Evaluation of Space Weapons Modifiers

Several months ago on Qo’nos First City I was witness to a discussion as to which space weapons modifier was best: Acc or Dmg.  The argument was vociferous, vehement, and vitriolic, but the positions were supported only with bald assertions, basic thought experiments, and a lot of name calling.  I think it’s time I got to the bottom of this.

Disclaimer: I don’t usually put disclaimers on these but I thought that this time it was warranted as my results may be very much limited to my build and other very similarly built ships.  The main cause of concern is the bonus to critical hit from weapons specialization, the Borg assimilated module, and the passive bonus from the Romulan reputation system.  Other confounding effects would be the critical bonus from heavy cannons, the critical bonus from antiproton weapons, whether your captain has the accuracy trait, and probably a few others that slip my mind.  As such, I’m not posting this under Game Mechanics Revealed.

Premise

While accuracy is of paramount importance when fighting smaller, faster moving ships, especially other human players with all their various abilities and equipment that increase defense rating, what if you don’t PvP?  Is accuracy, with its bonus to critical hit when there is no chance to miss still best?  Or is it damage?  I consider two experiments: one where I fire at a stationary target, the other where, in a moving ship I fire at another ship moving at the same velocity, such that my target’s defense rating is somewhat higher than 0.

Experiment

The aggressor is armed with 4 rare tetryon dual cannons mk x.  At 8 km and 125 weapons power including the Borg Assimilated Module universal console but no other equipment, the aggressor fires at the unshielded, unarmoured target and dps is recorded.  The modifiers on the dual cannons are [acc]x2, [dmg]x2, [crth]x2, and [crtd]x2.  The aggressor captain has full ranks of Starship Weapons Training, Starship Energy Weapons, Starship Targeting Systems, and Starship Energy Weapons Specialization, along with the bonus 3% critical hit chance from the Romulan Reputation system.

 
Results

Run	[acc]x2	[dmg]x2	[crth]x2	[crtd]x2
1	1606.4	1700.7	1615.2	1799.4
2	1711.1	1652.6	1730.9	1555.1
3	1743	1683.7	1588.1	1717.6
4	1676.3	1709.3	1736	1684.5
5	1625	1594	1635.6	1663.2
6	1681.3	1585.2	1634.4	1792.3
7	1673.6	1608	1710.4	1572.4
8	1595.6	1622.8	1688.9	1668.9
9	1663.5	1595.3	1609.1	1776.9
10	1581.3	1600.2	1614.6	1710.1
Average	1655.71	1635.18	1656.32	1694.04

Analysis

We see here that the average dps of each of the modifier types is quite similar, but there are differences.  Surprisingly, at least to me, the [dmg]x2 came in last while the [crtd]x2 came in first.  But are the differences significant?  Let’s look at the highest and the lowest average dps modifiers, the [crtd]x2 and the [dmg]x2 and do some fancy-pants statistics on them.

Null hypothesis, Ho, is that the means of dps are the same, or u1 – u2 = 0.  Therefore the alternate hypothesis, Ha, is that the two means are not the same, or u1 – u2 ≠ 0.  We will compare the outcome with Student’s t distribution.  There are 10 data points per sample, implying 10 + 10 -2 = 18 degrees of freedom and we are using a two-tailed test, Ta(18) = 2.101 at the 95% confidence interval.  Therefore we will reject the null hypothesis if t > 2.101.

n	10	10
average	1635.18	1694.04
sample standard deviation	52.10499	96.32923
sample variance	2714.93	9279.32
Pooled s^2	4145.316
s	64.38413
t	2.044214

Since t<2.101 the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the 95% confidence interval. But holy cow, is it close (and I might not even be using the right percentage or number of tails for this application).

Conclusion

By the rigorous standards of statistical analysis, there is no difference in hitting power between the four standard space energy weapon modifier types while shooting at a stationary target.  Since not all targets are stationary, [acc] is best since it will help you in those occasional situations where you have to shoot something that is moving quickly.  It is by far the best in PvP when you have slippery escorts and ships with Aegis set.  Consider me a proponent of [acc] as the best modifier.

Since none of the other modifiers was noticeably better than [acc] even when stationary, the second half of the experimental program is cancelled.

Warning: Completely irresponsible conclusion jumping ahead

I find it interesting that the dps of [acc] and [crth] was exactly the same.  I guess that means that with my accuracy rating, the bonus to critical hit percentage was identical to the bonus from [crth].

The difference in average dps as calculated by my combat log parser between the [dmg]x2 and [crtd]x2 was 3.6%.  That’s rather a lot, really.  Sure, it wasn’t quite statistically significant at the level of sampling I performed, but it’s right there.  I’ve made sweeping generalizations about other weapons setups on less.  But what is going on here?

I’ve done some number crunching before about the modifiers, always just from reading the tooltips and doing quick calculations, and each time [dmg] came out far ahead of [crth] and [crtd].  Now once I actually do the experiment it seems that [dmg] is lagging behind absolutely everything else.  It makes me think that I wasted quite a bit of ec on that modifier when cheaper ones existed.  Of course, I did all that math back before I had the Romulan +3% to critical hits, and it seems logical that as a higher percentage of my hits are critical, the more important critical damage becomes.  If both critical hit percentage and critical damage bonus are very low, then of course [dmg] is more effective.  So to follow this train of thought to its conclusion, [dmg] would be most important at low levels as you level up, but once you get things like the Borg console and whatever else that makes your criticals more frequent, [crtd] takes over.