Sharpshooter: The most overratted passive skill

[lucidlore]

Firstly, I would argue that the 10% crit bonus is the worst archery one, since like Sharpshooter it scales poorly with endgame gear - crit degrades in value the more you have. If you have 15% crit, 10% from Archery is life changing, taking you from 1/6 to 1/4 crits. But you go from 68% to 78%, it's marginal going from 2/3 to 3/4.

If you have your pick of endgame gear, you should easily have well in excess of 50% crit base.

I just wanted to respond to this. Crit doesn't "degrade in value" the more you have, unless for some reason you have more than 100%. Each point of crit provides a linear increase in your dps, regardless of your current crit percent. There are no diminishing returns. An increase in 1%crit will provide you with the same change in dps regardless of whether you're going from 5% to 6%, or 90% to 91%. This is also true for ias, crit damage, dex, and + damage.

[DaemonX]

No, sorry this is incorrect.

Because crit is not a flat gain in damage, it's a probability of doing more damage. Thus it works like the diminishing returns on say, armour mitigation.

If you go from 5% to 10% damage mitigation, you have gone from 95% damage taken to 90% damage taken - 5% more effective. If you go from 90% to 95%, you have gone from taking 1/10 to 1/20, literally 100% more effective. Therefore each percentage of mitigation is more valuable than the last.

Crit operates like this, but in reverse. Going from 5% crit to 10% crit means you crit 100% as often! But going from 70% crit to 75% crit is a boring increase of about 7% chance. In the extreme example, if you crit 95% of the time, and you had gear to bring that up to 100%, would it be worth giving up say, 25% crit damage or 50 dex for that extra crit? Definitely not - you would only notice it 1/20 attacks on average! But if your crit was base at 5%, is 25% crit damage or 5% crit better? Well 5% chance to do 100% damage or 10% chance to 75% damage, clearly the crit is better.

[DaemonX]

I just wanted to respond to this. Crit doesn't "degrade in value" the more you have, unless for some reason you have more than 100%. Each point of crit provides a linear increase in your dps, regardless of your current crit percent. There are no diminishing returns. An increase in 1%crit will provide you with the same change in dps regardless of whether you're going from 5% to 6%, or 90% to 91%. This is also true for ias, crit damage, dex, and + damage.

I am sorry, this is incorrect.

If you are at 5% crit, and you gain 5% crit, you just increase your crit chance by 100%. If you went from 70% to 75%, you increased it by around 7%.

In the extreme case, if you are at 95% crit, is it worth giving up 25% crit damage or 50 dex for that last 5% crit? Well, you'd only notice the improvement 1/20 attacks on average. But if you are 5% crit, and you have the same choice, well 5% chance to crit for 75% damage, or 10% chance to crit for 50% damage, clearly critting more is going to help your sustained dps more. Moreover, you will notice the extra crit 1/10 attacks on average.

[mrparanoid]

I am sorry, this is incorrect.

If you are at 5% crit, and you gain 5% crit, you just increase your crit chance by 100%. If you went from 70% to 75%, you increased it by around 7%.

In the extreme case, if you are at 95% crit, is it worth giving up 25% crit damage or 50 dex for that last 5% crit? Well, you'd only notice the improvement 1/20 attacks on average. But if you are 5% crit, and you have the same choice, well 5% chance to crit for 75% damage, or 10% chance to crit for 50% damage, clearly critting more is going to help your sustained dps more. Moreover, you will notice the extra crit 1/10 attacks on average.

I'm sorry, but lucidlore is correct. You are also partially correct, but wrong in most ways.
The relative gain from sharpshooter indeed diminishes as it gets greater. Yes, a rise from 5% to 10% means you crit twice as much, and a rise from 20% to 25% means you only crit a quarter more.
HOWEVER, the dps gained from critting is the same in both cases, since this is a linear quantity. This is much in the same way as going from 100 dex to 200 dex doubles your damage (1% for each point), but going from 2000 dex to 2100 dex only adds 1/20 to it. In both cases the same amount of dex will add the same amount of damage, but it will be smaller relative to your existing damage.
Your dps is given, roughly, by
weapon_damage * attacks_per_second * skill_mods * stat_mods * (1 + crit_chance * bonus_crit_damage)
where bonus crit damage is your total bonus damage on a crit, including the base 50%.
It's easy to see that the formula is linear in crit_chance (as well as in crit_damage, btw).

[lucidlore]

Sigh ... i get what you're saying, but we are focusing on different things. I am focusing on the change in your raw DAMAGE PER SECOND that additional crit percentage brings. I have this modeled on a dps spreadsheet, and additional crit% will give you a LINEAR increase in your DAMAGE PER SECOND. I am focusing on raw DPS, and for you to tell people crit% has diminishing returns implies that you should not increase your crit% past a certain point because at that point, crit% gives you less and less dps -- this is wrong and bad advice.

If you are at 5% crit, and you gain 5% crit, you just increase your crit chance by 100%. If you went from 70% to 75%, you increased it by around 7%.

So if i have 10 dps and increased my dps by another 10, I've increased my damage by 100%. But if i have 100 dps and increased my dps by 10, i've only increased my damage by 10%. So following your logic, ALL damage boosting statistics have "diminishing returns" because the more dps i gain, the less useful increasing my dps becomes? Therefore, i shouldn't boost my dps if my dps is already too high? How does this make sense ?

For some reason, you are focusing on percentage change in crit% -- WHY ? It has nothing to do with how much your dps changes. If you have 5% base crit, an additional 1% crit will give you the same change to your raw DAMAGE PER SECOND as if you had 90% base crit. This is a mathematical certainty that you cannot deny. There are times when it is necessary to speak of numbers in percentage terms but this is not one of them. Doing what you're doing will only serve to confuse others.