Guild Wars 2

The last developer livestream featured some inside into the upcoming changes to berserker (-ish) gear.

A new statistic, called “ferocity” will replace the critical damage stat on all pieces of armor, weapons, traits and utilities. Ferocity will increase your critical damage aswell, however due to the new forumla the overall critical damage values will be reduced. This should lead to a 10% reduction in damage for maxed out full DPS builds.

This change is geared towards “narrowing out the gap between zerker and support builds”.

The wording of the reduction was actually a bit vague. When talking about "maxed out full DPS builds. " you can actually look at different scenarios, regarding team buffs, bufffood, and stacks.

This may look insignificant to most players, however it is actually quite a “big deal”, and here is why:

In order to understand the difference between these, you need knowledge of the following formula:

Average Skill Damage = (Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) * (critical strike chance * critical damage + non critical strike chance * non critical damage) / (target’s Armor)

Since the upcoming changes wont affect power, weapon strength, coefficients or armor but just critical damage only the bold part of the formula is relevant for the following explanation.

A “full zerker” (zerker armor with scholar runes and proper traits) character will have around 100% increased critical damage and around 50% critchance, both rounded in order to make the explanation easier to follow.

Let’s take this as a “maxed out full DPS build” and to lower the critical damage in order to achieve a decrease of 10% in average damage:
Watch out! Math incoming0,9 = (x _new crit damage_ * 0,5 _crit chance_ + 0,5 _non crit chance_ * 1 _non crit damage_) / ( 2,5 _old crit damage_ * 0,5 _crit chance_ + 0,5 _non crit chance_ *1 _non crit damage_ After some conversions we will get:
x new crit damage = 2,15 or 75% increased critical damage.

However with a proper team setup (ranger with spotter, warrior banners, proper bufffood, permanent fury, precision stacks or some assasins pieces) we can reach 100% critical strike chance. For a setup like this the “damage nerf” hits actually way harder:
More math, treat with caution!y _new average damage_ = (2,15 _new crit damage_ * 1 _critchance =100%_ + 0 _noncritchance = 0%_ * 1) / (2,5 _old crit damage_ * 1 _critchance_ + 0 _noncritchance_ * 1)
y new average damage = 0,86 or 14% reduced average damage. This would be 40% more for groups with a “proper setup” compared to the “intended” 10% decrease, which means the “maxed out full DPS group” would suffer even more from these changes.

While these groups may still be faster killing enemies, due to their damage being higher, this change lowers (lowers not removes) the incentive to take certain classes (e.g. a ranger for the spotter trait, mesmers for reflection damage) with you in more competitive team builds, especially when taking some other downsides of these classes into consideration (like lacking mobility or the inability to dodge). Or to put it into a different wording: It reduces the intention to take a wider variety of builds in your group.

Now you might ask: But what if “maxed out full DPS builds” meant exactly the ones mentioned above? What if these see a decrease of 10% in their average damage output? The ones with maxed out critchance and so on?

Actually it would not make a difference. The calculation works both ways. You can run the math for yourself if you don’t belive it.
This means: A nerf to critical damage hits those groups harder, that try to utilize more support (offensive in that case) and build/class variety instead of the ones that feature the hated lf 3wars+1guard Zerk only.

While I recall this beeing treated as an upside during the stream, here is another thing:

It was mentioned that due to the uneven distribution of critical damage on certain pieces players were able to get a lot of cheap crit damage, while getting tankyness from their armor by wearing soldiers for example.

The “rework” of critical damage balances out these disparities. However this means that the damage of ‘tanky dps’ builds gets nerfed by this change While this change might “help” with some issues in wvw, this does hurt those players in PvE that might have to rely on defensive stats in order to survive fights

• they deal less damage, therefore the fights will last even longer for them
• some groups, wether you like it or not are now even less likely to take these players with them.

Regarding the “narrowing out the gap between support and dps builds” topic:

There are a couple of reasons why a lot of supportive are subpar in the Dungeon meta, I will try to break these down:

• The support has little use for the most part, due to encounter design. Frequent and hard hitting enemies make defensive boons like regeneration and protection look meaningless, unless your group starts stacking up really high amounts of defensive stats – toughness for an imporved effectiveness of the sustain and vitality to avoid oneshots – in combination with healing power and boon duration on your side. The same is true for a lot of healing skills. What’s the point of 120 health per second and a 3k heal, if not dodging the attack means me faceplanting the floor?
  A solution to this would be buffing up the values of these skills while lowering the uptime to keep things fair. Applying perma protection isn’t hard as guardian, you could even say it is not very skillfull to do so at the moment. If protection would reduce incoming damage by 66%, while having to be used in the right time instead, it would actually reward “skillfull” play. For dungeon trash this could allow you to help you group survive when pulling some of the harder packs, until other ways of mitigation like blinds or AoE stuns can kick in.
• Chosing a supportive weapon means reducing your damage output by a significant amount, due to very low skill coefficients on these weapons. While I understand and agree that having extra support means you shouldn’t be able to lay out as much damage, the discrepancy between a lot of weapons is plain unreasonable. If we compare greatsword to mace on guard we have a discrepancy of about 35% in damage. Values in between 5-15% are bearable, this however isn’t. Bringing weapons into “reasonable” proportions for each class would go a long way for bringing “support and zerker builds closer to each other”.

• Traiting into support means sacrificing a lot of damage. Apart from stats like power, prec, critical damage there are often times a lot of minor traits aswell that are quite essential for good damage output. Like “Attack of oportunity”, “Elusive Power”, “Radiant Power” to name a few. You could add the possibility to change minor traits on a vertical level for example. This would also help players avoiding certain minor traits if they don’t really fit into their build (sharper images for example) and open up a lot of new combinations.