LOL... I cannot believe i actually thought you knew what you were talking about. For someone who's been presenting a lot of math in your posts i am quite disappointed. Until you understand 'units per second' it's useless going at it with you.
For someone who prides himself in being "open minded", you sure don't act the part. You're far too arrogant for your own good. You're wrong pretty often, no one cares enough to go out of their way to say so since this thread is mostly informative. Feel free to use LOL and LMAO NERD to curb your ineptitude, but I'll just stand here being correct. What an awesome pissing contest this has turn into. Thank you for that.
Absolutely, you'll definitely want at least a +30 AP perk somewhere with bows. However, even with other classes, crits are necessary for DPS. If you do the math using a 3x multiplier, the crit bow will still be ahead. You can think of each % crit as 2% of your total damage for humans/dwarves, and 3.5% for elves. So 12% crit off 100 damage is essentially 24 bonus damage for humans/dwarves (assuming no prior crit). Seeing how base damage tends to be ~80+ damage damage WITHOUT weapons, you can see how crits are great. So unless you're running a 10 dmg 40% crit weapon (which I do sometimes), 12% crit perk tends to be better than 25 damage perk. Crits don't apply to active skills though, so knights are better off with a +20/+25 rune. Also, crits are almost always better than attack speed (assuming weapon type is the same). You do benefit more from % based procs, so if the DPS is really close, then maybe you want to go with attack speed. Think of it this way, 8% extra attack speed off a 15% proc chance is really only ~1% extra total procs. That means with +8% attack speed, you proc one extra time every 100 attacks for a 15% proc skill, and 2 times for a 30%.
I mostly go pure split damage/crit anyway, except for my Dwarfzerker who has additional +15 AP axes in both hands (I could go better, but Runic Curse is maxed and I also have Forge as well on him), and I have a 20 AP/10% Unit Discount Rune on my Elf since he has his 103 damage/15 AP bow (I wish I had your bow... :c), and I'm trying to get a Crit Rune with either AP or extra damage as well, but that's not... Going great. Let me be honest. I find Attack Speed modifiers to be moreso of a final optimization stat than an actual modifier. Chock it to me being oblivious if you wish, but I still find them to be pretty negligible at best.
Fortunately, units >>> heroes and utility >>> damage. By the way, tested Mage thoroughly and I feel that Black Holes are amazing, maybe too much. I know FM don't like when we clain something is OP but, seriously, I can place almost unlimited Black Holes. The nasty thing is to place them at spawning spots making trolls/catapults useless. In addition, this leads to several bugs/crashes/sync errors when co-oping. Maybe a limit of BH at the same time would do it.
Attack speed is negligible for the most part, at least in its current state. High attack speed (40%) comes at the cost of 40% crit, which is hardly worth it. I've said it before and I stand by it: FM needs to balance attack speed more. It's being weighed more by the game than in actual practice. However, you still need to take actual DPS calculations with a grain a salt. You need a level of reliability to the criticals in practice, and these are the intangibles. ie. a 1% chance to do 1000x damage is a great on-paper boost to DPS, but in practice is quite worthless. If you want your crits to matter, they need to be somewhat reliable. Personally, I always shoot for 25%+ total crit so it's something you can count on. 10% quite frankly, is nothing more than a needle in a haystack sort of occurrence. You can think of damage/crit as two sides of a rectangle, with the area being DPS. The best way to optimize total area is to have a square. So the more damage you have, the more crits matter. The more crit you have, the more damage matters. [We can also factor in attack speed as being the depth of the cube, with volume being dps, but attack speed is improperly weighed atm]. Nevertheless, I do have a 3 dmg 40% crit 13% aspd 1 hand axe that I also use. 8 damage ends up being more than 5% aspd in terms of DPS, even with berserker bonuses (about 30 damage). Black holes are quite good yes. Humans are the one class who doesn't have any issue with mana in its current state imo. Perhaps this is the unbalanced part. Dwarves have HUGE mana issues. Elfs have the perfect balance of mana imo with its chance-to-regen-on-kill. It makes it possible to use multiple spells without feeling like an annoying chore as with dwarves, or somewhat "cheating" as with arcane magic (which could use a higher CD or less regen!). Although, I will say as a whole the three races are quite balanced (assuming elven arrow is fixed), so everything gets sorta touchy from here.
Arcane Magic needs more drawbacks. 10 HP are a joke, seriously. Especially when combined with HP regeneration, which is low tier as well. Make its mana cost 0 but increase the damage, maybe even a strong percentage like 50%. The player has to pay a price if he wants full mana at once.
You need both Armor and AP. My Knight's 80 damage with 216 HP, +25% Crit with 30 total AP and 75 Armor. 0 Armor is almost never advisable with Knights, especially if you're using Taunt.
I don't have equipment that good. I'm never lucky with blacksmith even though I spent over 2000 diamonds there I have only one legendary weapon and two legendary runes.
Quality doesn't matter, in all honesty. My Knight's Shield is a Legendary (And gives me 15% of my crit), but you need passable stats. That's more important than having everything Legendary.
I see your point. But I choose my equipment according to my play style although I don't have any legendary items I don't think my stats are that bad. It's just Wave 32 is too damn hard. Orcs have plenty of health and they do good damage and a lot of them attack at the same time I can't get enough units to deal with them in time.
I think what's more important is... are you a sword striker? You don't need ap if you sword strike. Knights aren't very good at normal attacking compared to the other two races anyway.
You're right sword strike is my main move after the first update that's why I don't have any AP. I use the magic research and it helps at the beginning I just need to figure out which units I should summon and I'd like to do that myself since that's the challenge I'll experiment a little.
Re: attack speed, you're forgetting one major thing. Its not just attack speed vs damage output... you get -attack speed AND -stamina attack cost (those are tied together), including -stamina cost on heavy attacks. Of course the raw damage output on -attack speed isn't going to be the equivalent of other stat buffs bc it also comes with different, perhaps less quantifiable traits and more utility along with it. There are many instances where the utility of being able to heavy attack 3-5x as often can EASILY outmatch raw damage output... or the utility of being significantly more mobile because you don't have to worry about attack stamina anymore can also be of greater impact. It also opens up the utility of some of the more stamina heavy weapons like many 2 handers. Its not always a damage # output equation.
Do you actually get 3-5x more heavy attacks with attack speed though? This doesn't seem to be the case always. A +10 vs a +25 attack speed weapon both seem to cost the same stamina. EDIT: Not questioning the usefulness of attack speed, just saying you could do with giving more without sacrificing so much of the other stats.
Of course you're right and the devs are not. And it's pretty obvious you arent questioning the usefulness of aspd. You already declared it's negligible for the most part. I dont even know why Foursaken is still posting here when we have you.
