Poncho

I wrote a small app to calculate DR, factoring in crits. You can read about the formula I used here. You can get the app here.

__________________
I'm Poncho, and I approve this message.

Uyaem

Right and wrong.
Since all weapons of a tier have roughly the same DR, looking at max. damage suffices.

__________________

Chix

What exactly is it that max damage alone tells you?

Max damage alone doesnt say how much a weapon hits for on a average noncrit swing, nor does it say how much the weapon hits for on a average crit swing.

So if you wanna know how much damage a weapon does "on average", which is the only intresting comparative value, max damage alone helps us how?

Paikis

Yay for spreadsheets!! I made up two weapons, both with the same DR, but one with a higher spread (and consequently a higher max damage) and here they are!



In this picture, we have the two weapons being shown at 2% crit rate... you should NEVER have a crit rate this low, but I'll show it anyways. You can see that without any crits (non-crit av. dmg) both weapons do exactly the same average damage. Weapons with the same DR will do the same average damage before crits. Then we have a look at the average critical damage. The weapon with the higher max damage (and ratio) is clearly the winner here. note however that the weapon with the LOWEST ratio will have more crits above Max+1. Doesn't really mean much in terms of DPS, but I thought I'd point it out.

Here's the same weapons with a 20% crit rate, this only shows the sections which change based on crit %. no point clogging the screen with redundancy.



And just for shits and giggles, here's 100% crits:


Basically there's an increasing gap in DPS between the two weapons as you add crit%. The weapon with the higher Max dmg (and ratio) is clearly the winner here. Weapon 1 saw a 45% increase in DPS by adding 100% crit, weapon 2 (higher max dmg and ratio) scored a whopping 67% increase.

Incidently, minimum damage was used in one calculation, so I'm going to give it a bit more importance than I did earlier, but still not much. It was used to determine what % of your hits will be greater than Max+1. but since the lower ratios give you LESS hits bigger than Max+1, I really don't see the point. You can generally ignore the ratio if the DRs are very similar and just looking at the max damage will suffice. If the DRs are significantly different, then ratio wont really matter, just take the DR and go with whichever is biggest.

The Verdict: Ratio and Max damage can be used interchangeably for determining which weapon is better.

__________________
'The bait isn't supposed to eat the fish!'

Chix

Minimum damage used in "one" calculation? Try all of them! All of the red fields are somewhere using the min damage number, either in the actual formula or by referring to another field where min damage was used. (hope that made sense, not too hip with the spreadsheet lingo)

In your spreadsheet, you wouldnt have gotten past the very first calculation without factoring in min damage. Its really as simple as that, and our discussion could and should end here.


...but that would be no fun.

As for your "verdict", this is what you had leading up to it:

These questions beg to be asked I feel, how similar is "very" similar? And how different is "significantly" different? I'm sure any serious min/maxer would prefer cold hard numbers over vagueness like that!


Furthermore, I'm going to throw two fictional weapons right back at you:

Weapon A: 28-252 (70DR) 4.0s delay
Weapon B: 120-200 (80DR) 4.0s delay

Question, which one of these weapons is better at 20% critrate, and which is better at 30% critrate? I DARE you to calculate this using neither min damage nor ratio. (no problems, max damage is interchangeable with ratio right?)

Dants

I agree. The whole "compare max damage if DR's are similar" argument is just an approximation for the min:max damage ratio (if the DR's are the same and one has a higher max damage, you could safely assume the min:max ratio is greater). But the problem is that you don't need to approximate because it's a simple division of 2 numbers that pretty much anyone could do in their head in under 5 seconds.

__________________

Paikis

Don't know what I was smoking there, you are correct. Think I got hung up on the whoe crit thing.

Perhaps I've been talking about this the wrong way, let me instead say that ratio is not used in ANY (not a single one, I checked) calculations. So I can calculate things without using ratio at all, and I can calculate damage range of crits without using min damage, but average critical damage will require the min dmg ammount to tell me how many hits will crit for more than Max+1. By the way, does anyone know how to get Excel to display a ratio? I've just typed those ratios straight into the cell.

Anyways, i plugged your two weapons in and came out with this @20% crit:



Now we both knew that it was going to turn out this way, you purposely made those two weapons up to prove a point, but to you I would say: Do this with two weapons which have similar DRs. (70 and 80 are not similar, that's a whole tier's difference, maybe more)

Incidently, Weapon 2 has a higher Average Total DPS score until 31% crit chance.

__________________
'The bait isn't supposed to eat the fish!'