Quote Originally Posted by pandabearcat View Post
Std dev for a binomial distribution is sqrt(np(1-p)).

Confidence is std/sqrt(n)

You want this small.

If you have lower crit, you want to do more trials, because the standard error relative to the probability is higher.
One of these days, I really need to take a statistics class. >_>

I get the second term, but just to make sure I have the first one right, that's sqrt(swings*odds(odds-not)), correct? And yeah, presumably low leveling crit is part of why I'm waiting to 60. That, and more gear means more possible crit values.

Quote Originally Posted by Kenji1134 View Post
Well the simplest solution is to grab ACT, which has been updated for 3.0, and autoattack a dummy.
Your crit rate is the same whether you are using weaponskills or autoattacks, so afk at the dummy for 10-20-30 minutes. . .
Everything you said is basically what I planned, except that the afk kick timer is still a thing for a while, so I can't just sit there

Besides, throwing in AOE abilities makes the swing count rise faster, even if it's mind-numbingly boring.

Quote Originally Posted by SunnyHirose View Post
You can't actually say what the rate is, but you can say there's a such-and-such chance it is within a certain range of the number you came up with. This is the confidence interval on a proportion. So if you had 2263 crits in 10000 swings and wanted a 95% confidence interval, you could say there your margin of error is 1.96 * sqrt(.2263*0.7737/10000) + 0.5/10000 = 0.00825133679 (a 95% chance that the rate is between 21.80% and 23.46%).

I'm saying this because the number of swings is but one factor here--the closer the observed rate is to 50%, the more swings you'd need to establish the same margin of error.

Edit: whoa, it's a kenji sighting
That's basically what I meant by "establish," since we all know there won't be any certainty until either SE gives us the real formula (I can dream!) or one of us gets hired and steals it. >_>