I realized I hadn't been making this clear enough: power rating improves the base damage of all your abilities.
What does this mean for critical hits? Power rating increases the base damage that critical hit calculations (with surge) take into account. Power basically makes all of your damage better across the board. However, you hit massive diminishing returns when you attempt to stack stats in any way on your gear.
How is this applicable to Sniper? Well, I don't recommend stacking stats at any point, but I do love temporarily stacking power rating (relic + adrenal) in order to do massive amounts of normal and crit damage. What stims and adrenals allow you to do is get very close to the power cap. At that point, your crit/surge ratings come into play (scaled off your new base damage) and you end up hitting like an absolute truck.
Basically you want to use the Field Tech gear that BWA has designed for you and stack power rating from consumables and relics on top of that.
How does it work in practice? Ask the people I just triple-killed with Orbital Strike.
How do you know if you reached your power cap?
ReplyDeleteYeah How do I know when im over power cap ?
ReplyDeleteLet's just say that at 1100+ power rating I'm still getting as much "bonus damage" benefit from Power as I am from Cunning (about 0.2 bonus damage/point of each stat). Aim, in comparison, is also giving 0.2 bonus damage/point.
ReplyDeleteThe "bonus damage" aspect that the power rating contributes to is important because it is added directly to the respective base damage ratings (with more or less modifiers) as reflected by your ingame damage tooltips.
The "Power Cap" to me is a soft point where your high crit rating means you'll get less overall benefit from the higher "normal" base damage granted by increased power rating because you crit more often than you fail to crit. Where this point occurs may vary with different specs and on the crit chance/frequency of use for various abilities with more or less natural crit rating.
I have an upcoming post with more details on tooltip numbers and other elements of interest.
As with any stat: you don't want to stack one rating exclusively.
I've noticed a lot of people running around with high surge ratings but miniscule amounts of accuracy and/or power (bad!). As long as you're not doing that you're fine.
The "power cap" is a soft point at which the benefits of adding more power are fewer than the benefits of adding the stat you are otherwise neglecting (i.e. more surge). There are some base goals I've set for myself (based on my current stats/gear) that I'll also be posting a little later.
Short version: Unless you are tweaking your raid gear, keep your stats balanced.
I'll have something more directed at level 50 players in the near future.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the different modifiers power has on our abilities. For example, Ambush gets triple modifier. When I hit my power relic and power adrenal, my Ambush damage (as per tooltip) increases by ~700 damage while my base damage increases by ~200.
ReplyDelete