I didn’t pick up on this before, but the standard +35% crit multi affix is actually only 17% more damage assuming you have 100% crit chance and no other crit multi 'cause the base that you’re working off is 200% not 100%, a crit without any other sources of crit multi would be 200 damage if the non-crit was 100. If you had an additional 35% crit multi from the prefix, you’d do 235 compared to 200 = 17% more.
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Yea, I mean generally, if you don’t want to minmax to the max and calculate the nitty gritty, a good baseline would be 10-20 penetration including from skills
Yes, but if I am already building a crit build(which normally have huge damage number per hit), I want to know if the amulet gets more value out of crit multiplier or penetration. In this case, penetration is generally still good to have vs crit multi since most crit build will already have additional crit multi from other sources. correct me if I am wrong here
Without going through the numbers, yes, you are correct. The more of a thing you have, the less impact more of it has (except more modifiers). So if you’ve already got lots of crit multi/penetration then an additional prefix on your amulet won’t be as impactful & therefore the other one may be better.
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Penetration is a rare affix and extremely potent. It’s a flat multiplicative modifier, so highly superior to crit multi. Crit multi scales well because it’s also part of a multiplicative calculation of damage, but not as good.
Yeah, but some skill have innate high penetration. Lethal mirage have 50% penetration if skilled into. If lethal mirage is the main burst skill, there is no need for amulet with another <10% penetratiln
150% to 160% is still very significant. But yes.
I recommend reading this thread
https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/damage-penetration-diminishing-returns/40274
Using amulet to upgrade from 50 to 60 penetration, it is 7% more damage.
A crit rouge without flow normally have 75 crit multiplier from passive. So for every 100 base damage we get 275 damage from crit. If we assume no other crit multiplier yet, an amulet with 35% multiplier will give us 100x(200+75+35)/100 = 310 damage total. In term of damage increment, that is (310/275-1)x100= 11% more damage. In this case, crit multi would be the desired affix.
Edited. Thanks @darkdeal
I guess it’s true only for lethal mirage, which I’ve never used. It’s an edge case, in other situations, you want pen on your amulet, because you’ll get crit multi from other sources.
Yes, generally get penetration in amulet. But if skill has penetration to 20% or res shred then starts to think if other option is better.
In this case, going from 0 to 10 penetration would still be less overall ‘more’ damage.
Maybe someone could do up a spreadsheet that could show the points where each is better than the other. I don’t know if the game calculates decimals or rounds, but you would need 350 crit multi before that 10% penetration is even equivalent to another 35% crit multi. That assumes 100% crit chance though. The crit multi value would be multiplied by the crit chance if below 100%.
Pretty sure there has been a spreadsheet somewhete but the reason I don’t want to calculate min max so much is because we have 5 skills to use and each have their own penetration/crit multiplier/res shred so it is hard to gauge which affix is better down to the detaisl. Lethal mirage is easy to prioritize since it is such a high burst. Similar to meteor. But other skill build would be harder to calculate.
There is also some build that does not have 100% single attribute damage type(physical+void for example). Not to mention penetration benefits DoT as well. All add to the complexities
Time like this is when I wish there is accurate dps tool. Meanwhile I will just stick to 20 percent penetration.
I don’t know how much this applies to other builds, but my shadow cascade BD has 400 CM and still gets pen on the amulet, and this is with shit gear. I mean you get 40-60 CM from sword implicit, it’s on every gear slot and you get more from skills. It’s extremely easy to stack.
I’d say, 90% of crit builds want pen above crit multi when they can get it.
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Right, but I am pretty sure that is because the intention is to have enough multi to make the penetration a better value. You would need an absurdly high Crit Multi (500+) to make 7% penetration better than another 35% multi though.
As an aside, penetration is hurt even more, in comparison, because it is mostly damage element specific. Crit Multi will multiply all damage elements you deal. So if you have an attack that deals half fire and half physical, fire penetration is only half as valuable.
I guess, going back to the OP, penetration just seems underpowered compared to crit multi. The only exception is if you are playing a DoT build, but those are generally bad as well. DoTs would need to deal much more damage total for it to be preferable to up front damage.
Playing off meta double handed rouge 
. Need implicit to have melee crit chance instead of crit multiplier
I forgot about the skill CM, which is another 80%. So lets see.
479 Critical Strike Multiplier and zero penetration. We have to choose between (let’s pick t5) 8-9% penetration, and 25-29% critical multiplier. Easy choice. Penetration is 8-9% more(let’s say 9). CM is 29/479 * 100 = 6.05% more damage.
And I can’t think of any crit builds which have a lot of elements to consider, in which case, why would you pick pen? You don’t use penetration with rainbow builds. Are there many of those? I don’t know, having multiple elements is a terrible idea because you can’t scale the damage as well. The only case in which pen gets significantly worse otherwise, is if you already have a lot.
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it is not on purpose. Usually just skill limitation. For example VK warpath does not have full conversion to void but have huge +melee void dmg. Coupled with +melee void weapon affix and passive, it is a mix of small physical and a large part of void damage in warpath
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Agree. Considering only the amulet crit multi vs penetration affixes, and assuming only a single element type of damage, the T5 Penetration is better than the T5 multi at the approximate ranges of 312-322 crit multi given 100% crit strike chance. That is pretty easy to get to for any crit focused build.
Crit warpath sounds like a nightmare to gear.
Not really. It is your standard crit multi/crit chance and increased void damage. Penetration wise, guess it is good to have since there are some dots. But really, it is just a small <5% percentage difference if you choose wrong between penetration and crit multiplier so to me it is not worth to take out the spreadsheet for it. I’ll leave that to my job. That 5% difference will not gate end content anyway, with good skill build
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