Vicious or Supremely Vicious?
- Thread starter Kzach
- Start date
keterys
First Post
For the real math, it's basically this - if you roll below the average for a die, assume you roll it again and it gets the average for that die. In practice, it'll probably average slightly lower cause you'll probably just let things like a 4 on a d8 lie (or are the crazier type who rerolls 5s 
, but in theory you roll it again and get 4.5
Anyhow, that turns critical extra dice of:
d8s into 5.5 (from 4.5)
d10s into 6.75 (from 5.5)
d12s into 8 (from 6.5)
Which means that if you're wielding a high crit d12 weapon with devastating critical at level 11, your crits with a SV weapon would deal 4.25 more from your non-weapon-based extra crits, so a +2 and +3 SV would be better than a +2 or +3 Vicious. Vicious wins for most other comparisons where there's not as many dice... but there is at least a niche.
Even if I don't think it's one worth exploiting, since it's prone to human error and eats up game time.
, but in theory you roll it again and get 4.5Anyhow, that turns critical extra dice of:
d8s into 5.5 (from 4.5)
d10s into 6.75 (from 5.5)
d12s into 8 (from 6.5)
Which means that if you're wielding a high crit d12 weapon with devastating critical at level 11, your crits with a SV weapon would deal 4.25 more from your non-weapon-based extra crits, so a +2 and +3 SV would be better than a +2 or +3 Vicious. Vicious wins for most other comparisons where there's not as many dice... but there is at least a niche.
Even if I don't think it's one worth exploiting, since it's prone to human error and eats up game time.
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DracoSuave
First Post
I think the name for it is stupid.
Next they'll have a 'Extremely Vicious' or a 'Mondo Vicious' or a 'WHOA VICIOUS' weapon
Next they'll have a 'Extremely Vicious' or a 'Mondo Vicious' or a 'WHOA VICIOUS' weapon
Yeah, the previous posts are right about the math.
More technically: the optimal thing to do is reroll anything that comes up less than average. As keterys said, for d8s this pops the average result from 4.5 up to 5.5. However, as also noted, because of your rerolling, you're more likely to get results of 5 and higher than 4 and lower -- in fact the ratio is 3:1. Thus the result is both more consistent (the deviation from the mean is smaller) and skewed to higher results, as compared to a d10.
More numbers as an example: with supremely vicious, and rerolling d8s on 4 or lower, you'll get a 6 or higher about 56.25% of the time (compare to 50% with a d10). Of course, rolling 9 or higher is impossible (but happens with 20% of d10 rolls).
The real win, as keterys also pointed out, is that "supremely vicious" also lets you reroll any other crit dice too, such as what you get from the "high crit" property, and these can be d12s already. If you have Devastating Critical and have a +3 vicious d12 weapon with high crit, then your extra crit damage is 5d12+1d10 (average 38). With the same feat and a +3 supremely vicious d12 weapon with high crit, then your extra crit damage is 3d8+2d12+1d10 with the ability to reroll, which pops the average up to 41.75. So you get a 10% increase in average damage, and it'll be more consistent and skewed high on top of that, so that's a pretty good advantage.
Just to be clear, the advantage doesn't really depend on paragon levels, it's just that Devastating Critical makes it more obvious.
Short summary: without high crit plain vicious is better. With high crit on a d12 weapon, supremely vicious is better. It really takes off if you start tacking on extra crit dice in other ways, too.
More technically: the optimal thing to do is reroll anything that comes up less than average. As keterys said, for d8s this pops the average result from 4.5 up to 5.5. However, as also noted, because of your rerolling, you're more likely to get results of 5 and higher than 4 and lower -- in fact the ratio is 3:1. Thus the result is both more consistent (the deviation from the mean is smaller) and skewed to higher results, as compared to a d10.
More numbers as an example: with supremely vicious, and rerolling d8s on 4 or lower, you'll get a 6 or higher about 56.25% of the time (compare to 50% with a d10). Of course, rolling 9 or higher is impossible (but happens with 20% of d10 rolls).
The real win, as keterys also pointed out, is that "supremely vicious" also lets you reroll any other crit dice too, such as what you get from the "high crit" property, and these can be d12s already. If you have Devastating Critical and have a +3 vicious d12 weapon with high crit, then your extra crit damage is 5d12+1d10 (average 38). With the same feat and a +3 supremely vicious d12 weapon with high crit, then your extra crit damage is 3d8+2d12+1d10 with the ability to reroll, which pops the average up to 41.75. So you get a 10% increase in average damage, and it'll be more consistent and skewed high on top of that, so that's a pretty good advantage.
Just to be clear, the advantage doesn't really depend on paragon levels, it's just that Devastating Critical makes it more obvious.
Short summary: without high crit plain vicious is better. With high crit on a d12 weapon, supremely vicious is better. It really takes off if you start tacking on extra crit dice in other ways, too.
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Even if I don't think it's one worth exploiting, since it's prone to human error and eats up game time.
For the number of times a player averages a critical in the game system (i.e. less than once per encounter for most people), it eats up more game time to put bloodied tokens on and off PCs than it does to figure this out.
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