Guild Wars 2

Made a similar post in a thread that got too toxic, I’ll repost it here so everyone doesn’t miss out.

Unlike trinkets, weapons have a significant effect on damage since they carry Weapon Strength. Trinkets purely held stats and thus it upgrading from them from rare to exo to ascended made little impact on your damage output.

I have done an experiment with illustrate this effect. The traits are the standard 25/30/0/0/15 Backstab thief, but taking Hidden Killer instead of Executioner’s to obtain a consistency in damage and 100% crit chance. Due to the raise of cost in weapons, I was only able to afford one rare dagger. However, two rare daggers vs two exotic daggers should also produce the same difference in damage as Weapon Strength is averaged when using two weapons. Feel free to conduct similar experiments yourselves by comparing your damage output when changing between an rare and an exotic weapon.

As you can see from the first picture, the Stat difference when changing between the daggers and nothing else seems negligible between a Rare and an Exotic dagger. However, the effects on damage are very noticeable despite the stat difference being so small. As you can see from the second picture, the damage done using the exotic dagger outputs slightly more than 15% damage compared to the rare dagger.

From the ascended stats leak when legendaries had been upgraded prematurely then quickly reverted, we can infer that the difference in Weapon Strength will be roughly the same 10% increase as it is between rare and exotic and thus we can expect the same increase in damage.

However, as condition damage is based solely on level and stats, this change in Weapon Strength will not be very noticable with condition builds. Engineers will also fall behind professions while using kits since Bundles still use their own Weapon Strength value and only stats and sigils carry over.

PS: No rams were fatally wounded in this experiment, I let him/her reset

NB: Ascended stats won’t be as overpowered as I thought,
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Stat-effects-of-Weapons-vs-Trinkets/first#post2733380
Under the same backstab testing conditions, a 5% boost in ascended weapons should only mean a 6.4% increase in damage under the same testing conditions.

Thanks for putting this together, my theorycrafting indicated the difference would be much smaller, 5% instead of 20%.
The Exotic dagger had the damage of : 923-981
The Rare dagger had the damage of: 818-869

Which is about 6% better. But the numbers you show are about 16% better in terms of damage.

Any idea why that happened?

TooBz.3065:

Thanks for putting this together, my theorycrafting indicated the difference would be much smaller, 5% instead of 20%.
The Exotic dagger had the damage of : 923-981
The Rare dagger had the damage of: 818-869

Which is about 6% better. But the numbers you show are about 16% better in terms of damage.

Any idea why that happened?

Because Weapon Strength is MULTIPLIED with power in damage calculation, that is then further multiplied by Crit Damage and traits. This is why elite dungeoneers stack as many +% damage traits as they can since they so reach ridiculously large numbers.

The equation is:
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

From: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

But it’s better to test it out in game, any rare/exo swap would produce the same results though the numbers may be more volatile if you can’t get 100% crit.

The difference between exotic weapons and ascended weapons should be 5%. Attached is a screenshot from when they accidentally updated legendary weapons several months ago.

The likely returns from such an upgrade will be tangible, not excessive to the degree you are predicting. The upgrade to ascended from exotic isn’t as large as that from rare to exotic, at least for weapons.

Kelnis.1829:

The difference between exotic weapons and ascended weapons should be 5%. Attached is a screenshot from when they accidentally updated legendary weapons several months ago.

The likely returns from such an upgrade will be tangible, not excessive to the degree you are predicting. The upgrade to ascended from exotic isn’t as large as that from rare to exotic, at least for weapons.

Thanks for that, that looks alot less game changing.

(Suddenly washed over by a feeling of disappointment though, I didn’t know a little, nasty part in me was looking forward to Meteor Shower fools for mega damage right off the bat on Tuesday…)

I don’t see why you would do an in-game test. Damage ranges make it bit unreliable. You can easily calculate the effect with just the damage ranges (or damage formula if you want to include stats).

Wethospu.6437:

I don’t see why you would do an in-game test. Damage ranges make it bit unreliable. You can easily calculate the effect with just the damage ranges (or damage formula if you want to include stats).

3 Reasons:
- I hate maths even though I’m azn =w=
- I prefer to see numbers in-game for myself
- People seem to prefer seeing numbers in screenshots than when you type them out

If they were smart about it, they wouldn’t give the weapons a base damage increase. However, I’m sure they will because they fail at making compelling content so here we go with the gear grind cop out.

Bleh, come Tuesday I’ll need to decide to just keep saving for a legendary or potentially spend those same mats (to make t7 ones) on ascended weapons.

Under the assumption that ascended weapons are only 5% stronger than exo as per the leak, under the same test backstab testing conditions, only a 6.4% difference in damage would be observed.