Attention Data Miners - Critical Hit Research

Good day,

I am looking for help beating up low level monsters to mine the data necessary to firm up the critical hit equation. Unlike the other equations, this is a statistical process so I need a lot of trials to get half decent confidence intervals.

The sweet spot for getting results quickly involves using a level 20 character to beat up level 8-10 mobs using 9-12 weapon skill. This is the region of the equation where the critical hit rate is the most sensitive, so we can get usable results relatively quickly (unlike level 20 on 20 attacks, which require 25,000 or so attacks to get a usable confidence interval).

If you would like to help, just go hit some mobs and report the results here. I need to know the level of the mob you hit, the number of crits and the number of non-crits, and the attribute level of your weapon skill. Please use a level 20 character.

Also, if you know of a better spot to do this than outside of Yak's Bend, please let me know.

Would you want the weapon to be a specific damage and requirement, ie req9 15-22 sword, as opposed to req13 14-21 sword?

Weapon doesn't matter. I suggest low damage so you can get more hits on a guy before he dies. Weapon req and damage do not affect crit rate at all. What's most important is to make sure you're hitting guys who don't have armor stances, RoFs flying around, or things that give you false negatives.

I'm using the level 10 minotaurs outside of Ice Tooth for my data. Here's what I have so far:

Req 10 Vampiric Hammer, no +15% mods.

12 Hammer Mastery:
289 Crits, 106 Non-crits. 73.1646% crit.

11 Hammer Mastery:
264 Crits, 131 Non-crits. 66.8354% crit.

10 Hammer Mastery:
255 Crits, 140 Non-crits. 64.5570% crit.

Victo's Maul, 15^50.
9 Hammer Mastery:
199 Crits, 196 Non-crits. 50.3797% crit.

Kind of surprised there's such a sharp drop between 10 and 9, to be honest.

@Yunsoo: That caught me on my first run. I was wondering why I was C-spacing for 60 when Wild Blow did 46.

Would something like a candy cane sword be easier to use because the damage is exactly the same unless a crit?

Couldn't you just test on the Isle of the Nameless or am I missing somethign? I would suggest making videos too of everything if you have the space.

I believe Ensign wanted to avoid testing on level 20 monsters so that he can reduce the amount of data he needs in order to get a result that falls within the 95% confidence interval...

The reasoning goes like this.

Beating on level 20 barrels in Isle of the Nameless gives you data, but you need a lot of it because things change so little. For example, is the crit rate at 12 weapon mastery and same level 17% or 18%, or something in between? You would need tens of thousands of data points to make that distinction; and even if you did, what does it mean to anything else?

If you're hitting level 8-10 targets with 9-12 weapon mastery, the disparities are large enough that you'll be getting crit rates in the 60-90% range for most of those, and each level difference in weapon or mob level will give very big differences in crit rate. For example, the difference between hitting a level 9 monster vs a level 10 monster with 12 weapon mastery is over 10%. Contrast that with hitting a barrel, where the difference between 11 weapon mastery and 12 weapon mastery is 1-2%. Because the differences between each level / weapon mastery point are so large, we can start to draw conclusions from relatively few samples, which is what makes this experiment realistic.


Yeah, pretty much; when you're crit rates are low and don't change much with attribute investment, you need really tight 95% confidence intervals (<1% crit rate), but when your crit rates are really high (as close to 100% as I can get them and scaling fast) then you can draw useful conclusions even with 3-4% on your confidence intervals.

I lack the time to whack a bunch of monsters, but I will contribute something to help with the testing: I'm reposting my critical hit mod. Using this mod, critical hits should look like the bottom picture here -- hard to miss.

Ooh, nice animation. I may just try that if I ever want to see them. I believe there was another animation that made it more obvious too.

=IF(((0.05*2^((((8*LevelA)+(4*WeaponSkill)+6*MIN(W eaponSkill,(LevelA+4)/2)-(15*LevelD)-100))/40))*(1-(WeaponSkill*0.01)))+WeaponSkill*0.01-WeaponCritChance>0,((0.05*2^((((8*LevelA)+(4*Weapo nSkill)+6*MIN(WeaponSkill,(LevelA+4)/2)-(15*LevelD)-100))/40))*(1-(WeaponSkill*0.01)))+WeaponSkill*0.01-WeaponCritChance,0)

?

Churrir Fields (next to Kamadan) has Lvl 5 practice targets that could help.

Good luck with the research, but I suggest you change the topic title so more people realize what it is for. When I read the topic title, I thought of the 3 stooges.

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Data_Mining

To prevent having people expecting info/help on that quest, a new topic title may be useful.

This has been posted before. Plug some numbers in and you can see that it's obviously incorrect.

There isn't a sharp drop, the error bars are just large. Thanks for the help M'Aiq

No problem. I was kind of wondering what the deal was with 10 Hammer Mastery, if my warrior was just "feeling it" or what. Think I should give it a second run? I'm not sure if 395 hits per skill level is enough.

There's a 95% chance that the critical hit rate with 10 weapon mastery against level 10 targets is between 59.74% and 69.37% based on that data.

I'm combining it with some of my own data to get the bounds down. Even wide error bars are useful though, as I'm trying to fit some tight data points (the 12 WS / 10 target) and the looser ones still provide a sanity check.

Have you got any idea what the difference in critical hit chance between 14 and 16 mastery is with level 20 vs. 20 ?\

Also are you going to adapt your data to lvl 20s?

I am liking this idea, its actually gettin us all together well saying that im not able to get on gw atm. I suppose you could probably gave asking them on wiki, they might be kind enough?
Nice plan on the mod too forgot about using that one

The difference in critical hit chance between 14 and 16 mastery, 20 vs. 20, is something like 2.5% - 3%. I haven't seen any experiments that show the difference with reasonable error bars.

I'm doing experiments on low level monsters, but ultimately any model based on that needs to predict 20 vs 20 results as well. 20 vs 20 numbers are more of a sanity check; your model needs to fit them, but realistically you can't get enough data to differentiate different hit % models from 20 vs 20 alone.