Guild Wars 2

(For those that don’t know, prowess was at one point the name associated with the Critical Damage stat. I like it more so I tend to use it.)

So I was trying to run some calculations for damage the other day about which stat would get a player the most direct damage in various situations. After some number crunching and over-zealous usage of spreadsheets, I was finding something interesting:
Stat point for stat point, power always boosts damage more than precision or prowess. (I assumed 10 power : 10 precision : 1% prowess for this)

Now I’m more than aware that my calculations could have been mistyped or ignoring some important variable or wrong in other ways. So I want to ask the forums at large: if you have the choice between those three stats, is power always the correct choice for maximum direct damage?

I understand that with the way stat points are bundled on items you can’t easily pick and choose one stat at a time, and that things like on-crit traits and fury change the relative value of precision / prowess, but just in the basic, straightforward situation: is power ever the wrong choice for direct damage?

If you’re only looking at ONE stat… it depends on how high you can boost that stat. Critical hits have a base multiplier of 150% (plus your Critical Damage score). So if you can get your critical chance up to 66% – 75%+ (through Precision and traits), you’re going to be getting crits often enough that the fairly-consistent 150% damage bonus could outweigh the flat damage bonus an equivalent power score would give. I’m not sure where that threshold is, though.

But if you really want to maximize your damage, you’re going to want gear that boosts all three of those stats (Berserker’s armor/weapons, Ruby gemstones). Those three stats have a strong synergistic effect with each other — spreading your stats among the three will have a stronger effect than just maximizing one of them. Of course, going with a “glass cannon” build like that means you’re sacrificing defense, but that’s a topic for another discussion.

Although at very low levels when your gear usually only has one stat, I’d say power is your best bet since you’re dealing with such small bonuses.

it really is quite complicated and compounded even more by the different amounts each stat gives at different levels (10 precision gives more crit chance at level 1 than it does at level 80 for instance)

Power is at the very least the simplest way to increase the damage, it simply increases your damage regardless of your other stats and does so multiplicatively.

Every point of power is an additional multiplier to your damage, double your power and you double your damage against the same target.

Precision and critical damage however are both heavily reliant on each other for the damage boost (though critical damage more so than precision) having massive critical damage but no critical chance means your damage gain will be negligible.

Then you have to throw in the fact that they then multiply power again meaning each point of power you have with them gets increased further.

So it should really be Power > Precision/Crit chance > Crit damage, the actual weights are far too complicated for me to work out at 6am.

However there are still a few caveats, if you know you will be weakened for the majority of the time a high precision rating would have the advantage of less damage loss to it and there are also on crit effects that can boost the power of higher critical chance so there are a few bonuses for sacraficing pure skill damage for critical chance.

Critical damage however is still by far the lesser stat in terms of singularity, it relies far too heavily on the other two to be considered stacking by itself (even if you run something like a 100% crit stealth thief you still need to combine it with power to achieve the best results)