Crit or AP

A small post on Crit and AP While it's cool to get 4000 AP, it doesn't so much without crit or hit. And while it's cool to get 50% crit, if you only have 500 AP those crits won't hit very hard. Try to find a good balance in crit and attack power, or spell damage. Let's have a quick example. Your base hit does 500 damage. You have zero crit, and zero AP. Now you could add 26 points worth of gems (remember from earlier?), you could 52 AP, or 26 Crit rating. 26 Crit rating = 1,177 % Crit chance. 52 AP = 52/14 = 3,714 Dps Lets say your base attack speed is 2.5 seconds, nothing unreasonable. This means that your 52 AP adds : 3.714 * 2.5 = 9,29 Damage per hit. While 1.177 % Crit adds : 500 * 0.01177 = 5,885 Damage per hit. So the extra Attack power would benefit you more than the crit would. Now, let's presume your attack speed is 1.5 seconds, like an offhand attack would. 3.714 * 1.5 = 5,57 Damage per hit. The bonus from Crit should be the same as your offhand has the same damage. Interesting! Now it seems the 1.177% Crit would actually add more damage to your weapon. I know, i know, there's also hit rating, glancing blows, parry, dodge, block, poison procs, cooldowns, offhand doing only 50-75% damage and a whole load of other lovely factors that you could add into the calculation. But let's keep it simple for the sake of example shall we? Summary In the end it comes down quite simply to how hard each of your hits are, and how much damage 1 crit adds vs how much 1 DPS adds to your blows. As a rule of thumb you can keep this in the back of your head (though it's not 100% accurate, it works ok most of the time) Assume +1% crit = +1% of your normal hit damage. In the example above that would be If 1 dps * attack speed is less than what the crit bonus would give you, get more crit. Otherwise get more AP. Lets look at the above example again, but this time we presume a normal hit does 1000 damage. (you got better gear, and a lot more attack power) The bonus damage given from +AP will still be exactly the same. 3.714*weapon speed = 9.29 at 2.5 speed, or 5.57 at 1.5 speed. However 1.177% crit gives : 1000*0.01177 = 11,77 bonus damage per hit. You see where it's important to get both stats raised up?