Guild Wars 2

I admit, I only read the last couple of posts, so I apologize if some of this has been discussed already, but I’m not going to let not knowing what I’m talking about stop me

Toughness not only increases the amount of hits you can take before you die, but also makes your heals stronger in that the health they return also benefits from toughness, which essentially makes it more useful the longer the fight drags on while vitality only gives you an advantage in the beginning. Then again, toughness does nothing to protect you from conditions, which makes it a less attractive choice if condition removal is a problem. Still, necromancers have plenty of conditions removal, so if this was all there is to it I’d probably go for toughness. Unfortunately it’s necromancers we are talking about, which means we also have DS to worry about.

Vitality also increases your life force pool and since life force gain is percentage based it basically increases the amount of life force gained. On the other hand toughness doesn’t magically vanish when you enter DS, so it too must be taken into account. I suppose we could calculate DSEHP of some sort, but then there’s also the fact Life Force keeps degenerating automatically while in DS AND the fact few people use LF as effectively as it could be. Besides, eating hits using DS should only be used in an emergency to begin with.

Long story short, this gets rather complicated, so I’d really just go with whichever is easier to come by. If you’re going for a non glass cannon hybrid build, Carion is the way to go, while Rabid works better when you want pure condition damage and on-crit effects.

Sam.7269:

Condi duration has a cap.

Do you know what that % is?

At this point, after messing around with builds, I might end up going full Spite.

Thx for testing, Pendragon.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The highest EHP is when health=armor*10. This is the assumption we should work on.

This assumption of what the golden ratio is has nothing to do with this discussion.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Necros start with high health, but low armor. As such, adding Toughness does more to increase EHP than adding Vitality. EHP determines how durable you are in a vacuum. (other factors, such as signets, Protection, Weakness, dodges, blocks, heals, etc. are not factored in and would be practically impossible to calculate).

All those “other factors” don’t increase your vitality or armor, therefore they don’t factor into calculating EHP.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Yes, Carrion does make you more durable, but not as much as Rabid does. There are no perceptions involved in this, just math.

Please… show me that math. Because the one that Pendragon has proven to work correctly is the one I used.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

As for increasing our health to match the EHP, yes, you can do that, but now you are dealing with exponential increases. You hit the point where it is easier to just get Toughness to increase your EHP rather than more Vitality. Necros actually start beyond this point.

Actually, when you look at the damage formula… the exponential part comes with toughness because you’ll get deminishing returns the higher you get. Vitality on the other hand scales linear.

Also, you still don’t get how EHP is calculated.
To simplify I assumed that all damage taken is direct, non-condition. That’s why you can determine EHP by multiplying your total health.
If you add condition damage in one specific encounter with another player, you can mitigate less, therefore your EHP is lower in this specific fight.
For example: you have 20k hp. Your armor reduces damage by 20%. If you take 10k in conditions and another 10 in direct damage, then that would mean your armor mitigated 2,5k (10/0.8=12,5). That means without your armor you would have taken 22,5k damage (=EHP). Ergo: taking the same damage without armor but with 2,5k more health would have the same result.
If it’s just direct damage, then the EHP would have been 25k. If all the damage you take is dealt by conditions then your EHP would have been your actual health pool: 20k.

So, I don’t know how to make it any simpler, but that is exactly why you can tell how much health you would need to compensate for the extra damage taken by not having the amount of toghness you’d otherwise have with rabid.

Zindrix.1750:

Sam.7269:

Condi duration has a cap.

Do you know what that % is?

At this point, after messing around with builds, I might end up going full Spite.

You can’t have more than 100% condi duration, except with Curses 30 trait, that gives you 33% scepter durations, which does not count, as it raises base durations (unless they changed it).

Zindrix.1750:

Sam.7269:

Condi duration has a cap.

Do you know what that % is?

At this point, after messing around with builds, I might end up going full Spite.

100%.

Lingering Curse ignores this cap, so scepter bleeds can get133%.

Also, you can get 115% fear duration with the Sigil of Paralyzation.

I might have to resolve this debate later, right now I"m running short on time. But here are my rune recommendations:

For pure rabid condition specs, go with Undead. You’ll get higher bleed ticks, but will have to get condition duration from other sources.

For condition duration, I recommend 3x krait + 3x afflicted. This gives you 30% more bleed duration while also giving a substantial amount of condition damage. While 2x krait + 2x afflicted + 2x centaur does give you 45% bleed duration, it also gives substantially less condition damage. The necromancer isn’t wanting for condition duration, so I’ve found the 30% to be more than adequate for my builds.

For terror builds, I’d recommend Runes of the Necromancer. The runes give condition damage + vitality, while also giving 20% fear duration. The runes of the nightmare give a 10% duration to all conditions and a 5% chance to cause fear when hit, so they are also worthy of mention. It depends on the build used, and how easily they get fear.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I might have to resolve this debate later, right now I"m running short on time. But here are my rune recommendations:

For pure rabid condition specs, go with Undead. You’ll get higher bleed ticks, but will have to get condition duration from other sources.

For condition duration, I recommend 3x krait + 3x afflicted. This gives you 30% more bleed duration while also giving a substantial amount of condition damage. While 2x krait + 2x afflicted + 2x centaur does give you 45% bleed duration, it also gives substantially less condition damage. The necromancer isn’t wanting for condition duration, so I’ve found the 30% to be more than adequate for my builds.

For terror builds, I’d recommend Runes of the Necromancer. The runes give condition damage + vitality, while also giving 20% fear duration. The runes of the nightmare give a 10% duration to all conditions and a 5% chance to cause fear when hit, so they are also worthy of mention. It depends on the build used, and how easily they get fear.

Yes, except now, you have to consider our new additions of torment, burning, buffed weakness, chill, poison, and potentially vulnerability, as well depending on your spec and what medium you are playing in. I, personally, prefer to run 2x lyssa, 2x or 4x mad king (depending on if you want that power or not as the 3 piece bonus on the way towards the 4 piece bonus of bleed duration), and 2x afflicted. You trade off some bleed duration in exchange for a longer duration on all the other conditions I listed.

If you want to go with that, why not just run givers weapons with nightmare runes and 30 in spite, and then with pizza you’ll get 100% in everything.

Eh, you can run 2 lyssa, 2 Mad King and 2 of your choice too. Or 2 Lyssa, 4 Nightmare. Lets you get away with only one Giver’s weapon and still have +100% condition duration (I’d stick a sigil of paralyzation on one of them to increase fear too).

Now that I have free time, I’ll contribute to the debate at hand.

The effective HP of any player is essentially how much health they have multiplied by how much armor mitigates damage. It’s the whole “I have 10k HP, but take half health, so it is the same as someone having 20k HP”. Now, there exists something called the Golden Ratio, which is the amount of HP you need vs. the amount of armor you have in order to get the maximum amount of survivability with a limited amount of stat points. This seems complicated, but it is effectively 8th grade algebra. Let me put it into a perspective that might be more easily recognized:

What is the maximum volume of a rectangle who’s perimeter must add up to 100?

It’s the same problem, but in a videogame: You have two stats that multiply each other (area), and a limited number of points to invest in either of them (perimeter). The answer to the above problem is a square: height is equal to width. That is, when armor is equal to health (health X 10, of course, due to 1 point of vitality giving 10 health).

The whole debate on survivability with rabid vs. carrion is interesting, but even more interesting is that necromancers are the exception to the rules. They are the exception due to the following:

#1: Necromancers already have the golden ratio (armor x 10 = health), with 18,372 HP and 1,836 armor. 1 point of toughness and you’re set.

#2: Necromancers have a form of healing that scales with vitality: Life force generation. The Life Force pool scales with health, and the skills that generate life force do it as a percentage.

Because of this, the debate on survivability with carrion vs. rabid is moot for necromancers: they both provide about the same amount of survivability. You can get into specifics, like how well our condition transfers cure conditions, or how healing can be interrupted and thus isn’t reliable, these aren’t mathematical factors. They are skill and situational factors. You can “what if I’m fighting 2 condi rangrs and a daze mesmer” all day if you want.

So then we look on offense. The condition damage from both sets are the same, so then we can look direct damage and then procs. For now, the only traits I will assume are 300 precision/condition damage from the curses tier (this is, after all, a condition build).

Power damage ratio increase (carrion): 1.76
Crit rate (carrion): 18%
Crit Damage (carrion): 1.5
Scaled damagae ratio: 1.76 x (1.5 × 0.18 + 0.82) = 1.76 × 1.09 = 1.92

Power ratio (rabid): 1
Crit Rate (rapid): 51%
Crit Damage (rabid): 1.5
Scaled Damage ratio: 1 x (1.5 × 0.51 + 0.49) = 1 × 1.255 = 1.26

So with carrion, you’ll do 92% more direct damage than with nothing, and with rabid you’ll do 26% more direct damage. this means that carrion does about 52% more direct damage than carrion. Retaliation with carrion does 319 damage per tick, whereas rabid does 267 damage per tick, so carrion does 19% more damage with retaliation.

Given this is a x/30/x/x/x build there’s a couple of things you can add in regarding direct damage. The first is target the weak, which gives 2% more damage for each condition on an enemy. This is difficult to work with, since those conditions changed, but for now I will assume 3 conditions: Poison, Bleeding, and any combination of cripple, chill, and weakness. This is a 6% increase in direct damage, pushing the direct damage ratios up to 1.33 for Rabid and 2.03 for carrion.

Another trait worth mentioning is Furious Demise, which gives fury for 5 seconds when entering DS. This can be used to achieve a 50% fury uptime easily, however this comes with a caveat that no condition build will tap DS just to get fury. DS is used mostly for defense in condition builds, and it is very likely that a necromancer will be in DS using all of their utilities for 5 seconds, using up the entire duration of the fury in that span. If someone wishes, they could factor in 50% fury uptime (average of 10% increase in crit rate), but for now I will just say that carrion benefits more from fury.

And now with procs. There are two procs that are worth mentioning: Superior Sigil of Earth, and Barbed precision. Now, Barbed precision gives a 66% chance to cause 1 stack of bleeding for 1 second, no known cooldown. Sigil of Superior Earth has a 60% chance to cause a 5 second bleed, but a 2 second cooldown. With these numbers, we can come up with an “expected bleed output” from these two. It is quite simple to do with barbed precision:

Barbed precision: 0.66 x crit rate x 1 second bleed

For carrion this comes to 0.12 bleed ticks per attack, and for rabid this comes to 0.34 bleed ticks per attack.

However the sigil has a problem with the internal cooldown, and both involve the attack rate being highly variable in fights. This can muddy the numbers greatly, so I will have to get back to this later. For now, I will assume that with the scepter/dagger combo there are roughly 3 attacks per 2 second with the auto attack, and afterward it’ll take so many attacks to activate the proc again. Now, the chance of the proc occurring is the same as barbed precision:

= 0.6 x crit chance

So for carrion it is a 10.8% chance, and for Rabid it is a 31% chance of happening. Now, the chances that the proc will have occurred over 90% of the time for each of these is, for carrion, 20 attacks, and for Rabid, 7 attacks. Because both of those are substantially longer than 2 seconds, I’m going to take a shortcut and just assume it works by a similar function as Barbed Precision (against a single target):

0.6 x crit rate x 5 seconds of bleed

So for carrion this adds 0.5 bleed ticks per attack, and for rabid this adds 1.5 bleed ticks per attack. This can be increased with condition duration, but for now I’m going to assume there is no additional condition duration. This comes to a total of 0.62 bleeds per attack for carrion, and 1.84 bleeds per attack for rabid.

Now comes the hard part: putting it against an enemy. This is difficult for direct damage, which is affected by the armor value of the opponent. For now, however, I will assume the opponent has 2000 armor, and thus all tooltip damage is increased by 30% (or 2600/2000). I will also assume that in this build spec, with 1003 condition damage from equipment and 300 more from stats, that bleeds do 108 damage per tick. To get these damages, I just apply the numbers above to the tool tip. I’ll only show the calculation for the first move. Looking at each of the necromancer’s attacks for scepter/dagger we get the following:

Blood Curse (carrion):
118 × 1.3 × 2.03 = 311 direct damage.
5 + 0.62 bleeds = 607 condition damage
Total damage: 918

Blood Curse (Rabid):
118 × 1.3 × 1.33 =204 direct damage
5 + 1.84 bleeds = 739 condition damage
Total damage: 946

Rending Curse: Same Values

Putrid Curse (carrion): 443 direct damage, 67 bleed damage, 856 Poison, 1366 total
(Rabid) 290 direct damage, 199 bleed damage, 856 poison, 1345 total

#Grasping Dead:
(Carrion): 620 direct damage, 2335 bleed damage, 2955 total
(Rabid): 240 direct damage, 2467 bleed damage, 2707 total

Feast of Corruption (assuming 3 conditions)
(Carrion): 1214 direct damage, 67 bleed damage, 1281 total
(Rabid): 795 direct damage, 199 bleed damage, 994 total

#Deathly Swarm (per bounce)
(Carrion): 549 direct, 67 bled, 616 total
(Rabid): 360 direct, 199 bleed, 559 total

#Enfeebling Blood:
(Carrion): 443 direct, 2227 bleed, 2670 total
(Rabid): 290 direct, 2359 bleed, 2649 total

While doing this, I’ve noticed an interesting shorthand emerges. Rabid does about 1.22 seconds more bleed damage for every attack. This makes things really simple to do with changing builds: Increasing bleed duration to 100% will mean that rabid gets 2.44 seconds per attack.

1. Except for all AoEs this is incorrect. With AoEs hitting up to 5 targets, the sigil of earth only triggers a 5 second bleed on one of them. Because of this, the contribution of the sigil of earth is only 1/5th of what it normally is. So for AoEs, you can get this additional amount of bleeds from procs:

Carrion: 0.22 seconds of bleed
Rabid: 0.64 seconds of bleed

Which comes to a 0.42 seconds of bleed difference between the two. Note that this is also technically incorrect, since AoEs are capable of launching more than 20 attacks in 2 seconds. As I mentioned before: Muddies the prospect. But lets ignore the mud for now.

All in all, this ends up with a very simple formula to find out whether carrion or rabid is superior (assuming 300 in curses):

For single target attacks, rabid will do (1.22 x condition duration x bleed damage) additional damage from procs. For AoEs, rabid will do (0.42 x condition duration x bleed damage). If this damage is less than the difference between carrion and rabid’s direct damage, then carrion is superior. If this is more than the difference between carrion and rabid’s direct damage, then rabid is superior.

So suffice to say, for AoEs and every weapon other than the scepter/dagger, carrion will be superior in damage. The exception to this being Life Transfer, which hits for only 72 tooltip damage 9 times, getting multiple procs from barbed precision. The only other “condition” weapon that necromancer’s have is the staff, and all of the staff attacks are AoEs.

So whatever you pick depends on what you’ll be doing. If you main something other than scepter/dagger, if you are in PVE with many enemies or in WvW with many enemies or in an sPVP match that has many enemies, go with carrion. You’ll get more damage out of it. If you are fighting 1 vs 1 or away from the group in tPVP, go with rabid. If you are hybriding equipment, go with carrion.

Also something I’d recommend is to use a carrion staff, but rabid scepter/dagger. Or if hybriding, something like zerker or soldier for the direct damage equipment.

Also note: different builds will change the outcomes of the calculations. However, as long as 300 in curses is maintained and no other equipment is hybridized with anything else, then the shorthand (1.22 for single, 0.42 for AoE) can be maintained.

BTW sorry about the final conclusion taking forever to get. When I start these explorations, I have no idea how they’re going to turn out. I often don’t see the shortcut until I’ve gone the long way.

You forgot to factor in healing in regards to rabid vs carrion. At no point have I disputed that carrion does more damage than rabid. Its the survivability that I’m debating.

Really nice analysis by BRA. I’d argue that the Sigil of Earth is over valued by a factor of two or so because of the cooldown, but it’s all good.

Just out of curiosity, what exactly were the gear sets you were considering? Straight carrion / rabid weapons (with sigil of earth), armor and jewelry without assuming any runes / gems?

sas.6483:

Really nice analysis by BRA. I’d argue that the Sigil of Earth is over valued by a factor of two or so because of the cooldown, but it’s all good.

Also because of cleanse. Where Earth Sigil really can surpass Carrion is getting your durations up, esp at 8-10 seconds. This is nice in PVE, however for PVP, how many times per fight does an opponent clear your bleed stack, least a couple if they have a decent build. Good chance one of those removals eats up a lot of your earth sigil duration. Barbed really don’t have to worry, most of those will get through at 1-2 seconds.

Currently I am not using earth sigils, for a 30/20 burn/terror build, I’m finding a mix of carrion and rabid fitting. I want just enough precision to crit that burn pretty quick when its up, but not too much that it is eating into Powers natural advantage over Precision. (Maybe BRA could tell me the exact ideal cut-off, ).

And there are other good sigils that can compete with Earth if you aren’t going full rabid anyway. Which have to be factored back into the damage of carrion. Because its dumb to use earth with a low crit rate.

Deciding on a split is one reason the sPVP turns me off in this game, builds are too complex to be straight jacketed by the limited amulet choices.

Kravick.4906:

You forgot to factor in healing in regards to rabid vs carrion. At no point have I disputed that carrion does more damage than rabid. Its the survivability that I’m debating.

I didn’t forget to factor it in. I chose not to factor it in for two reasons.

#1: Healing is unreliable. It can be interrupted and burst beyond, meaning that there is no guarantee that you’ll get a heal off.

#2: Necromancers get a form of healing that scales with power in Life Force generation.

Because of this, factoring healing is at best a preference and not a necessity. If you want more nits to pick, I also didn’t factor in condition damage done to the player, and this was because of the chaotic nature of condition cleanses, both based on build and on player skill. The whole thing is just too unreliable, so for analysis I fell back on what was reliable: the stats you bring to the fight. Those don’t change.

sas.6483:

Really nice analysis by BRA. I’d argue that the Sigil of Earth is over valued by a factor of two or so because of the cooldown, but it’s all good.

Just out of curiosity, what exactly were the gear sets you were considering? Straight carrion / rabid weapons (with sigil of earth), armor and jewelry without assuming any runes / gems?

Sigil of Earth probably is overvalued. I used 90% activation probability with 3 attacks/second as a baseline, but really that is all arbitrary. You can use 50% activation probability while assuming 2 attacks per second, or maybe something completely different.

I suppose the big thing about sigil of earth is that it is incredibly negligent of AoEs. In scepter/dagger it isn’t so bad, since you’ll stagger grasping dead and enfeebling blood far enough that it can proc on each. But on my WvW staff build, I’ll commonly throw out 3 marks and well of suffering in the span of 2 seconds, then following that up with life transfer + weakening shroud for the next 3 seconds If all of those hit 5 people each time (well does 35 hits, marks do 15 hits, life transfer does 45 hits, weakening shroud hits 5 more), then it comes to 100 attacks in which the Sigil only has 3 chances to proc in.

Anyway, the stat arrangement I used was basically weapon stats + armor stats + trinkets + backpack. No runes or sigils (other than sigil of earth), no additional traits beyond 300 in curses and minor traits and not factoring in boons from utilities or bonuses from food. All bonuses were assumed at the exotic level. Basically, a this was done with a condition build skeleton.

I didn’t want to go any further, because then the subject becomes more about my builds than condition builds in general. Thankfully it was enough to make the “1.22 bleeds vs. single, 0.42 bleeds in AoE” shortcut, assuming that no additional precision is added to either build. From there you can play with the condition duration, the condition damage, the power added from other traits and might, and all of that stuff. But if you change the precision, you have to calculate the proc rates again.

And that isn’t even going near the fact that a carrion build and a rabid build wouldn’t be cookie cutter copies of each other.

A few points that might be useful:

1) Barbed precision is terrible. It’s so terrible in fact that vampiric is better. (Vampiric is actually pretty good, but people that can’t do math think it sucks.)
2) At 50% crit and attacking every half second, you’ll get a proc from SoE every 2 + 0.5*(1/(0.6*0.5)) = 3.66 seconds. At 25% crit and attacking every half second, you’ll get it every 2 + 0.5*(1/(0.6*0.5)) = 5.33 seconds. Crit isn’t really as critical as you’d think, given the cooldown.
3) With respect to Dhuumfire, you can do a similar calculation. At 50% crit, you’ll get a proc every 10 + 0.5*(1/0.5) = 11 seconds. At 25% crit, you’ll get it every 10 + 0.5*(1/0.25) = 12 seconds.

Somebody knowledgeable can check the math, but it should be about right. Crit just doesn’t seem to be all that important, at least to me, in terms of proc effects. The only good reason I can see to take rabid would be the toughness.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I suppose the big thing about sigil of earth is that it is incredibly negligent of AoEs. In scepter/dagger it isn’t so bad, since you’ll stagger grasping dead and enfeebling blood far enough that it can proc on each. But on my WvW staff build, I’ll commonly throw out 3 marks and well of suffering in the span of 2 seconds, then following that up with life transfer + weakening shroud for the next 3 seconds

You hit on one of my major beefs with Earth Sigil. It kinda stinks for staff. In fact, a few months back it would frequently bug out and stop even working (not sure now). But even when it does, yeah you are going to cast 4 marks at most, and it won’t even take much longer than 3 seconds, the thing may proc one time. Compare the damage of that to something like a Sigil of Battle, that is going to last 20 seconds, up your condition AND direct damage, on all AoE’s, and last likely through your swap into scepter. Only problem – the Earth Sigils from Scetper/Dagger on a high crit rate have an exceedingly high chance to put any on swap sigil on cooldown. So you basically can’t run a on-swap sigil with Earth on the other set unless you want to lose any sigil function probably half the time.

sas.6483:

A few points that might be useful:

1) Barbed precision is terrible. It’s so terrible in fact that vampiric is better. (Vampiric is actually pretty good, but people that can’t do math think it sucks.).

If you are running full rabid its not bad for a minor adept.

For ease of comparison, in an entire rotation of both weapon sets and DS you are attacking around 20 times, at 50% crit rate, and say 50% bleed duration, Barbed Precision should add about 1000 damage (6.6 procs) over that rotation. 1000 damage for such an early trait is very strong compared to what a lot of our traits are giving, especially the passives.

It’s really doing a bit more since when you jump into DS that fury proc is going to make Life Transfer fire off a lot. Then stuff like wells, locust swarm, any fire and forget skill that attacks fast, will return a lot of them too.

If you are carrion, then yeah its pretty much nothing.

#2: Necromancers get a form of healing that scales with power in Life Force generation.

This is assuming that you’ll have 100% life force when you use it, which more often than not, is never the case. Especially at the start of any sPvP match. Also, not factoring in heals is obviously going to make carrion look better on paper, but you can’t ignore it, because it is a HUGE factor. This is why theory crafting sucks. With theory crafting, everyone likes to throw away parts of the equation to make their build/stat choice look better than it really is. In the real world this would be called confirmation bias. More often than not, most people will get their heal off.

Well, let me put it this way:

50% crit, you’ll get one proc of BP every 1/(0.5*0.66) = 3 hits, for about 120 damage.
25% crit, you’ll get one proc every 6 hits for about 120 damage.

Vampiric with Bloodthirst gives me about 42 damage per hit plus the healing (in my current soldiers / carrion gear with 300 healing power). I’m guesstimating that’s about a 3%-10% damage increase from my staff and various dagger 1 non-crit attacks. Now, of course this requires 15 points in Blood Magic rather than just 5 in Curses… but, you know people go gaga over the other 25 point percentage damage increase traits, so why not Vampiric.

I run Runes of Lyssa for my Necro’s condi build, partially because they were cheap to get when I was putting together that armor set, partially to amp up Barbed Precision and my Sigil of Earth, and partially because Necros can proc the #6 very well with Flesh Golem. I already have two full condi clears and a lesser clear, but I like having one more clear in my back pocket. I’d probably go with Runes of the Necromancer or Nightmare if I were interested in just damage.

Good guy Arachnid, writing essays like a boss

Kravick.4906:

This is assuming that you’ll have 100% life force when you use it, which more often than not, is never the case.

No, this is assuming that every % of life force is worth more hitpoints with carrion than rabid. This is true regardless of whether your lf bar is full or not.

Kravick.4906:

Also, not factoring in heals is obviously going to make carrion look better on paper, but you can’t ignore it, because it is a HUGE factor.

If you want to factor it in (and leave out things like interupting heals in combat etc…), just add as much hp to both prefixes until you see where the EHP of rabid overtakes carrion. That’s exactly what I did in one of my earlier posts.
The bottom line was: you’ll need to heal at least 5 times. And in that post I assumed that you take direct damage only. If you factor in conditions you’ll have to heal for much more.

So healing isn’t as HUUUUUGEEEE of a factor as you make it out to be.

Kravick.4906:

This is why theory crafting sucks. With theory crafting, everyone likes to throw away parts of the equation to make their build/stat choice look better than it really is. In the real world this would be called confirmation bias.

So… basically what you just did for your rabid build.

Pendragon.8735:

Currently I am not using earth sigils, for a 30/20 burn/terror build, I’m finding a mix of carrion and rabid fitting. I want just enough precision to crit that burn pretty quick when its up, but not too much that it is eating into Powers natural advantage over Precision. (Maybe BRA could tell me the exact ideal cut-off, ).

Challenge accepted.

Awhile ago, a few others helped me come up with a golden ratio formula where power eats into precision and vice versa. It’s already been linked once in the thread, but I’ll post it up again since my failures bear repeating:

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

The conclusion basically is this:

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

Now, for this build I am assuming that you have achieved 100% condition duration through means alternate means than Master of Terror (x2 Lyssa, x4 mad king, at least one giver weapon), to capitalize on staff abilities. I can be very wrong here, but regardless I will continue. Assuming no additional crit damage, you’d need 4,284 power before precision becomes more valuable. Since there is no way Grenth’s domain that this can be achieved, precision will always eat into your DPS without high crit damage.

This is where things get a bit hard. To gain precision from power means I’ll have to compare the power lost to the extra damage done by dhuumfire. This requires a lot of specifics that I don’t have, so I’ll have to do some assuming again. If these assumptions are wrong, then hopefully my math will help others do the calculation under different circumstances.

Dhuumfire’s damage can be summed up as the following

burn damage / how many attacks between activation

where the attacks before activating follow this rule (assuming 90% probability of occurring)

-1 / log (1 – crit chance) + attack rate x 10

I’m going to simplify things a bit here, for the sake of my own sanity. I’m going to assume that, in this terror build, you are not concerned with dhuumfire when fighting against multiple enemies, but rather when fighting against a single target. Know that any gains from dhuumfire are mitigated in a situation where you can launch 100 attacks in 5 seconds. Now, doing this and assuming roughly 1.5 attacks per second, this comes to 15 attacks in down time. So, I’m going to have to divide doomfire by this to get the following formula for the overall effectiveness of doomfire:

Burn damage x burn duration/ ((-1 / log (1 – crit chance)) + 15)

(328 + 0.25 Malic) x (4 x condition duration increase) / ((-1 / log (1 – ((prec – 832)/21))) + 15)

This will all be on the exam :p

So, with a starting precision of 353 from lyssa runes and traits + one giver weapon (the staff), you have a starting crit chance of 20%. Assuming full carrion and the above runes (- the weapon), you’ll get 1094 condition damage with pizza. Assuming Master Tuning Crystal in full carrion + 200 toughness from staff traits, this will come to 1614 vit, 1116 toughness, and a total boon from the tuning crystal of 131 condition damage, bringing the total condition damage to 1225. I’m also going to assume you are running sigil of paralysis for more terror ticks (it goes past 100%, doesn’t it?), and so 1225 will be the final condition damage used. If you are using corruption, then the final condition damage is 1475.

So, going with 1225, burning does 634 damage per tick. At 100% condition duration, this is 8 ticks in total, for a rand total of 5,072 damage on proc. So, going back to that formula again, you’ll have

5,072 / (-1 / log ( 1 – crit chance) +15)

Now, currently, with a 20% crit chance (40% under fury. Remember, you have furious demise), this comes to

5,072 / (-1 / log (0.8) + 15)
= 5072 / (10 + 15) = 203

So against single targets, dhuumfire is adding about 203 damage per attack. That is quite a lot, actually. If I am to assume that you maintain 50% fury uptime due to furious demise + boon duration from death magic, then you can say you have a 30% chance to crit, and this comes to 231 additional damage per attack.

Now comes the hard part. Logarithms aren’t linear, so I can’t just do a 1 for 1 comparison with power. Assuming the stats I assumed above, this build would get 1,861 power.. The hard part is, this will require calculus; something I am out of practice on. But, looking at a formula for damage modified for my own personal use:

Damage = K * power * (1 +crit chance) x crit dmg + 5072 / (ln0.1 / ln (1 – crit chance) + 15

dDamage/dPower = K * (1 + crit chance) x (0.5 + crit dmg)
dDamage/dCrit Chance= K * power * (0.5 + Crit dmg) /2100 + 5072/15 * ln (10) / (2100 * (ln(1- crit chance ) – ln10 )^2 * (1 – crit chance))

Note: d/dCrit Chance = 1/2100
Note: due to how the equation is solved, crit dmg means only additional %, and not the total critical hit damage mod.

Reference: http://www.derivative-calculator.net/#expr=ln%281-x%2F2100%29%2Fln%280.1%281-x%2F2100%29%29&showsteps=1

I had to get a little assistance on this one, since the derivative of that last part overflowed my whiteboard. I had to jury rig the calculator to work, and even then it the solution was horribly displayed. The whole numerator reduces to ln10. I kept many of the variables in place since thy represent things (like 5072 = burn damage x burn duration, 15 = attacks in 10 seconds on average, ect). One variable, K, represents the product of weapon strength x skill coefficient / Enemy Armor.

When the second equation is larger than the first equation is when Dhuumfire is better than the alternative. Again, this is ultimately a question of choosing power or precision. Now, I’m going to assume that the enemy has 2000 armor, and the attack used will be staff auto attack (0.67 coefficient), and the staff has an average attack rating of 1048 (exotic). This will come to damage being equal to 0.349 x Power, which is then modified further by other things 0.349, BTW, is equal to 0.66666 × 1048 (average exotic staff strength) / 2000 armor. Solving for power, you get

0.349 × 0.5 x Power / 2100 + 5072/15 * Pile of Logarithmic crap > 0.349 × 0.5 x (1 + crit chance)

=

Power > 2100 (1 + crit chance) – 5072 × 2/ (15 × 0.349) * ln (10) / ((ln(0.1- 0.1crit chance ))^2 * (1 – crit chance))

And unfortunately, it can’t get much simpler than that. It is also impossible to understand just by looking at it. But alas, unless I have made a mistake somewhere, your answer lies in there. You can also cut up the values however you want, like changing the damage of Dhuumfire or changing the attack rate of the necromancer. I’ve already spent more time than I expected on this challenge, and solving for precision after all this seems too daunting a task to tackle for free this late at night.

If you want my personal advice, I wouldn’t go for a crit rate higher than 25%. Using that, dhuumifre will trigger every 23 attacks, but this adds a nice threshold for dhuumire: when on off cooldown, it’ll trigger once every 8 attacks (90% certainty). Heck, arguably what you could do is pop DS to get fury, and with fury and just 200 points of precision, you can get 33% crit rate, and that comes to just 6 attacks.

So yeah, regardless of your build you are probably fine.

flow.6043:

So… basically what you just did for your rabid build.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

Sigh, I’m done.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Eh, you can run 2 lyssa, 2 Mad King and 2 of your choice too. Or 2 Lyssa, 4 Nightmare. Lets you get away with only one Giver’s weapon and still have +100% condition duration (I’d stick a sigil of paralyzation on one of them to increase fear too).

I might be missing something here. 2x Lyssa, 2x Mad King, 30% from Spite = 50%. Where is the other 50% condition duration coming from? (Including the Hemophilia and Lingering Curse traits in Curses?)

Separate question: If Sigil of Earth isn’t the popular choice anymore, what’s better assuming I still have a decent crit rate?

Zindrix.1750:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Eh, you can run 2 lyssa, 2 Mad King and 2 of your choice too. Or 2 Lyssa, 4 Nightmare. Lets you get away with only one Giver’s weapon and still have +100% condition duration (I’d stick a sigil of paralyzation on one of them to increase fear too).

I might be missing something here. 2x Lyssa, 2x Mad King, 30% from Spite = 50%. Where is the other 50% condition duration coming from? (Including the Hemophilia and Lingering Curse traits in Curses?)

---

Separate question: If Sigil of Earth isn’t the popular choice anymore, what’s better assuming I still have a decent crit rate?

10% from givers weapon, 40% from pizza. If you want to stay at range as much as possible, earth is still good, or battle. Geomancy offers better bleed capability but it’s pbaoe, and there are options like hydromancy too.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If you want my personal advice, I wouldn’t go for a crit rate higher than 25%. Using that, dhuumifre will trigger every 23 attacks, but this adds a nice threshold for dhuumire: when on off cooldown, it’ll trigger once every 8 attacks (90% certainty). Heck, arguably what you could do is pop DS to get fury, and with fury and just 200 points of precision, you can get 33% crit rate, and that comes to just 6 attacks.

So yeah, regardless of your build you are probably fine.

Hah, wow. Have to admit I got waylaid not too far into your process, but still interesting and appreciate you trying to take it on.

The end conclusion does surprise me a bit. I’m at about 27% crit and scraping around to see what bits I might gain more from, or was. Your numbers weren’t too far off on build assumption. My burning only lasts 7 seconds though. The trouble with averaging fury at 50% uptime, is I can’t see jumping into DS at the beginning of a fight just for the buff, then not having it available for 10 seconds. Often the LF just isn’t there to want to burn some early. And therefore the most important dhuumfire to proc is the first one, which usually will need to be started with just the basic crit rate.

If you are doing something like chain farming, or even taking waves in an event, most mobs won’t live past the first burning sequence that hits them anyway, so maybe I’d adjust it up a few % points, thus end up being content where it’s at.

Would also note on fighting multiple enemies, burning is still worthwhile to get up fast, because you can epidemic it to 5 more and usually have good damage left on it if your duration is long.

sas.6483:

A few points that might be useful:

1) Barbed precision is terrible. It’s so terrible in fact that vampiric is better. (Vampiric is actually pretty good, but people that can’t do math think it sucks.)
2) At 50% crit and attacking every half second, you’ll get a proc from SoE every 2 + 0.5*(1/(0.6*0.5)) = 3.66 seconds. At 25% crit and attacking every half second, you’ll get it every 2 + 0.5*(1/(0.6*0.5)) = 5.33 seconds. Crit isn’t really as critical as you’d think, given the cooldown.

Somebody knowledgeable can check the math, but it should be about right. Crit just doesn’t seem to be all that important, at least to me, in terms of proc effects. The only good reason I can see to take rabid would be the toughness.

I keep forgetting about that expected value equation. Anyway, it is a handy equation to use, however it comes with a minor caveat: procs with cooldowns have highly variable sample sizes. You attack until the proc hits and then go through the cooldown procedure, and these cooldowns culminate over time to add to the overall proc rate. What happens is that, each attack’s individual chance for triggering a proc is wholly dependent on the previous attack’s chance of triggering a proc, and that is dependent on the previous one, and so on and so fourth.

Lets say something has a 1/3 chance to proc that has a cooldown. Say you have 3 attacks: the expected value for this proc to occur. It seems O.K., but on which attack did it work? Maybe it didn’t work on those 3 attacks, since there is a 28% chance it won’t happen then. Maybe it worked the first time, and then the next few attacks don’t have any chance at all of causing the proc to activate.

With attacks that don’t have a cooldown, you can assume an infinite sample size and non-mutually exclusive events. Then the expected value matches actual performance.

To elaborate on that strange logarithm I’ve been using, it is basically a form of tree diagram:

does it proc?
| \
| \
| \
| \
no yes (0.6 × 0.25)
(0.85)
| \
| \
| \
| \
No yes (0.15)
(0.85)
| \
| \
| \
| \
No yes (0.15)
(0.85)

and so on. At the end, each branch has a certain chance of happening. At first it is a 15% chance. Then it is a 0.85 × 0.15 chance, then it is a 0.85^2 × 0.15 chance, and then so on until eventually it hits and things reset. The total chance that any attack would’ve activated the proc at any point is the summation of all of the odds added together.

But doing this is tedious and annoying, and there’s no clear goal to find. Awhile ago, mathematicians came up with a way to get these probabilities, and it is a complication operation that involves combinations. However, there is a simpler way to do it:

The chance of any proc happening is 1 – the chance of it not happening.

And the chance of it not happening is really easy to find. You just take all the routes where the proc doesn’t happen (0.85), and keep multiplying them until the number is small enough that you can confidently say that it would’ve happened by then. So if I wanted to find out where there would be a greater than 50% chance of the proc having already occurred, then I would have 0.85^5 = 0.44, and 1 – 0.44 = 0.56, or a 56% chance of occurring.

But that is really mess and it looks like pulling numbers out of thin air. So you make an equation for it:

1 – (1 – proc rate x crit chance) ^ Number of hits = desired percentage.

And to solve for the number of hits, you have to take the log of everything:

Number of hits x Log (1 – proc rate x crit chance) = log (1 – desired percentage)

Since I use 90% as my desired percentage, and the log of 0.1 = -1, I often abbreviate this to get the following:

Number of hits = -1 / log (1 – proc rate x crit chance)

And this makes for a nice shorthand to solve for those procs on cooldown. What the end result of this means is, essentially, there is a 90% chance that the proc activates and enters into a cooldown in this period, and because of this the proc has a 90% chance that inside of X number of attacks lies it’s actual frequency. This number is arbitrary, since you can make a case for basically any number above 50%. I pick 90% due to my statistical background, and that people will all agree that 9/10 times is a really good chance that something happened.

Tl;dr: Procs with cooldowns muddy everything up, especially procs that stack in intensity instead of duration.

Yeah, the high fury uptime is a pipedream in most circumstances. Its why I personally never bothered with it. On my condi build I use DS for defensive purposes: use enfeebling blood + get retaliation + life transfer to tank while my conditions do their work. Though Dhuum would probably proc in all of that (life transfer hitting 9 times exceeds 90% certainty), it is far form my concern at that moment.

Another thing to note is that the 90% certainty means that there’s a 90% chance it’ll proc by then. It doesn’t mean that it’ll always fire off on the 8th attack. There’s actually a 1/4 chance each attack that’ll work each time off cooldown, so 25% of the time you’ll be burning ‘em on your first attack, and in 3 attacks it’ll proc more often than not (58% chance). The number I pick is reserved for when the RNG cops an attitude and doesn’t cough up the goods; a worst case scenario for most players. But if it is really important, I’d put the maximum crit chance based on proccing dhuumire to be 30%. Then, it happens more often than not with just 2 attacks.

For others, the sigil I personally use is Superior Sigil of Corruption. In WvW and PVE It is surprisingly easy to get 25 stacks, adding a total of 250 condition damage. It’s only about 13 more damage per tick on a bleed, but when my malice maxes out at over 2200, my conditions hit like a truck.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

For others, the sigil I personally use is Superior Sigil of Corruption. In WvW and PVE It is surprisingly easy to get 25 stacks, adding a total of 250 condition damage. It’s only about 13 more damage per tick on a bleed, but when my malice maxes out at over 2200, my conditions hit like a truck.

I have been thinking about switching to that Sigil, but then after hitting max stats, what sigil should be used?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Tl;dr: Procs with cooldowns muddy everything up, especially procs that stack in intensity instead of duration.

If it helps, here is a handwavingly exact formula for the time to event bound for a proc.

Let T be the time to event. Let C be the cooldown time. Let H be the number of hits. Assume that hits come every half second (we could easily get around this, but let’s not). H is geometrically distributed with event probability pC*pP, where pC and pP are crit and proc probabilities.

The time to event from cooldown is given as T = C + 0.5H. The probability that T happens before some target time t* is Pr(T <= t*) = 1 – (1-pC*pP)^(2*(t*-C)). If p* is the target probability for time to event, then we want to find t* such that 1 – (1-pC*pP)^(2*(t*-C)) = p*. Grinding through some equations gives the formula:

(ln(1-p*) / (2*ln(1-pC*pP))) + C = t*.

For SoE, at p* = 50%, I calculate we get bounds on times to event of 2.97 second and 4.13 seconds for 50% and 25% crit respectively. At p* = 90%, the numbers are 5.22 seconds and 9.08 seconds.

For Dhuumfire, at p* = 50% I calculate bounds of 10.5 and 11.20 seconds for 50% and 25% crit. At p* = 90%, the numbers are 11.66 and 14.00 seconds.

As always, if something needs to be fixed I’m happy to have somebody fix it…

Edit: BAR is right in his above post, just tidying everything up here to make it clear for the very few people that are actually interested.

The carrion vs. rabid stuff is all quite interesting.

Rabid still feels like it makes more sense simply because we already have a fairly large HP pool and very low armor. Just throwing even more HP onto that might be just as effective on paper when you look at only raw EHP, but it also drastically diminishes the value of any healing effects from any source.

Yes, Life Force pool size scales with HP, but it also essentially scales with Toughness, so it’s hard to say that Life Force is a clear win for Vitality.

Unless Carrion somehow totally blows Rabid away (which I can’t imagine making any sense) it would seem like Rabid would win once you take any sort of healing effects into account, and especially if a fight goes on for any significant amount of time.

This would all be moot if they’d just give Condition specs some decent itemization. It’s rather annoying that Carrion is about the only easily accessible choice, Rabid doesn’t have a craftable exotic version or a full set that you can purchase with Karma, and Condition/Vitality/Toughness doesn’t exist at all. Meanwhile, power builds have just about every stat combination possible and they’re all fairly easily attained in comparison.

Bovinity.8610:

This would all be moot if they’d just give Condition specs some decent itemization. It’s rather annoying that Carrion is about the only easily accessible choice, Rabid doesn’t have a craftable exotic version or a full set that you can purchase with Karma, and Condition/Vitality/Toughness doesn’t exist at all. Meanwhile, power builds have just about every stat combination possible and they’re all fairly easily attained in comparison.

I invested in a few pieces of sentinel gear to balance the loss of survivability from my old condi build, which I figured was about value of 5k health stemming from 1K health blood magic, 1800 regen from Full of Life + Mark of Evasion, ~2800 DS health from 20 into SR, and Last Grasp auto-cast, which likely will save you another 2k health with the protection.

The nice thing about sentinel is primary stat is vitality, making it much better itemized than solider. It’s hideously expensive now though. But hard for me to see where a lot of Condi Necros are going 30 into power and just doing nothing to recoup their tankiness. In 1v1 or small situations the improved weakness and longer duration of stuff like chills can make up for it, but in larger zergier fights where you aren’t guaranteed to be debuffing all targets hitting you, you end up way squishier if not counter balancing it in some way.

This is kind off topic, but since there’s so many great minds contributing to this thread, which offhand sigil do I want for Scepter/Dagger weapon set? What are some good choices of sigils in general for necros?

Just want to note that while PvE calculations are a solid way for figuring out the predicted offensive or defensive capabilities that a mechanic can provide, in PvP they almost always hardly matter and are only there as a reference point.

Zindrix.1750:

This is kind off topic, but since there’s so many great minds contributing to this thread, which offhand sigil do I want for Scepter/Dagger weapon set? What are some good choices of sigils in general for necros?

For Scepter/Dagger, it’s decent to go with Corruption as one of the two sigils. Especially in pvE and WvW. PvP it’s riskier, but it also stacks five times as fast. Earth is just fine as well, but you may want to give Blood a try. Extra damage when it procs and more health for your opponents to go through.

Actually, I need to try Blood on my scepter.

Zindrix.1750:

This is kind off topic, but since there’s so many great minds contributing to this thread, which offhand sigil do I want for Scepter/Dagger weapon set? What are some good choices of sigils in general for necros?

What kind of trait setup do you have and gear. If you have terror / burning, you might want to look into Sigil of Paralyzation, to increase your fear duration back up.

If more old school condition necro, rabid gear, then you’ll probably want a Sigil of Earth for bleed procs, and corruption off hand. If you have carrion style gear, then you have more choices in sigils, Battle, Geomancy, or several others even are often chosen.

Pendragon.8735:

Zindrix.1750:

This is kind off topic, but since there’s so many great minds contributing to this thread, which offhand sigil do I want for Scepter/Dagger weapon set? What are some good choices of sigils in general for necros?

What kind of trait setup do you have and gear. If you have terror / burning, you might want to look into Sigil of Paralyzation, to increase your fear duration back up.

If more old school condition necro, rabid gear, then you’ll probably want a Sigil of Earth for bleed procs, and corruption off hand. If you have carrion style gear, then you have more choices in sigils, Battle, Geomancy, or several others even are often chosen.

Carrion/Rabid mix, mostly Carrion though with Rabid weapons. 30/30/10 and I do have 1 Sigil of Earth atm.

I would not use Earth if you are more carrion, its going to get surpassed in damage by Sigil of Battle, or Geomancy if you can get close enough most of the time. Plus an on-crit sigil will restrict your choices on your 2nd weapon set as if procs within 2s of a swap, it will ruin an on swap sigil. Though you could pair it with like Force, or a duration one, increased bleed or chill time for instance.

Swiftness sigil is kind of neat on off hand for open world PVE, if you kill fast and in groups, you can stack up perma swiftness several minutes long moving between events.