Thread: Increase Tactical Mastery versus Increase Critical Chance - not so simple

I’ve heard people say that after a certain threshold of tactical mastery (offense), it is better to increase the chance for a critical than to increase tactical mastery. But it was rather mysterious what that threshold was. I decided to look at this.

There's a bunch of text and numbers here, so some of you might want to skip to the bottom line.


Everything I will talk about is based on Alad’s equation. Details are here: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...nuses-Reliably

Some quick definitions:

Tactical mastery (tactical offense): Bonus to your tactical damage. So, 100% tactical mastery means that a 100 damage burning embers does 200.

Critical chance: The probability of landing a critical hit. Most LM's have values ranging from 0%-15%.

Critical multiplier: The bonus to damage related to a critical. If your multiplier is 150%, that means that your 100 burning embers does 150 damage on a critical hit.


I calculated the expected damage for a given value of tactical offense, then the percent increase that would result from a 1% increase in tactical offense, holding constant the other values. For example, assume a base damage of 1000, a 6% critical chance, a critical multiplier of 1.5, a 3% devastate chance , and a devastate magnitude of 2.0.


For a tactical offense rating of 92%, my expected damage is 2016. Increasing my tactical offense to 93% yields an expected damage of 2026.5. Hence, a 1% increase in tactical offense produces a half percent more damage (2026.5/2016 – 1 = 0.52%).


Figure 1 plots these estimates. The green line is the curve for tactical damage bonus. Note that the curve goes from 0% to 140%. I capped the curve at 140% based on another thread where people were posting their stats. As a point of reference, 100% is roughly 23,000 tactical mastery. On the X-axis, I put a marker between 90% - 130% tactical mastery so that you can focus on the range where a typical L75 might be trying to make decisions between different builds.


Figure 1 also has a black line for critical chance. Note that the line is shorter. This is because critical chance is capped much more severely than for tactical offense. I added some reference lines to flag the interval between 0% to 15%, which is where I believe most LMs will be able to increase their critical chance. I suppose these values will be higher for champs and RK’s (importantly, most of the other threads do not use values that are realistic for LMs).


This graph shows several things. First, you’re better off increasing tactical offence than critical chance, until your tactical offence is about 107%. Second, at around 90% tactical or greater, there isn’t a major difference between tactical and critical. Third, tactical mastery matters a lot at low values. So, a level 10 LM with little tactical mastery would be way better off increasing tactical mastery than critical chance.


BUT … there is a major but. These recommendations hold for my reference values, but not necessarily for other values. Look at Figure 3 where I changed the critical multiplier from 150% to 200%. Most of what I wrote in the previous paragraph is no longer valid. In this graph, a L10 LM will be fine if she increased either the critical or tactical rating. Further, a L75 LM is way better off increasing their critical chance. Intuitively, this makes sense – you want to increase the chance for a critical when the critical actually does a lot more damage.


I am unsure whether increasing one’s critical multiplier to 200% is realistic for LMs. I can’t find the values for my own character; I assume that the base value is 150% based on what I read elsewhere. Figure 2 plots what happens if our critical multiplier is 160%. You can see that even increasing our multiplier by 10% dramatically increases the importance of critical chance.


Here’s the bottom line:

1. For a LM with no bonuses to their critical multiplier, increasing tactical mastery is generally better or equivalent to increasing critical chance (here, I assume that the critical multiplier for someone without any bonuses is 150% - please correct me if I’m wrong).

2. That said, if you can increase your critical multiplier, then #1 goes out the window. The higher your critical multiplier, the more benefit you’ll get out of increasing your critical chance.

3. Recommendations for which stat to increase all depend on what your other stats are. So, be wary of blanket statements.

I welcome any criticisms, alternative points of view, and data.

Attachment 1172

Generally for me:
1) If I have an asset which increases critical percentage (so Staff-sweep), increase tactical mastery
2) If I have an asset which increases critical multiplier (so Fire Critical Multiplier on staff), increase critical rating
Hence, since 2) takes root from 1), these are all dependant on playstyle and environment - habit and melee friendly to use Staff-sweep or not? It becomes even more significant on AoE environment.

The most compromising so far is to use critical rating equipment where it can reach the highest possible (either 656-672-704 at lv. 75), notably cloak, pocket and (very small choice of) wristlet instead of earring and relic. On the other hand, will are readily available.

No hard data, sorry :P

Thanks, Ahli.
This makes me wonder if there's a list that shows which items give critical multiplier.

As a tactical class, your critical multiplier will never be 1.5 because Fate increases it. A LM DPS build is more likely to have a multiplier around 2-2.5 (12% from rings, 25% from legacy, unknown amount from Fate).

Edit: And don't forget that a MoNF LM with the Tactical Skills Direct Damage legacy will start at +70% (85% for any skills you have individual legacies for, such as Burning Embers) before Tactical Mastery even comes into the equation.

Edit 2: Don't forget that Criitcal Rating incrases devastate chance, too. =)

Originally Posted by Gondolindhrim

As a tactical class, your critical multiplier will never be 1.5 because Fate increases it. A LM DPS build is more likely to have a multiplier around 2-2.5 (12% from rings, 25% from legacy, unknown amount from Fate).

Edit: And don't forget that a MoNF LM with the Tactical Skills Direct Damage legacy will start at +70% (85% for any skills you have individual legacies for, such as Burning Embers) before Tactical Mastery even comes into the equation.

Edit 2: Don't forget that Criitcal Rating incrases devastate chance, too. =)

Thanks for these points. I cannot find the multiplier values in my character sheet, so any advice on where to find it would be appreciated.

I am uncertain about how Fate works with multipliers. There was some debate about it on this thread; please advise if there is more updated info somewhere:

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...ding-Fate-Stat

I created a spreadsheet that mirrors Alad's approach. Feel free to play around with it using your own values.

1. In the yellow boxes, enter your current values.

2. In the orange boxes, enter new values that you get by swapping gear, etc.

Figure. If you change tactical mastery by one value (e.g. change tactical mastery from 100% to 101%), you can see how it changes the influence of critical chance. You can also do the converse and change critical chance by one value to see how it affects tactical mastery.

The table to the right shows the relative changes, using a 1% increase in tactical mastery as the reference. For example, if you increase tactical mastery by 1%, you get a 0.77% increase in damage using the sample values. To get that 0.77% increase, you could also increase your critical chance by 1.73% or your devastate chance by 0.87%. Thus, for this specific example, increasing devastate chance is the "best" because it requires the least increase. All of this follows directly from Alad's example.

I have password protected the worksheet, but provide the password at the bottom for anyone who wants to unlock it and play around with things. Please advise on bugs and problems.

Again, I would love more info on values of critical multiplier, etc. based on something concrete. Thank you!

Originally Posted by anteku

Thanks for these points. I cannot find the multiplier values in my character sheet, so any advice on where to find it would be appreciated.

I am uncertain about how Fate works with multipliers. There was some debate about it on this thread; please advise if there is more updated info somewhere:

Unfortunately, Critical Multiplier values aren't shown anywhere (I honestly don't have the faintest idea why, I might bring it up in the Suggestions forum at some point if I'm not too lazy :p), so it's difficult to quantify just how much Fate increases it. You can test your "true" critical multiplier by parsing on a target with zero mitigation, though; just record the observed critical and devastate values and compare them to the average damage on your tooltip (i.e. (low range+high range)/2).
Since criticals and devastates are calculated using the high end of the tooltop damage, your "true" multiplier will always be higher than 1.5 times average damage, even with no additional modifiers whatsoever.

Oh, and neat spreadsheet. I have to point out that you can never choose to increase critical or devastate chance though, it's always both (I realize you probably separated them for the sake of comparison, but there are others reading the thread ^^).

Originally Posted by anteku

I am uncertain about how Fate works with multipliers. There was some debate about it on this thread; please advise if there is more updated info somewhere:

My best guess is sqrt(fate + 44) / 93.

Only tested for level 75 RKs using ceaseless argument, but I've no reason to suspect that it doesn't work for all level 75 tactical damage critical multipliers. No idea if it varies due to level.

Originally Posted by anteku

Thanks, Ahli.
This makes me wonder if there's a list that shows which items give critical multiplier.

Almost nothing does anymore, that is level 75. There's a crafted robe that has 4% on it. I don't think any tac classes are even concerned about this anymore (until they add more choices in :/)/.

Originally Posted by rhegan

Almost nothing does anymore, that is level 75. There's a crafted robe that has 4% on it. I don't think any tac classes are even concerned about this anymore (until they add more choices in :/)/.

Glowing Aureate Band of Tactics is arguably still the best DPS ring (haven't actually done any math on it personally though, my RK and LM are still lvl 65).

Originally Posted by Gondolindhrim

Glowing Aureate Band of Tactics is arguably still the best DPS ring (haven't actually done any math on it personally though, my RK and LM are still lvl 65).

Well, here's the math:

Let's assume a critical rating of 5600, which translates into a critical hit percentage of 15.6% and a devastate percentage of 5.3%. We'll give our LM a fate of 500, for a bonus critical magnitude of 25.1%. Critical multiplier (the term in the damage calculation that changes due to criticals) is:

0.85 * 0.791 + (1.5 + .251) * 0.156 + (2.0 + .251) * 0.053

The ring increases critical rating by 1.75 * 20 + 248 (critical percentage is now 16.1%, devastate percentage is now 5.6%), and tactical critical multiplier by +6% + (sqrt(500 + 20 + 44) / 93 - sqrt(500 + 44) / 93), or roughly +6.5%. The new critical multiplier is:

0.85 * 0.783 + (1.5 + .316) * 0.161 + (2.0 + .316) * 0.056

Taking the ratio of the two multipliers, we get an increase of 2.14%. Assuming a base of +100% tactical damage, we'd need to increase that by 4.28% to match that, or about 120.3 will, for a total of 160.3 will.

The high will skirmish raid ring has 122 will and 166 tactical mastery, for a total of 138.6 will. You do get 21 more vitality out of it though.

So, yeah. That's a pretty good ring.

(0.85 is used for the now critical hits, because the minimum damage on a tactical skill is 70% of the maximum damage.)

Originally Posted by moebius92

Stuff

Thanks for being less lazy than myself, +rep!

I would point out that it's almost impossible to have an outgoing damage bonus of only +100% in a MoNF build (at least 150% is more realistic and that's still lowballing it with good gear), so the Aureates are definitely still awesome.

Originally Posted by moebius92

0.85 * 0.791 + (1.5 + .251) * 0.156 + (2.0 + .251) * 0.053

0.85 * 0.783 + (1.5 + .316) * 0.161 + (2.0 + .316) * 0.056

Just curious, is the lower value in equation #2 a typo? Or am I missing something?

All of this discussion has been very useful and has me rethinking some of my less-used gear. It might be fun to put together an analysis of crit multiplier (not crit chance).

One thing we should keep in mind, however, is that the rules of thumb for capped LMs is not necessarily applicable to lower level LMs.

That's good information to have, I have been leveling my LM and he has a pair of the old arueate tactics rings (As well as a few of the tier 9 gems with 1200 tac mastery), I guess I should probably hold on to those rings.

Originally Posted by anteku

Just curious, is the lower value in equation #2 a typo? Or am I missing something?

As the chances of scoring a critical or devastate go up, the chances of scoring a normal hit go down.

Originally Posted by moebius92

As the chances of scoring a critical or devastate go up, the chances of scoring a normal hit go down.

Oh, duh! So obvious now that you say it.