Power Rating

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.

Crit Rating vs. Power

I see this question all the time. Read on for an outline of the common arguments in favor of each rating and a glimpse of my perspective on this important aspect of Sniper gameplay.

02 Stats and Ratings and Mods, oh my!

I want to pause here to tell you something very important: most of this information is available on the in-game character sheet! If you ever need to quickly determine which rating does what, you won't even have to come back here to look it up at launch. Currently, TOR's character sheet is quite open about what each stat and rating does and how it works. Although the calculations are not totally transparent, you can get a general idea of which rating impacts which stat and produces which potential output.

You just have to know where to look (i.e. mouseover). If you're in weekend beta, take a moment to hit 'C' to open the character sheet and play around with different tabs (ranged, tech, defense) and mouse over the different stats and ratings that are listed there. It's a good character sheet and if you've never played the game there's a lot to learn. Knowing how to both use your character sheet and read armor ratings (and/or enable comparative tooltips) will help you make good decisions about your gear as you level. It's pretty common to be wondering "what's better?" now and again.

I'll cover more of that as we continue.