snipe vs lily

[echomirage]

I searched for this but couldn't find anything; first and foremost, please do point me to a thread where this may have been covered so I don't add to the noise. That said:

Snipe says "always crits".
Fire Lily says "no more crits".

The above are absolute statements. I expect Snipe to always crit, and I also expect Fire Lily to prohibit crits. "There can be only one"... but which is it?

I don't have the skill or experience that others here do to meaningfully test or answer this. From what I've inferred from other threads, Fire Lily supersedes everything else and its effect is the last word.

Is this the case? Even though one piece of gear says one thing definitively, another piece of gear can change that effect? If so, are there any other gear combinations in Eternium where the stated effect of a piece of gear is completely obviated, without indication, by the effect of another?

[Ozymandius]

I ran a test in the training grounds using the same Stalker BH. I ran the comparison using no trinkets because the results were too variable when Talisman of Storms randomly activated. In the Fire Lily condition, I added in the following Fire Lily as the only trinket.



I kept each trial to approximately the amount of same time, by running until I had manually fired Snipe five times with the same cooldown time to recharge between attacks. The results are shown below:

The comparison is a bit inaccurate because the control condition BH did not have any trinkets, so there would be a loss of damage stats. You can still see that, even for a very short interaction, the Stalker BH without any trinkets had more overall damage (including higher damage for each Snipe attack cast) than the exact same Stalker BH equipped with Fire Lily. The difference in the amount of damage from each Snipe attack may indicate that the snipe attacks in the Fire Lily condition are not being awarded a Critical damage boost. There is clearly a drop in performance, so it makes sense to conclude that those attacks are not "always crits" as the old language would suggest. This is most likely because Fire Lily is new to the most recent game version, while the language for Snipe has been around long before the Fire Lily was created.

FYI, it is possible that if you crafted a Stalker BH with CR/CD on gear replaced with Power and Haste that the difference would not be this large. I have a traditional CR/CD build on this BH that goes against the thinking for a Fire Lily build. There is a Havoc BH on the leaderboard for the Silver ANB using Power, Haste, and AR build with Fire Lily that is currently in 6th place. Look for Mara to see how that build is set up to get around the lack of critical damage.

[echomirage]

Ozymandius Oh, super! I’d very strongly suspected this would be the case; seems to me that the smartest language fix would be updating the Lily description to say that it takes precedence over all other effects, though making the descriptions of everything affected (weapons, skills) dynamically reflect this also would work. Doubt that’s possible without a rewrite of how descriptions work.