Guild Wars 2

The debate on whether a damage meter enriches or poisons a game is a neverending one and I’d rather not go into it.

My suggestion is that the dummies in the Heart of the mists would show you a death breakdown (like the one you get when you die in PvP) but from the assailants point-of-view.

Where it shows what skills did what damage, how many instances of damage and maybe how long it took for the dummy to go from 100% – 0% hp.

This seems like a rather unintrusive way to give people a hint of what damage sources are actually working for them and what isn’t.

Besides, in the heart of the mists you already use normalized equipment with all runes available for easy testing purposes.

With the release of HoT I’d love to try a Bow + Sword/Sword condition damage Berserker, but with all the small instances of damage there is no way for me to effectively say “This is better/worse/up to par” with build/rune/weapon XYZ.

I’m terrified of chucking my full ascended zerk gear with strength runes into the Mystic fountain to reroll them into condition damage, and buy new runes only to realize that it’s not viable and pay roughly 100g to restore my gear to it’s previous point.

The question of what is considered viable is in itself a big one, I’m not much on letting metabattle decide for me what’s best even though i appreciate the hard work behind it and definitely take hints from it.

Also I do realize that training dummies do not tell the whole story since different fights have different environmental variables, but it’s still enough to establish a baseline.

tl;dr: I want training dummies to give me an abuse-summary.

Thoughts?

I don’t suppose the damage log and some basic number crunching is beyond you? I mean, I’m never against a quality of life change that’s for the better, but is it really that difficult for an experienced player to gauge how much damage each skill deals?

It’s not, I just feel it’s too arbitrary for a few reasons,

• Timestamp is hh:mm, meaning it’s hard for me to see exactly how long the target was affected by a certain condition damage and calculate where in my rotation it spikes, and where it falls off.

• Not being able to export the contents for easy summaries and grouping (i.e. Excel), manual number crunching is so 1993

Having played a direct-damage Warrior for 3 years I’m finding it very hard to transition into condition builds, just because I can’t gauge the effective damage.

I did realize last night after writing this post that I have been playing with “simple conditions” setting since god knows how long back, making every condition fight a messy rupture of floating combat text with no actual weight to the numbers. After turning that off it’s a bit easier for me to estimate damage and differentiate bleeding from burning now. However I’m still pretty lost with how to attack the data.

Tips on benchmark methods are absolutely appreciated.

Conditions deal 1 tick per second. You take the amount of damage you deal and divide it by the time it takes to deal the entire thing. That’ll give you the damage per tick for that skill.

As far as I know, the way it works when reading the death log is as follows:

Assume you toss 3 skills that deal the same condition. The game simply shows one type of damage occurring per second. What happens here is that each skill ticks once per second until its duration is over. The death log, sometimes, could show a ludicrous 85k damage condition (usually the case in a prolonged fight vs a condition guard) and a certain amount of hits. What people sometimes make the mistake of doing is dividing the damage by the amount of hits, not taking into account the different skills used to apply the damage. So let’s assume this, for a moment:

Skill 1 does 1k condi damage over 5s. This averages out to 200 DPS.

Skill 2 does 5k condi damage over 2s. This averages out to 2.5k DPS.

Skill 3 hits for 400 condi damage over 1s. This averages out to 400 DPS.

Add these up together and you get a total 6.4k condi DPS over 5s. If you notice, though, during the fight those numbers floating out of the victim fluctuate. What this causes is (assuming insta cast) is you seeing a whopping 3.1k condi tick for the first second, then 2.7k in the next, then a paltry 200 for the next 3.

Generally, an easier way to look at your skills is to divide them down to the very basic damage per tick. Once you do this, you’ll get a better feel for what deals more damage and what doesn’t.

I really appreciate the time you took to explain this Slayer, I’ve been struggling with this exact information. It kind-of deviates from my 1st post, but I’m glad we took a detour on this one

No problem.

/15char