http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d1...37/DexGear.jpg
Aight so decided to try and get a random party with my dex build to see how high I could push my crit rate without any external bonuses i.e. a hidden effect from Maat's Cap.
This was like at 3:00am when no one was doing anything so three other LS mates decided to make a party with me. I was using squid sushi for an additional +6 dex bringing me to +61 dex total. I never swapped out of this gear for any WS or any JA.
http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d1...tRateParse.jpg
From top to bottom that is:
lolbst pet
Mandau thf/war
mnk/war (me)
brd/whm (which we had melee for a bit in af2 body to mimic Ravenlokk's setup as much as possible)
war/nin
brd/nin
rdm/whm
This was at greater colibri camp, we only fought one wivre out of the 152 mobs. It was pretty much a joke party, me and the war were constantly doing Mistral axe > dragon kick with light threnody up, etc etc. A few times I switched to sis kabebi and lost the +6 dex to try and produce some better lights. Bard songs were dual minuets and marches.
Anyways to get to the point, a few times throughout the parse I broke 30% crit rate, finishing at 29.38%. I also had the war run a parse incase there was any bias in my parser, he also had me down at 29% crit rate. Both of us parsed on Dvs 1.5.1., I tried to get a copy of his parse to post, but he was running into problems with it getting shrunk down etc.
I think this is pretty conclusive evidence there is no hidden effect of crit rate+ on Maat's Cap, Ravenlokk's high crit rate was just the result of stacked dex. I'm pretty sure I have slightly more dex than him in this gear setup, which could explain why I'm slightly above a few of his parses where he was around 28% crit rate. (Although I do only have 1 trial backing me up, and there also was at least one instance he parsed above my crit rate. I probably am not going to do this again for more trials, meleeing in warwolf belt makes me cringe. )
The only thing that puzzles me is how stacking additional dex had such a large effect on the crit rate. People say Byakko's haidate is a 1-2% increase from the 15 dex. In my normal gear setup I have +20 dex (haidate and rajas) which is always around 16% crit rate. I had 41 more dex on top of that in the dex setup, so if every 15 dex is 2% more crit rate (being slightly generous with the previous assumption) I should have only gained around 5-6% crit rate from all my dex, putting me at 21-22% total crit rate, this was clearly not the case, and the reason for thinking Raven's maat's cap was providing a hidden +7% crit rate to make up for the gap.
So either people were underestimating the crit bonus from byakko's haidate, or as I mentioned in the sticky thread, eventually if you stack enough dex you must break some kind of critical rate tier, where each dex you add has a larger effect on your crit rate.
Either way, discuss, or something.
Edit: did some more ninja editing.