Guild Wars 2

Flawless Strikes -
a trait in critical strikes trait line gives 7% Critical Damage while over 90% of your total health points.

I tested the trait out of curiosity and noticed how when equipping and unequipping the trait it does not change the % value on stat screen. I feel if it does not manipulate the % total value it doesn’t work in game period.
I am unaware of how to post pictures on the forums for this to show proof, but you can go in the game and test this for yourself.

Can Anet add this into their next minor patch?

The only modifiers that show up on the stat page are non-conditional ones.

All % damage modifiers do not show up in the stat panel as mentioned. Test a few hits on something, OOC, remove the trait, and try again; you’ll be down on damage. Further, Flawless Strikes doesn’t modify the actual Critical Damage stat based on ferocity; it’s a fixed % increase of outgoing critical hits, which means it’s much more significant than the 105-equivalent Ferocity.

The thing about modifiers, and particularly in the case of the thief and the CS line, is that they get more effective the more you have since they’re multiplicative except for ferocity. A single trait for 7% will do very little, but combined with many others, the multipliers stack up in intensity, such that a thief running CS over meta DA and using Trickery and Daredevil with HM and Bound (odds are if you’re going CS you’re going for damage anyways) – assuming no ferocity gains for whatever reason – will have the following:

CS:
1 (base damage) * 1.07 (FlS) * 1.1 (FerS) * 1.15 (LA) * 1.07 (HM) * 1.1 (BD) = extra 59.3% damage (without the potential 30% critical damage modifier (on marauder amulet, for example) bonus based on ferocity factored; CS ends up providing much more damage overall).

DA (Improv):
1 * 1.1 * 1.15 * 1.07 * 1.1 = extra 48.9% damage.

So the 7% figure ends up turning into a multiplier of an additional 10.4% The more you stack, the more substantial the gains become.

Ferocity, like what you see from the effects of Practiced Tolerance and NQ, is additive. Because of this, it also means that the more you stack, the less effective point-per-point it becomes. All professions have 150% base critical damage. Marauder amulet baseline puts the thief to 187.3%. The increase in damage isn’t a relative 37.3% like the other bonuses mentioned above, however; the real difference is 187.3/150, or roughly 24%.

From the gains from CS, assuming NQ is used, the gains move to 201% from PT and then from there 217.67% from NQ under fury. Holistically, this is only a 45% gain in damage between crits and non-crits from baseline – the entirety of your Ferocity stat contribution yields less damage on critical hits than your other combined modifiers alone!

This is why % damage modifiers need to be handed out sparingly; a profession with tons of access to increasing-damage modifiers can end up hitting harder in Soldier’s or sometimes even Sentinel’s gear by stacking offensive traits rather than taking Berserker-type gear and stacking defensive ones. Add boons like Might into the mix and things get out of hand quickly. The thief is balanced in this regard since it lacks substantial might access (also why it’s weak in sPvP but strong in WvW since its base stats are higher from gear letting those % increases scale harder) and because aside from LA and EW, these all require pretty big build commitments/sacrifices. However, you can quickly see how others with lots of might (Ele/Herald/War/Druid/Reaper) could get way out of control if given such multipliers, as they also have more power to scale damage from.

So while insignificant on their own, small multipliers play a huge role in defining CS and the thief’s damage in general (also why the thief has some of the best DPS in raids, since it achieves simply more potential modifiers than other professions).

DeceiverX.8361:

All % damage modifiers do not show up in the stat panel as mentioned. Test a few hits on something, OOC, remove the trait, and try again; you’ll be down on damage. Further, Flawless Strikes doesn’t modify the actual Critical Damage stat based on ferocity; it’s a fixed % increase of outgoing critical hits, which means it’s much more significant than the 105-equivalent Ferocity.

The thing about modifiers, and particularly in the case of the thief and the CS line, is that they get more effective the more you have since they’re multiplicative except for ferocity. A single trait for 7% will do very little, but combined with many others, the multipliers stack up in intensity, such that a thief running CS over meta DA and using Trickery and Daredevil with HM and Bound (odds are if you’re going CS you’re going for damage anyways) – assuming no ferocity gains for whatever reason – will have the following:

CS:
1 (base damage) * 1.07 (FlS) * 1.1 (FerS) * 1.15 (LA) * 1.07 (HM) * 1.1 (BD) = extra 59.3% damage (without the potential 30% critical damage modifier (on marauder amulet, for example) bonus based on ferocity factored; CS ends up providing much more damage overall).

DA (Improv):
1 * 1.1 * 1.15 * 1.07 * 1.1 = extra 48.9% damage.

So the 7% figure ends up turning into a multiplier of an additional 10.4% The more you stack, the more substantial the gains become.

Ferocity, like what you see from the effects of Practiced Tolerance and NQ, is additive. Because of this, it also means that the more you stack, the less effective point-per-point it becomes. All professions have 150% base critical damage. Marauder amulet baseline puts the thief to 187.3%. The increase in damage isn’t a relative 37.3% like the other bonuses mentioned above, however; the real difference is 187.3/150, or roughly 24%.

From the gains from CS, assuming NQ is used, the gains move to 201% from PT and then from there 217.67% from NQ under fury. Holistically, this is only a 45% gain in damage between crits and non-crits from baseline – the entirety of your Ferocity stat contribution yields less damage on critical hits than your other combined modifiers alone!

This is why % damage modifiers need to be handed out sparingly; a profession with tons of access to increasing-damage modifiers can end up hitting harder in Soldier’s or sometimes even Sentinel’s gear by stacking offensive traits rather than taking Berserker-type gear and stacking defensive ones. Add boons like Might into the mix and things get out of hand quickly. The thief is balanced in this regard since it lacks substantial might access (also why it’s weak in sPvP but strong in WvW since its base stats are higher from gear letting those % increases scale harder) and because aside from LA and EW, these all require pretty big build commitments/sacrifices. However, you can quickly see how others with lots of might (Ele/Herald/War/Druid/Reaper) could get way out of control if given such multipliers, as they also have more power to scale damage from.

So while insignificant on their own, small multipliers play a huge role in defining CS and the thief’s damage in general (also why the thief has some of the best DPS in raids, since it achieves simply more potential modifiers than other professions).

The Trait reads as While above 90% health increase your Critical Damage by 7%. It sounds as if this should be shown in the stat panel because there’s a Critical Damage stat.

The trait’s hard to follow, from your lengthy explanation, but seems like it doesn’t apply itself visually or works as intended as described.

I would think since it doesn’t explain to the player of multiplying the Critical Damage % it would be a visual bug instead of functioning bug. Maybe Anet should reword the trait to better explain the Multiply factor behind the trait instead of wording it as a stat type in the window.

Overall it’s confusing and easily a question that could come up in the future from players who won’t see your explanation in coming weeks, months, or years.

This is where a combat log should suss out if the trait works properly. We should be able to export a combat log into Excel or similar and run the numbers. I suspect any number of traits do not work as they are described but we have pretty much no way to verify.

I have tested it multiple times on multiple occasions; the trait works.

It doesn’t display in the log because 7% outgoing critical damage as a modifier != 105 Ferocity or an update of 7% critical damage as though provided by 105 ferocity; all multipliers except for ferocity-stacking effects are applied in a multiplicative fashion after base damage, meaning that the trait would be in a constant state of dynamically-updating your character menu every time you received an extra modifier, stack on LA, etc.

It could use a re-wording, (something like, “Your critical strikes deal 7% more damage.”) but the trait is not bugged and works exactly as I described; it’s just conditional on critical attacks.