I think spell power is out performing crit this patch . @Gilliamtherogue did a number crunch somewhere recently .

Here's the baseline way to look at it, without CP's or other gear modifiers. It will give you a pretty good indication where the cutoff lays.

For each 1% you increase spell crit, that's 1% additional chance at dealing 50% more damage. This averages out to 0.5% more damage.

With the exception of Light and Heavy attacks (which benefit more from Spell/Weapon Damage) and Pets (which benefit more from max Magicka), most setups will get about 50% of their damage from their max stat, about 50% from their spell/weapon damage. Convert one to the other (again, appoximation) by taking stat divided by 10.5 and adding it to SD/WD, or by taking SD/WD and multiplying by 10.5 and adding to stat.

For example, if you have 31.5k Max magicka and average 2k Spell damage, that works out to be 52,500 equivalent magicka or 5,000 equivalent spell damage.

So you're getting 40% of your damage from the spell damage portion and 60% from the max stat portion.

Comparing two things, figure if you increased your Crit chance by 10%, you'd effectively increase your damage an average of 5% overall.

Compared to Spell damage or max stat, you'd have to raise your equivalent by 5% or an increase of 250. A set / passive that increased your spell damage by 250 or your max stat by 2625 would match the 10% above.

Again, these are only rough, quick calculations to give you a quick comparison. It doesn't factor in CP's, % boosts, or other things like that. Ideally, these will be affected in similar ways, so this is for quick comparison of one set's equivalent vs another.

Think of it kinda like a gear score. It won't tell you what your DPS will be, but it will give you an idea how it may change based on losing set bonus #1 and gaining set bonus #2.

Mundus stones for dps is currently warrior or lover for stamina or apprentice or lover for Magicka.

Use lover if the total amount of penetration you typically have on a Target is less than 14000.

Example: my DK can provide 5280 penetration from ele drain, 4884 from the light armor passive plus the 100 base pen, and I assume my group support will provide close to 4k pen. This gives me about 14000 pen, so I chose the lover stone. Note I'm not using any spell Erosion points. Alternatively, i could put close to 40 points into spell Erosion and go with the apprentice Stone.

That's typically how I look at it is if you run lover, don't put points into the pen stars. If you run warrior or apprentice, put points into the pen stars.

As far as the topic at hand... You can look at it this way. Crit is a higher risk, higher reward. Spell power is fixed damage, and with lower risk, but also lower reward in some cases.

You are more likely to do more damage for example, with a Magicka DK using burning spellweave. However, if you run mother's sorrow instead, you can achieve higher dps with good crits. You will probably do more damage 8 times out of 10 with spellweave, but the chance to do more is greater with mother's sorrow..

Just test it yourself and you'll see. An example of this is my most recent test, I had about 45% crit on my power lash, for a maximum hit of 32k and average of 17k. However when I swapped to my mother's sorrow, the dps was comparable and sometimes slightly higher, with a much lower maximum at around 28k, but a higher average of around 24k.

In short, spell power is the safe bet, crit is the risk/reward in my opinion. I like to mix things up sometimes.

Thanks for all the input on everyones part.

KanedaSyndrome wrote: »

Do a dps calculation based on your current parameters.

As of this weekend with 5pc juli and 5pc mad tinkerer (i'm slowly collecting burning spellweaver, just dont have all 5 pieces yet) I'm averaging 14-19k on my skeleton at home. (Yeah, pretty dismal score). Theres a couple passives I've learned about today that I need to grab, and a different food I'm going to try. Hoping that with all of that, some more CP, and Burning Spellweave I might be able to bring my DPS up a fair bit