Expertise: Max or 1200 - Debate has ended

Already settled in previous posts in this thread.

I will always take two pve 61/63 armourings for bonus and drop my expertise on classes like scoundrel dps +15% crit on back blast, sage healer -1.5sec on healing trance, guardain tank increased duration on blade turning and warding call, commando dps +15% crit on grav round etc.

What you also dont account for is the person with two pve armourings might do 0.63 more dmg but he will have alot more than 0.63 health boost so it works out the same in the long run in a 1v1 situation.

Its funny how people like to use mathematical soundness to convince themselves of stuff. There is a reason the "Engineering" profession exists. If those "Mathies" or people who focus purely on the theoretical, were the ones building bridges, you would see many more of them collapse than you do today.

Theory is one thing, practice often tells you another. Like for instance, all the number-crunching people didn't think of integer-to-floating point decimal conversions or the error inherent in a 32-bit decimal representation.

Finally someone gets it. I keep saying this over and over to people but they don't seem to get the concept. Just because it's one way on paper doesn't always mean it is going to be in practice.

When you're dealing with real world issues, this might be a valid argument. The problem is that we're not... we're dealing with a computer game which is using pure math to determine what happens "in reality." The stuff you plug into a spreadsheet is exactly and without variance what the game is doing. This is quite a bit different from designing bridges, where a whole plethora of random variations in nature impact how a design will work out in practice. With things like SWtOR's damage interactions it's all just fixed numbers running through fixed equations in a consistent arithmetic environment.

On top of that, the OP and those few who support his conclusions have yet to acknowledge - or perhaps simply to recognize - that the item people are curious about is not who will win a one on one between two players with a 200 or so gap in expertise. This is what his "test" actually looks at. Rather, the question is who will do more damage to some third party target - that is, who does more damage as a whole.

Most people already know from experience that the player trading expertise in for power will do more damage, and the math just confirms it.

Wrong. If you knew anything about Software Engineering you'd know Computers are far from pure math.

If you knew anything about game development you would know they don't even have the mathematical model you're trying to simulate. The developers actually run the entire game to simulate numbers because the spaghetti code makes it nearly impossible to extract a mathematical model.

Factor in network latency into the model and then you'll find all your mathematical models incorrect. There is a reason being a programmer requires more than a high-school degree now.

When they're working correctly for basic human applications they may as well be. This isn't a Pentium from 1993 that is going to miscalculate some digit of Pi 1,000,000 places in. It's basic arithmetic concerned with 7 or 8 place values in very defined formulas which, like it or not, are what the game uses.

You're trying to make an argument by sounding like you have something profound to say, but in reality you're talking out of your butt.

hi, im an engineer. if you really want to get technical about it

and guess what? engineers use computer simulations ALL THE TIME. whether you are dealing with physics or with a computer game, there are certain governing laws and equations which control the environment you are working with

that guy building a bridge? yeah, hes been using a computer model to determine that what he is building is going to be able to hold up against the different stresses applied to it. do you know why those bridges DONT collapse? b/c they have run the simulations, done the calculations, built scale models, etc.

you make it sound like a guy goes out and just inherently knows how to build a bridge b/c his job title is "engineer" and not "math professor". engineering is nothing more than the practical, real life application of mathematics; specifically physics.


the model i did is correct. just b/c a test is done in "real-life" does not mean that a mathematical model cannot be created to duplicate that experiment on a much larger scale and be just as accurate. and really? integer-to-floating point decimal conversions and 32 bit? youre really going to pull that out? you would never even notice a loss of accuracy in this kind of situation.

people wanted to know what 1214v1396 and 1396v1396 looked like. i showed them

what. please, tell me you are joking. Network latency has NOTHING to do with this. this is not a debate of who wins a 1v1, or even a simulation of an entire fight. its a model that predicts (and accurately at that) damage output for a single attack. and its not like these equations are complicated. they are very simple, and all readily available if you know where to look.

If you looked at my previous post, you'll see that a sage with 1200 exp does 17 more damage on his TKT to a max expertise target, than a max exp sage against a max exp target. It's negligible to the point of worthlessness. So if people want to spend millions upon millions of credits to do nothing, go ahead.

It isn't necessary to spend millions of credits. All it takes is swapping in 2 power crystals. In any case, people don't use PvE armorings for extra bonus damage - at least, they shouldn't. They do it to allow them to balance crit better while taking more power mods in their other slots.