I happened to notice during logon my Ice character is listed as having a CR of 204, while on his status bar it says 200. I looked in the stats and saw Combat Rating is 204 and Equipped CR is 200. So I asked some questions in chat and did some searches and it says your CR is based on what gear you've had, even if you deleted / salvaged it, while Equipped CR is what you are currently wearing. My question is, why have the two different values? It seems to me the only one that should matter is the CR based on your equipped gear. If I have a bunch of higher-level gear in inventory / bank for some reason, why should that matter? It's not doing me any good if I'm not actually wearing it. And why should it affect CR once I've deleted it? Again, a higher level chest piece I salvaged isn't going to help me because its gone. I put the CR of all 14 pieces of gear into Excel, and per an on-line article about CR calculation, multiplied each value by 1.15 (115%) and then averaged them all out. It comes to 201 vice the 200 displayed in-game. I used an on-line calculator and the result was 200.8 Not a big deal but just curious. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I appreciate it.
The combat rating is pretty much only used to see if you are allowed into higher level areas/DLCs of the game. Otherwise if it only went by what your equipped level is then say my Healer side would be able to get into content but my DPS would not because they were wearing lower level equipment. Also say you just put on a piece of gear that got you to into the next DLC up but accidents happen and you deleted it. If it didn't go by combat rating you would now be barred from that content until your next piece of gear leveled you up again.
The Equipped Combat Rating is a measure of the gear you are presently wearing. Your Overall Combat Rating is a measure of all the gear that has been/is currently in your inventory/bank. The overall CR affects your CR relevance for On Duty and open world content.
Thank you both for the information. I understand the purpose of the CR vice Equipped CR now. All going into my notes on DCUO.
The ECR is a relatively new things in comparison to the age of the game. CR was the original but was a more broad calculation of where a character was at, so eventually the Devs made a more refined system. The differences are strictly in how the calculations are done. CR is a set number that can only be raised not lost and is based on the total average of the current gear you have on and in your inventory. Once you acquire an item it's CR is added to your average calculation whether you put it on or not. As Kestral said the CR is mostly a base point for access to content now a days. The ECR is not a set number and can be raised or lowered just by changing gear. It is completely based on the gear a character has on at the moment, which is meant to give a more accurate measure of a character's rating. The ECR will mostly be lower than the CR but usually only by a few points.
