Guild Wars 2

So, I have a freshly-minted 80 engineer from level up tomes/scrolls, and started looking at builds. I found this:

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/15457607-dnt-engineer-build-127-patch

Now, my main is an elementalist, and I remember reading about the difference in DPS between full zerker and full celestial, also on DnTs forums, and that the takeaway was the full cele = 30% DPS drop.

Since Engies work a little different from Elies, I decided to run the numbers myself and see if the drop was quite so precipitous since engineers use more conditions and what-not. Also, since it seems like they’re making some changes to conditions to make them more viable in HoT stacks-wise I wanted to see how rosy the world could look if I was able to realistically utilize conditions.

For my calcs, I utilized the same build as the DnT one, except 6/6/2/0/0 instead of 6/6/0/0/2 for Energized Armor, because the 100-ish power the trait gives is better than the 100 Ferocity 2 points in Tools gives DPS wise (though I didn’t run the numbers with Static Discharge in the rotation so this could be off).

Other assumptions made: 25 vuln all the time, all exotic equipment, calculated both with 0 might/fury and 25 might/fury/damage banners. Runes are force and accuracy, and scholar at 70% uptime. Permanent burning from the Flamethrower, and permanent poison from the nades. 5 conditions all the time for Modified Ammo. If an ability ticks or has a variable multiplier, then whatever it’kittenting will be hit for all ticks/max damage (for blunderbuss/acid bomb). Obviously, this is idealized, but my hope is that the numbers I get will be roughly proportion to what I’ll get in practice.

Using the assumptions, I calculated the DPS from the rotation given in the build above. For funsies, I also calculated the standard error of the DPS, to see if there was a huge different in the randomness of the damage the builds did (on average about 66% of expected damage from one full rotation will fall within 1 standard error).

Final tally:
Full Assassin’s with zerker trinkets:
no buff ~ 10,190 DPS w/ SE 1320 (so 66% interval ~ 8,870-11,510 damage in a rotation)
full buff ~ 16540 DPS w/ SE 770 (15,770-17,310)

Full Celestial:
no buff ~ 8,680 DPS w/ SE 1000 (7,680-9,680)
full buff ~ 14,310 DPS w/SE 1090 (13,220-15,400)

Interestingly enough, Celestial does right at 85% damage of assassin’s/zerker, regardless of how much buffing is going on. Also, while the damage is more variable for Assassin’s gear without buff, it becomes much less random than cele with buffs (mainly because fury gives 100% crit chance, negating that source of variance)

That 15% drop in DPS is in exchange for about a third more HP and a quarter more Armor, plus a oh-why-the-hell-do-I-care amount more of healing power.

I’m thinking I’ll start working toward a celestial set for pugging…

Well, some people like stacking these minor bonuses altogether in exchange of that slight DPS loss.

Few things. First, I don’t believe accuracy is ideal for sigil, with our 10% under 50% and war banner ~63% is the golden number IIRC. Just saying might be able to get more out of something else, but not a big deal unless in your calculations it’s being underutilized with Assassin (basically if you’re factoring in the 10% under 50%)

Second, you forget the Toolbelt cooldown with Tools. Takes a few seconds off allowing more damage from them overall(Both through static discharge and themselves).

Then as a side note witht he current condi situation celestial hurts more than assassin due to it. However that will be leaving with the update. But also we get more cooldown on toolbelt skills and access to an instant recharge if we get hit low enough. And maybe some of those TBD might turn out to be something offensive /shrug. Either way trait stuff will be changing quite a bit.

All that said, yeah never seen celestial as a bad choice for Engi, it’s just not optimal if you can survive without it is all. Personally I just swap my toolkit or p/s in for PUGs and it’s enough, some fights going with the perma vigor trait or whatever, cheaper option

just use energy sigil instead of cele gear…

Jerus.4350:

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I factored in the 10% at 50% counting it at 5% overall. According to my calculations, you can juuuuust get to 100% when the 10% kicks in alongside fury and banner with a celestial build. Accuracy is definitely sub-optimal in assassin’s, but since the second signet is usually “whatever floats your boat” I didn’t bother researching around a whole lot for the “optimum” signet in the second slot. Since this is an alt, I don’t want to have to craft a handful of rifles to switch out for when it’s nightime/fighting specific enemies/whatever. Though, I guess it would be easy to sub zerker in for assassin’s until you can get the full benefit of an accuracy sigil…

To your second point, there’s only 1 toolbelt skill that does damage on this particular layout (grenade barrage) with the others either healing or adding a 15s more burn. The grenade barrage packs a decent wallop, but shaving 3 secs off the 30s cooldown isn’t going to make a huge difference

What I’m going for, is a “whatever I feel like doing today” build. If I want to do open world, or soloing, or dungeons, or WvW, or whatever, just go out and do it with the same set of gear. Of all the stuff I like doing, dungeons seem to be where builds gonna matter most (and I always PUG) so I wanted to know exactly how much of a DPS hit adding a fair bit of survivability would incur.

I went through all this work under the assumption that ANet will make conditions more viable in the near future. Call me an optimist.

less survivability is just something youll get used to if you go zerk. cele will hold you back from being truly awesome in pve. :P

Abnaxis.4593:

Jerus.4350:

snip

I factored in the 10% at 50% counting it at 5% overall. According to my calculations, you can juuuuust get to 100% when the 10% kicks in alongside fury and banner with a celestial build. Accuracy is definitely sub-optimal in assassin’s, but since the second signet is usually “whatever floats your boat” I didn’t bother researching around a whole lot for the “optimum” signet in the second slot. Since this is an alt, I don’t want to have to craft a handful of rifles to switch out for when it’s nightime/fighting specific enemies/whatever. Though, I guess it would be easy to sub zerker in for assassin’s until you can get the full benefit of an accuracy sigil…

To your second point, there’s only 1 toolbelt skill that does damage on this particular layout (grenade barrage) with the others either healing or adding a 15s more burn. The grenade barrage packs a decent wallop, but shaving 3 secs off the 30s cooldown isn’t going to make a huge difference

What I’m going for, is a “whatever I feel like doing today” build. If I want to do open world, or soloing, or dungeons, or WvW, or whatever, just go out and do it with the same set of gear. Of all the stuff I like doing, dungeons seem to be where builds gonna matter most (and I always PUG) so I wanted to know exactly how much of a DPS hit adding a fair bit of survivability would incur.

I went through all this work under the assumption that ANet will make conditions more viable in the near future. Call me an optimist.

If you’re looking for “exactly how much of a DPS hit” it is, then don’t sugar coat it. I mean you go to all the trouble of the deviation but ignore static discharge/toolbelt recharge and a likely superior second sigil. It adds up.

That said, again I don’t think celestial is bad, but I’d bet calculating all that stuff in you’re gonna see it drop down to 80% or close to it instead of your 85% you claim.

Also, if you PUG a lot I’d really suggest Strength Sigil as most PUGs I run into suck at might unless I get lucky with a PS War. Energy is of course a nice catch all defensive option. I have 2 rifles on my Main Engi and I’m happy with them

Couple things:

1) I already have a zerker warrior and a zerker ele, I don’t need to L2P. Zerker’s all fine and good that 25% of the time when you’re in a PUG that is halfway decent, but for the rest of the time I usually switch to warrior because trying carry everybody else is PAINFUL in a cloth glass-cannon versus a warrior with some damage mitigation, even if I can get better boon stacking/party DPS on an ele.

Also, as I already said, I don’t JUST want to do dungeons and fractals. I want some happy funtimes doing other stuff—where optimizations outside DPS actually matter—without making it impossible to do dungeons.

2) I can run the calculations over a longer time period to account for static discharge procs (in fact I probably should because my uncertainty numbers kinda relied on normal approximations when I probably didn’t have a large enough sample for that in the span of 1 rotation) but I’m confused about SD. Does it proc on non-damaging toolbelt skills? Only 1 toolbelt skill in the build does direct damage (Grenade Barrage), while the other three (Incendiary Ammo, Regenerating Mist, Healing Mist) are all support, which is why I discounted it. When I’ve used SD in my own experience I never notice any damage on using these skills, but maybe I need to aim better? Also, does barrage proc 5 SDs if all explosions hit?

Don’t quote me because it’s been a long time since I’ve messed with SD much outside of just screwing around with a build based around it (rifle turret and such).

I believe if you have a targetted toolbelt skill it’ll travel to your target, but if it doesn’t you need to aim it a bit by bringing your camera down, sorta the same funky pathing of the projectile that Flame Blast can have.

Also I’m pretty sure it’s any toolbelt skill. So yes you’ll have those other non damaging skills trigger it as well.

Quick look at the wiki seems to confirm my memory. And no grenade barrage will just be 1, each skill use = 1, I know it’s nice with Rifle turret you can use the quick recharge toolbelt skill, then drop the rifle turret, trigger that, and blow it up for a second SD proc, then quickly after grab a third SD proc with the toolbelt skill again.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Static_Discharge

So, I made the following changes to my calculations:

• Added Static Discharge procs, and extended time period so they can recharge. This added about 1% DPS to the max-DPS build (though adding grenade barrage itself added a lot more than 1%). In the celestial build, OTOH, Static discharge is a drop in DPS (3%) vs. Energized Armor when self-buffed, and about 0.5% better when fully buffed to max might/perma-fury, so I switched between the two since it’s easy to re-spec.
• Switch to ascended gear for both comparison builds, since celecstial gear is hand-crafted on a time delay anyway. Optimized assassin’s+berserker gear so that crit chance is 62% on max-DPS build, so that chance is 90% with fury + banners to prevent losing benefits of Target the Weak
• Ran numbers for Celestial using both Accuracy and Strength. Accuracy is better than Strength, if someone else in the party can provide might. Otherwise, accuracy is ~12% worse than strength if the engie is completely self-reliant for buffs. Calculations for strength runes assume 10 stacks of might, between the sigil and bursting the fire field on the flamethrower
• fixed SE calculations for direct damage, which wasn’t properly calculated for attacks with multiple hits

New numbers at steady-state:

Self-buffs only:
Max-DPS: 12,186 (1670)
Cele w/Strength: 10,210 (1130) or 83.4% of max
Cele w/Accuracy: 9,120 (940) or 73.7% of max

Max-buffed:
Max-DPS: 18,270 (1100)
Cele w/Strength: 15,442 (1080) or 84.5% of max
Cele w/Accuracy: 16,100 (950) or 88.1% of max

In conclusion, even after re-configuring my calculations, we’re still talking low- to mid-teens DPS drop for switching to celestial gear, given all the assumptions I listed. Also, as I was expecting before, celestial gear can be much more consistent in the DPS it deals since condition damage has less variance than direct damage when crit chance is not close to 100%. The difference in spread drops with fury and precision buff from a warrior, however.

I used to (and rarely still do) run full celestial. From my personal experience, the damage difference can be large or insignificant depending on what you’re fighting.
Note: I don’t run the meta build, bombs are my main damage kit

Examples from my experience (solo):
Belka – full assassin’s is 30% better for me.
Labyrinthine Horror – seemed to make no difference whether I ran celestial or berserker gear.

Also gotta keep in mind bosses reduce Condi duration – flamethrower alone won’t keep 100% burn uptime. And trash usually melts faster than condis have enough time to do meaningful damage.

That being said, run what you want in PvE. Celestial is better than most other armor stats, just not better than full dps sets (berserker, assassin, rampage, or sinister)

Typed this on my phone, so please excuse any autocorrect errors.

Yep, people often exaggerate the gap between Berserker and other gear stats. Very often some player would be better using knight/celestial/valkyrie since they would die less often.

But in the end, Berserker is optimal, even if it only gave 5% DPS increase, some players would still use it because they can do so without dying.

I also want to point out, after 3 years, lots of players have racked up thousand of hours of gameplay, of course the content is going to be easy to them, they know everything. I played Dark soul 2 for 100 hours and found the game very casual, imagine spending 5k hours.

For an easy in between option, carry 2 sets of amulet/rings/accessories in zerker and celestial. It only takes 5 inventory slots and accounts for 50% of your stats from gear. I run the following:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpEr1axdLseNSbBNqwA6TMi2+5CEgjC-TxBBABYp8DgHAgg7PknOAHVCSq6PBcBAIDQ+YA-e

With banner of discipline and spotter, you have 76% crit chance. That’s 96% with fury, and 100% when target is under 50% health. With just one or the other, you’ll be between 85-95% crit chance.

It’s not optimal for dungeons, but I use it for open world and WvW too and like not having to carry multiple sets of gear for different activities. And in dungeons, I’m still able to carry my DPS weight while having more passive defense. I can solo mai trin in the 10-19 levels using this build with celestial trinkets and a few trait changes to get vigor and backpack regenerator only thanks to the sustain (I also swap flamethrower for Elixir R for more dodges and the self revives). I’m not a hardcore skilled player, so without the celestial there’s no way I could sustain the damage.

I like the DnT calc because it was validated in game. Don’t trust calculations without validation, I’ve done my fare share of figuring and testing but I never had confidence in it. I did see a significant drop in DPS when deviating from Assassin/Zerker though to the point that I wouldn’t touch Cele for PvE, 20%ish in game. SD adds a notable increase in DPS.

That being said, a good engineer in cele that knows kits and cycling will out perform a mediocre zerker camping grenades any day. If you’re at the top of your game I wouldn’t worry about zerker vs cele especially when the new traits and condi system drops.