So with the downtime, I guess now is as good a time as any to try and clear up some SPA questions I have in light of the recent patch. First, SPA 330 and SPA 496. From what I gather, this is what they changed in the patch on April 19. I guess I'll explain how I think it works and people can tell me how wrong I am. To put it simply, they both do the same exact thing (Increase Critical Hit Damage by X% of Base Damage), but abilities that do it in the form of SPA 330 will stack together while the abilities that do it in the form of SPA 496 will not stack, correct? So to give a hypothetical, if I'm on my Berserker and I hit Savage Spirit, my Bard uses Fierce Eye, my Shaman uses her Epic 2.0, and the entire group (myself included) hits Glyph of the Cataclysm, my group is going to see 12% (FE, since it's still listed as SPA 330) + 110% (Ruchu) while the 60% mod on Glyph is wasted up until the point that Ruchu fades. I, on the other hand, will just see the 12% (FE, since it's still listed as SPA 330) + 275% (SS), while the 110% on Ruchu and 60% on Glyph are wasted, correct? Also, along the same line of thought, everything is just an all-skills modifier now, correct? For some reason I'm looking at the old Glyph of the Cataclysm and remembering the parts of it that used to be, for example, Increase Critical 1H Blunt Damage by 60% of Base Damage, and I thought there were other abilities that did it like that where it was broken down by skills, but apparently not. It looks like everything is just a one-size-fits-all, all-skills-mod now? The next one is SPA 169, such as the Auspice of Hunter's portion where it reads Increase Chance to Critical Hit by 225%. This might sound like a really stupid question, but how come this doesn't "scale" the same as the caster equivalent SPA 294, Increase Chance to Critical Nuke by X%? I relate it to the caster equivalent so much because I main a Magician, so in my head I'm thinking that each melee or hybrid class has a certain base chance to critical hit, and then their Cleave adds the worn effect with the Velazul's Arms giving a 360% chance to critical hit with each ability type. With the nuke equivalent, if you're at or over 100% critical nuke rate, you're landing a critical nuke every single time. Anything over that 100% mark is wasted. With the raid arms alone being 360%, wouldn't that mean a critical hit every time? And then you stack another 225% on top of it with Auspice, and you're way, way over the 100%-always-swinging-critically mark, no? This is something that is quite confusing to me. The last one is SPA 482, which I only just learned about with messing around on my Berserker alt when he uses Disconcerting Discipline. When it reads Increase Base Hit Damage by 53%, should I basically consider that to be a "scalar" for anything that increases my damage using the base damage as a reference point? I'm not sure I'm wording that in a way that makes sense, but basically if I used Disconcerting for the 53% boost to base damage and then my Shaman hits her epic for the Increase Critical Hit Damage by 110% of Base Damage, that means my base hit damage is first increased by 53% as a "scalar" and then the Shaman epic modifies that even further? Sorry if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it's difficult to try and phrase it correctly to ask the right questions when you don't entirely understand them in the first place! Thanks in advance!
Usually, you have to take into account the slot as well as the SPA value. So, different slots of the same SPA would stack but if two abilities used the same slot in the same SPA you'd only get the highest value. For Savage Spirit and Glyph it no longer matters what slot is being used for that melee ability. It'll only count the highest modifier that's active regardless of slot. If they didn't change any of the 330 abilities then I'd expect them to still stack as long as different slots are listed. The crit chance of melee abilities seems confusing to me too. Would be good to read an explanation of that one
That's one thing I was looking at, too, because I know previously (and currently) SPA 330 wouldn't stack if it appeared in the same exact spell slot. With the examples I gave, though, Glyph, Ruchu, Savage Spirit, and Fierce Eye all have their critical hit damage modifier appearing in different slots (slot 1, 10, 2, and 11 respectively).
SPA 196 affects your base melee crit rate. Like casters, this is different for every class. Not sure if dexterity factors in before or after the mod (I'm not a melee). Not sure how the mod is actually applied, but I would assume it would look like this for an SPA 169 ability where base1 = 100, with a 10% rate used as the class' base crit: 10 * 2.0 = 20% Again, not a melee, so take that assumption with a grain of salt. Not sure about your third question, you'd need one of the pro-tier melee folks to answer that one. I have no idea how the melee damage formula works.
No idea if this is useful but maybe it's a hint of what EQ really does? I was just looked at the EQEmu code for a few minutes after getting more curious about this.. Their version bases the chance to crit off dexterity and there's a different base chance for each skill type. So, if a war/zerker was doing a normal melee hit and had 255 dex they end up with a 300/8900 or 3.37% chance to crit. Then if you add an extra 400% crit chance from some SPA mod or AA it would get applied to the 300. So, it would come to 1200/8900 or 13.4%. They have the 8900 hard coded. They do a random 1 to 8900 and compare the value to the dex bonus/modifier. And yeah if dex is over 255 they scale it back. For example, a dex of 1000 would end up as 449 for their 'dex bonus'.
That would make sense. I figured there had to be some convoluted "EQ Math" applied to it somewhere, somehow, but I had no clue where it was coming from. Also, I see now that I wrote 169 instead of 196 in my original post. Oops.
