Guild Wars 2

Intro: I am a casual player, my main is a mid 30’s engineer. I read the forums occasionally when I can’t play and have some questions about mechanics, but have no idea how to go about finding those answers. My question arises from the dilemma of how to spec my main in terms of traits and gear. I know a lot of opinions are out there, but I haven’t seen my questioned answered in any of those discussions so I figured I would just ask it here.

Question: How is Damage Calculated?

I know on the wiki, the warning is we have no idea. I appreciate that, but I still am confused. I know a weapon has a certain damage range, I know my power affects it somehow, and I am sure that somewhere along the line armor decreases that amount till it becomes the number I see on the screen. But I am confused as to how that works. Is my power limited by my weapons, or is it added to my weapons? If so then, how much does armor really affect things, given that there was a conversation earlier about how marginal it seems the toughness stat effects damage mitigation.

I recently upgraded my weaponry, from mid teens pistols to lvl 31 pistols from the TP. Sounded great, but my damage numbers that were popping up didn’t change much if it at all. Because of this, I am left wondering, how in the world does power and weaponry effect one another, and how does it affect the final outcome of the number that pops on my screen? I am left wondering the benefit of investing in power gear and the constant upgrade in items, if they don’t make much of a difference.

Hopefully that makes sense, and hopefully there is someone much smarter than I who has some idea as to what is going on, to give me guidance in my future endeavors in GW2.

well im not 100% sure so this is mostly how ive felt it to work overall.

there is 3 values for damage, damage, power, and condition damage.

id assume that damage it self, is the solid modifier for weapon damage, how much your weapon does on skills, just like in any game. then its up to wich you choose to focus on, power (solid damage) or condition damage (damage over time effects) that increases the said type of damage in the end.

wich would make something like:

weapon damage + modifiers (power, condition dmg) = damage – enemys armor and toughness = ammount hit for.

now i dont know real values, but to put that in numbers to make it more simple. it could look like this:

132+122=254-54-50= hit of 150

and as we dont know how much 1 power, or 1 condition damage, or 1 weapon damage increases it, or how much toughness ,or 1 armor reduces it, we cant really tlel exact numbers, but that should give good idea atleast ^^

and thats excluding the boons you both might havegoing on

Make sure you aren’t downlevelled when you test.

AFAIK, condition damage bypasses armour.

First of all some weapons do have different scaling values with stats. Your situation is a perfect example of this. On engineers, pistols have very low scaling with Power, this weapon mainly works with stacking conditions (mostly bleed) on enemies. You will get better result with condition damage than you would with Power or the straight up damage from the weapon. Everything has scaling values, and I don’t know them.

Also, when you use a weapon kit as an engineer, like grenades, flamethrower etc, your weapon makes absolutely no difference, you could even unequip it and you wouldn’t see a difference in damage.