Khora: Magistar vs. Sancti Magistar

A question I had when I was working on my whipclaw build for Khora was what melee weapon to use as my stat stick. The best choice is magistar, but there's a variant for the vanilla version: sancti magistar, from New Loka.

This isn't a straightforward question: when you apply the incarnon to a magistar, the incarnon's bonus stats differ slightly between the two weapons. I wasn't sure if it evened out to be exactly the same, or slightly favoured one variant. The common advice I saw around was that sancti was not worth it -- but usually, this is posted without the supporting maths.

The definitive answer: regular magistar incarnon is a better stat stick.

Here's the same build on both variants¹, with the incarnon applied² and the same incarnon upgrades selected³.

Sancti magistar build with 5 forma. Shattering storm, discipline's merit, blood rush, gladiator might, primed pressure point, sacrificial steel, organ shatter, north wind, primed fever strike, and spoiled strike give this build high a high crit chance and crit multiplier.

Magistar build with 6 forma. Shattering storm, discipline's merit, blood rush, gladiator might, primed pressure point, sacrificial steel, organ shatter, north wind, primed fever strike, and spoiled strike give this build high a high crit chance and crit multiplier.

The differences work out in magistar's favour:

Stat	Sancti	Regular	Sancti -> Regular Difference
Crit chance	134.4%	115.2%	-19.2%
Crit multiplier	11x	15x	+4x
Total damage	3,226.6	3,847.1	+620.5

In the grand scheme of things, losing 19% crit chance is nothing when you consider how much crit chance is coming from combo points via Blood Rush. The additional base damage means the crits will be bigger, and the additional 4x multiplier means they'll be even bigger.

With the regular magistar equipped, I started seeing hefty 2m+ red crits as I approached my combo point max, like I should be with this build.

With that, all is right in the origin system...

Ignore the fact that one has six forma: I screwed it up. The build works on both with five forma. ↩
If you need to move your incarnon, it's pretty easy⁴: you just need the duviri resources and you can unequip / re-equip it via the NPC. The evolution challenges do not reset when you do this, so you can pick your incarnon upgrades straight off. ↩
The crit multiplier is red and reflects a downgrade in the screenshots because the arsenel doesn't seem to know what to do with the archon shards on khora. It's a UI bug: there is no pending downgrade, and the higher value is correct. ↩
Getting pathos clamps sucks, but that's the worst thing you'll have to do. ↩