Crit or Power for Vanguard

[FourPawnBenoni]

Trying to be more offensive minded, looking at Assault or Tactics tree and want to know if i should go for crit or power?

[Mozivicus]

Go for crit until it's at about 30%, then stack power

[Mordris]

Go for crit until it's at about 30%, then stack power

 

So how are you going about stacking your mods to get 30% crit and have room to stack power after that?

Edited April 24, 2012 by Mordris

[Hethroin]

Go for crit until it's at about 30%, then stack power

 

30% may be a little high, making you work hard against diminishing returns. I try to not push too far over 25%, with around 75% surge. A fact to keep in mind is that with the eliminator set your HIB has 40% crit rate, while all elemental tech gets a bonus crit rate from the spec.

[Fulleffectz]

at around 400, crit starts to have diminishing returns

at around 200, surge starts to have diminihing returns

stack power after that

[bglodt]

at around 400, crit starts to have diminishing returns

at around 200, surge starts to have diminihing returns

stack power after that

 

Actually both crit and surge have diminishing returns from the start. It just gets worse as you go higher, and surges curve is steeper (worse) than crit. People used to always say stack power after your primary stat reaches "x". However with the changes in 1.2 primary attributes scale linearly just like poet does for +dmg. That said your primary attribute also adds crit %, but this does have DR. The point to note is tgat the primary attribute crit DR is a rather gentle decline. FYI power gives 0.23 dmg per point vs primaries 0.2 dmg per point and it's +crit which is about +0.0067% per point at 1300 and 0.0077 at 300. So still primary is better than power if you also want crit even up to 1750.

[Mozivicus]

30% may be a little high, making you work hard against diminishing returns. I try to not push too far over 25%, with around 75% surge. A fact to keep in mind is that with the eliminator set your HIB has 40% crit rate, while all elemental tech gets a bonus crit rate from the spec.

 

Just use different mods and enhancements. You can also use a different crystal in your rifle. Also (obviously) using different gear (helmet,chest,etc), if you don't have orange gear will allow a wide variety of stat combination.

[ShiroRX]

We have a lot of passive crit increases available to us, it's use for us on gear is diminished greatly. So I prefer to stack power and surge. Edited April 25, 2012 by ShiroRX

[Mozivicus]

Meant to quote Mordris, sorry. Stoopid iPhone

[bglodt]

We have a lot of passive crit increases available to us, it's use for us on gear is diminished greatly. So I prefer to stack power and surge.

 

Just remember surge has very steep DR curve. At 51 each point provides 0.16 while at 225 each point is only worth 0.10.... A 37.5% drop in value over just 175 points. It has the steepest DR of any of the stats ( though admittedly I have not done the math on presence.... But who cares about that one!)

[ShiroRX]

Just remember surge has very steep DR curve. At 51 each point provides 0.16 while at 225 each point is only worth 0.10.... A 37.5% drop in value over just 175 points. It has the steepest DR of any of the stats ( though admittedly I have not done the math on presence.... But who cares about that one!)

 

80% is my cut off. unfortunately i dont see many power/crit enhancements.

[exphryl]

Good baseline to start off of:

 

Surge: 75%

Crit: 23-25% (Ranged)

Rest Power.

 

If you feel your crit is to low at 25%. To solve that, get more Power. How does that solve that? It doesn't. It makes your hits hit so much harder that you won't need the extra crit.

 

 

With Agent/Smuggle Crit Buff I haven't broken 30% Crit on Ranged for a good two months.

Edited April 25, 2012 by exphryl

[bglodt]

Ok I did a similar thing for another thread but i can do it again with crit and power. In order to make it even and look at total damage over time we will say you do 1000 attacks and each attack does 1000 damage. we will also say you have a 75% Surge rating. Now will all other things equal we will compare the addition of 50 points of both crit and power individually. Power scales linearly at 0.23 damage per point, so adding 50 pts of power has the following effect on dps (1000+(50x0.23)) x 1000 for a total of 1,011,500 damage over 1000 attacks. Crit suffers from DR but at 300 crit rating, each point is worth .036 crit and adding 50 pts gives you a crit rating increase of 1.8. Thus over 1000 attacks you will do an additional 18 crits. Each attack will do an additional 750 damage (1000 x 0.75) x 18 for a total of 13,500 additional damage over 1000 attacks. Obviously 13,500 > 11,500. Thus crit is better at 300 rating, but becomes less so as its value increases, though it will still hold its numerical damage superiority at over 400 crit.

 

Now... people are going to say... "no no no, crit is only good for burst." THat is not true. What we did is looked at damage over 1000 attacks. You may have spikes of increased damage but overall this effect is minimal as far as sustained vs burst goes.

 

AGain people will say it puts you at the mercy of RNG. That is why i chose to use 1000 attacks, to take away some of the RNG argument. Now poeple will also say "well that assumes that ll your crits on attacks that do 1k damage". To that i would argue, that most likely less than 25% of the damage you do comes from attacks that do less than 1k and the rest of your attacks do over 1k... thats why picked that value, because its conservative. In fact when i parse data, hammer shot is way down there on the list.

 

So to answer your question, until you hit a crit rating of over 400 pts... crit rating is better than power. At 300 crit rating... even if you have a surge rating of 65% you would still do 200 more damage with crit than with power over the same period of attacks.

 

The real question you should be asking yourself is when is surge better than crit?

Edited April 26, 2012 by bglodt
oops math!

[Hethroin]

...Some Math...

 

When doing napkin math please remember to consider that there is a base crit rate and that Vanguard can spec a +6% crit rate on his elemental, and an additional 6% on all tech attacks. Additional considerations need to be made for surge talents involving Plasma cell, HIB, Assault Plastique, Fire Pulse, SS, and others.

 

My feeling is that you want to balance Crit, Surge, and power in such a way that you're not sacrificing too much power to boost crit and surge. A good balance for me is somewhere in the 24-28% base crit and 73-79% base surge.

 

Many will advise that you drop as much accuracy from your gear as you can, I tend to agree if you are NOT assault spec accuracy means very little. However if you are assault spec you will want to maintain a 95-98% accuracy on your base attacks. Deflected HIBs mean 4k swings in damage.

[bglodt]

When doing napkin math please remember to consider that there is a base crit rate and that Vanguard can spec a +6% crit rate on his elemental, and an additional 6% on all tech attacks. Additional considerations need to be made for surge talents involving Plasma cell, HIB, Assault Plastique, Fire Pulse, SS, and others.

 

My feeling is that you want to balance Crit, Surge, and power in such a way that you're not sacrificing too much power to boost crit and surge. A good balance for me is somewhere in the 24-28% base crit and 73-79% base surge.

 

Many will advise that you drop as much accuracy from your gear as you can, I tend to agree if you are NOT assault spec accuracy means very little. However if you are assault spec you will want to maintain a 95-98% accuracy on your base attacks. Deflected HIBs mean 4k swings in damage.

 

Just so you know, all those bonuses to crit in the talent trees, DO NOT effect DR on crit at all, and while i understand what you are saying, it doesnt change the facts that i presented earlier, because it does not change the math at all. Your point about when balancing surge is important, but more important is the number at which the return on surge makes it less valuable than actual crit. Im not saying you shouldnt have power or surge. Infact in the math i used a surge that gives you a 75% multiplier. The question was crit or power, and from the math, crit wins out, regardless of your passive crit skills, which again DO NOT affect DR on crit. And as far as napkin math goes, i actually used a spread sheets, graphs, and yes math, to look at the curves and calculate values.

 

Power, crit, and surge are all useful and good stats. The question comes when you are going to mod swap or augment and whether you want power or crit. Since power scales linearly and Crit logarithmically the lower your crit the better it is over power, which you probably knew. All I was saying is that if you look at total damage done, over a period of time, EVEN with a crit rating of 300 from your gear, it still performs better than power. Am I saying dont have any power at all, and just stack crit? No, because at some point power becomes better than crit, 400 iirc. Should you have some of all three? Of course. BUT at a crit rating of 300, if you have to choose between crit and power, and you want to maximize your DPS, over a period of time, crit is better.

[Hethroin]

Power scales linearly at 0.23 damage per point, so adding 50 pts of power has the following effect on dps (1000+(50x0.23)) x 1000 for a total of 1,011,500 damage over 1000 attacks. Crit suffers from DR but at 300 crit rating, each point is worth .036 crit and adding 50 pts gives you a crit rating increase of 1.8. Thus over 1000 attacks you will do an additional 18 crits. Each attack will do an additional 750 damage (1000 x 0.75) x 18 for a total of 13,500 additional damage over 1000 attacks. Obviously 13,500 > 11,500. Thus crit is better at 300 rating, but becomes less so as its value increases, though it will still hold its numerical damage superiority at over 400 crit.

 

I re-did your math from two posts above. I think you forgot to consider the fact that the power gear can still have cause crit hits and that those will hit for higher numbers. I'm sorry if I sounded condescending.

 

Spreadsheet.

 

As you can see the higher the cirt rate goes the greater the benefit of power becomes. Not due to the internal diminishing returns on the crit calculation, but due to the nature of crit having a finite maximum. This is why I brought up the points of having additional crit % on spec and gear set bonuses.

[bglodt]

I re-did your math from two posts above. I think you forgot to consider the fact that the power gear can still have cause crit hits and that those will hit for higher numbers. I'm sorry if I sounded condescending.

 

Spreadsheet.

 

As you can see the higher the cirt rate goes the greater the benefit of power becomes. Not due to the internal diminishing returns on the crit calculation, but due to the nature of crit having a finite maximum. This is why I brought up the points of having additional crit % on spec and gear set bonuses.

 

Soooo Hethroin I checked YOUR math....

 

and you are right.... at a base 25% crit rate adding 50 power gives you 156 more damage over 1000 attacks. I stand corrected. Interestingly of note from your data is that as the average damage of your attacks goes down below 1k, power becomes even better, but as the average power of your attacks goes up from 1k crit becomes increasingly better. So for tanks power is definately the better stat... but for dps builds crit may still have an edge.

 

I say to you sir, mia culpe. touche mon adversair... touche and good catch btw. thanks for that.

[Mozivicus]

Great info for specification on the differences between preferential stats stacking for a DPS and tank!

[TirjacShiki]

Alright, I can't sit here and let this go on.

 

If you are playing PVP, you should be stacking as much power as possible, not crit. Now let me explain.

 

All this math is flying around that include fights that last minutes, that is complete garbage, you cannot do the math that way. In PVP, fights last < 10 seconds for the most part so you need to calculate that. And these calculations also don't include the crit cd's, not sure what it's called for vanguards but the one that adds 25%!!!! crit, probably the best offensive cd in the game. Then there's relics. These cooldowns easily make up for you having low crit, im talking about ~200 crit.

 

Not saying you should avoid crit completely, but if you had to choose power or crit, you would be a fool not to take power.

 

A player stacking power would utterly destroy a player stacking crit (counting all the cd's we have, because you need to count these). All the math in the world will not change that.

[olemanbourbon]

What attacks exactly will Power buff? Not all of them, correct?

[Hethroin]

Alright, I can't sit here and let this go on.

 

If you are playing PVP, you should be stacking as much power as possible, not crit. Now let me explain.

 

All this math is flying around that include fights that last minutes, that is complete garbage, you cannot do the math that way. In PVP, fights last < 10 seconds for the most part so you need to calculate that. And these calculations also don't include the crit cd's, not sure what it's called for vanguards but the one that adds 25%!!!! crit, probably the best offensive cd in the game. Then there's relics. These cooldowns easily make up for you having low crit, im talking about ~200 crit.

 

Not saying you should avoid crit completely, but if you had to choose power or crit, you would be a fool not to take power.

 

A player stacking power would utterly destroy a player stacking crit (counting all the cd's we have, because you need to count these). All the math in the world will not change that.

 

While no one is going to argue that power is important, I think there is something to the balanced approach to building your stats. You certainly would not want to try going over 30% base crit, as the sacrifices in other areas cause it to be less than optimal. Likewise you don't really want to strive for much more than 80% surge, same issue: the diminishing returns from the % calculation from rating.

 

What you want to remember, however, is that we have surge talents in every tree, which every spec should pick up. While some have it for AP/HIB/DoTs, others have it for SS or IP/SS/FP. Crit chance is key to maximizing the effectiveness of these talents. I would rather have 20% more of my HIBs crit for 5k than have them crit for 6k but at a 20% lower rate, because it's not the single large hits that kill people it's the back to back crits.

 

What attacks exactly will Power buff? Not all of them, correct?

All of them.

Edited May 4, 2012 by Hethroin