Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Critical Missions and Companion Affection

Getting crits with Crew Skills just seems more and more important.

Not only do most of my slicing profits come from mission discoveries (found on a slicing crit) - but I'm also busy crafting items with augment slots (Rakata relics, lvl 49 implants...) and want some sense of how tough it'll be.  And come 1.2, I'll want some critically-crated moddable gear (weapon / vest / legs / helm), for a free augment slot - something that was confirmed in the Guild Summit.

So I was particularly excited to see this post:
Companion affection improves your crafting efficiency and crit chance. (Source)
To take a look at how companion affection influences crew skill crits, I ran just over 1000 slicing missions on characters with 400 slicing, using companions with a wide range of affection. Each point is a slicing mission, color coded by companion. Triangles are crits, circles are not. The red line is the predicted probability of a crit for a given level of affection, and the shaded region is its 95% CI.

In short: companion affection really, really, really makes a difference. While companions with no affection have about a 13% chance of a critical success, companions with 10,000 affection have a 20% chance - even without a bonus.

Curiously, mission yield didn't influence chance of a critical mission. Excluding bountiful missions - I didn't run enough to get a good estimate - all mission yields had approximately the same percentage chance of a crit, whether in the raw data (table below) or included in a logit model (with controls for affection, whether the companion had a critical bonus, and mission yield).



I did notice, however, that running lower-level missions while at 400 slicing (say, the rank 5s) yielded a higher chance of a crit than running the max-level missions (by about 1% - so take this with a mountain of salt).

TLDR: companion affection dramatically improves the chance of getting a critical success on a mission. Yield does not appear to matter. The class of the class of mission may have a (minor) effect.

One thing I should note is that I get ridiculously streaky crits across my companions (if one gains a mission discovery, the others are more likely to than should happen by chance). I'm still unsure whether this is a programming quirk, an artifact of the data, or what.

*For a look at companion affection and crafting efficiency, pdxmarcos on the forums has a great guide, and an excellent spreadsheet.

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