Is aim really always the best stat?

[Aritok]

The knight/warrior bonus is actually a 5% bonus to bonus damage and healing. The counsilor/inquisitor bonus is 5% to aim. However, the bonus damage from +5% aim also benefits from the +5% bonus damage, so aim benefits twice from these buffs while power only benefits once. These bonuses then indirectly affect crit as well since it now applies to a larger number.

 

Knight, consular. Both carry some lightsaber. So hard to see the difference .

 

Yes, i didnt name the 5% bonus to power, because both get it, so it equals out.

 

 

Are you saying that a critical only affects the bonus damage of an ability and not the total damage done by an ability? So if I had 0 bonus damage, then crits and non-crits would deal the same amount of damage? The in-game tooltip says "Critical hits increase the damage dealt by this percentage", which to me reads as saying that critical hits apply their bonus to all the damage of the ability, not just the bonus. Are you sure it's only the bonus damage that gets critted? If not, that increases the usefulness of crit above what you calculated. It also makes the bonus damage different for every ability, so it becomes more complicated.

 

No, you missunderstood what i wrote. Crit is the chance to do a critical hit. A critical hit is doing the normal damage plus the critical damage as bonus. With a critical damage value of 70% it means your critical hit will be 1.7x your normal hit.

 

But to callculate and to compare power bonus with crit you have to get these on an equal level. Else you cant compare these. So i just reflect the critical chance togetther with the critical damage to the bonus power. Because this add always the same to the damage and the skills.

 

The true damage bonus from crit (the number you see on the screen) would be even higher. Because there are more factors that result in the damage than only the bonus damage (- healing). But these are bound to the ability you are doing and are not fixed. So its hard to calculate with these.

Else you have to take every ability with every skill combination and compare these with the changed stats. Honestly, i dont have this much time .

 

But on the other hand, you can never say: 1% more bonus damage = 1% more damage. The formual for this is a bit more complicated. Same with Critical chance. 1% more critical chance is not equal to 1% more damage. You have to take the critical damage as well into this. With 50% critical damage the 1% more critical chance will be reduced to 0.5% more true damage.

 

There are also 2 talents from the Gunnery tree that increase the value of crit and surge above your calculation:

 

- Cell Charger: crits add 1 ammo (at most once per 3s)

- Deadly Cannon: critical bonus damage from Full Auto and Demolition Round increased by 30%

 

With crit being worth more like this, the question becomes if crit might be better than aim for reasonable values of crit and aim. I don't know!

Of course, first of all you need to check if you need crits at all. But Aim just add so many that is usefull, that its in most cases better than a straight power or crit value.

Aim (and as well power) dont have a diminishing returns (DR). They always add the same, no matter how much you have. critical and surge (and the crit bonus from aim) have the diminishing returns. For surge you are really fast over the usefull value, for crit and aim you will not even reach the first τ. Means you will not even get 18% crit chance from aim and from critical.

 

We get back to the point that you can't ignore the exact rotation used when calculating the value of crit, because it for example depends on how much of the damage is coming from Full Auto. In gunnery, if you do less grav rounds, you also get fewer Full Auto's. The value of crit through triggering Cell Charger is also significantly different depending on whether you are using an ability that hits just once (high impact bolt) or something that hits many times (full auto). So it really just gets very complicated to figure out

 

If you really want to find out what is better (aim, power, crit) you have to get a set of each, go to the training dummy, and hit this one for 2 hours with your rotation with each set. And analyse this.

And even after this, it might be still your rotation that is not good enough and you could get total different values if you change this one.

 

I only see and would say, that aim give you the best bonus of the choices you have.

If you can get always aim as first stat. And only power (or critical) if it give you at least double the aim loss.

This is my rule for gear. It might be wrong. And others might have other priorities. But this is everyones personal choice. I am not saying that mine is the right one. I can be wrong as much as everyone else on this .

[Aritok]

That is disturbing me as well. I would have done this calculation:

0.46% crit chance, with 55% crit damage at 700 bonus damage will grant you:

((1+0.55)*0.46/100+1)*700 - 700 = 4.99

 

Yes, true. My bad. Messed up the formular.

 

So its even more than i thought.

[Boufsa]

What about your calculations on page one? Didn't you use the same formula?

[Aritok]

Now you confused me and i was not sure myself anymore, so back to square one .

 

Image you have 100% crit damage and 50% crit damage.

 

This means you will crit with every hit and do 50% more damage.

 

So with my formular: 1 + 0,5 * 1 = 1,5. Means a factor of 1,5 on the damage.

With yours: (1 + 1 ) * 0,5 + 1 = 2. Would mean you do twice the damage all the time (what cant be)

 

Extrem with 100% crit damage and chance.

1 + 1 * 1 = 2. Means you do twice the damage.

With the other: ( 1 + 1 ) * 1 + 1 = 3. Would mean you are doing 3 times as much damage as normal.

 

You were it seems adding the 1+ to the surge, and ending at a to high critical when adding again the basic to it.

 

So in the end, i was correct (on both, page 1 and page 2) how i calculated it, and lost track.

Edited May 11, 2012 by Aritok

[krahar]

I'm coming to realize that there is no best stat. The more power and aim you have, the better crit and surge become because they multiply on to a larger number. The more crit and surge you have, the better power becomes because it's multiplied by a larger factor. So if you have a lot of any one stat, then that makes the other stats better, so it's not a question of which stat is better, it's a question of how much of each stat you want. It would be that way even without diminishing returns on critical chance!

 

Calculations just on the stats won't give you very meaningful information as the situation is much more complicated than that and you get into things like procs from criticals and the exact rotation used. However, from what simple calculations I could do trying to take some of that into account, it did seem that for gunnery you want as much aim as you can get, some crit, a little bit of surge and a lot of power. There is a point at which you wouldn't want aim any more, but you can't put all your gear points into aim anyway, so it's not easy to reach that point. You can make any one stat (say crit) worth twice of any other stat (say power) just by increasing the one stat way more than the other one. So if you have 1000 power and no crit, you'll do a lot more damage by changing that to 900 power and 100 crit.

[ArchangelLBC]

My basic feeling is Aim is almost always better because it adds to both, crit should be stacked till you hit DR, then power should be stacked as much as possible. Accuracy and Surge usually come as the third stat on an enhancement that has either crit or power. I personally say get accuracy to around 100% then stack on the surge, but whichever.

[Boufsa]

With yours: (1 + 1 ) * 0,5 + 1 = 2. Would mean you do twice the damage all the time (what cant be)

 

I don't see any reason telling why it couldn't be? Anyway we can check just by testing. I believe one developer gave HERE the specifics about the armor of the ops trainin dummy. With those numbers and taking into account armor mitigation we should be able to figure it out, but I have the feeling you must be right although I don't like it because it makes crit&surge way less interesting than I thought.

 

I will do the calcul for my next dummy session.

[Aritok]

I don't see any reason telling why it couldn't be? Anyway we can check just by testing. I believe one developer gave HERE the specifics about the armor of the ops trainin dummy. With those numbers and taking into account armor mitigation we should be able to figure it out, but I have the feeling you must be right although I don't like it because it makes crit&surge way less interesting than I thought.

 

I will do the calcul for my next dummy session.

 

The reason why it could not be? If you crit every hit (100%), and if you have 50% surge, It means you only hit for 50%, but not for 100% more.

And 100% crit chance with 100% surge means you just crit every hit, and every hit is doing 2x the normal damage. But not 3x, as it would be with the formular.

If a non crit would do (for example) 1000, a crit with 100% surge would do 2000, but not 3000.

 

It has nothing to do with armor or something. It has something to do with basic math. 50% + 50% is not always 100%.

[Boufsa]

What I was saying is that you are saying that it's obvious that a critical hit at 100% surge is double damage compared to a normal hit, but is it really so obvious? Now that I think about it, it is very likely, but still an hypothesis so far.

 

Sorry for disturbing you.