Guild Wars 2

Based on the other math threads, I was inspired to do the math myself and how it effects me as a player. I’m a DPS-focused ranger who tries maximizing her damage output, and upon reading the change made to quickness, I felt dishearten. But did it really effect me? Would my damage output change insignificantly?

With 15 second pet swap and 2 second quickness per swap, I make sure to swap pets as soon as my cool down timer is up. QZ is used often. I’m a PvE player primarily, so the positive/negative effects of the change in that regard are meaningless to me, including the “disadvantage” of being able to heal while QZ is up.

Anyways, assuming I use QZ whenever I can and assuming I pet swap every opportunity I get (and minimizing the overlap between the two), the following files are what I get. The first attached file is the data I generated to form the graphs. A 1000 second fight might not be likely, but I wanted to see if the % Decrease of DPS converged (it did).

To explain:
Link 1 is the raw data that I conjured. The last three columns are just Boolean logic. 0 means False, 1 means True meaning that that skill or buff is active or not for that one second. The Before and After columns refer to the accumulated DPS at that duration. A simple IF(QZ or PS = 1, then 2/1.5 + prior, else 1+prior) formula is used. As we can expect, at 4 seconds the Before has a DPS of 8, and at 5 seconds the After has a DPS of 7.5. We also have a % Decrease in DPS column which, you guessed it, shows at that point in time how much your DPS has decreased. This means, say, if you have a fight that lasts 10 seconds, and you fight the way I do, your DPS has decreased by a maximum of 15%.

Links 2-4: Here we can see the older DPS vs the newer DPS (with quickness maximized still). Of course as the battle gets longer, the gap will get bigger, so I find the 1000 second graph (#4) less useful than the other two. In the first graph (#2) you can see that quickness has a less profound effect.

But now let’s get to the most interesting ones. Links 5-6 show the decreased DPS based on battle duration. In (#5) we can see a very significant hit to DPS initially, but we should expect that our DPS was reduced from 200% to 150% which is a 25% decrease. As the battle duration increases, our DPS reduction decreases which is both good and expected. Yet in a 35 second fight our DPS is reduced by 10%. Ouch!

Graph (#6) is the most important. 60 second fights are common, but do we really lose out on those big, long boss battles? The answer is yes. In the long term, our DPS is reduced by 7-8%. This isn’t insignificant, and actually a rather big deal! The amount of gold one pays to increase their DPS by a percent or two, or what you pay for food buffs to increase your DPS by only 3% makes this loss extra hurtful. Of course, this is the maximum DPS loss you will suffer from the change to Quickness if you extend your battle duration longer than 500 seconds. If you sit between the 60-120 second mark for battle duration, expect a maximum DPS loss of 8-9% instead.

Links:

1. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhMRbtXpW9UNdDRseVN1VUhHajQ5UDM5aEQ1bnJIV3c#gid=0
2. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNSThCdE1xVlZRTnc/edit
3. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNanFTMkRHWm01M0U/edit
4. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNdUttc3lUdTlyaFk/edit
5. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNQ3NyNUsxaElVd0U/edit
6. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMRbtXpW9UNVzNqdDh5cndORUU/edit

Congrats, and thanks for satisfying my own personal curiosity. I like what you’ve done here.

However, you also brought math to the internet ( and to a gaming forum no less ). I’m thinking its going to bounce off of many people’s heads that are just too convinced that rangers are no longer viable in pretty much everything. It’s not your fault, its just the way things seem to go.

I play both engineer and ranger extensively. After finding out the observational differences in game, I gotta say that I don’t feel terribly underpowered in PvE. In fact, the overall output of both has not changed in any dramatic way, despite what people are saying. In WvW, there is some active difference, but the play style is much more fluid and one needs to react to changes quickly. Its the nature of the beast. A build only reflects part of the story. How its implemented and played is entirely another matter.

Ramethzero.3785:

Congrats, and thanks for satisfying my own personal curiosity. I like what you’ve done here.

However, you also brought math to the internet ( and to a gaming forum no less ). I’m thinking its going to bounce off of many people’s heads that are just too convinced that rangers are no longer viable in pretty much everything. It’s not your fault, its just the way things seem to go.

I play both engineer and ranger extensively. After finding out the observational differences in game, I gotta say that I don’t feel terribly underpowered in PvE. In fact, the overall output of both has not changed in any dramatic way, despite what people are saying. In WvW, there is some active difference, but the play style is much more fluid and one needs to react to changes quickly. Its the nature of the beast. A build only reflects part of the story. How its implemented and played is entirely another matter.

You’re welcome, and I absolutely agree When I say a maximum decrease of 8-9% DPS, this is under the assumption that a person plays like I do, always grabbing their chance for quickness when it’s available. So this hurts my specific build and play style the most, and potentially anyone else who min/maxes to the degree I do. Ultimately, your average ranger will walk away from this change nearly unaffected. Though I do take a significant hit and I can’t say that that doesn’t make me sad.

Rangers were definitely caught up in the quickness nerf.

However, quickness overall needed some adjustment, so I am ok with it. I am hoping that they will adjust the proportional damage split between the player and their pet eventually. Just given the AI, even with our control, they are too unreliable to make up such a large percentage of our damage, imo. If the overall damage output was kept the same, but just a bit more focused on the player character, I think it would put rangers in a better place. Ideally, it would also make the difference between a beast master and a non beast master a bit more obvious, as it would move back towards the pet doing a very large percentage of the damage.

Thanks for the research into it.

What weapons are you using? The shortbow auto attack has a delay that doesn’t get shortened by quickness. Some of the testing I’ve done indicates there’s a ~0.24 second delay in the longbow auto attack that isn’t shortened by quickness either. If that really is the case, then the quickness change would result in a smaller drop in dps with longbow and shortbow. I’m not sure about the other weapons.

This is a great analysis! Good job.

However, one thing that is not explicit in our weapon skills is that quickness does not actually increase our attack rate by 50% (and pre-patch it didn’t increase it by 100%, either). For shortbow, it’s closer to 31% now (which I tested here). If you’re using a shortbow and maximizing use of quickness, that means this patch hit you for about 5.1% of your DPS over extended fights.