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Tinkering Calculator
Weapon Damage Calculator
Weapon Maxes

Base Skill
Buffed UA Skill
Imbue
Base Damage -
Variance
Blood Drinker
Blood Thirst
Buffed Damage -
Give % Bonus to Iron %
Show # Tinkers

How do I use this?
1. Fill in either your weapon's base damage range or its buffed damage range. If you are using the base damage range, also fill in the buffs that are normally on the weapon. (Note: If you happen to know the variance but not the minimum damage(s), you can fill that out instead.)

2. Select the imbue that is on the weapon. If the imbue is either Critical Strike or Crippling Blow, fill in your base weapon skill (since armor rendering does not affect critical hits in any way, it does not affect the way a weapon should be tinkered).

3. If you are UA, fill in your buffed UA skill.

4. Select the number of tinkers remaining on the weapon, and click calculate.

Note that the difference between an Iron tinker and a Granite tinker is often very minor. Since Granite is so much more rare and expensive, you may consider that a certain percentage difference in damage is not worth the extra cost of Granite. If so, enter a value in the "Give % Bonus to Iron" field. This will increase the average damage of each iron tinker by the given percentage, effectively biasing the outcome in favor of Iron. This number should be small; a value of 5% will eliminate almost all Granite tinkers.
How does this work?
This calculator determines the average damage of your weapon with either iron or granite applied, and then compares the two to see which is higher.

Without critical hits, the average damage would simply be the mean of the minimum and maximum:

Mean = (Minimum + Maximum) / 2

However, every Nth hit is a critical hit, whose damage is a multiple of only the maximum damage:

Crit = Maximum * Multiplier

The Multiplier is a function of Base Skill for Crippling Blow weapons and is 2 for all other (loot-generated) weapons.

These two different damages are averaged together using the rate that they occur. Critical Rate is a function of Base Skill for Critical Strike weapons, and is 10% for all other (loot-generated) weapons. The remainder of the hits do the Mean damage.

The average damage formula, therefore, is this:

Average = (Rate * Crit) + ((1 - Rate) * Mean)

What is variance?
Variance is defined as the ratio of the damage range (the difference between the maximum and minimum damage) and the maximum damage. The formula for variance looks like this:

Variance = (Max - Min) / Max
or
Variance = 1 - (Min / Max)

However, it is rarely useful to think of variance in this way. It is more useful to think of the difference between 100% and the variance: that is the ratio of the minimum to the maximu.

For example, many UA weapons have a variance of 75% (0.75), which means that the minimum damage is 25% (100% - 75% = 25%) of the maximum damage.