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Stats and How They Work


Daellia

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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 Assassin 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

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 Sorcerers. 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 ability 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 resistance, and force attacks have a base accuracy of 100% against all targets. Thus, this stat is worthless for Sorcerers 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 Sorcerers. 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 Sorcerers. 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. Sorcerer base defense is 10%. Has no effect on Force or Tech attacks. Generally useless to Sorcerers. 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 Sorcerers 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 sithwarrior.com (warning: it's a bit mathy):

 

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

Edited by Daellia
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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 50%.

 

I believe it limits itself at 47%, I tried once popping a 400 some surge pot with my base 200 surge to see if you could get over 100%, the result was being at 97%. Not sure if it just gets a really strong DR or if thats the cap though.

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I believe it limits itself at 47%, I tried once popping a 400 some surge pot with my base 200 surge to see if you could get over 100%, the result was being at 97%. Not sure if it just gets a really strong DR or if thats the cap though.

 

It limits to 50%. However, it's an asymptotic limit, so it would take ∞ Surge Rating to hit 50% bonus. It's not like a linear conversion then it just cuts off, it's a gradual curve that continually approaches but never quite reaches the limiting value.

 

Also, I know it's 50% because the game files state that value as the limit.

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For Surge rating.. when you say limits at 50%, do you mean mean the bonus limit or overall (base+bonus)? I'm currently at 79.94% ..

 

Same for crit rating, does that 30% mean the bonus amount or overall?

 

 

I am sorry, my English comprehension is not that great ...

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Can you explain how willpower affects crit? You said that the bonuses from willpower just stack on top of the bonuses from other stats, but then you said crit won't go over 30%. How does that work if willpower does not affect the DR curves of other stats?

 

Edit: I just reread the first post again. Is the benefit of willpower linear and crit just capped at 30%?

 

Thanks

Edited by Byle
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Just one bit of feedback really: Things like Shield Chance, Defense, Absorb etc are useful in that they apply to our companions. It might be worth at least pointing out, that some of the stats which may not be directly useful for Sorcs could still be useful for their companions.

 

X

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Does Creeping Death push my crit multiplier beyond the Surge limit?

 

On my current gear I have 271 Surge, increasing my crit multiplier by 33.27%, for a total of 83.27%. Does that mean that my DoTs and Death Field multiplier is 113.27%, or is it capped because of the limit on Surge?

 

I would think that a talent would allow the exceeding of stat limits, just want to verify.

Edited by spellegren
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For Surge rating.. when you say limits at 50%, do you mean mean the bonus limit or overall (base+bonus)? I'm currently at 79.94% ..

 

Same for crit rating, does that 30% mean the bonus amount or overall?

 

I'm pretty sure the OP means that the bonus is limited to 50% Crit bonus damage starts at 50% and the cap for aditional bonus damage is 50%, so if you stacked as much surge as possible you'd end up with just under 100% in total because you can never quite reach the cap.

 

The cap is just for Crit Rating, which is one of several things than can effect your total Crit Chance. Your total Crit Cahnce is calculated as follows:

 

5% base + X% based on your Willpower (capped at 30%) + X% based on your Crit Rating (capped at 30%) + Crit chance granted by skills or buffs.

 

A rough example from what I remember of my own stats (can't log in right now):

5% base crit chance

10% crit chance from having 1500 willpower

13% crit chance from a crit rating of 350

5% crit chance from skills

 

Total crit chance is approximately 32%. If an operative comes along and casts their 5% buff this increases to 37%. The only parts that are capped are the contributions from crit rating and willpower.

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Can you explain how willpower affects crit? You said that the bonuses from willpower just stack on top of the bonuses from other stats, but then you said crit won't go over 30%. How does that work if willpower does not affect the DR curves of other stats?

 

Edit: I just reread the first post again. Is the benefit of willpower linear and crit just capped at 30%?

 

Thanks

 

From what I understand your total crit chance isn't capped, but the amount of crit chance you can get from willpower and crit rating are separately capped at 30%. The benefit to crit chance of willpower is not linear, but at current realistic values of willpower it is so close to being linear that you can probably ignore the diminishing returns unless you are getting into very intense theorycrafting.

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Looks like Alkerris mostly covered it for me. The benefit to a value is only capped from that rating. IE. the benefit from crit rating limits to 30%, but Willpower is on a separate pool for DR. So if you had infinite willpower and crit, you could have 30% crit from both, for 60% total. There is no cap on the benefit from raw percentages (with the obvious exception that you can't have higher than 100% chance in a number of stats, like Crit, Alacrity, and Defense).

 

Surge just has a base of 0.5 instead of 0. So if you have says 32% crit multiplier from Surge rating, your character sheet would display 0.5 + 0.32 = 82% crit multiplier.

 

I'll see if I can clarify the OP to include that information. I'll also note defensive stat benefits to companions.

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Looks like Alkerris mostly covered it for me. The benefit to a value is only capped from that rating. IE. the benefit from crit rating limits to 30%, but Willpower is on a separate pool for DR. So if you had infinite willpower and crit, you could have 30% crit from both, for 60% total. There is no cap on the benefit from raw percentages (with the obvious exception that you can't have higher than 100% chance in a number of stats, like Crit, Alacrity, and Defense).

 

Surge just has a base of 0.5 instead of 0. So if you have says 32% crit multiplier from Surge rating, your character sheet would display 0.5 + 0.32 = 82% crit multiplier.

 

I'll see if I can clarify the OP to include that information. I'll also note defensive stat benefits to companions.

 

Got it, thanks!

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I'm pretty sure the OP means that the bonus is limited to 50% Crit bonus damage starts at 50% and the cap for aditional bonus damage is 50%, so if you stacked as much surge as possible you'd end up with just under 100% in total because you can never quite reach the cap.

 

The cap is just for Crit Rating, which is one of several things than can effect your total Crit Chance. Your total Crit Cahnce is calculated as follows:

 

5% base + X% based on your Willpower (capped at 30%) + X% based on your Crit Rating (capped at 30%) + Crit chance granted by skills or buffs.

 

A rough example from what I remember of my own stats (can't log in right now):

5% base crit chance

10% crit chance from having 1500 willpower

13% crit chance from a crit rating of 350

5% crit chance from skills

 

Total crit chance is approximately 32%. If an operative comes along and casts their 5% buff this increases to 37%. The only parts that are capped are the contributions from crit rating and willpower.

 

 

Thank you so much for the clarification :jawa_biggrin:

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I'm interested in learning more about the accuracy stat for Sorcerers.

 

I'm confused as to the uselessness of accuracy in PvE (admittedly, I have never seen an ability miss). Although, the stats on the Rekata and Columi gear make more sense (having no accuracy whatsoever!)

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