Guild Wars 2

Been seeing a lot of posts about burning damage and what weapons to use, or just what weapons do the most damage in general. Here is a spreadsheet I developed for myself using steady weapons in the mists.

keep in mind that attacks can not happen simultaneously, so the numbers are misleading and should be thought of in attack sequence to find the true damage output

Even with that caveat, these numbers give interesting insight to each weapon and the end results mirror what is shown with smaller numbers.

Basing the information purely off of numbers is slightly misleading if you factor in scepter and staff orb travel time, but it does show in a static perfect condition scenario how the weapons would preform without any enhancements from traits and such.

For me this helps me see how some weapons benefit from burning more than others and helps emphasize what I might want to use with certain traits.

Hopefully I cleaned it up enough for someone other than me to understand it, but across the top the spreadsheet shows what weapon/attack is in that column, how much time is being evaluated in the fight in seconds, how much damage in burning is being done, and the hits needed to proc the burning effect from our virtue.

This also shows how many attacks were done in that time and how many second of burning were applied via those attacks.

Chain attacks are totaled together as one hit for damage, but the individual strikes are counted for the hits to burn count.

The torch is slightly misleading since the primary source of damage is burning so those do not count towards the hits done.

In essence, the torch can do all the burning damage you need so any other burning you stack on top of that just prolongs the duration. If you already have enough burning to make it to the next application refresh then you are over doing it with burning.

Hope this helps people, but this is a one dimensional spreadsheet showing damage, which does not take into account utility.

I would not entirely say weapons… I think a VAST majority of our Guardains truely don’t understand our mechanics when it comes to reactionary offense and i think you’re spot on w/ a post like this.

Retaliation + Burn on Blocking Build is awesome for Bunker builds.

So I would count up the ways in which we can block, and add that as a weapon.

I actually built one based of blocking a while back when I was testing defensive damage in spvp and this is what I came up with.

I can appreciate what you are attempting to do here, but it’s a bit misleading and incorrect. For instance, from your first chart, you list GS, it has a damage for each skill and you simply multiply how many times that would hit in 60 seconds for each one of them and add them all up. In reality, that’s not what happens. There are execution times and if you are executing one skill, you can’t execute another so a simply linear addition of each skills damage isn’t reflective of how much damage you will get using that weapon over a period of time.

As a more simple example … if you are hitting as much as you can with GS skill1 @ 130 damage per hit with a 1.5 second cooldown, resulting in 5200 damage, you AREN’T using skill 2,3,4 or 5. If you aren’t using 2,3,4 and 5, you can’t add the theoretical damage you would get from skill 2,3,4 and 5 in that 60 seconds to the 5200 damage you get from skill 1 to get your stated 10K damage for using a GS.

It’s the same thing for calculating the number of hits you make in a second. It’s not that simple.

Additionally I have spreadsheets on our healing and healing traits such as zealous healing, altruistic healing, and monk’s focus….those are much more scatter brained though and in no condition to make any sense to others.

Overall answer for that is that AH is best in groups and sufficient solo, Monks is best for burst heals and solo survivability, and the lesser known fact is that Zealous Blade heals fairly well and scales great with multiple targets.

Try combining Zealous blade with Monk’s focus for some fun greatsword play without feeling too squishy.

Also AH and Empowering Might procs are not the primary focus of what AH Crit hammer builds are good, the seal boon applies so consistently and reduce damage at the same time that it makes that build great, the might procs are good and help provide group utility and damage but not so much a focus in survivability.

Forgot Zealots Defense for Block + burn.

As well, maybe making note of which one’s are AoE based on duration blocking (Zealots & Shelter)…

Obtena, I completely understand and as I said it is purely based off of numbers of the skills themselves and not the rotation you would actually use.

I do have a spreadsheet showing projected damage rotations and I will say the damage trends do match up but the damage totals come out differently as expected because you have cast times in this attacks and they can’t be used simultaneously.

I can post those as well if you like but again they are much less clean in appearance.

Amins, zealots defense and other projectile blocks do not provide burning effects from the trait. They simply “block” as a line of sight and not as a blocking mechanic.

I would be much more interested in the results from that as it would be more accurate. As a burn-user, I would be generally interested in seeing how passive vs. active burning compares in damage from the Virtue.

I pasted my spreadsheet for damage rotations into a googledocs, best way to show it.

Again NOT perfect, because I rounded damage attacks to the nearest second to quickly show myself a projected turn based attack rotation for each skill. This way skills can not execute in conjunction with each other, but must wait to trigger.

These are not the optimal attack rotations either, that would take a lot more time/effort/calculations. Some skills should be ignored if you want to do the best “dps” but again this is a quick down and dirty way to show how weapons could perform.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au1z6TUkf93KdGNkRThhX2NKSEJFMnM3R29McTl5T1E

Passive burning will provide the best effect in a solo situation. In a group situation active burning by triggering the trait would probably be best as with 5 people and 5 seconds per each burn you can make it so burn stays applied on the target until you are ready to trigger VoJ again to refresh the burn stacks.

Each person’s condition damage changes the burn damage individually and as shown in the gw2 wiki each person’s burn application would take turns doing their full effect.

The thing to remember with burning is if I add 60 stacks of burning, I have to wait 60 seconds to see that damage.

Passive burning allows you to not have to wait for damage so it happens with your attacks instead of next to your attacks. (5 strikes add 1 second of burning on 5th strike versus 10 seconds of burning on the target and you hit 5 times and added 1 more second, now you have to wait 11 seconds to see full damage potential)

CMF.. interesting. I didn’t catch that. Will double check, thank you.

Can you give your conclusions about your work CMF?

also I don’t get how scepter does more dps than the GS and sword.

From my personal experience in terms of overall DPS : GS >Sword+torch>Scepter+torch>Hammer>Mace>staff

It is not a clear cut answer for most things but the above samples give some insight as to how our weapons work.

If you calculate weapon damage and rate of hits in, then you get a significantly higher damage output from a weapon with procced burning effects (assuming you are not using the virtue as a cooldown and simply letting it proc every 5-4 hits depending on how you trait)

Due to that, you will see things like scepter, greatsword and sword providing higher damage output via burning.

Other weapons benefit very little from burning so raw increase in power and/or crit dmg and chance help provide better damage for those weapons, such as hammer and mace.

Scepter only “looks” like it does more damage because in a perfect situation the target is at point blank range and not moving so there is no travel time and there is no misses due to movement. It is our best 1h damage output though, so on a boss fight maybe switch to scepter to focus your damage on a single target better. This again is fight dependent.

Greatsword is our best damage dealer overall due to the fast attacks, strong hits, and good application of burning procs. Also it provides decent AE with the wide arc and whirling wrath. As most guardians found when they started, the greatsword is a good weapon overall and they favored it greatly as they felt the usefulness of it more reliably than other weapons that you have to tweek to get to work well.

Hammer is good burst damage but bad sustained dps damage. The biggest bonus of the hammer is the all to famous AH healing. Combine that with might procs and you have good utility from crits giving might and a lesser heal, fast symbols providing high up time on protection which reduces damage, and consistent healing via symbol boons giving more healing via AH and if you trait for it, symbols can stack heals on top of it as well.

So scepter can be good if used right just because of how fast it attacks, greatsword is a well rounded tool that focuses on damage and works single target or multi-target, hammer is our perfect utility weapon that gives us damage and survivability.

What about mace, sword and staff?

Mace provides tons of healing, but in a game that likes to downplay healing you can find better survivability via protection boons with hammer. This is still a great weapon for defensive play and stack some crit on that and you will see some big burst hits.

Sword is a good balance between the full offensive scepter and the full defensive mace. Sword has no symbol so stack power on it and condition damage to see more gain in damage. Crit always helps any attack but I am unsure if the smaller hits will see as much of an effect from crit as it might from pure power increase and condition damage from fast attacks.

Staff is a full defensive weapon but it attacks fast like the scepter with a wide arc auto attack chain. Downside to the AE is you can only proc burning to 1 target at a time. But if you have 5 targets infront of you, then every ae strike from attack 1 will proc a burn. The biggest bonus for me with staff is the swiftness boon and the might boon. This is a good offhand for traveling and in the event that you need a ranged weapon it is “decent” but not as good in damage as scepter.

Our off hands are more about utility and use them as you see fit. Shield is group utility with burst damage reduction through on demand protection. You can not maintain that, but in the event of a big hit coming your way, you can provide the group with protection and hopefully mitigate that damage by 33%. We don’t have a 1 hit block, but we have a group “shield” through that ability.

Focus is very selfish in its useage, but provides better cooldowns than the shield in terms of stopping full damage for 3 hits.

Torch is a great suppliment to low damage 1 handers through burning effects. Like the mace for example, horrible dps but good burst. Combine that with the torch and you have a decent balance of defense in one hand and offense in the other hand.

But if you put the torch with a fast proccing weapon like the sword or scepter, then you see less use in burn damage. What you can do though is ensure the burn condition is up and combine that with Fiery Wrath for an extra 10% damage on burning targets.

Cleansing flame does direct damage and not burning damage, but you have to think about the fact that you are not doing any other attack while breathing that flame. So unless you combine with smite, you are only doing 1 attack or the other. The sword auto attack does about the same damage as Cleansing flame and the scepter auto attack does less. I would have to run some numbers to see if it is worth it to use that over the auto attacks or not.

Long “conclusions” about my work and I hate to use the tired old phrase but: With the above information, hopefully you can play the way you want to play. Just with more information on the choices you are making.

They do give some insight yes, thanks for that.

I have to mirror Obtena’s comments though and say that for the ‘lay reader’ your initial spreadsheet could be extremely misleading. Testament to this are some of the posts above where incorrect conclusions have seemingly already been made off the data.

Perhaps making it clear in your opening post that those damage figures can not be taken as a direct comparison between weapons for how they would perform (solely DPS-wise) when actually fighting (i.e. against an enemy that will provide for reactive damage) would probably be prudent.

Nevertheless quite interesting, thanks again.