Crit or Double Attack

[Hissori]

<p>I'm having a hard time figuring out which way to go with equipment for my monk. Is DA more important to monks? Or is Melee Crit? Is sacrificing 12da for 6mc a better choice? I don't have the equip to parse bothe equally, just wondering if anyone had, which is more important to monks.</p>

[Couching]

<p>In general, melee crit is better than DA. But 12 DA > 6mc for sure in your question unless you can cap your DA with group buff or gear proc.</p>

[Turb]

<p>Well I would usually defer to Couching's view as an expert, but my personal take is that DA is more useful to me than melee crit.   I do maybe 75% of my damage through autoattack, so DA is very important to me, and any DA can also crit, so the benefit is linked of course <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p><p>Need to find a maths guru ... any takers?</p>

[Morrolan V]

<p>I did some math, using the critical damage formula that's been around for a while on the forums.</p><p>What I found surprised me quite a bit.  For high end monks (with Mythicals and good raid drop weapons), crit is indeed better than DA, but it's quite close.  I expected melee crit to have a more significant advantage.</p><p>In general, since critical damage depends on the top end damage of the weapon or CA, the impact of an increase in melee crit is VERY sensitive to the damage spread of your weapons.  (Spread is the top end damage of a weapon divided by the bottom end.)  The higher the spread, the greater the impact of increased crit.</p><p>My conclusion on doing the math is that, for me, using 2 5x spread weapons, 1 melee crit = about 1.1 double attack.</p><p>Here's the math:</p><p>Assumptions:</p><p>50% of damage output from auto attack, weapons 5x</p><p>40% of damge from CAs (average of 3x spread)</p><p>10% of damage from procs (average of 3x)</p><p>At these numbers, adding 1 melee crit (if you are not capped or into diminishing returns) will add about 0.55% to your damage output.  (0.65% to autoattack, 0.475% to CA and proc)</p><p>Adding 1 double attack will add exactly 0.5% (1% increase to autoattack).</p><p>So 1 melee crit = 1.1 DA.</p><p>If your weapons are significantly worse than this (under 4x spread), such that the effect of melee crit is reduced, then it gets closer to 1 to 1.  The fact that melee crit increases virtually all of our damage output, whereas DA only adds to our autoattack, though, should keep crit at least on par with DA in almost all realistic situations.</p>

[Hissori]

<p>Thanks guys, I appreciate the insight. I was struggling with the shard armor. For dps I use a full set of tier1 shard armor (fighter set, not the brawler set). I was doing the math on changing to tier 2 shard armor, granted there are added benefits for tier 2, but I was just trying to figure out the pure best for dps ignoring the crit mit benefit. Right now against a guild hall dummy I'm about 2500 give or take 100. I'm using SOD and ROK Epic not Myth. What gets me is the nice da proc from the tier 1 chest piece. That in combination with my Epic da proc gets me between 54 and 62% da and both are up more often then not.</p><p>The difference between tier 1 and tier 2 are the following:</p><p>Tier2 gives +10 dps, +6c crit, -5 da, (- chest da proc), +18 str,  +3 haste over the Tier 1 armor. So thats how i figure losing the da proc on the chest and the -5 da "could possibly" be worse then the benefits of the tier 2 armor (for pure dps ignoring all the other benefits).</p><p>But thanks for the numbers, it gives me other things to evaluate.</p><p>cheers!</p>