Player stats and other incomprehensible gobbledegook!

[smilodon]

Coffee shop time and free WiFi means......... another mega post :sad:

There's been some discussion in Team Speak about all the various stats we see on weapons and gear and therefore on our character sheets. The concept of adding numerical values to character traits isn't new and isn't restricted just to MMO's like Star Wars. It's the standard method for defining how many Orc's we can smash on the head before we pass out, how easy we find it to pick the lock on the local Inn's cellar door or what our chances are if seducing the Blacksmiths daughter. However different games use different stats and even use the same named stat in a different way. In one game Willpower is the stat associated with how powerful your magic spells are but in another it covers your ability to negotiate better prices in shops! So how is it implemented in Star Wars?


First of all Star Wars is a new game. There are currently no fancy add ons for the game that let us record detailed logs when we fight battles and so exactly how one statistic works compared to another is still open to some debate and disagreement. Also certain stats have changed their names and not all the web based resources we can reference have updated their terminology. Even the official web site isn't totally up to date in this respect. So we're working a little blind, however there is quite a bit we can be clear on. The rest I will just make up as I go along :norty:

Primary Statistics


Endurance: All classes will have endurance. This is pretty straight forward in that it directly links to your health bar. The more endurance you have the longer you will survive in a fight. When considering endurance think about how much you get hit by NPC characters or Republic players? My character is a Sniper and my companion is used as my Tank, so I don't get hit much at all. Therefore I might value endurance less than a Sith Warrior Jugernaught who get's hit all the time. Endurance is still important though and should be a priority stat for all of us.


Aim, Cunning, Willpower and Strength. The Bioware developers have stated (I cannot find the damned link) that each piece of gear and weapons are designed for one of the four primary classes (the Imperials and Republic have the same four classes they just name them differently). In the past other MMO's have designed gear that has confused players about who it is meant for. Some while ago in WOW there was an issue with Paladin Knights. Paladins are heavy armour wearing Knights with shields and hammers and such like. They were built to wear thick plate mail gear. However it was discovered that in some situations (healing) they were actually better off wearing priests cloth robes! Blizzard fixed this anomaly but not before many paladins had started rolling need on gear designed specifically for Priests.


Therefore in Star Wars each of the four primary stats designates an item for a specific class. Aim is for Bounty Hunters, Cunning is for Agents, Willpower is for Inquisitors and Strength is for Warriors. By design a character will loose more of their ability to survive and fight by taking a piece of gear with the 'wrong' stat on it than they will gain from that 'wrong' stat. For example an Agent might consider getting some gear with Aim. They reason that as a shooter of guns from range it would be good to have a statistic that  Increases your aptitude with ranged weapon. However by equipping some +Aim gloves they will have to discard their +Cunning ones. The loss of cunning will always hurt more than the benefit from getting some +Aim. So the advice is always take the stat that is designed for you character.


The use of primary stats also works for companions. Each companion will technically be one of the four classes and will benefit from the stat for that class. So Mako the companion for the Bounty Hunter is considered to be an Agent. Therefore you will notice that all her starting gear is +Aim. You should make sure to keep it that way. The same is true for all other companion classes.


Presence. Presence is an odd stat that has no clear counterpart in other games. It makes your crew character more effective. Exactly how that works isn't certain. It's probably worth having if you find it but treat it with suspicion and don't loose to much of your other stats getting it.


Expertise. This is a stat that is built for PvP. Outside PvP it's worthless. If you don't PvP you probably won't see gear with this stat as +Exp gear usually comes as a reward from PvP play. Basically it makes you more powerful against other players by increasing the damage you do and reducing the damage done to you. It works in a similar way for healing as well. If you PvP it's useful although the forums are busy discussion how useful or not it might be. In WOW expertise was pretty crucial for my character, but that's no real indicator of what it means in SWTOR.



Ranged, Melee, Tech and Force. All attacks fall into four types.

Ranged is fairly obvious in that it helps with damage from guns and rifles but not all damage done at range is ranged damage  :blink: (see Tech & Force below).

Melee is all about you hitting stuff and the more melee damage you do the more you hurt mobs when you punch, kick, stab and head-but them. However as with ranged not all attacks you might think of as melee actually are.

Tech Damage is what Bounty Hunters and Agents do as they are not Force Sensitive. While some of their attacks are ranged and melee, they also might be tech damage. Grenades, exploding probes, healing shots, Kolto Bombs, flame throwers etc are based on Tech damage. So how much ranged damage you do won't be the thing to worry about when you chuck in a Nuclear Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. That will be Tech damage.

Force. Inquisitors and Sith Warriors are far more stupid that Hunters and Agents and so don't understand tech damage. Lucky for them though they are force sensitive and so can use force damage. Some of their attacks (sorry I don't play a space pixie character) will do force damage. The Force stats will be important for them.

Exactly how you distribute your stats between these four types of damage is up to you. Obviously an Agent Sniper won't do much in the way of melee or force damage so can ignore those stats. However a Sith Marauder might well want to choose them over ranged and tech.

One last point. Tool tips will describe gear that gives extra tech power as +tech power for example. Likewise for the other types of attacks. But there is a stat that just appears as +power (i.e. +20 power). This basically don't distinguish between power types and will improve them all equally.

Damage types
Kinetic, energy, internal and elemental powers. The only thing worth remembering is that energy and kinetic damage is reduced by wearing armour, Internal and elemental isn't. Therefore if you are fighting a Trooper (wears heavy armour) all of your elemental and internal damage attacks will get through while some of your kinetic and energy attacks won't. Therefore if you have a choice between i)Energy Bomb = 100 damage and ii)Elemental bomb = 100 damage shot make sure you use Elemental on  armour plated Boba Fett, but you can spank Yoda on his wool robed bottom with either type.

Secondary Statistics
 
Critical. Damage and healing do a certain amount of damage/healing. That damage is usually defined as being between an upper and lower limit. So the Blast of Horrific Stench might be shown to do 100 -120 damage. This means it will hit for anything between those two figures. However now and then the spell will hit for maybe 170 - 200 damage. It is said to have 'critically hit' it's target. How often it does this is based on the crit chance. A 20% tech crit chance means tech based attacks will crit one time in five on average. A 33% melee crit chance will occur about one in three. Doing these big spikes of damage but not being sure when they will occur has good and bad features we will look at in a bit.


Surge. This defines how much extra damage these crits will do. The more surge you have the bigger these damage spikes will be.


Accuracy. You won't normally have 100% chance of hitting your target. The higher your accuracy the less chance you have of missing. When you reach 100% accuracy all your attacks will hit. Accuracy over 100% will start to reduce your enemies defence ability (see below)


Alacrity. This statistic defines how fast you can fire off certain attacks. Some abilities take several seconds to activate. Higher Alacrity makes these cast times quicker, meaning you can fire off more of them in a given time and do more damage.

Bonus Damage/Healing. This one is a bit confusing. It would seem that bonus damage adds additional damage to all attacks but helps more with the more powerful attacks than it does with the weaker ones. So if you're play style concentrates on your big powerful shots this might be useful. Remember though that if you equip an item with bonus damage it will have to have less of some other stat to compensate So you gain in one area but loose in another. Choose wisely Padawan.


Armour rating. Reduces the damage done by kinetic and energy attacks based on the armour you're wearing. Remember though that it does nothing to help with Internal or Elemental attacks. Still a crucial stat for tanks who take lots of damage.


Defence Chance. Your chance to completely avoid the damage from an attack i.e. you duck, dodge and jump out of the way.


Damage Reduction. General ability to avoid damage not based on avoiding the attack or what type of armour you're wearing. Works equally well against all types of attack so offers protection against elemental and internal damage that armour based defence doesn't. So it's useful if you plan to go kick some Jedi Consular ass as their damge will be reduced by this stat.

Armour Types

There are three types of armour, light, medium and heavy. Light armour protects the least, then medium and then heavy. Certain classes can wear certain types of armour. Inquisitors can only wear light armour. Agents can wear medium armour. Oddly the ability to wear medium armour automatically gives the Agent the ability to wear light armour too, although they would never normally want to. A Bounty Hunter can wear heavy armour and seems able to wear both medium and light as well. Again I can't see a reason why a BH would ever want to wear medium or light gear. To re-enforce the idea of one type of gear for each class all +Aim gear is for Bounty Hunters and all Bounty Hunters can and should wear heavy armour, so unsurprisingly all +Aim armour is also heavy. Similarly all +willpower is light armour and only light armour wearing Inquisitors need +willpower. So there is no heavy +willpower gear available.


What statistic for what role?

Clearly the defence chance, defence reduction and armour rating are going to be important stats for reducing damage. If you find your character or your companion dropping dead all the time. It might be worth looking at improving these stats. It's particularly important if you play style means you expect to get hit. For example my Sniper doesn't plan on getting hurt, apart from occasionally getting gun smoke in my eyes. I play in such a way that my companion always gets the damage. My job is to kill stuff as fast as possible from 30 yards away. Therefore I don't bother much with endurance, armour, and defence stats on my character. However if you're a Powertech Bounty Hunter that's always in the thick of battle and  using Mako as a healer, you might decide that defence is the best offence.... or something like that and stack up on defence and armour stats.

If you want to improve the damage you do you will have to choose between two alternative paths or decide to mix them together. Basically you can go with the damage bonus, +power route or the critical, surge route. Most gear choices will either favour these damage bonus stats or the critical stats.

Basically damage bonus and +power will improve your damage across the board. You'll find that all your damage will improve but not by a huge amount. You will be better at doing consistent even damage. We call this flat damage. On the other hand if you go for critical and surge you will increase the times you do critical damage and the amount of extra critical damage you will do. This will lead to you doing lower base flat damage but every now and then you'll do really big attacks that do massive damage. This is a more spiky form of damage and less predictable. We call this burst damage as it comes in bursts.

There is an argument that for PvP and levelling burst damage is good as it can destroy an enemy fast and we all have some abilities that we can use that will guarantee a critical hit when we choose. So a stealthed assassin could sneak up on an enemy cast a guaranteed crit ability and then use their most powerful attack to take a huge chunk out of the enemy. They already have big powerful bust damage attacks and critical hits can make these very, very powerful indeed. Then again if you have a melee, heavy armour character with a healer companion you might not have to rely on a huge opening attack. You can stay on your feet far longer than an Agent or Inqusitor and so doing more manageable flat damage could be preferable.

On the other hand in raiding it might be better to do more consistent and predictable damage all the time. You will be better able to manage your damage output and not to grab aggro from a tank by mistake  due to suddenly doing three critical hits in a row!


Finally while levelling up a character your stat choices won't be critical. You can make mistakes and not make your character unplayable. As you level and gain experience you'll see where you character excels and where it struggles and can adapt your gear choices to improve your effectiveness. As and when you are ready to raid there will be many players far more experienced that me to guide you towards the best set up for your class and role.

Enjoy.

[OldBloke]

I'm really appreciating these posts, Smilo, so many thanks for taking the time to research and share. Much appreciated :thumb:

[Lorr]

Thanks for this, its really helpful. But why do you keep dissing the space pixies?

[smilodon]

Because I've never been good enough to play mages, wizards, casters etc and so am just bitter and twisted

[Twyst]

am just bitter and twisted

:g: :g: :g: