What is the best combination of skills to choose from in the combat branch?

[Astagion]

I would like know the opinion of the Stardew Valley community -especially those who have passed the third year of play- regarding the best combination of skills that can be chosen in the Combat branch.

1. Fighter + Brute (+25% DMG and +15 HP)
2. Fighter + Defender (+10% DMG and +40 HP)
3. Scout + Desperado (+50% crit. chance and critical strikes are deadly)

 

[Ray of Hope]

I thought critical chance bonus are multiplicative, not additive?

To quote from the wiki :
"Choosing the Scout Profession increases Critical Strike chance by the following formula: critChance += critChance * 0.5. All critical strike chance bonuses are multiplicative, not additive: around 5-10% depending on your weapon. The Desperado profession increases the damage of critical hits from roughly x3 to approximately x21. Combined with the effects of Scout, the chance to land a critical hit is roughly 2%, resulting in approximately 42% extra damage in the long term. This damage percent is however not entirely accurate as critical strike damage can possibly exceed a target's remaining health. The maximum critical chance is 10.89%, achieved with a Wicked Kris, an Aquamarine Ring in each ring slot, and the Scout profession. "

Personally, I would prefer Option 1 or 2. Depends of my gameplay and mood, really.

 

[One More Day]

Time spent fighting is basically time wasted not doing something useful. So, you want to reduce your combat time as much as possible, and if you can't avoid it, then killing enemies quicker is the next best option. This means dealing more damage, so Fighter/Brute is the only sensible choice, for maximum damage every hit.

The extra HP from Defender is redundant, because you can just eat food to heal yourself

Scout/Desperado is pointless, because critical strike is still incredibly rare even with the Scout profession, and when it does happen, most of the damage from Desperado is wasted.


Pick Fighter/Brute every time, nothing else makes sense

 

[imnvs]

If you're paying attention even a little bit, you don't need the extra HP from Defender.

Also, Brute is more reliable damage compared to hoping you crit in order to do lots of damage. Sure, when the math is done, all other things held the same, the Desperado is going to output 42% more damage over the base compared to my 25% as a Brute, so it would seem that Desperado is better...

...BUT...

There are a few issues with this assumption.

First, less of my damage is lost to overflow/overkill. If we're both using a weapon that does 20 damage, and we're trying to kill something with 50 hp... I kill it in 2 hits every time, right on the nose. The Desperado does it in 3 most times... but when they crit, they can do it in 1 swing by doing 420 damage... 370 hp more than was necessary. That doesn't save up and make it easier to fight the next thing. That 42% average increase over base that Desperados see truly only applies when you're fighting a block of cheese that would take 100 swings to kill. Much of it is lost, but the math on figuring out the average loss from that 42% is a lot more complicated than I want to try to figure out.


Second, I can use any weapon to do that. Desperados need to find high crit chance weapons to capitalize on their ability... but those weapons do less damage. The best (non-galaxy) weapon for a Desperado is a Wicked Kris at 24-30. If we add the (as we already know, wishful thinking) 42% extra, that brings us up to 34-42, an average of 38 damage. I can instead use the Lava Katana, 55-64, times 1.25 because I'm a Brute makes that 68.75-80, which brings the average to 74.375.

I'll take that 74 damage average over the 38 damage average every day, guys.