Guild Wars 2

What is the DPS difference between DS #1 and Dagger #1? Anyone done experiments?

It varies a lot. But in organised groups dagger 1 should always beat DS 1 by a large margin. Ive done the maths several times but i never keep it. Probably should haha.

And even in the cases of DS 1 doing more than dagger 1, you have to consider lifeblast down time due to lifeforce etc. So its not even ideally suited for pugs. Dagger still does good damage in all situations.

This is from a pve perspective.

Turns out i do have some numbers saved. In fully buffed groups with banners, might, vuln, fury, sigils, scholar runes, pots and max dps food and stacks.

Dagger on 30/25/0/0/15 does about 10.2k dps and life blast on 30/10/0/0/30 does 9.5k dps at below 600 range and 6.8k dps above 600 range. Without stacks dagger does 9.4k dps and lifeblast does 8.9k dps and 6.3k dps above 600 range.

I also calculated life blast on the dagger build with stacks. It does 8.7k dps and 6.2k dps.

Spoj for the calculation on life blast did you use dagger on mh or staff? There could be a difference to your numbers.

But yeah, dagger auto should do more dps, its melee dmg and life blast is ranged. In pve i like life blast more because traited it can hit more than one target..stack meta ftw..

I used staff to calculate lifeblast damage. For all variants i assumed 1 slaying sigil. But if you used axe focus with slaying + force you could get slightly higher damage with lifeblast than you could with staff. But then you could also get slightly higher damage on dagger if you used slaying + force. So i ignored force for all variants seeing as a lot of the time you might need energy sigils.

I tried to give the lifeblast build as favourable buffs as possible but it still fell short. In a real setting you probably wouldnt stack power food and bloodlust because your base crit chance outside of DS would be so low. But i assumed those were use to get the absolute maximum possible lifeblast damage in this setting.

You probably should have done your test with axe and “axe training” because this trait enhance life blast too while you’ve got an axe equiped. 10% damages are still 10% damage.

staff is better than axe+trait

Pelopidas.2140:

staff is better than axe+trait

not… tested it with full asc berserker 30/10/0/0/30 and traited axe is higher dmg then staff, ofc both in DS….

havent tested it myself, i recall an old thread where it was tested and staff won. Is the difference high at your tests?

Axe with axe training is exactly the same as staff. Axe with axe training and slaying sigil + force is slightly better than staff because staff only has 1 sigil slot. But as i said i avoided using the extra slaying sigil on all calculations. Plus staff will have 2 sigil slots after the april patch so the difference will be gone.

Staff will probably win in testing because the damage varies less than with axe.

Test it in the mists with 100-100dmg weapons and Zerknecklace (or Soldiers, critdmg doesn´t matter both weapons will get the same amount).
Easiests way, did it long ago but i forgot to wrote it down.

Edit: Spoj was a minute faster then me.

Thanks for the numbers!

but life blast is more pew~

Pelopidas.2140:

havent tested it myself, i recall an old thread where it was tested and staff won. Is the difference high at your tests?

it was 100-200 deference. not much but still its there. tested on vet spark no interupts, no conditions. clean hits. ofc at 100% crit chance.

Rapier.3675:

Pelopidas.2140:

havent tested it myself, i recall an old thread where it was tested and staff won. Is the difference high at your tests?

it was 100-200 deference. not much but still its there. tested on vet spark no interupts, no conditions. clean hits. ofc at 100% crit chance.

Thats due to variance. Using maths they should produce exactly the same average dps. This is because axe as an average weapon damage of 1000 and staff has an average weapon damage of 1100. So axe with the 10% modifier bumps it up to 1100 (1000*1.1).

it does more dmg end of story … don’t care what stats are saying….

?
No axe traited does not more dmg (DS1) then staff. That´s the point. Believe it or not.
It doesn´t matter, fact is fact. Test it in the mists if u want.

Rapier.3675:

it does more dmg end of story … don’t care what stats are saying….

Just ignore maths, accurate tests and all logic. Good plan.

Norjena.5172:

?
No axe traited does not more dmg (DS1) then staff. That´s the point. Believe it or not.
It doesn´t matter, fact is fact. Test it in the mists if u want.

read above my posts…

Spoj The Second.7680:

Rapier.3675:

it does more dmg end of story … don’t care what stats are saying….

Just ignore maths, accurate tests and all logic. Good plan.

so numbers ingame is a lie?

Rapier.3675:

Norjena.5172:

?
No axe traited does not more dmg (DS1) then staff. That´s the point. Believe it or not.
It doesn´t matter, fact is fact. Test it in the mists if u want.

read above my posts…

Spoj The Second.7680:

Rapier.3675:

it does more dmg end of story … don’t care what stats are saying….

Just ignore maths, accurate tests and all logic. Good plan.

so numbers ingame is a lie?

No but your test was inaccurate. I explained this already. You experienced variance (weapons deal random damage within a range). If you want to test accurately test on the golems in the mists with steady weapons.

I’dd recommend dagger #1 for sustain damage, mainly in PvE. Life blast however has great burst damage which makes it better for PvP. Good luck

Fvux

Well this topic got derailed fast, but not too far off topic I suppose. Quick question though Spoj since you tested all this, from a PvE perspective does LB out dps dagger once you start piercing at least two targets per shot?

Shaogin.2679:

Well this topic got derailed fast, but not too far off topic I suppose. Quick question though Spoj since you tested all this, from a PvE perspective does LB out dps dagger once you start piercing at least two targets per shot?

Oh, easily. Dagger does higher DPS, but not twice as much as Life Blast will. As soon as Unyielding Blast and a second target come into the equation, Life Blast is the strongest auto necros have.

Thats true but you have to consider how many situations that piercing is worth it and efficient.

The simple matter of it is that piercing is a terrible form of cleave. It doesnt work reliably and in the cases where it could work ok (LoS pulls) you should be unloading your aoe combo. Mobs should be dead or near dead by the time your aoe ends so there is no need for lifeblast. Also in an aoe trash pull you have to keep targets to reliably hit the mobs, this is awkward when they are constantly dieing. Whereas dagger and aoe doesnt require a target which means there is no issue with tagging and contributing immediately.

There is also the fact that you lose lifeforce when hit or just by camping DS. You need to remain above 50% lifeforce at all times to keep respectable dps. Theres downtime due to sustained fights or just being hit. Ive seen people claim the downtime really isnt that bad but im really curious how they managed to come to that conclusion because ive tried it in organised groups with high dps and i still experienced issues with lifeforce downtime. Also on the quicker fights i did much less total damage because of how slow the auto attack is. If I had been in dagger i could of contributed a lot more in a smaller window. Its a really clunky auto attack and its really not viable in pve except for maybe a single blast or two while gap closing etc.

Crap, phone messed up my message. I’ll hit you guys up with more questions on all this later.

In the meantime, how do you get the little dps measuring program to work? Mine never displays any information.

Let me TLDR this thread:

Use Staff for DS if you are on a build which isnt full squish and for any longer fights (less damage variation between min and max damage helps life transfer dps since LT/transfusion and Tshackles use offhand weapon calculations in A/x setups)

Use Axe in DS for bursting aoe lines and dont like to use life transfer (which can be replaced by proper use of Lich form)

Use Dagger for anything else because its single target dps is beast.

I like my Frostfang and i love my Death Shroud, if it’s 5% behind on DPS i don’t care, i am doing really well and contributing to my team and having loads of fun, not everything should be about 000000.1% more damage.

(Yes i do higher level fractals in this build with no problem, and no i am not in “tanky” gear don’t worry :P )

Ax2 + DS 1 is ~ 5-10% weaker then dagger 1. But u can´t keep this rotation up. Because of DS cd and missing life force. If u spam Axe 1 your dps will be much lower. That´s the problem of the axebuilds.
U need a much proper rotation and more LF then daggerbuilds. And u do still less dmg, even in best possibel szenarios.

In real no “tank and spank” fights a/ds does about 25% less dps. With dagger + axe/ds ~ 10-15% less.