wtorek, 15 kwietnia 2014

Crit Damage versus Crit Chance

Some people asked me, when does crit damage become more valuable than crit chance and vice versa. Well, both stats are affected by each other and their actual value might differ depending on your personal stats.

By default, every class has base critical hit chance of 5% and critical hit damage of 50%.

Now, assuming that you increase them both proportionally, their value will remain the same. So, to make them most effective, you stats should progress in the following way:

10% Chc and 100% Chd
20% Chc and 200% Chd
30% Chc and 300% Chd
40% Chc and 400% Chd
50% Chc and 500% Chd

and so on...

Now lets take a look at the following example:

Lets assume that your current crit chance is at 10% and Chd at 100%.

Increasing your Chd by 200% will give you the same net gain in DPS as increasing your Chc by 20%

On the other hand, if you will increase your Chd by 100% and your Chc by 10%, you DPS will increase by TWICE as much.

And thus we are arrive at a simple conclusion: By balancing your crit damage and crit chance, you will gain more DPS than by simply stacking one of the two stats.

The above conclusion might of course vary from class to class, depending on what buffs your class has. Remember to take them into account when deciding whether to go for Chd or Chc.

Also, when you are deciding whether to roll Chd or Chc on an item, be sure to know what max rolls you can get on the said item. For this purpose, I advise you to make yourself familiar with the following website: http://www.d3maxstats.com/ (it does the job quite nicely and is relatively easy to use, with clean and simple user interface).

For example, you might want to increase your EHP by getting more vitality. If you have 50% Chd or 6% Chc on your ring, you should probably not replace any of these stats with vitality. Instead, you're better of getting rid of your weapon with 30-35% Chd. If you are using a weapon with the following stats: a socket, 650-750 primary stat and 30-35% Chd, you probably have no vitality on it. If your other weapon with potential vitality has same weapon DMG, you will gain more DPS by equipping that weapon and replacing your 30-35% ChD with 650-750 vitality. This is just an example to show you how important it is to know highest possible rolls in Diablo on all types of items.


sobota, 12 kwietnia 2014

'+All Resistances' stat in Reaper of Souls

I would like to talk about All Resistances stat in Reaper of Souls.

1. 'All Resistance' stat as a random magic property on an item

Lets take a look at 2 separate sets of items:

(we will ignore all other stats and focus only on armor and all resistances)

Set A:

Head: +595 Armor AND +160 of One type of Resistance.
Chest: +595 Armor AND +160 of One type of Resistance.
Legs: +595 Armor AND +160 of One type of Resistance.


Set: B:

Head:  +100 All Resistances
Chest: +100 All Resistances
Legs: +100 All Resistances


What makes armor superior to all resistances is that you can have both armor and one type of resistance on an item at the same time. If you roll +All Res on an item though, you can't roll one type of res anymore - which makes sense but renders all resistances much less desirable. Why is that so? Because all the other secondary stats are rather useless (unless you play a certain build/have a certain item that might make use of stat such as healthglobe bonus, increased gold pickup and so on).

Anyway, lets proceed with the analysis of set A and B.

100 armor = 10 all res (this might not be entirely true, depending on your stat values but lets just make that assumption for now)

So from set A we get: 1785 armor (which equals to about of 180 All Resistances AND on top of that +160 of three types of resistances).

Obviously, on some items you can't have as much armor as on the others (max roll on armor on shoulders, belt and boots is 397) but even so, in my opinion, armor is still superior to all resistances.

Anyway, the point of this analysis was not to show you how good armor is because in reality, it is not that good at all. But if it is sill better than all resistances, what does it tell us about them?

In my opinion, one should avoid getting All Resistances on an item and instead focus on other stats like crit chance/crit damage or w/e (assuming you have resistances as a secondary stat on your items). If you are playing on Hardcore though, You NEED to have either +All res or  +One type of res on an item, latter being better assuming it is arcane/fire > poison/lightning (the first 2 being the most deadly types of elemental damage). Unless intellect is your primary stat. In that case, you should be getting more hp or even armor because of the Diminish Return values that render All Resistances really useless for you. Classes that use strength or armor need to reach certain soft caps but you will reach them just by having high enough value of your primary stat (which you really should have).



2. 'All Resistances' Gems

I see A LOT of people going for All Resistances gems which in my opinion is a great mistake.

First of all, think about flawless square gems (imperial-like gems from before the expansion). They granted 34 all res AND 34 of a primary stat. As of now, while primary gem values jump to insane amounts like 220+, +All Res gems do not scale that well (you get almost triple times more strength than you do of all resistances). Just think about it, 1 str = 1 armor, so 220 str = 220 armor which is equal to like 22 all res. So in reality all res gems give you even less in comparison to primary stats ones. In my opinion, you should avoid getting all res gems even if you are lacking toughness and try to get more vitality/resistances on your actual gear (that way, you will end up having better DPS/EHP values).

So to sum up (TL;DR version of the post):

If you play a barbarian, crusader or a demon hunter and have hard time getting a one type of res that you want as a secondary stat on your gear, you need to get some all resistances gear. But if you can choose between an item with +160 Arcane Resistance and +100 All Resistances, go for the one with arcane res.

If you play a monk , all resistances are shit for you and you should really avoid them.

If you play a wizard or a witch doctor, all resistances are of much less value to you then to other classes because in Reaper of Souls, you will get more stats on your gear and more stats means reaching DR rather quickly.