While trying to nail down a bug, I found something interesting regarding Weapon Mastery, and Critical Attack Damage. I noticed this when trying to figure out why some Weapon Mastery combos were doing up to double the damage on some criticals and not others. Fully buffed out you'd see a 4-5k finisher on a sparring dummy on a critical, and then once in a while you'd see a crit for over 11k. That kind of thing. So I wanted to find out what the base critical magnitude was on a few of the combos were. I logged onto a toon I use for precision testing that has exactly 100 DPS (77.9 weapon, 221 precision) and specced into exactly +100% critical attack damage. The results were wildly inconsistent. I first noticed that the damage I was doing just on normal right-click attacks was higher than 100% on the criticals (even when adjusting for the +15% for melee weapons), so I thought that something had changed with the base Critical Attack Damage (which should be 25% base.) But switching weapons resulted in different numbers, so that didn't explain it either. Weapon Mastery states that when you master a weapon, you get an increase to your critical Attack Damage but this is inconsistent as well. I decided to test each weapon out with these same statistics (except hand blaster) by using the standard ranged attacks against a sparring dummy 1000 times, resulting in about 200-300 criticals to draw a data pool from. The results are below. Keep in mind I'm specced for exactly +100% critical attack damage, so the percentages given are above this amount. Bow Normal Hit Range: 20 - 44 Critical Hit Range: 43 - 94 Critical Magnitude Range: +13.65 to +15 Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 48 - 101 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +29.55 to +40 Dual Pistol Normal Hit Range: 18 - 27 Critical Hit Range: 38 - 57 Critical Magnitude Range: +11.11 exactly Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 38 - 57 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +11.11 exactly Brawling Normal Hit Range: 36 - 54 Critical Hit Range: 85 - 128 Critical Magnitude Range: +36.11 to +37.04 Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 87 - 128 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +37.04 to +41.67 Dual Wield Normal Hit Range: 36 - 54 Critical Hit Range: 84 - 125 Critical Magnitude Range: +31.48 to +33.33 Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 84 - 125 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +31.48 to +33.33 Martial Arts Normal Hit Range: 18 - 26 Critical Hit Range: 41 - 61 Critical Magnitude Range: +27.78 to +34.62 Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 43 - 63 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +38.89 to +42.31 One Handed Normal Hit Range: 35 - 53 Critical Hit Range: 82 - 123 Critical Magnitude Range: +32.08 to +34.29 Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 82 - 123 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +32.08 to +34.29 Two Handed Normal Hit Range: 32 to 48 Critical Hit Range: 74 to 112 Critical Magnitude Range: +31.25 to +33.33 Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 76 to 114 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +37.5 exactly Shield Normal Hit Range: 28 - 43 Critical Hit Range: 67 - 99 Critical Magnitude Range: +30.23 to +39.29 Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 67 - 99 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +30.23 to +39.29 Staff Normal Hit Range: 24 - 39 Critical Hit Range: 56 - 92 Critical Magnitude Range: +33.33 to +35.9 Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 56 - 92 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +33.33 to +35.9 Rifle Normal Hit Range: 40 - 60 Critical Hit Range: 86 - 129 Critical Magnitude Range: +15 exactly Critical Hit Range (Mastered): 97 - 144 Critical Magnitude Range (Mastered): +40 to +42.5 As stated, I didn't test hand blasters. As you can see from these results, the critical magnitudes across the board for weapons have absolutely no consistency whatsoever. A few conclusions and questions from this: While melee weapons get an additional +15% to their critical attack damage (and the melee weapons do have on average about 15% additional damage) this still doesn't account for the inconsistencies in certain weapons like Shield and Martial Arts The critical attack magnitude should be consistent and static - there's no reason for it to change especially when using the same attack. Certain weapons like unmastered Rifle, mastered Two Handed, and both versions of Dual Pistol reflect this Rifle and Dual Pistol do not have the +15% melee buff, but the numbers do not seem to show this. DP has a +11ish buff and Rifle is +15 exactly. I thought this meant that the critical magnitude buff had been raised to 35% instead of 25% but that doesn't explain the issue either Many weapons do not have their critical attack damages increased (Staff, Shield, One Handed, Dual Wield, Dual Pistol) when mastered while others do (Rifle, 2H, MA, Brawling, Bow) Can Tunso or Spord pop in here and explain exactly how the new criticals are supposed to work? Because I can't wrap my head around anything in testing.
Thanks for taking the time to specifically test it out. It's always bothered me how wildly the criticals seemed to vary at times, and I couldn't really put my finger on why. Like you, I'd routinely get crits of 3-4k, but then get one for over 13k. Made no sense. Why in the world would the crit mag jump that much. Seems like something's wonky in the calculations. I hope the Devs look at this thread, because it shouldn't go live like this.
Regarding the odd WM crit for 13k, it would appear that the magnitude from WM and the added magnitude that's supposed to work for a power get stacked when both criticals get triggered at once. That's what I was trying to test, and that's when I ran into all these issues.
Oh, snap. That would totally explain it. Brilliant deduction! Never thought about the natural crit stacking with the WM crit. Now, that can't be intended, can it?
Just wanted to point out some potential confusion. Each weapon attack has a specific DPS multiplier that multiplies your precision to get the base damage for the attack. There's also a built in variance. For Celestial combos it's .9 to 1.1, giving you a 10% variance above and below the base damage. For weapons, the variances are much higher. I feel confident that something is off with the way criticals are behaving not only because of the sample size (~around 300 criticals) but also the low amount of possible numbers from using a toon with only 100 DPS. This variance and multiplier is the same regardless of weapon DPS or precision, so the lower the number you use to test, the better. Using Dual Pistol as an example the base multiplier is .23 for a single attack (it's actually higher to account for a sparring dummy's defense but this should show the point) with a variance of +/- 20%. With only a range of 9 possible numbers at the lower DPS, it makes the range of the criticals much easier to deal with as there should only be 19 possible values with a critical magnitude of 100%. However, they were higher than expected by 11%. Regardless of how high someones precision or DPS is, the point is that when you average out the numbers, the critical magnitude chance should be roughly the same across the board. The sample size might not be large enough for some of the weapons that only show a 2% or 3% variance, but that doesn't explain the nearly 10% variance in certain weapons like Shield or Bow. And even in weapons where there aren't variances, there's a critical buff coming from somewhere undocumented, as you can see with Dual Pistols and every other weapon. I'm not sure where this is coming from, and it's not a bad thing, however it makes tracking down bugs very difficult.
Since making this thread, I learned a few new things through testing and discussion, and this is why my numbers were thrown off. Mastering a melee weapon gives you an additional +5% critical weapon magnitude bringing the total up to 20. Mastering a ranged weapon gives you +20 critical weapon magnitude bringing the ranged weapons in line with the melee weapons. I'll do some retesting, but it appears there's an additional 10% somewhere that isn't being accounted for.
