Comparison of Stat Gains. Items Vs Levels

There are 3 main ways to improve stats on units: Leveling up, Research(melee/armor only) and Items. I wanted to compare level up gains vs item gains.

Full Data -- http://goo.gl/U3eqG

I think the most intuitive metric to use is "Star/Level Equivalency." Pretty much everyone has felt the difference of fighting low level units vs high level units in PvE. On average, Star Equivalency is how many stars you would have to add to your unit to equal wearing a SINGLE ITEM of that rarity gear.

Code:

Rarity      Max      Avg
---------------------------------------
Godlike      28.50   21.38         
Epic         12.85   10.71         
Rare         6.00    4.67         
Uncommon     3.00    2.17         
Common       1.67    1.00

So wearing 1 piece of the best Uncommon gear is on average giving you the same number of combat stats as adding 3 stars or 3 levels. Average Godlike gear adds about 21 levels worth of stats. The very best Godlike gear would add 28 levels worth of stats.

Devs, please jump in if I have made any critical mistakes in my numbers? I'm using item stats based on decent item samplings from a few helpful players. Total sample size is >150 items; >40 per rarity (except godlikes). More info found here:
http://www.battleconforum.com/t142-new-player-help-understanding-stats-and-combat-mechanics#449

HealthySkeptic wrote:

But Hegorn, you always say that stats are not equivalent to each other and we dont know which is worth more than the other?

In this case, we are not comparing the actual value of any stats or stat gains. We are only looking at the various sources for those stat gains and comparing those - raw gains to raw gains. The stat gains from leveling up and stat gains from items are both distributed to the same pool of stats and in roughly equal ways (randomly). All other variables are equal in this case.

This is not a perfect model by any means, but it should help when discussing different sources of gaining power.

Caught my own mistake. I initially planned to calculate the Level equivalencies based on full sets of gear - but actually calculated it based on a single piece of gear.

I think its more informative to do the comparison as a single piece of gear, so I changed the wording to reflect that.

Hegorn has been doing a lot of

RuneSlayer wrote:

Hegorn has been doing a lot of

One day he will discover all your secrets. And that day......


Great work Hegorn!

Quote :

One day he will discover all your secrets,

Good luck with that.

RuneSlayer wrote:

Quote :

One day he will discover all your secrets,

Good luck with that.

Mmmm. Maybe I should prepare the torture chamber....

Quote :

One day he will discover all your secrets. And that day......

Haha. Yes. More to come too!

Bah you cannot hope to unearth the ancient runic secrets of the dwarves >< He only tells other dwarves such things.

Wow, great job at collecting informations !

If you allow me to comment your amazing work; average, min and max AP cost of items is missing, isn't it ? That would give another meaningful perspective imo.

Latexlord wrote:

Wow, great job at collecting informations !

If you allow me to comment your amazing work; average, min and max AP cost of items is missing, isn't it ? That would give another meaningful perspective imo.

Thanks. Glad its been helpful.

I originally set out to do exactly that - to compare AP valuations for stats from different sources (items, research, levelups) to see how much they differed. For instance, its very clear that +1stat from items is much more expensive AP wise than +1stat from levelups. Thats probably intentional and makes a lot of sense to me as well.

I'm still looking into AP valuations, but it is a much harder nut to crack because each stat is valued differently AP-wise. From my initial work, it even seems like small things like durability play a role in the valuation (which complicates the math a bit more). Basically I need a much larger sample size of items to draw any useful numbers from the data - a sample size that I do not personally have.

So I did a much quicker analysis on the comparison of relative power achieved through stat gains from items vs level-ups.