Crit VS Power - Rethink Your Position?

[idnewton]

Formerly I had been told that as of 2.0 it was BiS to stack all power instead of crit. My parses were decent enough, my ops dps consistent and high. All was well with my world, until I noticed the top Watchman (annihilation) parse of my server, The Harbinger, used a Crit adrenal. A CRIT adrenal. I was confused to say the least, but numbers don't lie - he was top for the spec. Tested it myself, and in one parse I beat my previous top by 50 dps, just by switching a Nano-Infused Power adrenal with a Nano-Infused Critical adrenal. That sparks the question, perhaps crit isn't so useless after all? For straight DPS specs like Marksmanship, you gain no benefits from critical hits besides the damage (at least, as far as I know). Some specs have increased critical damage for certain abilities, some have increased resource regeneration from critical hits. Annihilation Marauder.... has both. 30% increased Critical damage to bleed effects, as well as 1 rage returned for every melee critical hit on every bleeding target. Don't forget Marauders have an offhand, so you actually have a chance for it to refund 2 rage. That is significant, to say the least. I'll be running some tests tomorrow to better understand this new information I've acquired and attempt to locate the crit sweet spot for Annihilation. Stay tuned!

[vdbswong]

The Rage refund is... cool, but not amazingly necessary since your DoTs have a 30% chance to gen. 1 Rage every GCD anyways.

 

Also, the 30% Crit Damage to bleeds is amplified by your... Beserk(? - Zen on Pub side) which makes your next 6 bleeds automatically crit, so the need for Crit as a stat is less effective.

Edited June 4, 2013 by vdbswong

[idnewton]

The Rage refund is... cool, but not amazingly necessary since your DoTs have a 30% chance to gen. 1 Rage every GCD anyways.

True, but still having to use one less Assault makes a lot of difference I'd imagine

[oofalong]

No, do not rethink your position. Power is better than Crit on adrenals and on gear.

 

Will someone be able to cite one parse where the stars aligned and show good DPS with crit? Sure, but you should be targeting the builds/items that have the best chance of giving you the best consistent results.

 

Incidentally, if you expand your search to players not on your server, you will find many Annihilation Marauders and Watchman Sentinels who have far better DPS using Attack Adrenals or no Adrenals at all.

[XanderDet]

Generally agree/makes sense etc, obvious crit is RNG so sometimes it may be better etc. But if there is zero geared crit then the adrenal makes a significant boost to crit rate as it's not trying to add to a near maxed out stat, may be something in that.

[Thufir_Hawat]

Using a crit adrenal will eventually lead you to have a better parse compared to using a power, but on average you will be worse off.

So if your goal is to get the best dummy run ever for torparse then use a crit adrenal over and over and over again until the dice fall your way and you get the perfect parse.

If you want consistent performance that on average is better and helps your guild clear content go power or take a tiny bit of crit but not adrenals.

With the current gear, for watchman anyway, you take crit and you sacrifice average dps for a spiker DPS, imho it is not an optimal setup.

[idnewton]

Generally agree/makes sense etc, obvious crit is RNG so sometimes it may be better etc. But if there is zero geared crit then the adrenal makes a significant boost to crit rate as it's not trying to add to a near maxed out stat, may be something in that.

 

Seems like on a dummy parse you're going to want no crit at all. Even the adrenal is power, because you're looking for the perfect RNG. When you do get it, you want the power boost, not the adrenal. In a raid, I'd personally use 200 crit and a crit adrenal.

 

Just to throw out some numbers here... lets say you have no crit. It's a general estimation but lets jsut say one in every 100 parses is amazing. The rest aren't. With a decent amount of crit (200) you'll hvae, say, one in every 10 parses will be awesome, but it's awesomeness wont be on the same scale, a bit lower. in a raid setting you want the biggest amount of awesome parses without murdering your dps. 200 crit + crit adrenal seems to work.

[vdbswong]

Just to throw out some numbers here... lets say you have no crit. It's a general estimation but lets jsut say one in every 100 parses is amazing. The rest aren't. With a decent amount of crit (200) you'll hvae, say, one in every 10 parses will be awesome, but it's awesomeness wont be on the same scale, a bit lower. in a raid setting you want the biggest amount of awesome parses without murdering your dps. 200 crit + crit adrenal seems to work.

 

I would say in a raid setting, you're looking for consistency more often than not, as opposed to throwing the dice on being super awesome.

 

Maybe you use your "awesome" rolls on the run where your healer let the tank die, or your other DPS weren't on their game, so you hit enrage.

 

What you really want is to know exactly where you stand, so if anything does go wrong and you have to go again, you know you can repeat your performance, even if it's not quite as good it could be due to a string of crits.