**EDIT: FINDINGS***

From the discussion in this thread, this is what I believe the current BiS relics are for gunnery commandos:

DG kinetic proc relic *Kinetic proc uses tech crit chance while energy proc uses force crit chance

DG power activation relic

Additional threads:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=555367

http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/forums/thread-1024-post-24331.html#pid24331

**ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS**

So with the new patch we got updated stats on the dread guard relics, they now include a +47 power stat.

Dread Guard Relic of Dark Radiance

+64 end

+47 power

30% chance of 210 internal, 4.5 sec internal cooldown

I am trying to figure out if they are now better than then WH relic, for at least one of the relic slots. I do not know if this math is correct which I why I would like your opinions on it. I am using the internal damage type relic as it seems to provide higher dps in general in a raid. See this post as my reference

Here are some loose assumptions I am making. 1/3rd of the hits are critting, 75% surge, gunnery spec with normal full auto talents selected.

16.79 is the bonus damage difference between the WH relic and the dread guard relic

skill, base bonus damage, damage modifier, modified bonus damage, running time, running bonus damage

full auto 1/3, 16.79, 58%, 26.53, 1, 26.53 *assuming CoF is up for this full auto

full auto 2/3, 16.79, 58%, 26.53, 2, 53.06

full auto 3/3*, 16.79, 163%, 44.16, 3, 97.21 *crit tick

grav round, 16.79, 0%, 16.79, 4.5, 114.00

grav round, 16.79, 0%, 16.79, 7, 130.79 * this ability and forward has 30% chance to proc relic

demo round*, 16.79, 105%, 34.42, 8.5, 165.21 *crit + demo crit bonus

grav round, 16.79, 0%, 16.79, 10, 182.00

full auto 1/3, 16.79, 58%, 26.53, 11, 191.74 *assuming cof proc again

full auto 2/3, 16.79, 163%, 44.16, 12, 226.16 *here the flat damage increase outpaces the proc relic

full auto 3/3*, 16.79, 58%, 26.53, 13, 252.69

So it looks like the relic has 4 chances at 30% each to outpace the WH relic. I feel like I'm being pretty generous with CoF procs and crits, and also the relic should also crit every 3rdish proc. Finally the relic does internal damage which should ignore an ops bosses armor rating while our attacks do not.

It looks to me like the proc relic should over time do more damage than the WH relic, even if it is not by much. Does anyone see anything wrong with my methodology for this?

Yeah I do,

You're using the Internal damage relic when you have 35% armour pen and 20% armour reduction.

Due to all the armour mitigation the energy or kinetic relic does more damage than the elemental or internal.

The reason is that kinetic/energy has a higher tooltip damage but loses damage against armour which can be 30-35% on a boss. But if you have armour pen it doesn't lose as much damage and thus hits harder than the armour avoiding relics which hit a lower fixed number all the time.

Ok, well I think the kinetic/energy relic does 280. If it truly does more damage then that would just further cement the proc relic as the bis for one of your relics.

Where are you getting 35% armor penetration from though?

Where are you getting 35% armor penetration from though?

from armor piercing cell

from armor piercing cell

derp, I forgot about that. Armor penetration and armor reduction are effectively the same thing from a damage calculation point of view right?

Does that mean that the 35% penetration eliminates a bosses 35% armor rating?

derp, I forgot about that. Armor penetration and armor reduction are effectively the same thing from a damage calculation point of view right?

 

Does that mean that the 35% penetration eliminates a bosses 35% armor rating?

yes, and together you are getting 55% less effect from the boss's armor rating.

which equates to a little under 30% boost in damage

How much harder are we actually talking? I hear this argument all the time, and I'll grant it has merit but only if the armor pen gets you back over the internal proc relic's numbers, which means we need to know how much is actually being mitigated by bosses (which is the only time it matters).

A similar argument is brought up by asking if the on use power relics are now better for boss fights, especially the ones with burst phases. Too lazy to run the sims myself but I'd like to see something along those lines which shows the DPS improvement we can expect. Especially before I go grinding out tons of daily comms.

Austin Peckenpaugh posted this quite a while ago.

Operations training dummies have 5814 armor rating (not visible to you), which translates through our armor formula to about 35% DR. With your setup, you cut that armor rating down by 55%, effectively turning it into 2616 armor rating. [5814 * 0.45 = 2616] 2616 armor rating translates through our armor formula to 19.5% DR.

 

Therefore, an average Tracer Missile would deal 1804 kinetic damage, and a target with 19.5% DR would take 1452 kinetic damage. [1804 * 0.805 = 1452] This is only 3% different than the 1410 you reported, which given your small sample size is well within expectations.

So the kinetic and or energy relic damage would be 280*80.5%=225.4. Which is more damage than the internal damage relics. My problem is the up time on the proc relics. I've used them in the past and my up time was terrible. Mathing it may show the proc relic as beating out X. But real world conditions and logs from raids in the past told me otherwise.

Austin Peckenpaugh posted this quite a while ago.

 

 

 

So the kinetic and or energy relic damage would be 280*80.5%=225.4. Which is more damage than the internal damage relics. My problem is the up time on the proc relics. I've used them in the past and my up time was terrible. Mathing it may show the proc relic as beating out X. But real world conditions and logs from raids in the past told me otherwise.

Awesome info as always. Thank you sir! I'm also considering switching to a dread guard on use power relic, but similar thing, I just don't know how much DPS improvement we're talking about. Would help in burst phases, but there's something to be said for steady DPS output through an entire fight.

the proc accounts for about 2% of my overall damage.

comparing the dread guard relic to a war hero relic is basically 69 power (including buffs) or that 2%

granted proc relics tend to work better on a DoT heavy built (like assault, but you'd want the elemental/internal one for that)

my scrapper scoundrel, by comparison gets a bit more mileage out of his proc relic (even though he has 5% less armor penetration)

a few things about the damage: from my recent parses, the internal/elemental crits for me for 385. i'm critting on the energy/kinetic ones for well over 400 (i think 443 was my highest).

an interesting side note, in nightmare EC, my energy relic was critting for 385 on my gunnery commando (the same as the internal/elemental) on zorn & toth, so apparently they have a bit more armor. i was critting again for well over 400 on the firebrand & stormcaller fight (on the tanks and the trandoshans under the shield) and the trash. critting for the exact same was only with zorn & toth

ultimately, the new dread guard relics are very good: 47 power plus the additional proc, but i would say that the benefit is mostly negligible to feel the need to grind up 300 daily comms (granted the new daily area makes it a lot easier now). if you have the war hero relic now, there's not an overwhelming need to grind up for the new relics and have them immediately. i already had plenty of daily comms when 1.5 went live and picked up the dread guard cerulean nova (energy proc) and boundless ages (on-use power relic)

i went with the dread guard relic because i don't pvp anymore and was using the champion relics, so it was a significant upgrade from those (rather than the arguable upgrade from war hero).

i think if i had to choose though, i'd go with the proc relic though anyway. from my tests before with the campaign relic versus the champion relic, they provided about the same (so i figured ~100 was roughly equal to 2% of my total damage. someone could probably do the math better than i)

the new relic gives me 47 power (for for me, only a 50 power difference, 69 difference from war hero), and the proc provides me more hits, which gives me more chances to crit for first responder

With all the burst phases its not even a question of should you.

Alternate with adrenal and relic for burst phases.

They come with power now so the constant power loss is 113 vs 47 power, 66 lost.

Only 66 because you can keep one WH and one on-demand.

oaceen, do you have a torparse log of the EC run while you are wearing the energy proc relic? I would be interested in looking at it over a couple fights.

i use askmrrobot if that's ok. hopefully this link will work: link

also, i got roped into a FE run to help someone with their HK quests immediately after before i could turn off combat logging and back on again, so there's a couple fights from that at the end lol.

anyway, ignore the first two runs. we were still getting used to it, but as you can see from the zorn & toth fights (3-9, 11-13) it's hitting for 385 max.

check the other fights and overall, it hits as high as 443

i use askmrrobot if that's ok. hopefully this link will work: link

 

 

also, i got roped into a FE run to help someone with their HK quests immediately after before i could turn off combat logging and back on again, so there's a couple fights from that at the end lol.

 

 

anyway, ignore the first two runs. we were still getting used to it, but as you can see from the zorn & toth fights (3-9, 11-13) it's hitting for 385 max.

check the other fights and overall, it hits as high as 443

Thanks you, I looks like T&Z have more resistance then the tanks, but in both cases you are generally hitting on average for more than the 210 on the internal damage relic.

Thanks you, I looks like T&Z have more resistance then the tanks, but in both cases you are generally hitting on average for more than the 210 on the internal damage relic.

the average for the internal/elemental will show up higher than 210 since it's the set damage + the crits.

i just ran a bunch of dailies as assault and with only 18% of the elemental proc critting, it got up to 240 average damage.

but i think zorn & toth are an exception not the rule, and a gunnery commando will benefit more from the energy/kinetic relic than the elemental/internal

I looked over some logs I have in which I am wearing a campaign internal proc relic and hitting a operations dummy. The purpose was to find out how often the relic procs. I took the total number of seconds in the fight and divided it by the number of procs. I trimmed the few seconds of dead time at the end of each fight off. The proc is called corrosive injection.

Here are the source logs (sorry these are so split up, I was testing something else and labeling them to keep track of what I was changing):

http://www.torparse.com/a/45813

http://www.torparse.com/a/45822

http://www.torparse.com/a/45828

http://www.torparse.com/a/45832

http://www.torparse.com/a/45835

http://www.torparse.com/a/45836

http://www.torparse.com/a/45841

http://www.torparse.com/a/45843

Here is the data I got:

seconds, procs, frequency

279, 36, 7.75

276, 35, 7.885714286

193, 24, 8.041666667

210, 28, 7.5

190, 24, 7.916666667

217, 33, 6.575757576

189, 25, 7.56

198, 27, 7.333333333

196, 22, 8.909090909

216, 30, 7.2

totals

2164, 284, 7.61971831

This seems to indicate that the relic procs on average every 7.6 seconds. If I refer back to the running damage in my original post it looks like the DG proc relic is going to outpace the WH relic pretty consistantly regardless of damage type.

Additionally the energy/kinectic relic is looking like it might have the edge over the internal/elemental, at least for gunnery commandos.

I would be interested in seeing more data on these points if anyone has any other logs or analysis to contribute.

Wow this is great data here. Thanks everyone for the theorycrafting. I wanted to check this myself but I haven't gotten in game yet since 1.5 Yeah, little pissed lol.

Anyway, I guess to expand from here, when we talk about which relics to go with I guess I can see a couple of options with the new dread guard relic info:

1. WH + Kinetic/Energy

2. Kinetic/Energy + Matrix Cube

3. Kinetic/Energy + Clicky

As far as the basic ones. What's everyone favoring?

As far as I can tell, going with Option 1 most of the time and for certain fights with burst phases, switching to option 3 makes the most sense. I'm pretty sure the Matrix Cube is officially dead. Which is sad, felt cool to have and was fun to get. I'd love it if they scaled it up in later patches. Seems silly to not have matrix Cube be part of BiS equipment in some form or another.

Wow this is great data here. Thanks everyone for the theorycrafting. I wanted to check this myself but I haven't gotten in game yet since 1.5 Yeah, little pissed lol.

 

Anyway, I guess to expand from here, when we talk about which relics to go with I guess I can see a couple of options with the new dread guard relic info:

 

1. WH + Kinetic/Energy

2. Kinetic/Energy + Matrix Cube

3. Kinetic/Energy + Clicky

 

As far as the basic ones. What's everyone favoring?

 

As far as I can tell, going with Option 1 most of the time and for certain fights with burst phases, switching to option 3 makes the most sense. I'm pretty sure the Matrix Cube is officially dead. Which is sad, felt cool to have and was fun to get. I'd love it if they scaled it up in later patches. Seems silly to not have matrix Cube be part of BiS equipment in some form or another.

I don't know if there is quite enough data yet to really say if the kinetic/energy is better than the internal/elemental. I would really like to see some parses of people wearing the internal relic as well, but this is my current preference.

This would be my first pick: DG proc relic and DG click relic

This is also a very good combo: DG proc relic and WH relic

I don't know if there is quite enough data yet to really say if the kinetic/energy is better than the internal/elemental.

for gunnery commando and scrapper scoundrels, the energy/kinetic is better.

i don't believe any other class has an increased armor penetration on top of the normal 20% in a raid setting

so for everything else: internal/elemental.

it will naturally benefit some more than others, like assault troopers, balance consulars, dirty fighting smugglers, watchmen sentinels because of all the rolling DOTs that will help keep the proc as close to its cooldown as possible.

for gunnery commando and scrapper scoundrels, the energy/kinetic is better.

 

i don't believe any other class has an increased armor penetration on top of the normal 20% in a raid setting

This link appears to agree with you:

http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/forums/thread-1024-post-24331.html#pid24331

I would still like to see more logs where I can see the individual procs on a few different op bosses but I'm pretty comfortable with the energy/kinetic proc relics being one of the bis relics. I'm going to edit the original post to include the findings.

BTW the Dev Austin Peckenpaugh was wrong in the quote i previously posted. He said with 55% armor reduction of a dummy with 5814 armor would have a DR of 19.5%. I'll repost what he said then show my findings.

Operations training dummies have 5814 armor rating (not visible to you), which translates through our armor formula to about 35% DR. With your setup, you cut that armor rating down by 55%, effectively turning it into 2616 armor rating. [5814 * 0.45 = 2616] 2616 armor rating translates through our armor formula to 19.5% DR.

 

Therefore, an average Tracer Missile would deal 1804 kinetic damage, and a target with 19.5% DR would take 1452 kinetic damage. [1804 * 0.805 = 1452] This is only 3% different than the 1410 you reported, which given your small sample size is well within expectations.

His math is off. He said with full armor reduction that the DR is 19.5%. This probably explains why he also said the damage while low was within 3% of his math which he attributed to RNG. He was wrong on both counts. The real DR based on my non crit hits with full 55% armor reduction vs an Ops dummy is 21.8%. The Kinetic Relic was non critting for 219 full 55% armor reduction. Here's the damage values i got based on armor reduction.

0% armor reduction=182 ( no nothing)

20% armor reduction=196 (no armor piercing cell but using a +5 stack armor debuff)

35% armor reduction=207 (armor piercing cell only)

43% armor reduction=212 (armor piercing cell+2 stack armor debuff)

51% armor reduction=216 (armor piercing cell+4 stack armor debuff)

55% armor reduction=219 (armor piercing cell+5 stack armor debuff)

Note it only takes 1 grav round to apply a 2 stack armor debuff which exceeds the internal relic's damage. Note also that some people were complaining that there was no difference in damage between a 4 stack and a 5 stack when using any of our damage abilities. I believe these were mostly Mercs though. The above clearly shows that they were wrong.

219/280=78.2%

100-78.2=21.8% DR

The DR with 55% armor reduction is 21.8% and not 19.5% vs an Ops dummy. Using the correct math and his post with tracer missle damage you get 1804*.782=1411. Which is only off by 1 and approx a 0.1% difference.

Reports are in that show the internal relic has a very high crit% for Troopers and Gunslingers. It seems to be critting based on Tech crit%. Oddly it seems it's crit% is higher than the Kinetic relic. I ran a few short tests to confirm the behavior and got the following results.

Internal relic crit% 34% with average damage at 266

Kinetic relic crit% 30% with average damage at 267

fyi i did let the armor debuff fall off several times during the Kinetic test. The sample size was very small at 1 test each at approx 12-13 minutes. A previous poster using the Internal relic had 314 hits with 115 being crits for a 36.6% crit rate. I tried an old Kinetic Relic and only achieved a 23% crit rate during several tests. If the crit rate of the Internal relic is significantly higher than the kinetic relic it could beat out the Kinetic relic. I think we need more logs with the new relics as they may be behaving differently than previously. Also need larger sample sizes to determine the crit rates of both types.

-NOTE- Do not use the Elemental or Energy relics as they both have a terrible crit rate for us.

No the crit rate is BS and ignores what you have.

You can be naked and still get a crit rate of 34% or fully geared and get a crit rate of 19%.

The crit rate is just as random on any proc relic.

The only stat it uses for sure is your crit multiplier.

This is nothing new, was the same back when proc relics were only from the fabricator.

Show me some data to confirm whatever you think the relics are doing. I'm not buying off on completely ramdom crit chance. Oh sure small samples will show a huge difference. But adding them all together gets the accuracy that much closer. I understand what you're saying. I just don't agree with you.

From the results i'm seeing the relics may be critting based on ranged crit% and or melee crit%. And or tech and power. Although i suspect it's ranged and melee.

So i just got naked and this is what i got using the Energy Relic.

69 hits with 3 of them being crits for 4.35% crit rate naked and no buffs. http://www.torparse.com/a/59073

This seems close enough as we have a base crit of 5% plus 1% for companion quest for 6% crit total.

FYI i've tested this before with my clothes on and was getting between a low of 7.5% and as high as 17%. The low of 7.5% was without buffs btw.

Fine lets post massive parses for more accuracy.

Plasma Cell

Kinetic DG Relic

Hammer Shots for 23m

35.26 Ranged Crit

42.27 Tech Crit

76.19 Crit Multi

http://www.torparse.com/a/59076/8

Result = 41.84% crit rate, 1.76x crit multi

Plasma Cell

Elemental DG Relic

Hammer Shots for 7m and 9m

35.24% Ranged Crit

42.36% Tech Crit

76.19 Crit Multi

http://www.torparse.com/a/59088/1

http://www.torparse.com/a/59096/1

Result: 16.67 and 19.63% Crit Rate, 1.76x Crit Multi

Here's this thought I'm thinking.

From a players POV there's nothing to say which is better, we only know:

Energy and Kinetic are weakened by armour (but hit harder)

Elemental and Internal ignore armour (but hit weaker)

What if, the devs without making any note to players also had each crit rate link to a different attack type.

FOR EXAMPLE...

Kinetic = Tech Crit Rate

Elemental = Force/Melee Crit Rate

Internal = ???

Energy = ???

Of course that would be really really bloody annoying since the relics don't say anything on them about that but it would make sense...

So that looks to me to be confirming it's using tech crit for the DG Kinetic relic and force for the DG Elemental relic. I just did the same thing using the DG Kinetic relic although a shorter fight. My tech crit was 44.18%. The relic crit at 47.37%. Which is fine given the small sample size. http://www.torparse.com/a/59093

So it may look like this for which relic is using what for crit%

Internal=tech

Kinetic=tech

Elemental=force

Energy=force

Just a theory me and my guildies been working on for a few days now.

BTW what is or was your crit rating at as this may effect the elemental and energy relics. I'm thinking base 5%+1% companion quests+5% from lucky shots and +X% from crit rating.