Merman's vs BrutalFollow

I have this recollection of reading a post describing the merits of merman's earring over brutal earring for multi-hit WS within the past few months here on the THF forums. (Nope, not the merman's vs delta thread.) I've dug through several pages of threads, which has lead me no where. I'm starting to think the whole thing was a bad hallucination... I asked Raenryong and Deadgye about it. (I had thought Deadgye was the poster.) Raen and I briefly crunched some numbers and didn't see a benefit. Deadgye said he hadn't posted it, but suggested I mention it here.

So... does anyone else remember this mystery post? From what I remember it wasn't what the thread was originally about, but a derail. The argument was something along the lines of... since a Brutal can only proc twice at most on DE, because of the probabilities, the ATT boost from Merman's gave a more consistent boost to the WS.

/em puts on flame retardant suit.

I thought this topic way too coincidental unless you posted it <_<

I take that the 19%~ figure comes from 1/5.2 = 19.2%~?

5.2 being the fTP before and 1 being the effective added fTP from a DA of course?

This means that if you are using WS gorget and /nin, Brutal will be even worse? Using the exact fTP figure, you'd be looking at

1/6.2875, or ~15.9% damage added from DA, for a total of 0.795%~ damage over time?

Seems awfully low... maybe my perceptions have been flawed all of this time, but this would mean outside of zerg-grade attack buffs, 5atk > 5% DA on DE/Evis (less so for Evis due to lower fTP on first hit)...

EDIT: Would you not also have to account for DA "interference", ie if a DA occurs instead of a TA? I'm not sure how I would model this honestly.

EDITAGAIN: Because my abilities at probability math are solely limitted, would you not have to also include the fact that the DA has 6 opportunities to proc (with a maximum of 2 in this case) and so it would have a greater increase over time?

Or would it not...

I feel out of my depth whenever probability comes up :(

Edited, Sep 19th 2009 3:23pm by RaenRyong

Edited, Sep 19th 2009 3:27pm by RaenRyong

In dancing edge brutal and merman's earring are both really close. Milich pointed out the math pretty well so I won't rehash it. In general the earring choices for a multi hit weaponskill for thief are

In no particular order

Delta -- Pixie -- Merman's -- Brutal -- Hollow

then whatever else you may choose.

Myself, I weaponskill with pixie and hollow earring. For my set the 3 dex of my pixie earring breaks 2 dex/accuracy tiers so I get a full 1% accuracy boost from it, and it also adds 1 base damage via a broken wsc tier to boot! I end up with 132 dexterity and 54 charisma meaning a wsc of 50 versus 49 with an attack earring. The 1% accuracy does the rest.

Hollow earring is a duh, and there is no comparison. It's not a viable option for everyone because many players have one of the other apocalypse nigh earrings (or have yet to beat AN) but if you have it, 2 dexterity + 3 accuracy is a blowout of any other earring in multi hit, and even more power to a sneak attack stacked due to the dex.

Even if I didn't break 2 acc tiers I'd still use the pixie anyway. It was the first item I ever got out of HNM, and even though it wouldn't be as optimal it holds a special place in my heart with the memories attached. Not to mention being a king behemoth drop even if it is sold and etc when a shell doesn't need it, it's still rarer than brutal. It's a personal thing for me, but a strong item nonetheless.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer:
Unrelated side comment on math calculations. If you don't care about formulacraft you may skip the below section with no consequence.

/end disclaimer
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Coincidentally, when I finally uncurse the heca subligar +1 I've got stored away in my moggie house the delta earring won't break any new wsc tiers over the pixie. I'll be at one of those &^%$# you plateaus where alpha screws me over. With pixie earring I'll have a wsc that lands on 64 before the alpha modifier, and with delta earring I'd land on 65 pre alpha modifier. However...

64 x 0.83 == 53.12 floored to 53
65 x .83 == 53.95 floored to 53

For those of you wondering wtf I'm talking about, the secondary modifiers of a weaponskill aren't quite so simple as JUST the mods of the stats. Based on your level there is a second percentage taken out that's independent on the first, and both are floored before the next calculation. The values based on level are listed on wiki here , and since I'm level 75 the alpha value shaves off 0.17 of my secondary mods. It works like this

(132 x 0.3) + (54 x 0.4) == 61.2 (this is floored to 61 even)
61 x 0.83 (alpha) == 50.63 (this is again floored to 50)

Note: Flooring means rounding down to an even integer

The alpha value isn't usually a concern and only affects the wsc once every 6 numbers (with one exception), but when you get to that point you need to break TWO wsc tiers to raise base damage by 1. And in my case after I get my final weaponskill leg, I'll hit the barrier and the delta earring won't be enough to overcome it so I'll still use pixie then. As a reference, the wsc tiers you would run into this are (from highest to lowest, with a range larger than you should ever require)


Even there there is an exception to the 6 apart rule (47 is that exception), but it's a basic trend that's true throughout most of the equation. When your wsc lands on one of those numbers after calculating secondary mod percentages from stats, raising the wsc by 1 will result in the same base damage as the previous tier because the increase was lost to the alpha rounding. At this time I neither own nor plan to get a delta earring. Barring future changes (always possible) for my character at its current state, the pixie earring will always be better than delta earring in dancing edge. This could change with new updates, but as it stands that's what I'm looking at.

Edited, Sep 19th 2009 5:51pm by Melphina