Guild Wars 2

Picking talents and abilities is sometimes difficult because the tool tip doesn’t show exactly what the power does. For example their is a guardian ability that heals upon aegis removal.

OK great I have no idea how much of a heal that is. I’m assuming its going to be based on something like level and +healing power. But… how would I go about figuring that out?

Has anyone created or is starting to work on a wiki that goes into the equations behind the powers?

I would appreciate that too.

For example the Necro Bloodmagic trait which allows you to heal every time you hit a enemy, which then turns out to be 10 health, while mobs hit you for 1k.

Same for sigils, it would be interesting to know how strong the bleed or heal etc on crit is, before i buy them.

I would also highly appreciate if ability tool tips would change with traits, mentioning where it comes from.

For example with Wells, “Gives protection for 3 seconds on cast – by Ritual of Protection”, as tool tip amplification.

Yeah.. little things like that are annoying. I wanted to try Virtue of Resolve major trait at Virtues 20, but I needed to get 40. Then I hit 40, take it, check resolve’s description, omg huge improvement, over 100%! I’ve decided to check how good it is, nope, only 10 more hp per second, which isn’t what description was saying..(space)
(space)
40 to 82 (Description)
40 to 50 (Actually)
That was scaled down to around 30, I believe, when I tested it.

Yeah.. little things like that are annoying. I wanted to try Virtue of Resolve major trait at Virtues 20, but I needed to get 40. Then I hit 40, take it, check resolve’s description, omg huge improvement, over 100%! I’ve decided to check how good it is, nope, only 10 more hp per second, which isn’t what description was saying..(space)
(space)
40 to 82 (Description)
40 to 50 (Actually)
That was scaled down to around 30, I believe, when I tested it.Edit- Apparently I can’t skip a line..
Wtf? It shows 2 times now, but only once in edit.. Q_Q

Sounds like other people are in the same boat as I am… I’m sure someone has started working on this.

I’m currently working my way through the damage equations for Guardian weapon skills. Sword is up on the wiki. Fee free to do your own testing and add it to the wiki, we’re all in this together.

Alex.9432:

Picking talents and abilities is sometimes difficult because the tool tip doesn’t show exactly what the power does. For example their is a guardian ability that heals upon aegis removal.

OK great I have no idea how much of a heal that is. I’m assuming its going to be based on something like level and +healing power. But… how would I go about figuring that out?

Has anyone created or is starting to work on a wiki that goes into the equations behind the powers?

The Greatsword Trait that heals you provides 25 health per Greatsword attack. As of Beta Weekend Event 3, it did not scale with Healing at all. Not sure if this is still the case.

Power of the Virtuous provides +2% damage per boon.

I’m surprised this isn’t already a feature tbh

I did a bunch of this work last night; some relevant info for youse:

All base stats at 80 are 916.

The 300 Precision you get from putting 30 points into whatever tree gives you Precision will net you 12% crit chance, since 25 Precision at 80 is equal to 1% crit chance. Your Precision from gear + traits / 25 = your crit chance at lvl 80.

Power governs attk and skill damage and is calculated by weapon dmg plus traits and gear. Power is 1:1 so 300 Power from the traits would give you 300 more flat damage. The total damage of a skill (auto-attks are skills too) will be equal to the Skill damage on the tooltip plus your Attack stat (which is power + weapon damage). Keep in mind that you will never actually do this number during any attack, since your output is mitigated by the toughness of your enemy.

For example, you have 2500 Attack stat and your pistol auto attk does 200. Your 2700 dmg will hit the lvl 82 Risen with say 1500 toughness and you’ll see a white number for 1200 go off. Toughness is straightforward flat damage mitigation.

Condition duration and all the other % based stats are self-explanatory. My recommendation is to cater towards crit chance builds for DPSers (leverage the Fury boon if you can, 20% crit chance is amazing), and toughness/power or vitality/power for supports and tanks

A note on Healing power – Theres an algorithm on wiki that converts lvl 80 healing power at 100:138, meaning for every hundred points of healing power, your REGEN skills benefit 138 points. There was no algorithm for flat healing skills, but what this means is an extra 400~ points per tick on the regeneration boon. So if your primary healing method is over time heals, consider this stat. If not, consider the take less damage route and put traits in toughness.

Your mileage may vary – I did this math on my lvl 80 engineer and google, so its spotty at best. Thieves may have better Crit stats for all I know. So take from this post what you will, I know this info was helpful to me.

Hansuki – Thank you! That is some awesome info there. Do you know if all skills are 1:1 in terms of damage based on power? This makes AOE amazing and will have me rethink how I build my guardian.

The power attribute does scale the same for all weapon/slot skills, probably with some specific excepetions where the nature of the skill would taken into consideration.

For example, the engineers grenade kit is effected by a lot of traits dealing with explosion damage and crit effects. The primary attack in the kit throws two grenades which explode for AOE dmg. You can talent this kit to throw a third grenade on each attack – each grenade is effected by the power stat, giving the grenade primary skill a 50% damage boost.

So, by that logic, the more power you have, the more damage your AOE skills will do. AOE builds are exceptional for events and farming groups of mobs for mats, but typically lack the CC and DoT effects that the stronger, single-target skills can have. There are few AOE roots, mostly slows and this can leave glass-cannon type builds in a bad spot.

Look for traits that let your single target shots pierce and you get the best of everything (the ranger and engineer both get ranged pierce talents, probably more classes too). I use piercing pistols on my engineer with a crit build to reliably AOE crit large groups with single target attacks that also apply bleeds and some other effects.

Remember that power can only go so far – the biggest numbers will only ever be reached when you crit, so dont neglect crit chance/crit dmg as a viable, if less reliable, option. Swiftness+fury buffs are a deadly combo.

I strongly second this. It would be very helpful if it could be put in a wiki but it would be more helpful if it was in the actual game.

The other thing that rings true is how toughness works. Bosses do a crap ton of damage which means a lot of toughness may prevent a one shot but it will still wreck your world. Unlike other MMOs its not % based. Very interesting stuff. Are you going to post a website or create a wiki for it Hansuki?

I fear that there may be misinformation in this thread. The formula

skill damage = (power)(weapon damage)(skill multiplier)/(defense+toughness)

has been arrived at independently by many different people (myself included) and contradicts the claim that power and toughness merely add to and subtract from the damage. Direct damage is proportional to the source’s power stat and inversely proportional to the target’s armor stat.

An easy test would be reset your traits and locate a typical mob – say the neutral fireflys in most areas – and kill one with auto-attks and no traits, then another one after putting only 30 points into your power tree for the 300 power (dont take any of the traits that increase damage, you just want the 300 power). In theory, your attacks should average an additional 300 dmg – if not, then assume a different formula is used.

Its hard with no training dummies or visible armor stats on mobs. Id like to see some dummies in Lions Arch

There are practice dummies in Lion’s Arch, but I’m not really sure how these works…dmg output on them is really low…

I use the heavy armor dummies in the Mists. They seem to have 2600 armor. Also, the third tab of the PvP weapon vendor contains “steady” weapons which have a fixed damage range, making testing easier. It’s pretty easy to verify that doubling your power doubles your damage.

Testing armor is a bit more difficult since you need to let something hit you, and that thing presumably doesn’t have a steady weapon. I let some creature hit me about 10 times each at two different armor values, and the results — 1035±10 average damage at 1985 armor and 1236±12 average damage at 1642 armor — were consistent to within 1 standard deviation with the hypotheses that damage is inversely proportional to armor.

Ah, thanks for the more accurate math re the toughness issue – math never was my strong point. The conclusions we can draw from your analysis are useful and makes me consider condition damage more and more.

Condition damage could play into your builds as a form of “armor penetration” since effects like poison, bleed, and burn do damage that is not mitigated by your toughness stat. To counter condition damage builds (most of which are damage over time), you would want Vitality and healing power. IIRC there is a boon/buff/consumable or something that will decrease condition duration on your character (not to be confused with the increased condition duration traits for your skills).

Basically means that survivability will depend on a balance between ones armor and their ability to remove negative conditions. I know the engineer has a potion that converts conditions into boons – this was a lifesaver in the Cursed shore where a lot of bosses and mobs do poison or bleed damage. I think every character should reserve a slot for either a cleanse skill or stun-break skill (and switch between the two according to what they are fighting!)