Guild Wars 2

So now that a lot of enemies have breakbars, it would help to have a better UI tooltip on skills. Each CC ability damages breakbars by a certain amount, and I think it’s listed someplace how much each does, but it’s not listed in the game directly.

I think it would be really helpful if “Breakbar damage” was a listed stat under all abilities. So for example, Impact Strike’s first hit has a 2s Daze, which I believe translates to “2 breakbar damage” directly, so the tooltip would now read:

Damage: 444
Daze: 2s
Breakbar Damage: 2
Range: 300

That one is fairly straight forward, but the DoTs on soft CCs and involving multiple stacks of multiple durations are a bit harder to calculate. It would be really helpful to just see “oh, this ability is really helpful during a break phase, while this one is not so much.”

the question is, how much breakbar depletion does “2 damage” equate to? it would vary from mob to mob, and with event scaling, so i’m not sure that it’s especially useful information to have.

Unless you just mean for comparative purposes, to see how much depletion a 2s daze causes compared to, e.g., a 1 second stun?
In that case conditions like chill, taunt, fear, slow etc will also need to be updated to display their depletion/second (and should that scale with condition damage? hard cc scale with power?)

i imagine when it appears, the breakbar page of the wiki will be filled with peoples data/estimates of how much certain abilities or conditions deplete the bar by, which seems the most appropriate place for that info rather than further cluttering up tooltips.

the system doesnt work as simply as u think it does. as narrrz already said there are more factors you need to consider like scaling. but the main thing i can say from experience is that there is no set rule how much a cc depletes a break bar:

thiefs head shot does HUGE damage to break bars killing them in seconds (without scaling) and its only 1/4 of a second DAZE. you cant tell me it doesnt have a special position to keep thief remotely useful in fractals (i had long discussion with someone because i couldnt undertstand how such a short daze could deal so much break bar damage because i couldnt believe it).

eles ice bow 5 seconds deep freeze does almost nothing to a break bar. its not even worth the cast time while necro "chilled to the bone" 2 second deep freeze does a lot more. reaper shourds executioners scythe also leaves a deep freeze kinda visual on the target so we have no idea how different all the ccs are programmed and how the break bar damage is calculated.

the question is, how much breakbar depletion does “2 damage” equate to? it would vary from mob to mob, and with event scaling, so i’m not sure that it’s especially useful information to have.

Well, the same is true of damage numbers, when scaling is in play and different enemies have different bases. What does “444 damage” mean when some enemies have higher HP than others and that HP can scale based on surrounding players? But it lets you know that your attack #3 hits harder than your attack #4, and better than that other guy’s attack #3.

It would be useful as a measure of how much you are contributing, so that you’d know which moves you had that could contribute most at any given time.

In that case conditions like chill, taunt, fear, slow etc will also need to be updated to display their depletion/second (and should that scale with condition damage? hard cc scale with power?)

Yes, “soft CCs” more than hard ones, it would display the impact it would have exactly as condi damage is shown, something along the lines of “1 per second over 3 seconds” or whatever it ends up being.

thiefs head shot does HUGE damage to break bars killing them in seconds (without scaling) and its only 1/4 of a second DAZE. you cant tell me it doesnt have a special position to keep thief remotely useful in fractals (i had long discussion with someone because i couldnt undertstand how such a short daze could deal so much break bar damage because i couldnt believe it).

Well, whatever impact it has, don’t you think it would be helpful for the game to display that explicitly to the players? I mean, the game knows what impact it has, it uses that impact when calculating outcomes, so the tooltip is the perfect place to display it.

Even giving the absolute value of the break bar damage would be useful in allowing players to make choices. In fact, it’s no different than the damage value for an attack; just because we don’t know explicitly how much HP a mob has, I still like to know what kind of damage the attack does in the tool tip.

Good Idea, OP