Lucky or Menacing?

[Pixel8ted]

Depends on what build you want.

If you're going for a crit-build, Lucky is the way to go.

Menacing if you're looking for as much damage as possible.

I prefer Menacing more, personally. Since Menacing gives higher damage at all given times, as opposed to Lucky, which only gives them if you're, well, Lucky.

I highly suggest lucky for mage or melee but rangers should always try to max raw damage as well as summoners. Range already has a ton of crit and going over 100% doesn’t help much.

 

[Mille Marteaux]

I'm thinking of when you take on The Guardian (bonus boss I know, but still, he's got the most armor in vanilla).
When you are fighting him, it doesn't matter how much damage your weapons can do, he has so much armor that you can only do 1hp damage per hit. But when you crit, you do the 2hp instead. So when going up against him, it's best to have all the critical hit-chance you can muster, and a really fast weapon (in my case a gun like the vortex beater). Wouldn't something similar happen with other bosses/enemies with a lot of armor?

On paper, yes. There's a lot of weird min-maxy number crunching that goes into it; you have to consider rate of fire, damage with full Menacing, damage with full Lucky, so on and so forth.

The easiest way to consider it is you want to keep a nice balance of the two - you want to reach as close as possible as you can to 100% critical hit rate without sacrificing too much in the way of your damage modifiers.

However, damage modifiers are much, much easier to come by than critical hit bonuses. When you consider that you can have upwards of 70% from your armor and accessories alone before Menacing, it starts to make sense why some players would prefer an extra 4% chance to double their damage rather than go from 70% to 74%. Like, yes, it's more damage to get that extra 4%, but the opportunity cost of getting somewhere around 2~3 extra damage per hit is a 4% chance of doubling your final damage that's already fairly high to begin with.

Of course, as mentioned, Ranged damage prefers Menacing just because they get ludicrous amounts of critical hit already from their later armors and buff potions. Having 130% critical hit rate isn't giving you a 30% chance of doing triple damage, after all.

It starts breaching into the realm of theoretical DPS, and even casual play in Expert mode isn't really difficult enough to warrant the worry. It may matter more in Master, but for now, use what you like - especially considering Dungeon Guardian can be trivialized with tools like the Cosmic Car Key.

 

[1wolffan]

You guys both bring out good points.

So you could just use the worm scarf and not worry about warding.
(( quote contains more helpful math ))

I am SO glad you brought the worm scarf to my attention. I'm doing a ranger single-player playthrough as a challenge, and I was going to sorely miss that defense in late-game. This just saved me SO much trouble.

The easiest way to consider it is you want to keep a nice balance of the two - you want to reach as close as possible as you can to 100% critical hit rate without sacrificing too much in the way of your damage modifiers.
(( quote continues on, but, saving space ))

If this were a Yahoo Answers, your post would be the "Answered - With the following post" portion of my question. You helpfully summed up everything I was trying to roll around in my head, and helped me sort out the whole plan now.
Thank you SO much.

 

[Augustulus]

I use Lucky for when I'm going for an offense type build and Menacing when I'm either doing Summoner or just want pure raw damage.

 

[qwerty3.14]

Ok... let's do a bit of math here.


Assume a target with 0 defense
Assume a base crit chance of 'c'
Now let's say you damage boost is equal to 'D'
And you crit chance boost is equal to 'C'
To calculate your average 'dph boost' you would use the following formula
dph boost = (1+D/100)(1+(C+c)/100)
This means to maximise your 'dph boost' you should try to get D=C+c
In English this means you should try to get your % damage boost to equal your displayed crit chance to maximize your average dph.
Base damage, Damage boosts from reforging the weapon, and damage boosts from arrow, bullet, rocket damage boosts don't need to be considered since thier damage boosts are applied seperatly.

But what if enemy defense isn't 0? Critical hits are applied after defense reduces damage wich effectivly means they have to fight defense twice, this leans the investment to lean more towards damage boosts. There's the rare case of an enemy with so much defense that crit becomes better since the minimum damage of 2.
But for 99.9% of enemies crits effectively have to deal with defense twice.
I don't want to calculate every single enemy and thier defense to decide how much crit vs damage you should invest especially now base damage plays a huge factor in severe enemy defense is.