Guild Wars 2

For the most part i’ve been reading that power is our preferred stat, but how much power is better than say precision? Is it a 1:2 ratio, 1:3?

Ex: is it better to take a piece of armor that has 5 power or 18 precision?

This here may help you http://i.imgur.com/g2zblZl.png
it’s a chart that show you when it is better to start stacking precision/power/precision,

also here are some explanation on how to use it,
http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/19418960-math-balancing-power-precision-ferocity-based-on-ep

General rules, if an armor give you more of one (if one give 6 and the other gives 5), use the one with the most stats, it’ll be better, but if they both give 5, use the one the chart tell you too.

The last time I looked at the math, the values needed for precision to be preferred over power require unattainable power values. It also depends on if you’re teaming, etc… and getting crit buffs from others because crit caps at 100%. Perhaps a more savvy theorycrafter can comment better.

Slammed together a spreadsheet trying to visualize the power versus precision debate using base damage numbers and formulas from the wiki to determine power, crit chance, and so forth.

A real “quick” hodgepodge of code that may or may not have some human error involved in copy and paste, so I’ll link a googledocs as well so people can see how/why I got numbers and maybe input their own to tailor it to themselves.

For the rest I am posting a JPEG showing the table for quick reference.

End summary is, it is always better to get power over precision, unless you are jumping to up 380+ precision over 95ish gains in power.

I used 95 as the increments in power and precision simply because it made the crit chart end on a nice even 100% crit chance, so I made the power increases match that so they move together in even units.

I also just threw in the first attack from Greatsword auto chain, so “Strike” is the weapon attack coefficient utilizing basic greatsword weapon damage.

Ferocity decreases the gap in power and precision, but power still beats it out unless you are getting around 3675 ferocity………not possible, so ferocity does not change the picture realistically.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1maXUTsbH_Rx8JYf5DitlQgVCyIR5Xu6PURy7A_ubcIs/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks CMF I appreciate the effort and work but….

Individual skill co-efficients and the +damage modifiers a guardian has access to makes your calculations very flawed and way off from all my testing and spreadsheets. I haven’t had time to nail down and look at the calculations but I don’t feel it is worth it since the idea itself is flawed. The other thing that makes this such a hard calculation is that low crit build use crit on swap. That is another wrench.

For ex. examine the mace with high power and crit on swap with damage modifiers vs the sword. Than check it with a mediation ferocity low power crit build. This will give you some of the base concepts of which weapons go with which type of build,s which increase your damage in which spec. In my opinion, the basic lack of this understanding has stopped a ton of non-META builds.

its annoying because those never use damage modifiers as irish pointed out. therefor I can never use them.

Depends on the weapon/build your using

Precision can become a bit better for 1handed specs then it is for 2 handed specs due to the trait “Right Handed Strength”.
With that trait, permanent fury uptime & enough precision you can reach 100% critical chance with 1 handed attacks.

The downside to building this way is that 1 handed weapons have bad AOE.

I think you misunderstand the OP’s question. He wants to know when he should focus on the non-power offensive stats. It doesn’t have anything to do with the weapon you choose or the traits you have. It’s simply the mathematics that determines the relationship between damage as a function of power, precision and ferocity; that function doesn’t change for a given weapon. With the currently achievable numbers for Ferocity, I think the answer is never; power is always best. I didn’t check in depth but I think the chart CMF posted shows this if someone knows how to interpret it.

Obtena, i think when you look into the mechanics of the skill co-efficients for each skill of each varying weapon and how + dam is (for the most part this is where is gets weird, more exponential in growth than ferocity you will understand how that the simple calculation doesn’t begin to express the true value of precision vs power) It depends upon a variety of factors….. I didn’t even get into quite a few like choices of sigil and etc… it is really complex and almost mind boggling when you get into the numbers and the differences. I don’t understand it all and I am someone who can take raw data and can create complex dynamic spreadsheets and kinda gets off on that side of mmos. The only thing I know besides some basics concepts is that it is really really hard to figure out stuff on a guardian due to 2 or even 3, 4 paths that are lesser known have such a differing impact on your stats.

Well, the spreadsheet assumes no stats/traits/gear taken and simply increases in power and/or precision.

Any damage modifiers you take are available to both sides, thus if get a 10% mod to one, it can easily apply to the other, letting the numbers still “move together”.

As far as traits, your damage modifiers are Fiery Wrath, Radiant Power, Elusive Power, Unscathed Contender. All of those are obtainable, but normally only 1 or 2 are taken at a time, as it is a loss of damage or utility to spread out to all of them at once.

So normally you will have a 1.1 * 1.1 = 1.21 damage modifier from traits alone.

In PvE Scholar has been shown to be the clear and consistent choice, so you can add another 1.1 to the formula (1.1*1.1*1.1=1.331)

Force/night are the obvious choices, but to make it simple I’ll just assume Force as it is an all around increase and not dependent on day night cycles (1.1*1.1*1.1*1.05=1.39755)

After that you can apply the 1.39755 to the already averaged out crit chance/crit damage modifier per each cell in the spreadsheet.

All of those damage modifiers are also not heavily dependent on power or precision and if anything FURTHER the fact that power will be the heaviest weighing factor on increases to damage.

It is a lot of numbers, but with the available gear combinations and stats available, power will always win out over precision in equal proportions when choosing armor.

UNLESS you are gaining so much precision that you jump 15-20ish percent in crit chance, power is the clear choice. But you should never run into that scenario unless you are wearing level 1 gear and just now upgrading to level 80 gear or something to that effect.

After that, normal gear/trait/meta theory crafting can be assumed, which we already have a thread and stickied discussion for. The OP simply was asking what is better when picking gear of equal value, power or precision? I am 99.99% sure it is power after looking into it.

irish.3578:

Obtena, i think when you look into the mechanics of the skill co-efficients for each skill of each varying weapon and how + dam is (for the most part this is where is gets weird, more exponential in growth than ferocity you will understand how that the simple calculation doesn’t begin to express the true value of precision vs power) It depends upon a variety of factors….. I didn’t even get into quite a few like choices of sigil and etc… it is really complex and almost mind boggling when you get into the numbers and the differences. I don’t understand it all and I am someone who can take raw data and can create complex dynamic spreadsheets and kinda gets off on that side of mmos. The only thing I know besides some basics concepts is that it is really really hard to figure out stuff on a guardian due to 2 or even 3, 4 paths that are lesser known have such a differing impact on your stats.

It’s not as complex as you describe, though that might depend on the individual. The skill factor coefficients for the weapon skills are simply multiplicative coefficients on the damage function that is dependent on power, precision and ferocity.

What does this mean for the discussion? You can ignore specific weapon skills and effects when deciding how to choose gear to allocate offensive stats. They don’t change the core damage function that is dependent on the three stats.

I’m going to try and go a little more in depth and give an example of the change in power vs crit than make some guesstimates. I am getting a little outside my comfort level but…

If you look at trices post you can see that different stats combinations give you different tipping points where power and crit are equivalent. As you take away more power from that tipping point the more important power becomes. On the other side, as you add more power over that tipping the less important power is.

I “think” what I’m beginning to see in some testing is that our damage modifiers and the particular weapon co-effificients allow for some really skewed numbers where the curve (I think it is a curve I haven’t run the numbers to know for sure) gets steeper. That is as you get to the extreme sides of it…. power can be much more important than crit and on the other side crit can be worth significantly more important than power.

If we take some ridiculous builds and guesses that for every 1 power you could need 4 crit or more to equal it. On the other side of extremes you could need 2 (or more) power to equal 1 crit.

So layered over this is also crit on swap, crit sigils and quite a few other things that would impact your dps.

When it comes to levelling and picking up gear I’d think you would be well below your tipping point where power would be worth significantly more than crit. I will take a complete guess and say power is 1.5 times more valuable than 1 precision for typical levelling.

I could be completely wrong, please prove me it, but this got me through some morning shoveling. I always think I could be missing something or misunderstanding things and jumping to the wrong conclusions..

I have bookmarked an extremely good posts on this topic:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Damage-Power-Precision-and-Golden-Ratios/first#post1743110

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Finding-the-Diminishing-Returns-in-Stats/first#post2037714

I won’t get into the details but the result is that PRE gets better returns than POW when:

Power – Precision + 832 > 2100 / (0.5 + Critdmg)

This is an old post and hasn’t been upgraded for the new Ferocity stat but IIRC, the ultimate conclusion was that for the ranges of POW, PRE and FER that can be achieved, POW is always the stat that gives the best returns. That would be even more true since the crit damage to FER change; Ferocity conversion to crit damage percent was nerfed slightly when it was introduced.

While it is true that there are effects from sigils, etc.. that affect crit rates, etc…, that’s not the question that the OP is asking. Those are also temporary effects; the stats from gear is constant.

Obtena,
You quote the 2nd guy not the OP. The OP says that there are other variables that would impact his numbers like weapon skill, armor, skill co-efficient and that the calculations and relationships gets difficult to express and his numbers are less precise and all of the assumptions including no traits and sigils
As far as I can tell the OP looks like he has things right but… he is taking a snapshot and not telling you his specific stats. All of the variable he rules out could drastically change things and he knows it. The best idea of some of these changes is takes his ideas and than use the visualiation of how the tipping point changes from Trices post. The tipping point could go from like 1500 power to 6000 power depending upon some of the variables that the OP froze and some others. These different tipping points have different rates of growth on either side of them or curves.

Even the 2nd poster realizes his conclusion is different than the OPs.

’Your numbers show a dynamic difference between the numbers, where once the ratio is achieved the two stats do not have the same growth rate as each other."

These are the edges of the curves or the dynamic growth and it is what I think I have been noticing which I see in the first graph the most.

Thanks for the post and great info in that 1st thread. Able to get a much clearer picture of things now.

Wait fury can be stacked right? I’m honestly not sure, haven’t tried it yet. Stacked like 20%40%60% n so on

duration not intensity

id say if your build is based on power and precision then get enough precision that will get you enough crit % chance that you feel comfy with.

you should also pay attention to fury that gives another 20% crit chance, a 25 stack sigil that gives 250 precision maybe, or even a signet utility skill that gives you precision.

I know that not all of the classes have access to such utility or fury.
And thats why i use a skill calculator to check what can i do to get my sweet spot when it comes to crit chance.

I’ve been thinking about this a little bit more…

When you don’t have a lot of stats the numbers are fairly easy and more linear in relationship. As you get more offensive stats and deeper into trait lines this changes and can create more of a curve. So the right amount for your build is an ever changing ratio aka sweet spot. This ratio can change drastically by even who you fight. Or it changes by something as simply as adding a stat or even changing out a weapon. Other things impact it quite a bit and the right amount is… what is right for you is based on who you fight and your style and maybe can be thought of as… what will add the most for you against your hardest target(s) or that can positively change the most situations. Ok, now you are probably thinking I’m crazy so I’ll jump to an ex.

My favorite spec is a 0-0-2-6-6 virtue bunker with clerics. I run it with mace/torch and scepter/focus. My crit rate in this build is 4%. With one int sigil on the mace, if one target is present, I will crit on SoW, Zealot Fire, and Prot Strike. The amount of damage of that crit and how this impacts the power/precision ratio is huge. What if I land it with 48%+ damage and what if I land it with 4% + damage. To get 48% it would have to be the 2-0-0-6-6 I run quite a bit. What about if I’m fighting a thief and only get in 3 hits a weapon swap? What if I’m fighting multiple bunkers and land smite, symbol of faith, cleansing flame and get in 35 hits on one and 15 on multiple targets on a weapon swap or something like a total of 100 hits. So on one swap I am at a 100% crit ratio with 48% dam and the other I am at 7-8% crit ratio with 4% dam. Take out clerics and put in zerker gear and you still have many of the same ideas. My 3 big hitters are skills that have really high co-efficients. What if I tried to use a GS instead of mace/torch… how would a SoW, Zealot Fire, Prot Strike rotation compare to a SoW, Prot Symbol, WW. In WW the damage co-efficient is broken up over multiple hits and eats up the crit on swap. This is why the greatsword has no business in virtue bunker builds.

My virtue bunker build is really strong with any competent help in group situations and in 1v1 against any condition based damage and can bunker most bunkers. It’s typical weakness is high power builds like thiefs, mesmers and guardians and getting pushed off point as you need room to dodge damage. I pick my gear combination to better counter thiefs and mesmers than guardians. 2 classes that I would hit less in each typical weapon swap than the guardian who survives due to more healing. The meditation guardian is my kryptonite as it can negate my burst and heal through my dps and has much higher armor/toughness. Why try to tailor the build to beat something you can’t. So I go with high power, crit on swap, and a ton of dam modifiers.

Why are cele builds so popular with might stacking. As you gain more offensive stats your offensive stats become more valuable. So why not just run cele on a Guardian than? because you can’t stack might as fast and effectively as other classes and how much +healing power impacts our healing if we step outside of meditation builds and our biggest heals have very high skill co-efficients. In these other build you also start gaining +dam burstability to go along with many really big hitters.

I’m pretty sure the one way to figure out what it worth more for you is to…. try a couple or your rotations against single and multiple targets with varying types of game play and various armor levels. Get 2 pieces of gear for one slot that has the widest difference you can find. See what it does in the different situations. If you want you can add up all the dps or just become a judge of did I kill faster or slower. At what point in your standard rotations die or get to 1/2 health or how much hp did it seem to drop even.

Also walls of texts add 15% to your crit. Bam!

I don’t understand what you mean by sweet spot; I think you are overthinking this irish … The chart provided by CMF is all that is needed to determine how one should choose armor to get the ‘correct’ balance of POW to PRE and FER, provided people understand how to read them. For any position on the chart, you will see the increase in damage is always larger in the power axis than it is in the precision axis.

Fortunately, the answer is simple and a consequence of the linear nature of the core damage function: Always get power if you have to choose between the offensive stats.