Making mathematical sense of champion attributes
I tinker with my masteries all the time and one of the things that bugs me is that there is not a predictable way to optimize masteries that impact champion attributes. Specifically I am referring to crit rate, crit damage, and block proficiency. For example, my 5/50 Stark Spidey has a base crit rate of 899 with a corresponding percentage of .31. I interpret this to mean that each attack has a 31% chance to be critical. Using these numbers we should be able to calculate a max crit rate (the rate at which 100% of attacks will be critical) as 2900. (899/x=.31...x=2900) The Lesser Precision mastery adds a max amount of 125pts to your champions critical rate, so it would make sense that by adding 125 to Stark's base rate of 899, we can calculate an improved crit chance of 35%. (899+125=1024...1024/2900=.35). However, 2900 is not a common denominator, (in terms of max crit chance), for all champions. My 5/50 Morningstar has a base crit rate of 381, which, all things being equal, should equate to a crit chance of ~13%. (381/2900=.1314). Instead, she has a crit chance of 16%, and a calculated max crit chance of 2600. This makes it incredibly difficult to compare champions on an apples to apples basis, and even more difficult to predict the impact of masteries. This is important to me because mastery points are limited so it is vital to get as much value as possible out of each and every point.
When comparing Lesser Precision to Lesser Cruelty, Lesser Precision adds a maximum of 125pts to crit rating, improving crit chance by a flat (as opposed to proportionate) 4-5%. However, Lesser Cruelty adds a maximum of 150pts to crit damage, improving damage by 30-60%! Crit damage stats vary widely between champions which allows for a much bigger swing in overall damage output. In this case, you would get a much bigger bang for your mastery buck by investing in Lesser Cruelty rather than Lesser Precision, but there is no way to know this just by reading the description of these masteries!
And the variations are even more dramatic when it comes to Block Proficiency stats. My 5/50 WW2 Cap has a calculated max Block Proficiency (the rate at which blocking would reduce incoming damage to 0) of 7693. (Base stats are 5693bp = 74% reduction in damage...5693/x=.74...x=7693). By contrast, Stark Spidey has a max Block Proficiency of 4167. The Block Proficiency mastery adds 800pts to BP stats, which improves bp by anywhere from 14% to 170% depending on the champ! While in some cases it may be advantageous to have disproportionate effects on different champions, it makes it incredibly difficult and time intensive to try to strategically and predictably improve the performance of your roster through masteries.
Ultimately, my hope is that Kabam will do two things 1) create a common denominator for champion attributes so that we can more easily compare one champion to another, 2) add a percent change description to the masteries that have flat amounts so that we can strategically use our mastery points.
Finally, I am not mentioning diminishing returns as a part of any of my calculations because I don't believe they should come into account since the champion attributes and corresponding masteries are all based on flat amounts rather than percentages. If I am wrong, feel free to correct me.
