is actually wasting stats, because you only have 2 Enhancements to chose from: either Crit/Surge or Power/Surge, and to gain the remaining 2% Surge would be an utter waste of 60-80 stat points. There is not a single Enhancement after this point that will yield a greater DMG return than Accuracy/Power. At this point, Accuracy/Power becomes the best Enhancement, which BM is loaded with, so swapping out anything else for non-expertise Mods/Enhancements will be a damage loss.

 

You also have to remember the damage reduction component to Expertise. 18% damage reduction with 1283 Expertise is nothing to shake a stick at. I'm afraid your system of using PVE mods and enhancements in all your gear isn't the best way anymore. Whats the point in doing 5% more damage if you're taking 10% more damage from everyone who's properly wearing full Expertise gear? You're just hurting yourself in the end.

 

Not to mention, Accuracy is also a DPS stat believe it or not. If you're getting Ravage hits or Annihilate or Massacre or Gore parried, guess what, all those nice pretty PVE mods/enhancements mean nothing. Accuracy at or even slightly above 100% is quite healthy, especially against Sorcs/Sages who carry 10% defense baseline.

[Houdii]

I am basing my opinion on my experiences as a Valor rank 83 Marauder. If you have some raw data that supports your theory, I'd be interested to see it. As it is now, it seems all talk. Pre-1.2, I replaced several of my BM mods with Champion mods due to the poor itemization. I'd wear my Rakata bracer/belt/boots along with my BM gear. However, as I said, with the change to the Expertise soft cap, I feel it is better to stack Expertise now. Perhaps I am wrong, but until I see the hard data to support one over the other, I'll stick with full BM & War Hero gear.

 

So you require me to have data yet you have none yourself to support otherwise? You don't think that's kinda dumb..?

 

You're missing the point Houdii

 

Wow an actual intelligent reply I'm not sure I'm ready for this lol.

 

The accuracy argument has been active for quite a while and the "agreed" upon number came to be 5% to cover the 5% base parry all classes share. Now I'm in no way saying this is correct or incorrect but with the WH power/acc implant + max affection of whatever companion you can hit this number quite easily. The next question is do you stack more to fight 2/8 classes or stack dps stats to be effective against the lot? Its more like 1/8 aswell because tank shadows have an abundance of defense so there's no point chasing their number. It's a choice all players must make and call me a numbers whore but I prefer to output as much high damage as possible. Also I'm not convinced of the parry chance, playing with 5% or less acc from stats I have to tell you the parry/miss rate is much much smaller than the numbers say, something I really plan on testing when I can convince someone to assist me.

 

The defense argument is fair but reduction scales at a different rate so while I might be dropping a few % of damage I'm still around 1% less damage reduction than you, plus with orange bracers/belt your hp rockets and your pool is bigger and thus self heals are bigger. Also you can stack mods with expertise on these pieces which only really halves the expertise loss for some big stat upgrades.

 

Surgewise I have a lot, but stacking the power surge mods I obviously will. A guildy of mine, stock BM gear and WH weaps vs me, switched gear both weaps(except mine have power crystals), my damage bonus is around 130higher than his, my top end weap damage is almost equal to a shadows who's base top end is 97 higher and I have 79.1% surge. Overkill maybe? But with dots being our main damage and having over a 50% crit rate on them + how often zen is up it still adds quite a chunk of dps to my meters.

 

I study incoming and outgoing damage a lot and tbh I'm hitting sents/maras I know are full BM for noticeably higher than they hit me for and while I rarely see them with crits over 5k I'm doing this consistently with ease. Atm my damage is far higher than it was pre 1.2

 

Probably the last time I'll explain myself here, each to their own so find what works for you but you need to test it and actually have something to base an argument off. I'm still yet to see another mara/sent crit a BM sorc for over 6k, food for thought ;-)

[Reinholt]

Houdi is right!

 

For any Mara/Sent if you are playing the Annihilation/Watchman spec you should be stacking Power/Surge as much as possible, hitting the 100% white accuracy taking 3% from Carnage/Combat to allow better Power/Surge stacking. If you do this in that spec you will hit harder given the inate crit from Berserking, always take into account Berserking because it is almost always up, and 100% crit chance on bleeds, which is 60% of our overall damage there is no need to focus on crit.

 

If you don't believe Houdi or myself I can prove it with Combat Logs or you can watch my live stream because I show live dps in Operations.. Rein the Revanite

[revcrisis]

79.1% surge? That is useless as the DR hits so hard. if you look at this graph, http://www.jedilace.com/2012/02/01/when-is-too-much-surge-bad-for-digestion/ the difference between 300 and 565 surge is less than 4%. The expertise stats that you've sacrificed to get to 79.1% surge will be much more effective than that 4%. Edited April 24, 2012 by revcrisis

[PenoNation]

So you require me to have data yet you have none yourself to support otherwise? You don't think that's kinda dumb..?

I never said you were wrong and I was right, I just said that in my experiences, the expertise as it is now seemed to be worth more than wearing Rakata, as we did pre-1.2. I wanted you to show me some numbers where you could say "you are wrong, take a look at these numbers with and without Rakata gear." You didn't say that, so it seems your findings are based on anecdotal evidence, similar to mine. In a perfect world, we'd all have access to unlimited supplies of power/surge mods. Since that isn't the case for everyone, if you just go with the base stats on the gear, I think you are better off wearing all BM gear vs. mixing a combination of Battlemaster and Rakata gear, thanks to the change in Expertise.

[Houdii]

I never said you were wrong and I was right, I just said that in my experiences, the expertise as it is now seemed to be worth more than wearing Rakata, as we did pre-1.2. I wanted you to show me some numbers where you could say "you are wrong, take a look at these numbers with and without Rakata gear." You didn't say that, so it seems your findings are based on anecdotal evidence, similar to mine. In a perfect world, we'd all have access to unlimited supplies of power/surge mods. Since that isn't the case for everyone, if you just go with the base stats on the gear, I think you are better off wearing all BM gear vs. mixing a combination of Battlemaster and Rakata gear, thanks to the change in Expertise.

 

Just FYI you're not wearing rakata gear like before, you're swapping out only enhancements which hold 25exp each, you actually drop less than 2% exp damage for 190power 240 surge.

[GhoXen]

For Annihilation Crit and Surge are more useful than Power. In fact Power is the least important of the useful secondary stats (excluding things like Alacrity) for an Annihilation Marauder. Power is much more useful for Carnage.

[Angelfeeties]

Just FYI you're not wearing rakata gear like before, you're swapping out only enhancements which hold 25exp each, you actually drop less than 2% exp damage for 190power 240 surge.

 

Careful Houdii. It's not just 2% expertise that you're giving up. To obtain 190 power and 240 surge, that's 5 enhancements you're swapping. I can guess the 5 you're swapping are all 5 of the tier piece enhancements, and if i'm right, you're not actually gaining 190 power. It's more like 100 power, as some of the original enhancements already contained 37 Power each (I think 2 of them). The others contain 37 Crit. I'm going to ignore Accuracy due to your stated argument of 'preference', i'll leave you to that. Instead of your stated trade, the actual trade is more like:

 

125 Expertise (i'll leave your 2% guesstimation)

74 Power

111 Crit

*** Accuracy

 

for

 

190 Power

240 Surge

 

So you're really only gaining 110~ Power and 240 Surge, and you're losing a considerable amount of Crit and bonus damage/innate survivability garnered from the Expertise.

 

(The above numbers are guesstimations of the original enhancements in current BM Marauder gear. I'm going from sketchy memory.)

 

Then there is the middle-ground. Believe it or not, if you left the original Accuracy/Power enhancements in your BM gear, and only substituted 2 of the Accuracy/Crit for Power/Surge, you would maintain your heavy Power base and only drop 5% surge (down to 73%). You would basically have the best of both worlds. You would be sitting at around 100% Accuracy (103% if you spec into the accuracy talents) to help counter some of the tanks, sorcs and assassins that you fight in warzones, as well as the Accuracy debuffing Powertechs (oil slick) and Snipers (some random shot). It would also reward you with 75 extra Expertise rating.

 

I'd do the very least and consider it the next time your Annihilate gets parried by a Sorc. I've personally tested running 95% Accuracy as Annihilation. With 95% Accuracy, Sorcs have an innate 15% chance to parry some of my strongest attacks, my charge root, and the required white attacks needed to apply Deadly Saber. It was far to devastating when you got an unlucky string of parries.

 

I'm at a comfortable 102% Accuracy and 74% Surge (I use 1 Surge Augment), and I can claim first hand that i've Annihilate and 3rd hit-Ravage crit BM Sorcs for over 5k each. That is very sufficient in my books.