Guild Wars 2

Now that the new trait fact systems are up and running, there’s a lot more transparency in how skill calculations work, probably opening up avenues of theory crafting builds and play styles even further.

The thing is, while these skill facts might seem deceptively simple, there’s a lot of under-the-hood stuff still happening, and the in-game information is sorely lacking in how said skills interact, with the said stuff not too much spread out to the player base

Gonna open this thread (if there are others thread similar for this, it would be nice to please post some links to it since forum search is a jerk and broken) to help congregate information for would-be skill builders and methods of (theoretical) calculations and team compositions.

reserved for indices

To start things off…

Percentile damage multipliers, whether from traits, consumables, or effects, stack in a multiplicative matter, but some of them only take effect on certain conditions.

Not sure if verified as well, but are conditions applied first before calculating damage taken? This is in relation to skills that apply a condition AND deal damage, since I’d like to verify if condition-boosted traits such as Attack of Opportunity from warrior directly improve attacks with bleed on them, such as the warrior sword F1.

Question, though: I don’t really know if there are percentile stat modifiers, but if there are, how would they interact with flat numerical stat modifiers? Do flat modifiers get applied first before doing multiplicative changes from the percentile stat modifiers?

Not sure if verified as well, but are conditions applied first before calculating damage taken?

Tested for vulnerability-applying skills and the condition is applied first, therefore increasing the damage on the spell on hit.

As for your final question, it is hard to know. I think it depends on the traits involved. I think that a general rule for this is that any flat stat buff that is not permanent in combat is not taken into account (example). Testing is required.

Another question: do you guys have regular and optimal calculations for conditions?

what do you mean exactly?

DD attacks can be modeled using effective power, right? How do you model overall condition damage, though – taking into account on crit effects?

It is less straightforward but as soon as I know what rotation is optimal I can compute how many stacks of conditions the build will provide on average.

To know the effect of on-crit sigils you just need the number of hits per second your rotation outputs, it’s only a bit more complicated when sigils have ICDs.