Recent discussions on the change to helpless states got me thinking, and I realized that while I knew critical profile is an important-to-dominant factor in DPS, I didn't have a good sense for how it compared to other sources of damage. What's the real difference between a Khopesh and a Scimitar? I have a good sense for how much Power Attack adds, or Holy, or Holy Burst -- but no intuitive sense for how iCrit compares to Power Attack for added DPS.

So, I took a quick look at base damage across a variety of the top DPS builds. Generally speaking, a fully-raid-buffed DPS build will do somewhere in the neighborhood of mid-60's on-hand, mid-50's off hand for base damage if TWF, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 for top-tier THF builds. There was some variation, but it's in the 10% range on base damage among the variants trying to be DPS builds.

This makes the calculation pretty straightforward! I'm going to define something I'll call a "critical unit", which is the component of critical damage above base damage done across the d20 span. So, for example, a critical profile of 20/x2 is "one unit" -- the weapon gets one extra dose of base damage, on a roll of a 20. 19-20/x2 and 20/x3 are each two units: the first gets on extra dose of base damage on 19 and 20, and the second gets two doses on a 20 -- in each case, the total is two. 19-20/x3 is 4 units, 15-20/x2 is 6, etc. A Frenzied Berserker with a Khopesh and improved crit maxes out at 14 units: 4 for 17-18/x3 and 10 for 19-20/x6.

So, we'l use 60 for TWF and 100 for THF as our base damage reference. Each critical unit adds to the overall average damage of a weapon, in about the same amount as if you simply added basedamage/19 to the base damage for each critical unit. So, a critical unit for twf is worth about the same amount of DPS as adding +3.15 to the base weapon damage. A critical unit for THF is about the same as adding +5.26 to base damage.

Let's put this to use in a practical example. I've got iCrit:Slashing. How much better are Khopeshes than Scimitars? Well, the Khopesh has 2 more critical units (8) than the scimitar (6), which is equivalent to about +6.3 point of damage. So, if we were talking about the deciding between a +5 Holy Scimitar and a plain ol' +5 Khopesh, we'd choose the Holy Scimitar -- barely. But wielding a Khopesh with Power Attack *off* is going to do slightly more damage than wielding a similar Scimitar with Power Attack *on*.

How much better is a Falchion's crit profile than a Greataxe's, with Improved Crit? 2 Units, or about the same a 10.5 points of base damage. Again, roughly the equivalent of an (unmodified) power attack.

What's the difference between a Khopesh and a Kama, in the hands of someone with iCrit? 6 critical units, worth 18.9 points of average damage. A simple +5 Khopesh does more damage than, say, a +5 Shock Kama of Greater X Bane in the hands of a DPS build.

Of course, this doesn't even start to take into account Burst effects, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader -- just wanted to share my napkin-scratches with the rest of the class.