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damage calculation question....

westmetalswestmetals Member Posts: 8,479 Arc User
edited August 2021 in The Shipyard
Just a small question, doing some fine-tuning on builds and I don't have (nor do I want) a parser set up.

How exactly would one calculate the average damage done by a weapon/ability, using the following stats:
- tooltip displayed damage
- crit chance
- crit severity

I'm particularly interested in figuring this out because I'm trying to figure out a possible swap of deflector on my super-Gravity Well build, which would result in lowering the tooltip damage but increasing the crit chance and crit severity.

(Assume I know enough about the nuts and bolts to know why I'm getting the numbers I'm using. Am just not that great at developing a formula to deal with multiple variables.)

Comments

  • foxrockssocksfoxrockssocks Member Posts: 2,482 Arc User
    Okay, so take D, your tooltip damage per second. We can call crit chance C where its in decimal form and crit severity E, again in decimal form, not percentage. Don't forget E should be greater than 1, so if you only have base crit severity at 50% (or whatever it is,) then E would equal 1.5. C is going to be less than 1, a 30% crit rate would mean C is .3.

    So D*C*E is your total crit damage per second. Then D*(1-C) is your normal damage per second. Add them together and you should get total average damage per second.

    To use my example numbers, your crit damage happens 30% of the time with a 50% damage bonus from severity, so you'd have D*.3*1.5 or .45D, then your normal damage is the remaining 70% of your hits with 1-.3, or .7D. Thus total is .7+.45 or 1.15*D, which means 115% of the tooltip value is your actual average damage.
  • vetteguy904vetteguy904 Member Posts: 3,843 Arc User
    BUT, you have to take into account modifiers, and if they are cat 1 or cat 2
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  • foxrockssocksfoxrockssocks Member Posts: 2,482 Arc User
    BUT, you have to take into account modifiers, and if they are cat 1 or cat 2

    No, you don't, unless the equipment offers a cat 1 or cat 2 bonus that the other piece does not. Cat 1 is fairly easy if that's the case, it is already added into the tooltips. Cat 2 is more difficult to separate out but isn't actually an issue if the equipment your swapping does not have a cat 2 bonus on it.
  • foxrockssocksfoxrockssocks Member Posts: 2,482 Arc User
    westmetals wrote: »
    BUT, you have to take into account modifiers, and if they are cat 1 or cat 2

    No, you don't, unless the equipment offers a cat 1 or cat 2 bonus that the other piece does not. Cat 1 is fairly easy if that's the case, it is already added into the tooltips. Cat 2 is more difficult to separate out but isn't actually an issue if the equipment your swapping does not have a cat 2 bonus on it.

    Which in this case, neither piece of equipment has a cat2 damage bonus.

    And even if it did, wouldn't that be factored into the tooltips also?

    In the case given... I was looking at swapping out the build's existing deflector for a Colony one, which results in an observed decrease in the tooltip damage (because of other stats) but increases the crit hit and crit severity. I am trying to determine if the resulting increase in criticals outweighs the decrease in non-criticals.

    I don't know off hand if it would be factored in, but it is the issue that cat 2 probably also multiply crit damage, if all cat 2 bonuses are applied together. So it would be base damage*cat 1 factored in, which gets multiplied by all cat 2 bonuses. On the tooltip you'd see a premature bonus from cat 2 because if you crit the game wants to calculate it a little differently and the tooltip base you're calculating is less accurate. We can ignore that when the equipment doesn't have a cat 2 bonus because the tooltip number is off by the same magnitude in any other case, so when you're strictly looking for which is greater, not exact numbers, you're still going to get that. I'm not going to make sense of that because its a what if and isn't important.


    As for the numbers, yes they look right. With the high crit chance, it becomes far more important to push critD than regular damage. You're getting ~12% more damage 73% of the time on your crits where the base damage difference is definitely not close to that 12%.

    For fun, run the numbers again and invert your crit chances pretending the 26% and 30% non-crit chance is your crit chance.
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