So, what is better? Critical damage, critical chance, or offense? Actually, what is offense? I find it’s one of the least understood stats in SWGoH, but is just as important as any other.
Offense, put simply, is multiplied by one or more modifiers to determine a character’s Special and Physical Damage. Because of these modifiers, which appear to be different for each character, it’s not a straight 1 offense for 1 damage ratio; my own testing has shown you’re likely to gain less damage than expected, rather than more. So you can’t accurately work out how much your damage will change without putting the mod on and checking, but that’s okay, let the game do the work for you.
So, now we know what offense does, but what about the damage stats? On the surface, they’re simple – the higher your damage stat, the more damage you do. This is your base damage, before any crit damage, bonus damage, move multipliers (which we’ll talk about in another article), etc. So an increase to offense, without decreasing any offensive stats, is an increase to every bit of damage you do.
But, how do we know if offense is better than crit chance or crit damage? Allow me to introduce you to what I like to call “Average Damage Per Hit,” or ADPH for short. Sounds fancy, I know. The three stats are intertwined – more offense/damage means you get more out of critical damage (glossary of SWGoH acronyms & abbreviations), and the more you get out of CD, the more ADPH you gain from critical chance. Basically, having more of one makes the other two more valuable. The best way to maximize your damage is to find the right balance between the three, and the only way to do that is crunching the numbers.
To get our ADPH, we can use the formula “Damage*((Crit Chance*(Crit Damage-1))+1)”. If we plug some generic numbers into it – 2000 damage, 50% crit chance, and 180% crit damage, we get “2000*((0.5*(1.8-1))+1)”. Once we break it down into steps, it’s not as complicated at it looks. Using the algebraic order of operations, we start with the brackets nested the deepest; “(Crit Damage-1)”, or, in our example, “(1.8-1)”, giving us “(0.8)”. Next step will be “(0.5*0.8)”, which is “(0.4)”, and is our average crit damage bonus. At this point, our formula looks more like “2000*(0.4+1)”, so we do our last set of brackets, giving us “(1.4)”, which is the average crit multiplier, and now we finish with “2000*1.4”, showing us that our Average Damage Per Hit is “2800”. The last step is use the formula to compare different sets of numbers. For example, if we boost our damage to 2200, but lower our crit chance to 45%, while maintaining 180% crit damage, our ADPH comes to 2992, so we gain damage overall, even though we don’t crit as often.
One thing I haven’t touched on is bonus effects, like Droids gaining 50% TM whenever they crit from HK-47’s leader ability. To factor this in, we basically use the same peice of formula we used to find our average crit bonus – “(Crit Chance*TM)”, so “(0.5*0.5)=0.25”, so we average 25% TM gained each hit, which, over the course of the battle, will directly translate to a 25% damage increase, so we can add 1 to the 0.25, to express it as a multiplier, and multiply our ADPH by it.
So there we have it! You now have everything you need to work out whether that 3% crit chance or that +77 offense is going to increase your damage more. If you want to streamline this process, I highly suggest using a spreadsheet as a calculator. Here is an example.
PsychoPoet – Guest Writer
So the leadership of poggle should be better for the droids. He give +50% offense and 25% speed instead of the 30% cd and 50% turn meter that give hk-47?
Critical chance sorry
The turn meter is what makes the difference. With the +30% CC, your droids should be critting at least almost every attack, and end each turn with 50% TM – essentially +100% speed, plus AoE, assists, etc. That’s more than double the amount of attacks, if you have high crit chance.
Even assuming Poggle’s speed buff doesn’t get dispelled, the bigger hits just can’t keep up with the sheer number of attacks HK’s leader ability goves a droid team. Quantity > quality in this case.
Ok, I will try that, I being using poggle, 88, 86, r2 and lobot to cleanup and give turn meter for fase 1 and 2 of the AAT.
I will try with hk 47 as a leader
This is great, thanks for your insight. My only question is how does speed factor into this? I have some mods with lower offense/cd/cc secondaries, but higher speed. It can be difficult determining if the high speed secondary will boost my overall damage more than the offense/cd/cc secondary stats.
Speed is more complicated to factor in, since it means looking at the frequency of turns as well as raw damage. Generally though, a 10% speed increase (for example, going from 150 to 165) means your damage over a period of time increases by 10%. So to check whats better, you need to compare the combined change in ADPH and speed, and take whichever is higher. So if it’s a 10% speed increase, but you lose 7% of your ADPH, your total would be +3%, which is slightly higher.
What about a character that doesn’t crit, like darth nihilist as leader?
Character’s that can’t crit, or are being used against character’s that have strong anti-crit (like GK/zBarris combinations) want offense for damage instead.
I’m trying to figure out how to use this with a specific character to evaluate if a mod is any good. is that even possible?
I am not sure what you are asking… Higher Critical Chance comes from a pair (set) of CC mods, a triangle mod with CC as the primary stat or in a secondary stat on any other mod type. Higher CD comes from a triangle with a CD primary or a set of 4 CD mods.
When we are evaluating damage. are you going physical damage only, special damage only, or the combination of both – for plugging into the ‘calculator’
Whichever damage matters for that character. Characters like R2-D2, which do both kinds, it depends on which moves you want to do more damage.