Guild Wars 2

[Serious] Don’t bother posting if it’s not constructive. Take your ‘witty’ comments elsewhere.

And how bad will it be if it does?

My guildmates and I have been discussing it – 10% less damage when in a full berserker set – that’s pretty huge, and in my opinion doesn’t fix the issue your PvE’rs have(that your content can be skipped over by dodging, good players don’t need toughness/vit). What I, and my guildies are very concerned about, is our WvW builds.

We’re a roaming guild, we’ve been crafting builds for a long time to tune them just right – our sweet spots have the best of both worlds concerning damage and sustain. My elementalist for example sits at 70% crit damage unbuffed – a decent amount that allows me to still crit hard while not sacrificing stats elsewhere that help me stay up in long fights. How badly is the nerf going to affect him? – and will I need more ferocity or power to compensate for the lost damage, because I’ve already squeezed all the power I can into my build.

Meanwhile this condition meta that Devs are pushing is downright awful. Like, the lyssa rune nerf compared to the perplexity one? Of any rune that facilitated skillful play(knowing when to use lyssa rune’s set bonus), that was it. Perplexity is the ultimate “cheese” rune, and while nerfed, still reigns as the dominate rune for any condition class with a healthy amount of interrupts.

Reading it, my post sounds a little pessimistic – but I’m the most optimistic person compared to many of the people concerned about this change. A nerf to power builds would kill this game for many players including myself – we’ve disregarded heavy condi builds for a long time.

—P.S, read the post. It’s not long, and you won’t waste your time and mine when you write something completely irrelevant to PvP. I’m not in PvE doing 30K crits in full berserker gear.

Zerker will still be best in slot for dps. Its just a full zerker will lose roughly 10% dps. So if you crafted a bunch of asc zerker gear, it didn’t go to waste.

Pardon my rage in game the other day, as I’m still stuck on why chill is allowed to hurt eles so badly.

Your crit dmg should go to around 35-40% post patch (free balling that number) full zerks will be able to pull around 60% and a balanced build like we run may stick around 40-50%.

I wish I could say this wasn’t an indirect buff to the condi meta, but it is. Know how serious I am when I say I’m considering switching to thief on the 15th.

Mbelch.9028:

Pardon my rage in game the other day, as I’m still stuck on why chill is allowed to hurt eles so badly.

Your crit dmg should go to around 35-40% post patch (free balling that number) full zerks will be able to pull around 60% and a balanced build like we run may stick around 40-50%.

I wish I could say this wasn’t an indirect buff to the condi meta, but it is. Know how serious I am when I say I’m considering switching to thief on the 15th.

Yeah I’m pretty sour about chill too – and no response from Devs.
It’s an indirect buff to the condi meta and it’s strong. I guess I’ll start saving gold for re-gearing again – going to need a huge base of power to make up for this.

Let’s say you do 30k on a crit. After the change you will do 27k on a crit. It’s a 10% decrease in damage. It’s nothing.

If you and your guildies have been min/maxing using crit damage trinkets, you will be hit hard.
The percentage on armor is not much.
eg
for zerk ascended, heavy armor :
now,
(helm) 2% crit damage, will become 34 ferocity, so 2% crit damage, +4 points left. (better)
(coat) 5% crit damage, will become 76 ferocity, so 5% crit damage, +1 point left (slighlty better)
(back) 5% crit damage, will become 35 ferocity, so 2% crit damage, +5 points left. (nerf)

(math is 15 ferocity = 1% crit damage at level 80)
(right now, crit damage is not a major stat, so it’s based on the value of the secondary stat of each pieces)

I thought that it was 10% decrease in damage if you had 100% crit rate.

Cause it seems to be much more than a 10% decrease if you don’t have high crit.

In my opinion, you will definitely be able to notice a difference in your damage due to the ferocity changes. In terms of sustained damage over time, you will see somewhat of a difference, but that isn’t even the main problem.

The main problem is quickly focusing and bursting targets using power that gets dramatically less effective. If you lose 25% crit damage, suddenly a 10K Backstab becomes 7.5K, which is the difference between a target staying to fight, or a target being forced to blow cooldowns and panicking. A 6K Arcing Arrow becomes 4.5K, etc. Over time, the damage you do normalizes due to non-crits but the element of "oh kitten he just hit me super-hard with one attack" is significantly nerfed. Which is what people fail to consider when talking about these changes, the instantaneous critical burst which sets up a snowballing effect of pressuring your enemy.

Of course, we have to wait and see what happens on April 15th, because we do not know all of the changes that are going to happen and how runes and sigils play into everything. But this is what I can hypothesize.

Also who knows how it would change WvW. From these changes, it seems like the Thief could potentially be hit the hardest by these changes, although the tradeoff might be is that they will be hit less harder and glass cannon thieves may not be exactly a 2 shot. However, we may see more roaming condition builds because they seem to have not been impacted by any of the discussed changes. And as a result of more roaming condition builds, one may need to spec into more - condition duration and condition cleanse, which leaves you no room to build power; you may even lose more power being locked into a more condition removal type build.

I’m just trying to look at the bigger picture here, and what may possibly happen.

killahmayne.9518:

The main problem is quickly focusing and bursting targets using power that gets dramatically less effective. If you lose 25% crit damage, suddenly a 10K Backstab becomes 7.5K, which is the difference between a target staying to fight, or a target being forced to blow cooldowns and panicking. A 6K Arcing Arrow becomes 4.5K, etc. Over time, the damage you do normalizes due to non-crits but the element of “oh kitten he just hit me super-hard with one attack” is significantly nerfed. Which is what people fail to consider when talking about these changes, the instantaneous critical burst which sets up a snowballing effect of pressuring your enemy.

This is my concern here. I run fairly high crit builds on a lot of my classes, but mostly I’m thinking of my ele. In a glassier D/D setup, I rely on being able to hit someone hard and fast and force them to back off of me. My offense is my defense. If I can’t kill or discourage them relatively quickly, I’m going to have problems. Particularly against the increasingly strong condi builds that are already prevalent in small scale WvW, and from the changes it only looks as if I’ll be seeing more of them.

The rune and sigil changes may help you recoup some of that damage.

All power/precision runes are being buffed +10 so it will be 175 power for a full 6 set instead of 165. It looks like % damage has increased for runes with strength going to 7% and eagle to 6%.

From the stream they hovered of sigil of accuracy which will now be 7% chance so I am assuming that sigil of force will also be buffed to 7% damage.

My guess is all the popular sigils and runes were either nerfed or kept the same and they buffed everything else. Otherwise force would be even more used than it is already

killahmayne.9518:

If you lose 25% crit damage, suddenly a 10K Backstab becomes 7.5K, which is the difference between a target staying to fight, or a target being forced to blow cooldowns and panicking. A

Not quite. Let’s say you had 30% crit damage (so, just from traits). This means your crits deal 180% damage. This is getting changed to 300 Ferocity, which is 20% crit damage, so 170% damage of the normal attack. On a crit, you are only losing ~5.6% damage. So, that 5k hit is now a 4722 hit.

Now, before accounting for Runes, sigils, specific traits, etc., a full Ascended Berserker set with 30 points in the crit damage line has 101% crit damage, meaning crits deal 2.51 times their normal attack damage. After the patch, this same build will have 1045 Ferocity, which is 69% crit damage bonus. These crits will be dealing 2.09 times the normal attack damage. Your crits will thus be dealing ~83% of the damage as before.

So, that 10k backstab with maxed crit damage (pre-runes and consumables) now will still deal 8.3k after the patch.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

killahmayne.9518:

If you lose 25% crit damage, suddenly a 10K Backstab becomes 7.5K, which is the difference between a target staying to fight, or a target being forced to blow cooldowns and panicking. A

Not quite. Let’s say you had 30% crit damage (so, just from traits). This means your crits deal 180% damage. This is getting changed to 300 Ferocity, which is 20% crit damage, so 170% damage of the normal attack. On a crit, you are only losing ~5.6% damage. So, that 5k hit is now a 4722 hit.

Now, before accounting for Runes, sigils, specific traits, etc., a full Ascended Berserker set with 30 points in the crit damage line has 101% crit damage, meaning crits deal 2.51 times their normal attack damage. After the patch, this same build will have 1045 Ferocity, which is 69% crit damage bonus. These crits will be dealing 2.09 times the normal attack damage. Your crits will thus be dealing ~83% of the damage as before.

So, that 10k backstab with maxed crit damage (pre-runes and consumables) now will still deal 8.3k after the patch.

Point taken, however the way this could effect the potency of power builds is just the same and still makes a significant difference. Like I said we don’t know what ANet will do with runes and sigils. However, on-hit sigils will be introduced, which would benefit non-precision builds highly and allow them to build much more tanky. Condition and support builds seem to be the benefactor here although it depends what the effects of these sigils are.

If ANet considered power builds such a problem in WvW, they should have just nerfed the individual skills that are the main culprits themselves instead of a global power nerf.

why don’t they just reduce the effectiveness of toughness by 10% across the board then to compensate? Toughness scales much more improperly than crit damage. A PVT player vs a zerker player of the same class; the PVT hits harder. That tells you right there that toughness scales much more than a crit can deal.

You’d think a full zerker dps class hits the hardest in the game; nope, matched up against their counterpart in PVT, they do about 20-30% less damage. So I’m fine if they reduce the full zerk build by whatever they want, as long as, they reduce toughness to the point that a zerker will hit them 20-30% harder; not the other way around.

Another thing to consider is the rune/sigil rework. Your build may or may not be affected by the full 10% if rune set X gives you better stats then what you were using before.

All this means is people will have to change builds. For example the 0/10/0/30/30 d/d can’t rip ele wont be as viable for roaming any more, even more so with the boon duration runes nerfed. But a 0/30/0/20/20 d/d ele with the new air trait will be awesome

Not sure I don’t see 0/10/0/30/30 taking that much of a hit since it is a sustain fighter mostly. The original build was in all PVT anyway and since you could get might it worked. I think 0/10/0/30/30 will migrate to runes of strength if you are dps focused.

Gyler.8150:

My guess is all the popular sigils and runes were either nerfed or kept the same and they buffed everything else. Otherwise force would be even more used than it is already

True. You should see what’s happening to Celestials…

The 10% they called are a joke, it’s actually 22-36% depending on your profession, build and buffs (assuming you’ve been and will stay full offensive specced). But even *if*it was just 10%, that’s a pretty huge nerf. Especially considering all the passive play-buffs anet likes to spew out, it’s probably going to kill a majority of the last few direct damage builds there are.

Dub.1273:

The 10% they called are a joke, it’s actually 22-36% depending on your profession, build and buffs (assuming you’ve been and will stay full offensive specced). But even *if*it was just 10%, that’s a pretty huge nerf. Especially considering all the passive play-buffs anet likes to spew out, it’s probably going to kill a majority of the last few direct damage builds there are.

You have any calculations or link to show the 22-36%? Everything I seen shows 10% or less. I believe fadeway did one for all the meta guardian builds (pve) and it was 10% or less. I actually don’t think I have seen one for any of the other classes but I havent actually looked for them except ele.

oZii.2864:

Dub.1273:

The 10% they called are a joke, it’s actually 22-36% depending on your profession, build and buffs (assuming you’ve been and will stay full offensive specced). But even *if*it was just 10%, that’s a pretty huge nerf. Especially considering all the passive play-buffs anet likes to spew out, it’s probably going to kill a majority of the last few direct damage builds there are.

You have any calculations or link to show the 22-36%? Everything I seen shows 10% or less. I believe fadeway did one for all the meta guardian builds (pve) and it was 10% or less. I actually don’t think I have seen one for any of the other classes but I havent actually looked for them except ele.

There’s some confusion about the potential loss in overall DPS compared to the loss in actual crit damage. It’s very easy to calculate your loss in crit damage simply by adding up the ferocity that will be on your current gear, using the 15->1% conversion, and comparing that to your current crit damage. Many builds are looking at a 30-40% reduction in crit damage and that is very significant. Even if your DPS over an extended period of time may still be fairly high, a lot of power builds rely on the spike damage to survive.

I did calculations in optimized but realistic situations for guardians, warriors and elementalists. A 30/30/10/0/0 FGS Ele, full ascended berserker equipment, fury, 25 might, both banners and spotter loses 36%, including the stacking/force sigil loss. 30/25/0/0/15 warriors lose about 23%-25%, also full ascended but depending on the amount of buffs. Guardians (with their little critical damage) “only” lose 18%-23%, once again depending on party buffs.

Calculations can be found easily, there’s a spreadsheet with my (ele) calculations in the “The Ele Meta” thread in the elementalist profession forum. On the other side, anyone using practical assumptions (that means not grinding for another set of armor/weapons to match the new optimum), using a working spreadsheet will come to about the same conclusions. Less than 10% don’t even really work out if you ignore the stacking sigil loss, ignore fury and assume only berserker equipment, using BiS builds for pre/post patch.

And to clear things up, yes, I’m talking about DPS, not Critical Damage. Even with 100% critchance, when losing 30% critdmg, the dps loss is much smaller. If the update was solely about 20-25% critdamage loss (not percent of your critdamage, but actual critical damage) this would be about 10% dps loss. Sadly, it’s much more significant.

Thanks dub I’ll take a look at it