Guild Wars 2

It’s a simple question.

Hypothesis:

• I have a 50% critical chance
• 3000 attack
• 50% critical damage

What’s better between adding 100 more power or 10% critical damage in terms of pure DPS?

in this case i believe 10% crit. Damage is more influenced by level and equipment compared to power, with a solid Crit chance that extra 10% should be better. But then i might be wrong

Attack doesn’t really help for this calculation, as it’s not part of the damage formula, so I will assume a base of 2000 Power instead.
In this scenario:
going from 50% crit damage to 60% crit damage is a 3,33% damage increase in total.
going from 2000 Power to 2100 Power is a 5% damage increase in total.
Bonus:
going from 50% crit chance to 60% crit chance is a 6,67% damage increase in total.

This only applies to direct damage of course, disregarding conditions or proc effects.

Edit: corrected. Applied the crit multiplier in the wrong place.

There is a way to calculate your effective damage, all that is done here is we remove armor ratings, weapon damage and skill multiplier from the equation as they are not influenced by your stats and can be considered a constant.
Your damage is calculated by this:
(Weapon damage (WD) x Skill coefficient (SC) x Power (P)) / Targets armor (A)
We turn this into:
(WD x SC/A) x P
Now you only have to take into account your power.
Now to calculate your average damage you need to make an equation that introduces critical chance(CC) and critical damage (CD)
They will be used as a multiplier value instead of the percentage value.

P x (1-CC) + (P x CC) x (1.5 + CD)

For your stats it would look something like this (i’ll assume 1000 weapon damage as you did not give your power specifically).

(2000 * 0.5) + (2000 * 0.5)*2 = 3000

Lets check +100 power

(2100 * 0.5) + (2100 * 0.5)*2 = 3150

And let’s check +10% crit damage

(2000 * 0.5) + (2000 * 0.5) * 2.1 = 3100

Conclusion : In this case +100 power is better than +10% critical damage

*Note: this only calculates average damage, it does not take into account how much damage you would get from ‘on crit’ sigils for example, or ‘on crit’ traits.

Ironvos.9014:

There is a way to calculate your effective damage, all that is done here is we remove armor ratings, weapon damage and skill multiplier from the equation as they are not influenced by your stats and can be considered a constant.
Your damage is calculated by this:
(Weapon damage (WD) x Skill coefficient (SC) x Power (P)) / Targets armor (A)
We turn this into:
(WD x SC/A) x P
Now you only have to take into account your power.
Now to calculate your average damage you need to make an equation that introduces critical chance(CC) and critical damage (CD)
They will be used as a multiplier value instead of the percentage value.

P x (1-CC) + (P x CC) x (1.5 + CD)

For your stats it would look something like this (i’ll assume 1000 weapon damage as you did not give your power specifically).

(2000 * 0.5) + (2000 * 0.5)*2 = 3000

Lets check +100 power

(2100 * 0.5) + (2100 * 0.5)*2 = 3150

And let’s check +10% crit rating

(2000 * 0.4) + (2000 * 0.6) * 2 = 3200

Conclusion : In this case +10% critical chance is better than +100 power.

*Note: this is not very surprising if you know that for each 1% crit chance you need to spend 21 precision. A better comparison would be 10% crit and 210 power. In this case power would be the best.

*Note2: this only calculates average damage, it does not take into account how much damage you would get from ‘on crit’ sigils for example.

he did state 10% critical damage not 10% critical chance

Dasorine.1964:

Ironvos.9014:

There is a way to calculate your effective damage, all that is done here is we remove armor ratings, weapon damage and skill multiplier from the equation as they are not influenced by your stats and can be considered a constant.
Your damage is calculated by this:
(Weapon damage (WD) x Skill coefficient (SC) x Power (P)) / Targets armor (A)
We turn this into:
(WD x SC/A) x P
Now you only have to take into account your power.
Now to calculate your average damage you need to make an equation that introduces critical chance(CC) and critical damage (CD)
They will be used as a multiplier value instead of the percentage value.

P x (1-CC) + (P x CC) x (1.5 + CD)

For your stats it would look something like this (i’ll assume 1000 weapon damage as you did not give your power specifically).

(2000 * 0.5) + (2000 * 0.5)*2 = 3000

Lets check +100 power

(2100 * 0.5) + (2100 * 0.5)*2 = 3150

And let’s check +10% crit rating

(2000 * 0.4) + (2000 * 0.6) * 2 = 3200

Conclusion : In this case +10% critical chance is better than +100 power.

*Note: this is not very surprising if you know that for each 1% crit chance you need to spend 21 precision. A better comparison would be 10% crit and 210 power. In this case power would be the best.

*Note2: this only calculates average damage, it does not take into account how much damage you would get from ‘on crit’ sigils for example.

he did state 10% critical damage not 10% critical chance

Thx, i edited it

Haha, I made the same mistake at first