Guild Wars 2

Since recently, I have come across a complaint saying Weakness is too strong as a form of damage reduction, I wanted to explain exactly how to calculate how much it affects expected damage.

Weakness is a weird condition in that it scales with stats on the target moreso than with the applier’s. Its effectiveness scales with Crit Chance and Crit Damage. Power and weapon strength have no effect on it whatsoever. This is because we are only calculating percentages, not a final value (which is affected by those things).

The first step is to separate all damage dealt into three categories:

• Unaffected normal hits ((1-crit chance)*.5)
• Unaffected critical hits (crit chance *.5)
• Affected hits (usually starts at .5, or 50%, more on this later)

Step 2: multiply “unaffected critical hits” by your crit damage. Likewise, multiply “affected hits” by .5 for a glancing blow.

Step 3: Add all three values together. We’ll call this “W.”

Step 4. Repeat steps 1-3, but use just the “unaffected” categories and double their values. We’ll call this “N.”

Step 5: Divide W by N to see how much of your regular damage you are still dealing under Weakness. Subtract that number from 1 to get the effective average damage reduction from Weakness.

Dwarven Battle Training is currently the only thing that changes the equation. This changes “affected hits” initial value to .25 (.125 final) and causes you to to use .75 instead of .5 on “unaffected hits.” The rest of the steps are still the same.

If anyone can reduce this down to a simple equation, I would be appreciative.

I’m not going to comment on the math, but I would like to say that weakness is fine, and moreover we need more effects like it.

To many of this game’s active defenses are just straight damage negation which leads to extremely binary combat. We need less invulns and more partial mitigation effects like weakness and protection.

Crinn.7864:

I’m not going to comment on the math, but I would like to say that weakness is fine, and moreover we need more effects like it.

To many of this game’s active defenses are just straight damage negation which leads to extremely binary combat. We need less invulns and more partial mitigation effects like weakness and protection.

We have plenty for physical damage already, even in stats with toughness/armor, boons like protection, and conditions like weakness, but not enough of these modifiers for condition damage. The only real option is either Resistance boon or removal.

power =p
critchance =cc
critical damage = cd

Why so difficult? I mean you have a 0.5 chance to deal 0.5/0.25 damage reduction. When you redct the damage, you also negate the crits. So the damge reduction is 0.5*(p*0.5 + p*cc*(cd-1))
Since we are interested in the relative reduction we have to divide the damage (p*(1+cc*(cd-1)) which results in (0.5*(p*0.5 + p*cc*(cd-1)))/(p*(1 + cc*(cd-1))) = 0.5*(0.5 + cc*(cd-1))/(1 + cc*(cd-1))

So having 0% cc results in a 25% damage reduction and having a 100% cc and 200% cd results in 37.5% damage reduction. THe formula with dbt is

0.25*(0.5 + cc*(cd-1))/(1 + cc*(cd-1))

Zietlogik.6208:

Crinn.7864:

I’m not going to comment on the math, but I would like to say that weakness is fine, and moreover we need more effects like it.

To many of this game’s active defenses are just straight damage negation which leads to extremely binary combat. We need less invulns and more partial mitigation effects like weakness and protection.

We have plenty for physical damage already, even in stats with toughness/armor, boons like protection, and conditions like weakness, but not enough of these modifiers for condition damage. The only real option is either Resistance boon or removal.

Difference is, there also aren’t multipliers for condition damage. Those that are there are also much smaller than those for direct damage. Interestingly, the couple of reducers we do have tend to be larger than direct damage equivalents.

Zietlogik.6208:

We have plenty for physical damage already, even in stats with toughness/armor, boons like protection, and conditions like weakness, but not enough of these modifiers for condition damage. The only real option is either Resistance boon or removal.

My point has nothing to do with conditions vs power.

My point was that this game has way too many damage negation effects, with little emphasis on partial mitigation.

The problem with total damage negation is that it’s binary.
Thieves are a great example of this since all of their defenses are total negation. In 1v1s (particularly against classes with a low attack rate) thieves can be practically invincible because they can evade or blind almost everything. However in a teamfight they don’t have enough and tend to die in seconds.
That’s the problem, they either have enough negations for the situation and are nearly invincible, or they don’t have enough and they die horribly. And there is almost no inbetween those extremes.

That’s why this game needs more things like weakness and less evadeframes/invulns/blocks. Weakness provides a strong amount of damage mitigation without being absolute. Weakness also scales with attack rate (although it’s more swingy at lower attack rates)

Not sure why you’re over-complicating it. Damage either lands or it doesn’t.

50% chance to ‘fumble’ – ‘fumble’ deals 50% damage (also affects crits).

- 0.5 × 0.5 = 0.25

Regardless of crit chance, crit dmg or power the enemy will be dealing 75% of their damage whilst under weakness.

Its impossible/useless to think any further than this as you’d need to factor in each skill co-efficient.

Best way of thinking about it is as the Sister to Vulnerability. Full Vuln stacks increases incoming damage by 25%, Weakness decreases outgoing damage by 25%.

Is it #worth. Debatable, as ANET gives out so much CC that there are other (better) ways of trading damage more effectively.

I’d prefer to see boons like:

RESOLVE:
- decrease damage received by 50%.
- lose a stack of RESOLVE when hit.

LIFELINK:
- Under LIFELINK your auto-attacks leech ~300 health
- Stacks in duration
– Being hit whilst under LIFELINK extends its duration by 1s (1s ICD).

There are probably more/better options than these. But as one of the posts mentioned, it’d be nice to see some mitigation mechanics outside of CC into damage. ANET pls give scope to TRADING damage (esp 1v1).

Also, I’m disappointed to see boon duration come back. There is so much scope in the trait system for augmenting skills and most of the current ones are redundant anyway. Why make it harder to balance when you are already misusing the tools you designed to achieve it?

Byron.1902:

Not sure why you’re over-complicating it. Damage either lands or it doesn’t.

50% chance to ‘fumble’ – ‘fumble’ deals 50% damage (also affects crits).

- 0.5 × 0.5 = 0.25

Regardless of crit chance, crit dmg or power the enemy will be dealing 75% of their damage whilst under weakness.

Under weakness if you would have crit but you also fumble, you will not crit therefore reducing more damage then the expected 25%.

Tim.6450:

power =p
critchance =cc
critical damage = cd

Why so difficult? I mean you have a 0.5 chance to deal 0.5/0.25 damage reduction. When you redct the damage, you also negate the crits. So the damge reduction is 0.5*(p*0.5 + p*cc*(cd-1))
Since we are interested in the relative reduction we have to divide the damage (p*(1+cc*(cd-1)) which results in (0.5*(p*0.5 + p*cc*(cd-1)))/(p*(1 + cc*(cd-1))) = 0.5*(0.5 + cc*(cd-1))/(1 + cc*(cd-1))

So having 0% cc results in a 25% damage reduction and having a 100% cc and 200% cd results in 37.5% damage reduction. THe formula with dbt is

0.25*(0.5 + cc*(cd-1))/(1 + cc*(cd-1))

But dont forget that the 37.5% damage reduction coming out from your formula is only an average value. This mean, you can be lucky and if you never had criticals, then the damage reduction you get is only 25%. This is the lower value of damage reduction you can have. Unfortunately, the higher reduction damage you can have is much much much more higher. For example, as you go to watch on my screens on the “plz remove scepter autoattack buff” topic, with an high critical damage and 100 critical chance (sigill of intelligence), you can get an insane max dmg reduction of 82.
Now the fact that average dmg reduction is 37.5% doesnt matter, if we do want a game based on a RNG that can cause a 82% dmg reduction, then we have to admit that this game is less skill based than we think.
Also, your % is becoming closer to the reality the more the player spam. This means, classes based on crucial timed attacks rather than spamming skills, are more hurt by weakness since they have higher chance to get higher % of dmg reduction than the average on your formula and be totaly obliterated. Also, the fact that no critical chance and condi dmg is affected by the same dmg reduction of let’s say zerker build is itself an issue of imbalance. As i wrote in the topic i mentioned above, weakness %uptime is the reason zerker/marauder builds are beeing left apart from the actual meta (if you look at metabattle, even revenant now its suggested to go paladin!!!). Reason is, that the risk of running so glassy is too high compared to the reward, with the actual blind/weakness/evade spam meta.
Also, as i mentioned in the topic, there’s no reason for a condi dmg build based to cleanse weakness, since a condi player is loosing less than 25 of is total dps (since he get dps from condi also). This means, a power/crit build needs more cleanse than a condi based build. i.e weakness is not balanced. Go check mi video, with a corrupt boon on might giving 10 seconds of weakness, and all the weakness spamm there is in the game, i could eat entirely UA dmg without bothering of evade. At certain points, i even calculate that the best time to heal was… guess when… during the opponent UA burst! Reason is, i m 100% sure i cant be interrupted during UA, i’m 100% sure i cant hit during UA, best thing to do? is eat the ridicoulous UA dmg of 3k average (cuz of weakness) while healing!!!
Weakness is too effective, as i wrote, the boon counterparts wich should be fury, vigor, protection are way much more weaker than weakness. Also, you cant compare the fury uptime to weakness uptime, since it has less effectiveness.
You would prefer having perma fury/vigor or been able to put perma weakness on the opponent? i guess the answer is pretty obvious. in fact, i prefer having the chance to put 100% weakness uptime on opponent rather than having 3k armor. This is also the reason why the considered “heavy armor” arent the tanks in this game, tanks are class that can spam weakness very easily, i.e elementalist and necros.
And stop saying necro is easy to focus, rlly if i m using revenant against one necro, one warrior and one DH, i will go UA on DH, cuz he will go down faster than necro!! Then i would chose warrior, and hope necro will never focus me cuz if he is, i will probably have weakness and my build will be totaly useless.
Reason why necro is focused first, is because he is the major threat, so you rather kill him before he charge his life bar, or you better start with DH. Off course, the chance of killing necro at the first impact decrease the more the game goes on. This mean, after the first engage, necro wont be anymore the first target priority, cuz he will probably have life bar ready.

Now taking a possible scenario similar to my screens on the “plz remove corrupt boon scepter”, i could full my adrenaline, eviscerate for 1.1k instead of 6k, use fury signet, get another eviscerate for 1.1k instead of 6k, use To the limit, do another eviscerate of 1,1k instead of 6k, with a an entire build obliterade completely by weakness. So starting by this, its obvious that for a berserker warrior is better cleanse that weakness, instead while i’m playing with necro condi, when i have weakness i’m like “who cares”.

So my response of weakness effectiveness: i dont care if it is effective enough or not, is not this the problem, the real issue is that is totaly unbalanced cuz it has too much different output depending on the opponent build, i can accept autoprocs wich are timed and predictable, i cant accept a game DETERMINED by RNG, and weakness is one of those condi that promotes RNG. So NO, weakness is not OKAY and we DONT need more condi like weakness.

The only problem i have with most conditions in general is when nearly every class deals them like a side effect. If you want to deal weakness then you should have to trait it and leave some other good trait beside. Weakness itself is fine. Weakness in auto attacks feels quite lame. Elementalist trait is a good example how it should be. You have to leave out one of the main sustain traits to take it. This is a good tradeoff.

What we need is a condi resist stat, which would work similar to toughness.

Fivedawgs.4267:

What we need is a condi resist stat, which would work similar to toughness.

what does this means? is this the appropriate topic? we are talking about weakness…
Would this change help to make weakness have more fair effect between condis and power dmg?

-OFF TOPIC- NO we don’t need condi resist stat similar to togness, it would make no sense, it would be like bring condi dmg on the same floor to power dmg, wich shouldnt be. What we need is delete completely condition dmg stat. So class without heavy burst capacity will be able to recover aniway the dps from condi, while still beeing depending on power dmg. This will make condi dmg a secondary/side source of dps like is in every mmorpg (especialy the action based one), not the MAIN source of dps, wich is totaly wrong in a action rpg. – END OFF TOPIC-

Off topic -
But condi are the main source of dps this meta … end of off topic.

Fivedawgs.4267:

Off topic -
But condi are the main source of dps this meta … end of off topic.

Let me guess you never bother to check your damage taken stats at the end of match?

Because I don’t know about you, but on mine Power damage taken is usually 2x to 4x more than condi damage taken.

You might be right, I’ll make a thread about it later.. don’t want to derail this one.