Guild Wars 2

Just wanted to get a little discussion going on the above.

In theory the greatsword’s base damage of 296 + 296 + 443 = 1035 over 2.5 seconds is roughly equivalent to the 1h sword’s base damage of 269 + 269 + 504 = 1042.

Whirling wrath – A lot of people say this is unpredictable. I disagree. The floating combat text (and animation) is very misleading with this ability. What I have found is that as long as you are in melee range, 7 melee range strikes occur in the combat log. They do damage with a coefficient of 0.4 or 148 each at base, for a total of 1036 to melee range targets regardless of what the floating combat text tells you. Go to the mists and check your combat logs and golem hp bars. Don’t trust the tooltip! Additionally (and this is the random part) there are several projectiles with a coefficient of 0.15, for 56 damage each or 392 if you whirl from within the target and hit every projectile. Even if you only hit the melee portion, this is a dps increase. I’m only going to consider the physical portion of this skill going forward.

Symbol of wrath – has a high amount of damage (1016 base with a 2.75 coefficient) for such a low cast time. This too is a dps increase, and quite a decent one.

Those of you who have played warriors before will remember this part. To maximise dps you want to unload your high dps skills (100b, WW, symbol) and then swap away from your low dps auto attack weapon. Unless your build has zealous blade and not radiant power/powerful blades (which I can’t understand, going from 15 radiance to 25 radiance gives better returns than 10 zeal to 20 zeal) then I would bet your 1h sword #1 has more effective power and therefore does more dps than your greatsword #1 dps. What this means is that you unload your symbol, WW, and then swap to 1h while you wait out the very conveniently timed cooldowns. For example both 20/30/0/10/10 and 10/25/0/0/25 have roughly 10% more effective power with a 1h than with a 2h.

Keen to read your thoughts. Happy to be corrected too

I’m confused. So are you agreeing with the meta Sword/foucs + GS rotation of:

WW → Symbol → AA until WW is ready → WW → Swap to Sword → AA for 10-13s(this I have seen debated) → Swap to GS → Repeat.

There are slight variations of this, but its generally around that kind of rotation.

Yeah that’s the rotation I was getting at.

However something to consider… if you assume the first WW takes you from time point 0 to time point 2, and the symbol from time point 2 to time point 3.. WW is not available again until time point 12, and takes until time point 14 (assuming 2 sec cast time, I could be wrong but I’m keeping it simple). The swap to 1h lasts 10 seconds before you swap back to GS and start again. This is because the cooldown starts when you finish the ability rather than when you start.

This means that out of a 24 second rotation you have 2*WW (~4 secs), 1 symbol (~1 sec), 9 secs of GS auto attack and 10 secs of 1h auto attack. In comparison a pure GS rotation would likely look like 2 WWs, 1 symbol and 19 auto attacks per 24 seconds.

Knowing that the auto attacks are on par, and that the 1h has a ~10% effective power advantage, using the above base damage numbers I’m actually only seeing a few percentage different:

2 * WW @ 1036 min = 2072, symbol = 1016, GS#1*9=3726, 1H#1*10=4168. 10% bonus to 1H#1 from higher effective power assuming decent traits=416.
Altogether = 11398 / 24 secs = 475 base dps.

Straight up 2h:
2 * WW @ 1036 min = 2072, symbol = 1016, GS#1*19=7866
Altogether = 10954 / 456

You can get rid of the noise by simplifying it to 19 secs of GS#1@414 vs 9 secs of GS#1@414 + 10 secs of 1H#1@~460, which ends up at~20 base dps different over the 24 second rotation. Before taking GS might procs into consideration.

Perhaps it’s more even than we think.

what i think would give an edge to Sword over GS is the versatility that gives you the off-hand weapon, you can keep the nice dps of the sword and have the defensive utility of Focus/Shield or the more offensive utility of Torch, then again, GS has good cc so i’d say both are even, really, such minimal dps difference shouldn’t mater that much

From a PvE perspective, the burst potential of GS will likely always be higher, but the DPS throughput (after factoring in Right-Handed Strength) of Sword/Focus is going to prove more reliable on a fairly short timescale. @Tarsius and I have discuss (some what in passing, and not for quite sometime) the full potential in regards to WW. Even with the outrageous numbers I’ve been able to pull off with it, you will almost always see higher returns from autoattacking with sword. Keep in mind when calculating your hypothetical returns that cast and delay times for skills have a nontrivial effect on output. Every time you delay a skill or otherwise interrupt your autoattack you are paying that opportunity cost.

Speaking of WW… I need to get my guildies to follow me in Orr … I haven’t really tested anything extensively since getting my Sunrise/It being upgraded to Ascended. I was able to get a 31k whirl with solo buffs and a 20/25/0/0/25 build on the risen giant vets in Orr, but I’m pretty confident I could break my 36k record from back then, especially with group buffs.

waiting on that Kelnis! that was fun to follow. now get to it!! lol

after having “studied” Sword dps a bit, one thing i’ve learnt it if you can afford to, never interupt the sword auto 3rd chain. also, with the latest patch? not sure if exploit or not but a bug perhaps? i think, often i’ll be auto attacking and i’ll get to hit sword wave twice in a row. unsure of what causes it exactly, so that’s massive damage from the sword AA chain. just food for thought.

akamon.2769:

not sure if exploit or not but a bug perhaps? i think, often i’ll be auto attacking and i’ll get to hit sword wave twice in a row. unsure of what causes it exactly, so that’s massive damage from the sword AA chain. just food for thought.

I see this if the target I’m attacking dies at the second chain or I switch targets before the 3rd strike and the new target is out of range. You’ll just keep trying to do sword wave over and over until you actually hit a target. ( so I don’t think it’s exploitable ). Sounds like it might be related to the infinity-spin bug.

Tarsius.3170:

akamon.2769:

not sure if exploit or not but a bug perhaps? i think, often i’ll be auto attacking and i’ll get to hit sword wave twice in a row. unsure of what causes it exactly, so that’s massive damage from the sword AA chain. just food for thought.

I see this if the target I’m attacking dies at the second chain or I switch targets before the 3rd strike and the new target is out of range. You’ll just keep trying to do sword wave over and over until you actually hit a target. ( so I don’t think it’s exploitable ). Sounds like it might be related to the infinity-spin bug.

now that i think about it, that’s probably it. when i play, i am often switching targets while strafing and that’s when it’s happened the most. so probably related to the same bug. haven’t tested if it actually doesn’t do damage on the repeats (would be interesting to see if this is reproduceable just for the sake of testing) but you’re probably right.

anyways, back on topic. : ))

Wasn’t the greatsword autoattack like 3.0 seconds whereas the 1h sword auto attack is 2.7 seconds? Also, doing ingame tests on lupi (not the most accurate but i had more attempts there than anywhere else) and bloodstone shard are telling me: GS rotation without swapping to sword is a rather huge dps loss, even in solo. Whirling wrath seems to hit 9 times on average when in melee range but not moving (tested on bloodstone shard). Sword autoattacks only are not as good as a rotation of gs+sword but better than a pure gs rotation. Binding Blades and Leap of faith are a dps increase, taking 3 stacks of blind into account.

What i don’t know yet: the most optimal rotation. Even though it seems like gs 2, 4, 3, 5, 111, 2, swap, autoattacks for 4 chains + one ray of judgement or 5 auto chains and swapping back.

Anicetus.1253:

What i don’t know yet: the most optimal rotation. Even though it seems like gs 2, 4, 3, 5, 111, 2, swap, autoattacks for 4 chains + one ray of judgement or 5 auto chains and swapping back.

That is the second rotation I see. The one I listed was from guang, the crazy theory craft one. Has anyone put some good testing down with these rotations? And will the blinds increase dps if we already have warriors applying tons of vuln already?

I usually go with the sword AA, then ray of judgement mixed in there only if I want to insure perma blind on a mob.(like abominations before lupi if I think my pug group isn’t reliable to burst em quickly). All I know is, when in doubt. I just do WW → Symbol →AA →> WW —> Sword —> AA for 10 seconds. If Vuln applications are in doubt, then I will add in all moves that cause blinds.

Binding Blades is the strongest skill the guardian has, given more than one enemie to fight.

Anicetus.1253:

Wasn’t the greatsword autoattack like 3.0 seconds whereas the 1h sword auto attack is 2.7 seconds?

GS auto chain is something between 2.4 and 2.5 seconds, not 3.0. Tested it once when I didn’t even know how crappy the ingame tooltips are. Afterwards, I knew better.

But... 1035 per 2.5 seconds is more than 1042 per 2.7 seconds. That would mean that GS autoattacks are stronger than sword autoattacks which definitely isn’t right, not even when you have no sword trait.

Edit: Messed up sword and LH chain durations, sword is 2.5s. But still, when adding might in (1 might is about 1.5% damage), assuming 3 stacks average (almost 5%) that would put GS over sword. There must be something wrong.

Have you factored in the inclusion of the combos to this? Greatsword’s many advantages include the added retaliation on quite a low cooldown