Guild Wars 2

Heya folks! So, since they added small scaling to the lifesteal on the “vampiric” & “vampiric rituals” traits in the update I felt inclined to research what the scaling actually was.

So my first discovery is that the damage for these traits is unlike every other skill in game, the damage ignores armor and has a base damage amount.
the Base Damage for both of these traits seems to be 24.5.
Then they scale with 0.2% of your power in damage.

This means you will deal 24.5+0.2% of your power in damage (and heal yourself that much!) With vampiric, you deal this damage whenever you hit with an attack (it doesn’t proc off conditions) and with vampiric rituals you deal this damage whenever an enemy is in the area of one of your wells when a tick of it’s effect goes off (it doesn’t actually have to deal any damage first, you can even lifesteal off of your healing well).

The actual formula is Damage Dealt = 0.002 * POW + 24.5

Now, when we use the “Bloodthirst” Trait it gets funky.
The formula changes to..
Damage Dealt = 1.5 ( 0.002 * POW + 24 & 1/3)
or
Damage Dealt = 0.003 * POW + 36.5
This decrease in damage was INCREDIBLY hard for my to fish out, but for some reason the base damage drops by 1/6, or 0.16666666666 blah blah blah.

Now, I’m not sure if this is a bug, or my formula is wrong, or somesuch, but I thought I’d make a post about it in hopes of getting it fixed, or at least explained by someone (a dev maybe?).

I can’t get the spoiler thing to work, so unless you want to see how I found these formulas, stop here. If you’re curious about how I figured it out, keep reading! Or not, I’m an OP, not a cop.

So I tested the damage with and w/o the bloodthirst trait (or BT).

W/o BT:
1249 (and below) hit for 26
1250 hit for 27
1749 hit for 27
1750 hit for 28
2249 hit for 28
2250 hit for 29

W/ BT
1166 (and below) hit for 39
1167 hit for 40
1499 hit for 40
1500 hit for 41

my initial formula for the damage w/o BT was
0.002(POW-500/2)+25=Damage Dealt.

0.002 because the damage incrases by one every 500 power. -500/2 because I was having it only count damage past 250 power so the old base damage (25) could be the base damage.
When you plug the numbers into the formula the damage numbers match the power numbers exactly.

I rearranged it & compressed it to what you see above for simplicity.

Then my formula for damage w/ BT was 1.5*(0.002(POW-500/1.5)+25)

When you plug the numbers into the formula not all the damage numbers match the formula exactly. Some get rounded down by a small amount.

I changed the 500/2 to 500/1.5 because, after some fishing, it was the only number that matched. I’m still not 100% sure why it changes. I think this is the only number I have yet to fully explore and is definitely related to the cause of why the 24.5 goes to 24 &1/3.

So, by rearranging the formula I set it up so I could plug the damage number in and get the exact power needed. Then after lots of rearranging I used the exact power number & the damage number to find the Base damage number. I did this twice. Once with 1500 POW & 41 DAM and once with approx. 1167 POW (it had plenty of decimals) & 40 DAM.

Both times I got the same number for “base damage” and it was 24 &1/3.

All in all, I dont think it’s 100% finished, but for now, at least the formula is accurate, even if I dont know why.

Thanks for your time

Just did some more poking,

So it looks like the trait’s effect of +50% effectiveness (damage) is not fully applying to the base damage of the effect, while the power scaling is affected just fine.

The base damage is only increasing by about 148% instead of the full 150%.

You can see this by comparing the base damage w/o BT and the base damage w/ BT.

the increase in damage can be found by dividing the new (higher) base damage by the first (lower) base damage. This shows the trait only increasing the damage by 148.979591837%

..Boy I’m nit-picky _

Some notes:
True siphons are always shadow damage (armor ignoring), all skills that used to be siphons, got changed but retained the quality of one work with bloodthirst, Vampiric makes Signet of Locust damage portion Siphon hp too and Bloodthirst essencially doubles the worth healing power on Locust.

Yep, Vampiric makes anything siphon health (minus conditions). I havent tested how Bloodthirst effects other life steals, just mainly these two after the changes.
Some other interesting things I found while testing:

Vampiric Master – It was not changed to scale with anything with this patch. More interestingly, the minons heal you on hit, but deal no extra damage to their target. You only get the healing portion of the “life steal”. It is improved by ~45% w/ Bloodthirst.
Vampiric Precision – It was not changed to scale with anything with this patch. It does a static 30 damage and 31 heal. This one is improved by ~65% w/ Bloodthirst.