Note: All credit for the original thread goes to Daellia; I will simply be maintaining it subsequent to his departure. If you have any questions, though, don't hesitate to ask.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've seen a lot of questions and false information about character stats thrown around on these boards, so I'm making this post to provide a resource for everyone for how exactly all of the stats work. Note that this guide is sorcerer-specific, I won't be covering Shadow benefits here (the only real differences, for those wondering, are that Willpower also affects their melee attacks, they need Accuracy rating, and for tanking, Defense, Shield, and Absorption).

First, some background. Nearly every stat in the game follows a diminishing returns curve. For those mathematically-oriented, these curves asymptotically approach a certain limiting value.

For those not so mathematically inclined, that basically means that the benefit you gain from adding a certain amount more of that stat gets smaller and smaller the more of it you have, with a certain "ceiling" it can never exceed. For example, crit rating limits to 30%. Thus the more and more crit rating you add to your character, the closer and closer you get to that 30% bonus, but you can never actually reach it.

Also, note that the benefit from each stat is on a separate DR curve, and raw percentage benefits (such as from abilities) have no effect on any DR curves (they are additive on top of them instead). Thus how much Willpower you have, for example, has no bearing on how much benefit you get from X crit rating, and vice versa. This doesn't imply that the DPS value of the stats are independent, but that's another discussion entirely.

Willpower vs Power

5 + 30 * ( 1 - ( 1 - ( 0.01 / 0.3 ) )^( ( PrimaryStat / max(Level,20) ) / 2.5 ) ) + 30 * ( 1 - ( 1 - ( 0.01 / 0.3 ) )^( ( CritRating / max(Level,20) ) / 0.45 ) )

Willpower

Increases force damage, healing, and critical effect chance. Each points provides 0.20 Force Bonus Damage and 0.14 Force Bonus Healing. Critical effect chance benefit scales slowly and limits to 30%.

Force Power

Increases force damage and healing at a slightly higher rate than Willpower. Each point provides 0.23 Force Bonus Damage and 0.17 Force Bonus Healing.

Power

Identical to Force Power for Sages. Each point provides 0.23 Force Bonus Damage and 0.17 Force Bonus Healing. Also increases melee, ranged, and tech at the same rate.

Critical Rating

Increases critical effect chance with all damage and healing abilities. Benefit scales moderately and limits to 30%.

Surge Rating

Increases the bonus damage or healing from a critical effect. Additive with the base 50% critical multiplier. Benefit scales rapidly and limits to 30%.

Alacrity Rating

Reduces the cast time of casted and channeled abilities. Additionally reduces the length of the global cooldown for those abilities if their cast or channel time drops below 1.5 seconds. Does not reduce the GCD for instant abilities, nor for cast/channeled ones if their final cast time remains above 1.5 seconds. Additive with multiple Alacrity sources. New Cast Time = Original Cast Time * (1 - Alacrity%). Scales moderately and limits to 30%

Accuracy Rating*

Reduces chance to miss against a target, and once miss chance is 0%, begins to negate the target's Defense or Resistance. Boss targets are believed at this time to have zero innate force resistance, and force attacks have a base accuracy of 100% against all targets. Thus, this stat is worthless for Sages in PvE. In PvP, no gear stat gives resistance, and only limited abilities do. Thus it is generally worthless against most targets and not worth gearing for. Scales moderately and limits to 30%.

Shield Rating*

Increases your chances of "blocking" and attack with your shield generator. Referred to as Glance Rating on TORhead. Requires a shield generator in offhand, and thus is useless to Sages. Scales moderately quickly and limits to 50%.

Absorption Rating*

Increases the damage absorbed by a successful shield "block". Does not increase the damage absorbed by Static Barrier or similar absorption buffs/abilities. Requires a shield generator in offhand, and thus is useless to Sages. Scales rapidly and limits to 50%.

Defense Rating*

Increases your chance to avoid melee and ranged attacks. Dodge, parry, and a few other terms are all manifestations of this stat. Sage base defense is 10%. Has no effect on Force or Tech attacks. Generally useless to Sage. Scales moderately and limits to 30%.

Expertise Rating

PvP-only stat. Increases your damage and healing done to other players and decreases the damage you take from other players. Healing is increased by "ignoring" part of the Trauma buff that is automatically applied when you enter PvP combat, and thus scales somewhat better in actual effect than the percentage displayed on the character sheet. The damage bonus scale moderately and limits to 50%, while the trauma ignore scales slowly and limits to 30%.

The DR portion is now (as of 1.2) calculated directly off of the damage portion, and is equal to 1 - 1 / (1 + DamageBoost%). The net effect of this change to DR is that any character attacking another character with the same amount of expertise will deal the same amount of damage they would deal if both they and the target were at 0 expertise. Previously, the DR portion scaled somewhat better, so, for example, a 1000 Expertise character attacking another 1000 expertise character would deal noticeably less damage than if both characters were at 0 expertise.

*NOTE: Gear with these stats, while worthless to Sages directly, may be of some benefit if equipped to certain of your companions instead.

I've also made this handy graph showing the scaling of all of the stats. Left graph shows the total benefit of the stat based on how much you have, while the right graph shows the benefit of the next 10% of that stat based on how much you already have. Remember, separate stats have no effect on the benefits each grants, even if they give the same bonus (such as Crit and Willpower), and percentage benefits from skills and abilities are applied additively after the rating conversion is applied.

The first graph shows scaling from 0 to 1000 rating, the second from 0 to 2500. The third graph shows the percentage of the limiting cap obtained at each rating level. This is important, since the benefit rating gives you is proportional to how much of the cap you have remaining. ie. if you are at 60% of the cap, the rating will be providing you with 40% of the benefit it did when you had 0 of that rating). The fourth graph is simply a comparison of 1.1.5 to 1.2 values for Expertise.

0-1000 Rating Graph

0-2500 Rating Graph

Percentage of Cap Graph

1.1.5 to 1.2 Expertise Comparison Graph

If you're interested in more specifics on how the stats work, what the formulas look like, and how we came up with them, check out this post over on mmo-mechanics.com (warning: it's a bit mathy):

http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/forums/Thread-SWTOR-formula-list

Excellent, sticky requested as well.

By the way, there are still a lot of incidences of "Sorcerer" in there.

Good to see you taking over this.

BTW if you ever are looking for additional help, I should be around (either here or on the mmo-mechanics forums). I've just joined the development group at SimC so we should be able to keep that up to date with the sorc stuff as well.

Bear in mind it's talking about the contribution from different stats, not the final figures you see on your character sheet.

When we say Critical Rating is limited to 30%, that's 30% plus the 5% base, plus spec/companion bonuses, plus buffs, plus the crit from Willpower (which also caps at 30%). 30% total crit chance is nowhere near 30% from Critical Rating. Hovering over crit chance ingame will show you the individual contributions.

At any rate, you won't get anywhere near 30% from Critical Rating in practice; there simply isn't enough available from gearing even if you wanted to. Furthermore, it is a true, asymptotic curve; you'll get closer and closer to 30%, but you can never reach it.

Your actual crit chance is a sum of many different sources. You get 5% baseline, another 5% from the Smuggler buff, up to another 5% from skills (depending on your spec), and then some from crit rating and willpower.

The amount you get from crit rating is on diminishing returns. This means that every point you get gives you a smaller boost to your crit chance than the last point did. This is based entirely and only on how much crit rating you have, though. Your crit chance can never be increased by more than 30% by Crit Rating alone (though there's no hard limit on your actual crit chance).

Willpower works similarly. Each point gives you less of an increase to your crit chance than the previous point did, and similar to Crit Rating, this is based only off how much Willpower you have. Again, like Crit Rating, your crit chance can never be increased by more than 30% by Willpower alone.

So, for example, you could have 20% contribution to your crit chance from Crit Rating (which is less than the 30% cap from Crit Rating), and another 20% from Willpower (which is also less than the 30% cap on Willpower). Together with your 5% baseline crit chance and your 5% from the Smuggler buff, that gives you a 50% crit chance. Note that this final crit chance is above 30%. The 30% cap only applies to the benefit you can receive from Willpower and Crit Rating, and applies to each separately.

The primary difference between Crit Rating and Willpower is how quickly their benefit falls off. Crit Rating gives far more crit chance per point initially (about 5-6 times as much, actually), but diminishes much more rapidly. Where it might take you 2500 Willpower to halve the amount of crit chance you receive per point of Willpower, it'll only take you about 450 Crit Rating to do the same per point of Crit Rating.

Make more sense?

If not, think of this visual analogy (I find visualizations often help me understand something):

You've got two large wide funnels, about 2 feet across at their top. You plug the bottom ends, then start filling them up. Because the funnels are much wider the farther up the water goes, it takes more and more water to increase the water level by the same amount (say an inch). DR works similarly, except the design of the funnel is that it would take an infinite amount of water to fill the funnel entirely up to the brim.

Willpower and Crit Rating are in separate funnels next to each other. How much water you have in one doesn't affect how full the other one is (and vice versa), but your crit chance is equivalent to the total height of the water in both funnels added together.

I was curios. Does anyone know if the Force accuracy cuts into armor reduction at all. Or PVP reduction? Or just the resistance to force/tech?

Just resistance. Armor pen is only granted by... armor pen.

As noted in the first post, Accuracy on Force/Tech attacks is useless. Bosses have no resistance and the highest resistance players have is 2% (Tank Shadow, Scrapper Scoundrel and PvE tank set bonus on Vanguard, maybe some others not sure exactly). Terentateks have some Force resistance but that's only the bonus boss of Maelstorm Prison and trash. The PvP damage reduction works the same way as any tree reductions, i.e a flat decrease regardless of type of attack.

Question:

When would Power theoretically overtake Willpower? (While specced into Will of the Jedi, active Consular and Knight buffs as well as the comp buff, if there is one I am not sure)

When would Power theoretically overtake Willpower? (While specced into Will of the Jedi, active Consular and Knight buffs as well as the comp buff, if there is one I am not sure)

No relevant companion buff. At any rate, under those conditions Power would take the lead on a 1:1 basis somewhere in the vicinity of 9,000 Willpower.

When would Power theoretically overtake Willpower? (While specced into Will of the Jedi, active Consular and Knight buffs as well as the comp buff, if there is one I am not sure)

To explain this, Willpower adds to Bonus Damage at a slower rate than Power does. Willpower is only more valuable because it also adds to crit rate (at a substantially diminished rate compared to Crit rating, but also on a completely different DR curve that is *way* more shallow than any other). When WP gets sufficiently high, the diminishing returns on Willpower's crit contribution will reduce the benefit such that the Bonus Damage contributions are the only appreciable addition and, as such, Power becomes more valuable.

To explain this, Willpower adds to Bonus Damage at a slower rate than Power does. Willpower is only more valuable because it also adds to crit rate (at a substantially diminished rate compared to Crit rating, but also on a completely different DR curve that is *way* more shallow than any other). When WP gets sufficiently high, the diminishing returns on Willpower's crit contribution will reduce the benefit such that the Bonus Damage contributions are the only appreciable addition and, as such, Power becomes more valuable.

????

Well yes that is exactly how Willpower v Power works, as is explained in the OP. My question was when MS it would 'theoretically' overtake power. The question has been answered, even though an actual calculation would be nice. You just told me what I already knew and did not ask for.

And it is very useful, I am now running at 250ish crit rating but still have 40% crti, just because of all that MS. meaning I have a **** tonne of free rating all dedicated to power.

Also anyone know the number for Sentinels/Shadows, i.e. classes without mainstat buffs in tree.