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FAQ

• So what's the big idea here? A: You have a character with a bunch of stats (like strength and power) and characteristics (like damage and critical chance). You're looking at swapping out for some new gear, and you see you're going to get more of one stat but less of another. You want to know what to expect from this change in gear in terms of your damage output, healing output, or damage resistance, without spending a lot of money swapping mods around and smacking the target dummies. This will try to predict the outcome.
• Why do I have to enter in my current critical chance (or whatever) as well as my critical rating? A: because you might have abilities or buffs which increase your critical chance (or damage, or resistance, or whatever) which would otherwise not be correctly accounted for.
• What damage should I put in the damage box? A: Generally, NOT the damage you get from the character sheet, particularly for characters with offhand weapons. The best thing to do for optimizing your character is to look at the output for a parser like MOX and see which ability is doing the most damage, and then hover over that ability to see what the damage range is for it. Similar logic applies to healing abilities.
• How do I tell whether an attack is a "normal" attack or a force/tech ability? A: some are obvious; when in doubt, test it out. If you are a gunslinger, take off a piece of cunning gear. Check the damage range. Now put on a piece of Aim gear (borrow one from a companion). See if the ability's damage changes.
  • Cunning affects tech damage for both smugglers and troopers.
  • Aim affects ranged damage for both smugglers and troopers
  • Willpower affects force attacks for both councilors and knights.
  • Strength affects melee damage for both councilors and knights.
    However,
  • Strength only affects force damage for knights
  • Willpower only affects melee damage for councilors
  • Cunning only affects ranged damage for smugglers
  • Aim only affects tech damage for troopers
• What about alacrity, endurance, and so on? A: This won't tell you about those. Alacrity's effect depends a lot on your ability rotations - if you are spending a lot of time channeling abilities, and rarely run out of energy/ammo/force then you probably want more alacrity, but it isn't easily representable in these numbers. The value of endurance depends on what you're fighting - if the enemy damage is very bursty, you want the endurance to give the healers time to get you back up. If it's just a continuous rate of damage, endurance doesn't get you much besides a margin of safety.
• How sure are you of these numbers? A: We're very confident about the effects of deltas for most things, like critical rating, power, and stats (strength/willpower, etc). The models for surge and defense are not well behaved, however. Accuracy is better, but still not perfect. They're good enough to be confident of when there's a big margin between them and the others in terms of relative value, but there will be some error. You can help by contributing to [Stats data] and [Math] discussions.
• How do I find out my current power, surge, critical rating, etc? A: In your character sheet, hover over bonus damage to get power. Hover over critical chance to get critical rating. Hover over critical bonus to get surge. Hover accuracy to get accuracy rating. Hover over shield chance to get shield rating, shield absorption to get absorb rating, and dodge chance to get defense rating.
• Do I really have to fill in all of those numbers? A: No. You need every number that you're going to apply a delta to. Additionally, if you're a tank, you need defense chance, shield chance, shield absorption, and damage reduction. DPS and healers both need the critical chance and bonus filled in, as well as the current damage/healing. The delta calculations will only be as accurate as the information you put in for the current status of your character.