Guild Wars 2

Ensign.2189:

Narcarsis.5739:

Quite simply, I don’t think you are correct but there is no way to prove either theory after the removal of steady weapons.

Ferocious Strikes is actually quite easy to test – an AoE attack only rolls damage once when you cleave (but rolls crits independently), so just wade into the test golem pile with a cleaving weapon (I used the shortbow) and look for a hit that crits two different golems for different amounts – it’ll happen when one was above half and the other below half. You’ll find that the bigger crit is 10% larger than the smaller one, within rounding errors.

Flawless Strike takes a bit more work since as you said there aren’t steady weapons now, though again it’s not too hard. Shoot things with the trait and without it for a couple minutes and compare the average damage done per hit, it doesn’t take too long to get the ratio to converge tightly enough to distinguish between a real 7% boost and a real 4% boost to an arbitrarily large Z-value (I used 10).

Yes, I have tested both of these, and you can too. They behave as described.

Narcarsis.5739:

1. I don’t think many people have the patience to gather a larger sample pool to further reduce the variance between crits, and 2. I know I don’t and I have trust issues ^^

I have enough experience doing these sorts of tests that setting them up and running them doesn’t take me much time, and 2) I totally respect trust issues. Try the cleaving weapon as described above in the golem pit – it takes very little time, a minute or two at most, and is really definitive – no statistics necessary.

I won’t be able to for a week as I’m out if the country for break, but I will when I return. I’ve also spoken with a Dev who’s unsure about which way it works but believes it works as you’ve described – the reason being is that they don’t know if they do percentage critical damage outside of ferocity since the patch that introduced it but the wording is ambiguous and both calculations are plausible. They’re out of the office until January though so they won’t be able to confirm anything for a while as well.
I do know that the way I calculated them is how it used to work before the ferocity patch but I never really considered that they’d change it. I’ll have confirmation in a week or so as long as they’re not too busy with other work.

Also Deciever I’m not sure who taught you math… You seem to over-complicate simple math and you could make everything easier for people to follow (Just as suggestion). You can cover the same thing with a lot less.

Based on your average hit without Ferocious Strikes and Flawless Strikes of 7,016:
We can ignore Scholar and Force bonuses as they were consistent throughout your tests.

7,016 / 1.94 = ~3,616 base damage
Additive: 3,616 * (1.94 + 0.17) * = ~7,630
Multiplicative: 3,616 * (1.94) * (1.17) = ~8,208

Your average with both modifiers fell along the multiplicative range and that would suggest Ensign is right. However I will find out my own numbers later and just plug them into an excel spread to find out what I get. My previous post explains more on that.

It was intentional. I figured more modifiers included for the calculations would cause a bigger damage range as to offset the effects of the variance when testing without steady weapons. This would make calculations more definitive.

I’m not sure I agree that over-complication and unnecessary verbiage make something more definitive but that’s irrelevant.

If Ensign is correct, as it looks like he may be, the new Critical Strikes damage would be 25,614 compared to the 22,233 of Daredevil – which is still less damage than one Bound and still not worth the trade off in my opinion.

If we want to use a realistic number for backstab the result will be closer and the difference even more insignificant.

If you hate stealth like me, daredevil is the choice to go if you want to play “thief” profession.

so much nerd talk here guys, leave it out :p

Fwiw, I main a warrior in wvw and Daredevils appear to have given thieves a much deserved power boost. Tbh, it’s pretty hard to counter a DD as a melee warrior if the DD is played well, but it still doesn’t seem overpowered.

Frankly, I’m glad you got it and sad that base thief doesn’t have more viability.

Well, this is what we get when someone didn’t do their homework. might aswell wait for the dev confirmation or perhaps wiki will gonna take the credit again. who knows.