Real Crit vs. Sheet Crit - a study.

chemboy613 · October 2014

As some of you may know, i recently did a study of HV v. SW on my MOF CW. That study and discussion can be found here:

http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?774701-Chem-s-HV-v-SW-comparison-(MOF-THAUM-MOD-4)

I have personally run many, many ACT logs of myself and many others in an effort to understand the game better. I don't theorycraft per se - because I know two things.

1) Tooltips often either lie or mislead you.

2) All the things going on in combat create a very different environment compared to what is happening in the tavern of blades, beating on a dummy.

This is why, while i think theorycrafting is useful and informative, it is not dispositive. When building my guides and figuring out my spec, i ran many ACTs in many different situations in many different dungeons. Obviously, not all groups or dungeons behave the same.

First of all the most obvious variable is the other players. Unless, for some reason, you can get a group of the exact same five people to run the exact same dungeon, the exact same way, there is a ton of variation in results. In addition, this would create a situation where your results might not map onto other dungeons or groups in a similar way. Hence i decided to solo to minimize error.

Now if I picked something too difficult, there are chances i could die or struggle, making more variation in trials. If I picked something too easy, the mobs would die too fast to get good data. Hence I chose Epic Pirate King - where the mobs don't die TOO fast, yet it's easy enough I can solo it reliably.

What i noticed from all my tests was that different spells crit at different rates. While the specific numbers are different, certain things were always near the top (smolder and steal time), while certain things were always near the bottom (icy terrain, creeping frost and warped magics). While i had noticed this pattern before, i never had such a good data set as I did now.

Hence I made a table of the data, pictured below:

This is interesting here. It seems some things are consistent

Smolder crits 30% MORE than sheet crit
Rimefire smolder crits 20% more
Ray of Frost crits 15% more
Steal time, around 10% more

and

Icy Terrain crits 10% Less.

Now the other spells are more variable, and while the order is not the same, you can see that certain things crit more or less based upon the spell.

Also interesting is that Shadow Weaver boosted my sheet crit by 5.6%, but boosted my real crit 11.8%.

Now, this is obviously very highly spec, gear and playstyle dependent. I don't think these results map onto much of anything else. For example, increasing your crit % by 5% won't necessarily increase real crit 10% - you would have to study yourself carefully. Another thing is in SW a lot of my swings are smolder swings, which have high crit percentages.

But what I can tell is that real crit is not sheet crit. Here is my theory.

The crit chance of a certain attack IS NOT the crit chance on your sheet. It is modified by some hidden factor(s). We have no idea what these factors are.

Secondly, the crit chance VARIES BY ACTION. Yes, this means some abilites will crit more often and some will crit less often. As to what those are, besides the ones i am using, I have no idea whatsoever.

Therefore, I strongly encourage people to interpret this data narrowly. However, what i would also encourage people to do is also test similar things out on themselves, in an controlled environment (solo dungeon), trying different gear and/or different specs and seeing how your crit changes.

Having an idea of what your real crit percentage is will help you make better decisions. Such as "what weapon enchant should i use?" (though in that case you must also consider the damage of each swing, it gets more complicated).

Another question is, "should i add points to crit or power?" Well, test each one out and see. Maybe 1% sheet crit is NOT 1% real crit. Maybe it's .5% or 3%. All we know for sure is that 1% more crit is more crit than 0.

Chem

chemboy613 · October 2014

*Should be deleted, possibly future comments*

nwnghost · October 2014

Have you accounted for most DoT powers always critting/never critting depending on the hit that first applied the DoT?
So for example if you have 20% crit chance and got lucky by applying a critical DoT that ticks 8x on the target, it would show in ACT as you having crit 8 times at 20% chance

chemboy613 · October 2014

nwnghost wrote: »

Have you accounted for most DoT powers always critting/never critting depending on the hit that first applied the DoT?
So for example if you have 20% crit chance and got lucky by applying a critical DoT that ticks 8x on the target, it would show in ACT as you having crit 8 times at 20% chance

I'm only running critical conflagration, so every hit that applies smolder should be a crit, yet smolder does not always crit. The few smolders applied from furious immolation do not account for the discrepency here, as there are too many ticks that are non crits, should your theory be true.

So whatever is happen it's not "DoTs proced from crits also crit" nor is it "smolder crits according to sheet crit." It must be something different to get these results.

Maybe the DoT crits but the refresh to rimfire gives it another roll to crit? However, then rimfire smolder would crit at the rate of my chill spills, not higher, yet somewhere as we transition from smolder to rimfire smolder, we lose some crit chance?

Now even if that were true, it would explain the discrepancy in the other crit rolls.

Good idea tho ghost, which is further complicated by the fast most of my swings are DoT - however I don't think that would give us this data set.

bvira · October 2014

Nice Analysis!

Not sure if it affects other classes too.

chemboy613 · October 2014

I don't know either. I suggest people do further testing and see.

Real Crit vs. Sheet Crit - a study.

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