No, it doesn’t at all. As said, correlation is not causality. Parsing on world bosses (or even dummies, even if dummies have less external noise taken into account) as a reference to validate a theory is a huge methodological mistake, this is basically how we are lied to with statistics in real life as well, except that here, the data is evidently even more broken.
If you want to know the real difference between 2 agents and don’t want to dive into simulations, you don’t have any choice but to rely on napkin maths, which will already be way more accurate than throwing out random parse claims with no context at all.
Sarah Skelly is obviously better for your build than any crit power agents if your crit chance is too low, there’s no debate in that fact, but there’s no need to invalidate our agent bis lists claimed here since it just takes common sense to conclude that a crit power agent is obviously not a good pick without relevant stats. Moreover, a “bis” list is just that - best in slot, it implies that the agents labeled as bis have been calculated for the best gear available in the game.
No, the changes with a non-maxed gear actually have LESS impact than changes with a maxed out gear, if we’re talking about actual numbers and not relative damage increases / decreases. I can prove it very easily by modifying base stats on my simulators and calculating the damage difference between agents - the less overall stats i’ll have, the smaller the difference will be if the scaling remains the same (meaning, a crit power agent will obviously become way less valuable with less crit chance).
Yes, as i’ve stated, i did not implement anything for pistols. But the purpose was to see what was the damage difference between, for instance, Oleg Yablokov, the Quartermaster and/or Sarah Skelly, for a given build.
For example, for a Maul / Shunt build, Sarah Skelly sims 32 DPS more than the Faction Quartermaster; Oleg Yablokov sims 14 DPS more than the Faction Quartermaster, and Sarah Skelly sims 18 DPS more than Oleg Yablokov - out of a base of ~35k DPS. Here, the difference is so small that, at this point, it can even be attributed to rounding. Also, those differences are multiplied by 1.1 if you take into account Exposed for example.
The biggest difference in agents so far is attributed to druid 10% agents, which beat the 3rd worst agent in a given build by 1.5 - 1.8k DPS.
I’ve took a sim sample with less stats for Maul / Shunt build: 1k combat power, 20% crit chance and 120% crit power, and observed a 206 DPS difference when comparing Sarah Skelly to Faction Quartermaster. I’d argue that hammer’s main bulk of damage obviously comes from power abilities, likely more than any pistols builds considering how the specialty works and how pretty much every active and passive used adds to the power ability contribution: Seethe + Outrage allows for more demolishes and more rage, Brawler’s Belt gives more rage, Pneumatic Maul gives “extra rage”, etc…, where rage buffs the damage of Demolishes; whereas for pistols, the passive for Unload actually buffs proc damage from chambers, which isn’t buffed by Sarah Skelly, other passives also provide additional proc damage that is not buffed by anything, actives like Sixth Line also don’t provide any contribution to the power ability damage but to the proc damage, etc…
We had some decent theorycrafting around pistols on the old forums before they got nuked and before we got these forums. Unfortunately, they’re gone.
Anyway, again, don’t get me wrong, i don’t think that Sarah Skelly is not a good agent pick for your build, but there’s no situation where this agent over the Faction Quartermaster will give you a 3k DPS boost, such a number is purely confirmation bias. With everything i’ve said, i won’t attribute more than 500 to the potential damage difference that could exist between those agents, and that’s if you really have very bad crit chance, because the +300 crit power from the Quartermaster will buff absolutely all your critical damage, including procs’ critical damage, that’s not something that one should dismiss without a second thought.
