Well, I'm only a 30 Assassin currently, but I was curious as to how I should gear and dye at C grade +. Is focus or Crit damage better? or is it just personal preference? I noticed the dark screamer has focus but less p.atk than the crystal dagger with crit damage. Is the pure p.atk more important in that case?
Also, is +str -con the way to go? or +dex, - con for the crit and speed boosts? Any help on itemization would be greatly appreciated, Thanks in advance!
I can't answer all those questions, but I do know that focus is better than crit. dmg. More hits is always more beneficial than more damage when and if a crit lands. Go for the Dark Screamer.
oh, thanks for the response, I just wasn't sure how much actual crit percent the 81 crit rate grants. I know that the crit damage one is around 140 p.atk on a crit I think? which I'm still in d grade but that almost doubles my p.atk hehe (161 atm). S'why I wasn't sure on that part ^^;
The focus SA increases the number of times you land a critical. The Crit Damage increases the amount of damage you do when and if you land a critical. Landing a crit more often will be more beneficial than more damage but fewer lands.
Let's say you land a crit once during a mob kill, and the crit dmg SA adds that 140 to your damage (which is about doubled on a crit anyway), so you would do 462 damage ((161 p.atk*2)+140) on that one strike. Impressive.
BUT, let's go with focus instead. The p.attk on a Dark Screamer is about 10 less than a Crystal Dagger, so let's ball park that p.atk at 151 instead of 161. With Focus, however, you land a crit 2 times during a mob kill. Double your 151 and you get 302 damage, and landing it twice, gives you a total of 604 damage on those two crits. That's about 30% more damage dealt in the same amount of time it would take to kill that mob.
ALL THESE FIGURES ARE IMAGINARY and are only for example purposes! I didn't' take the time to calculate the exact amount of damage a particular weapon and buff combination will give.
I can't remember where exactly i heard this, but if you take your crit rate statistic and devide it my 10 you then have your crit rate.
Eg; +81 crit rate = +8.1% to your chance to crit. It doesn't seem unreasonable. As my AW often has 250 crit rate (25%), and i doubt he crits more than 1/4(again, 25%) of the time. Assuming this is true, i'll try to give ya a way of quantifying the damage potential of the weapons. I'll use the non-specific numbers i can remember from my own AW;
These numbers aren't based off any timescale, so they're just to give a relative feel for the weapon outputs. Also, if soulshots effect the added p.att of the Soul Seperator SA, this will bump its damage output slightly to 1420-ish.
You can see they're not that different in output above, but you would have to use real numbers to see exactly which is better. I have a feeling the SS might come out on top, as it will have a better p.att.
In summary; the SA doesn't seem to make too much of a difference to your damage output. However, when you factor in which weapon has better p.att it changes things somewhat. Also, crit damage will effect the damage you do with your special blows. Focus does nothing for you in that respect.
I used a focus dagger in C grade, but when I hit B grade then A I used Crt.Damage weapons because I cared more for my blow power than normal criticals.
Honestly just depends what you want, you can PvP and PvE just fine with either. As for Dyes most go for a +CON +DEX -STR setup which is what I currently use.
This all depends, there are dozens of discussions like this.
Mainly Focus is better for PvE where you rely more on normal hits than stabs.
In PVP you rely more on blows to deal damage so Crit. Dmg. is better.
Now that is all pretty logical and simple until you get to the S-grade dagger Angel Slayer. Haste or Crit Dmg? That's more of a personal opinion of what feels better for you.