Guild Wars 2

I have all rare zerk armor and ruby orbs as well as major rune of the fighter attached. with the eagle on others. How are you all hitting these massive numbers? i seem to get 2-4k hits

Hit from behind.

If you’re still using Rare armor and Major runes, you’re not fully geared out yet. You’ll be able to achieve those numbers with Exotic/Ascended gear with Superior runes or equivalents.

Formula: (source)
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

Lets Assume the following:

• Dagger = 981
• Backstab coefficient = 2.405 (source)
• Trait coefficient = 1.15 (Deadly Art dagger training & Exposed Weakness)
• Crit coefficient = 2 (base is 1.5 for crits, but with gear/traits you can easily get another 0.5 or more)
• Target Armor = 1000 (naked or upscaled lowbie player)
• Power = 2000

10,852 = 981 * 2000 * (2.405 * 2 * 1.15) / 1000 (this is without consumable/sigil)

Now a decently geared player will have about 2000 or more armor, so you will likely not get 10k dmg and get closer to 5K ball park range. In WvW there are plenty of upscaled player with low armor values, so in those cases backstab can wreck havoc on them.

i “mug” ppl for more than 5k, i think your calculations are wrong mate.

It’s hard in PvP – not so rare in WvW.

25 stacks of bloodlust and having might stacked too helps a lot.

^Attacking up-leveled ppl helps a lot too

DanH.5879:

i “mug” ppl for more than 5k, i think your calculations are wrong mate.

Mug calculation:
(With full Zerker gear and Ascended stuff allowing for 110% crit damage on a 10/30/30/0/0 glass cannon build)

981 * 2200 * (1.5*3.15) / 1000 = 10197.496 (Rounded to 10,197)

This doesn’t include outside effects such as Bloodlust, First Strike (10% more damage), any Might stacks from stealthing or armour used by players.

With the same gear a backstab in the same build would do:

981 * 2200 * (2.405*3.15) / 1000 = 16349.98365 (Rounded to 16,350)

Which would allow for 5k Mug hits and 10k Backstab hit even on players with armour

Taril’s math and assumption about +dmg% are in the ballpark for a couple of different glass cannon setups so you can plug in at least 1800 armor against non upleveled players and somewhere in the range of 2200 for a balanced light armor player if you want to see the typical damage you would put out.

Base – 50
Trait – 30
Amu – 5 [exq – 3]
Ring – 3 [exq – 3]
Ring – 3 [exq – 3]
Ear – 3 [exq – 3]
Ear – 3 [exq – 3]
Back – ? [exq – 3]
Armor slots – 2 5 2 2 3 2
Rune – ruby – 2*6
Food – 10 (power may be stronger, but this is just an example)
MH – 5 [ruby – 2]
OH – 5 [ruby – 2]

Total: 167% crit damage. I think a normal build would have closer to 150-160% and have other damage stats like more raw power or other runes.

kirito’s backstab damage result should be closer to 981 * 2500 * (2.405 * 1.15 * 2.6) / 2127 = 8.3k

Generally a DPS Thief should have a bit more raw dmg boosts (another 10-30 depending on approach), but whatever.

On a target that:

- Uses heavy exotic armor
- no +Toughness
- with no Vuln stacks (CND applies 3, so that’s usually the case)

Edit: Dropping to medium or light armor would easily break 10k. A few %dmg optimizations would also break 10. Any tier reduction below exotic would probably break 10k. Also, that’s not max power. Could go a little higher IIRC.

Faeyd.5094:

It’s hard in PvP – not so rare in WvW.

25 stacks of bloodlust and having might stacked too helps a lot.

I have pulled off >11k backstabs on GCs in spvp – especially other thiefs

25/30/0/0/15 and I think I’m using Ogre runes air/bloodlust sigils and of course zerker amulet/gem.

Also there was recently a post by a GC mesmer in the pvp forum who got hit with a 14k backstab O.o

I feel the OP. My biggest backstab in all berserker’s gear is 4,000. On a crit.

my biggest BS on a guardian was 9k and on a mesmer was 15k < this was full GC zerker 25/30/0/0/15

with my current build = 7-8k on heavy armor and 9-12k on light.

It’s all about your attack vs the target’s armor. It’s a sliding scale based on those values so each target is different. There are also things like vulnerabilities/might and other abilities like frenzy to think about. You can hit a GC warrior with Frenzy up for ridiculous damage. Imagine if you had some might stacks and they had vulns as well. Then they post the screenshot of the damage in a nerf thief thread with no context that they hit frenzy to try to 100burrds a thief in refuge who took advantage of the free +50% dmg.

20k+ backstabs are possible, with regards to the circumstances in stiv’s post.

DanH.5879:

i “mug” ppl for more than 5k, i think your calculations are wrong mate.

Care to provide some explanation/numbers to show why it is wrong?

The formula was done with filled assumptions of player gear as an example. A player can easily exceed those value. What you experience and get all depends on those values. In other words, your gear is different.

Stiv.1820:

It’s all about your attack vs the target’s armor. It’s a sliding scale based on those values so each target is different. There are also things like vulnerabilities/might and other abilities like frenzy to think about.

Entirely true. Look at the formula. You can easily see Power is divided by Armor. Those are the two main things that varies. Mostly everything else is a static value.

tl;dr The example calculations was just to demonstrate how the OP could figure out what he/she is missing and what to do in order to achieve those values.

jwburks.9735:

I feel the OP. My biggest backstab in all berserker’s gear is 4,000. On a crit.

You should read the skill desription then. Couse you are face stabbing.

It’s still possible, i imagine a lot higher in WvW with food/buffs. I hit this today in sPVP with only 3 stacks of might. 20441 with 3 skills.

Karolis.4261:

jwburks.9735:

I feel the OP. My biggest backstab in all berserker’s gear is 4,000. On a crit.

You should read the skill desription then. Couse you are face stabbing.

I’m laughing on the outside.
But on the inside, I’m crying.