S/D damage nerfed more than D/D (Math)
Well, when you want something really clarified, the best option is doing it urself, so i took upon me the task of finding out what is going on with the s/d set and its daze lock feature. Props anyway for Dracomir to doing this himself, shows he is not a bandwagoner, he is a man of reason. I tested it myself, using my spectacular imagination and craftmanship, not only to produce results, but also to devise a way for you fellow forumers to test yourself with an almost failure proof method that is easy to do and can be confirmed with roughly 15 minutes of testing, if not less. For this you will need to equip the mesmer rune set, have 2 swords and 2 daggers ready, 1 sword and 1 dagger with sigil of paralyze, and the other set with no sigil (this will make possible testing with all combinations of sigils possible, 2 sigils, no sigil, 1 sigil main hand,1 sigil off hand), ull also need a stop watch, or, if you dont have one, you must equip signet of agility (explanation comes later); equip only the runes, dont equip the amulet, we want as less power as possible, to make the heavy golem (our test dummy) last for a longer period. This test has 2 distinct parts, the first one will determine the lenght of the sword auto attack full chain, and the second will determine how long daze lasts.
First part:
*Put 15 points in trickery to get preparedness, for a initiative bar with 15 initiative, and put 10 points into shadow arts, to get infusion of shadow, in order to use as many C&D’ers as possible.
*Set the slot 1 skill to autoattack.
*Now, with your stop watch ready, press both the stop watch AND the slot 1 skill at the same time, and count 30 hits with autoattack, this is 10 autoattack full chains; alternatively, if you dont have a stop watch, equip signet of agility, this skill is instant cast and overlaps, meaning it can be used at the same time as another skill. This will be your stop watch, because this skill recharges in 30 secs, which is more than the duration of this experiment.
*repeat this experiment at least 3 times, just to make sure that the results have consistency.
Now, after uve followed this steps, you will get this result: ten full auto chains last ALLWAYS between 24 secs and 25 secs, never less, never more; this is higly consistent, so we can safely assume that 1 full autoattack chain with sword lasts between 2.4 secs and 2.5 secs (if ure using the signet, the last autoattack will finish at the 6 seconds or 5 seconds mark on the cooldown). Also, as you are observing this results, notice the white numbers coming out of the golem, its the dmg that ure doing to the golem, this is important because they will ALLWAYS appear on your screen at the exact same time the sword connects with the golem,and will be used on part 2 of the experiment as a gauge of the daze duration. This makes it so that each hit of the auto attack chain has a landing time of 0.8 secs, 0.8*3=2.4 (i will use 2.5 secs because the last hit seems to take just a trifle more time to land). As a side note, the golem will usually die at the 33/34 hits mark, unless you get a lucky streak of critical hits. Now on to part 2 of the experiment.
Part 2:
*Now, start doing the C&D->TS combo. You need to be fast. Hit golem with cloak,and imediatelly use TS, the autoattack lock will make the rest for you. Try to make as many
combos as possible, so you can see for urself as the golem is almost allways dazed. In fact, if you do it right, ull see this: after using TS, your auto attack chain will allways land 2 hits, and daze ends a fraction of a second before the 3rd hit lands, this 3rd hit will also apply weakness and cripple imediatelly, and you will see as the daze icon is almost instantly replaced by these 2 icons. Also, if you activate C&D imediatelly after the 3rd hit, the revealed debuff is beaten by again a fraction of a second, which makes C&D apply stealth on you again, right after revealed wears off, and allowing for another round of TS->auto->auto->auto->C&D… To further clarify results, and not have your eyes playing tricks on you, look at the white numbers from dmg, as i said above, they appear on your screen at the same time the hits land, and you will clearly see that after daze the numbers pop up twice, and daze only ends just a fraction of a second before the 3rd number appears, since each number takes 0.8 secs to appear, we have clearly a daze that lasts for well over 1.5 second.
*Repeat this experiment as many times as you are willing too, and repeat them with all possible combinations, no sigils, 2 sigils, only 1 sigil in whichever hand, no rune, or rune. The result will allways be the same, the sigils or the rune have no say on this.
Conclusion: Anet made it so that the daze still lasts for 2 seconds, but is now unaffected by any runes or sigils, another one of those ninja patches that went unexplained…
You guys can test this in this fashion, if anyone doubts me, but those were my findings, and i hope this clarifies.
Awesome stuff Eduardo. The only thing left to do is to test this on an actual player because it might be a test dummy bug.
If this holds true for actual human players, then we know 1) Daze lasts more than 1.5 seconds (if the autoattack chain is 2.5 seconds, then daze is between 2 and 2.4 seconds), 2) the mesmer runes are indeed bugged and 3) sigils don’t work (though we won’t know if this is a bug until Anet says something).
S/D still does pretty good in PVP. The Auto-Attack is really under-appreciated by people who don’t play the set for any significant amount of time. For reference, Crippling Strike, the third attack of our auto-attack chain, hits for 317 damage. Cloak and Dagger hit for 365 before the nerf. CnD+Tactical strike would have done a total of 584 while one sequence of your auto attack did 707. Aside from Dancing Dagger spam, our auto-attack was and is our best DPS option.
That’s not all though, our auto-attack also has a very wide cone and range and Crippling Strike applies Cripple and Weakness for 2 seconds which meant that we where really good at keeping an enemy from dodging around and fleeing.
S/D auto-attack is the primary reason we’re still competitive even after this most recent patch. Infiltrator’s Strike is still great for mindgames/evasion/running away heroically and Flanking Strike is still great for tearing away boons. It’s no glass cannon burst king, but you can still definitely kill a guy with it if you’re smart about using it.
I like how they also nerfed the Daze such that the Sigil of Paralyzation doesn’t apply to the daze anymore (oh and forgot to mention that in the patch notes).
How closely have you actually tested this? I’ve heard several people mention it, but I wanted to test to be sure. I recorded some video of me using the daze on PvP golems and sparring NPCs. I slowed it down to 10% speed, and the daze icon lasted a little over 19 seconds with Sigil of Paralyzation. I replicated this several times. I’d peg the daze duration as ~1.95s with the Sigil. You may want to test this yourself more closely.
I tested in the Mists using Fraps:
1) Capture the sequence from before debuff application to after it’s gone.
2) Import the video into a video editor that allows fine-adjustment of timing (i.e. 1 frame at a time)
3) Find the time at which the debuff showed up and the time at which it went away
4) Subtract the numbers to get debuff duration
I performed the above sequence using S/D twice: once with no sigils, once with Paralyzation on the Sword.
Both resulted in the exact same duration.
Edit: Forgot to mention that the daze duration was essentially 2 seconds, as Eduardo stated above. Also, I tested using the same method a while ago (several weeks ago) and the sigil used to affect the duration (before the latest patch).
(edited by Adein.2031)
S/D still does pretty good in PVP. The Auto-Attack is really under-appreciated by people who don’t play the set for any significant amount of time. For reference, Crippling Strike, the third attack of our auto-attack chain, hits for 317 damage. Cloak and Dagger hit for 365 before the nerf. CnD+Tactical strike would have done a total of 584 while one sequence of your auto attack did 707. Aside from Dancing Dagger spam, our auto-attack was and is our best DPS option.
Yup. I tested it a while ago. With a high-power build, S/D autoattack was within 5% of D/D autoattack, but it is a 3-target frontal AoE and it applies cripple and weakness. The autoattack is fantastic.
I like how they also nerfed the Daze such that the Sigil of Paralyzation doesn’t apply to the daze anymore (oh and forgot to mention that in the patch notes).
How closely have you actually tested this? I’ve heard several people mention it, but I wanted to test to be sure. I recorded some video of me using the daze on PvP golems and sparring NPCs. I slowed it down to 10% speed, and the daze icon lasted a little over 19 seconds with Sigil of Paralyzation. I replicated this several times. I’d peg the daze duration as ~1.95s with the Sigil. You may want to test this yourself more closely.
I tested in the Mists using Fraps:
1) Capture the sequence from before debuff application to after it’s gone.
2) Import the video into a video editor that allows fine-adjustment of timing (i.e. 1 frame at a time)
3) Find the time at which the debuff showed up and the time at which it went away
4) Subtract the numbers to get debuff durationI performed the above sequence using S/D twice: once with no sigils, once with Paralyzation on the Sword.
Both resulted in the exact same duration.
Okay, but what was that duration? I got 2s repeatedly.
The problem could be that you’re counting frames. You may not be getting the framerate you think you’re getting, which would throw off the measurement. I’d slow down by time (i.e. 10% or 5% speed) and use that. Other than that, you tested it the same way I did.
I’ll retest it when I get home, and you should too. I’ll pay more attention to with sigil and without sigil, and I might even upload to youtube.
I like how they also nerfed the Daze such that the Sigil of Paralyzation doesn’t apply to the daze anymore (oh and forgot to mention that in the patch notes).
How closely have you actually tested this? I’ve heard several people mention it, but I wanted to test to be sure. I recorded some video of me using the daze on PvP golems and sparring NPCs. I slowed it down to 10% speed, and the daze icon lasted a little over 19 seconds with Sigil of Paralyzation. I replicated this several times. I’d peg the daze duration as ~1.95s with the Sigil. You may want to test this yourself more closely.
I tested in the Mists using Fraps:
1) Capture the sequence from before debuff application to after it’s gone.
2) Import the video into a video editor that allows fine-adjustment of timing (i.e. 1 frame at a time)
3) Find the time at which the debuff showed up and the time at which it went away
4) Subtract the numbers to get debuff durationI performed the above sequence using S/D twice: once with no sigils, once with Paralyzation on the Sword.
Both resulted in the exact same duration.
Okay, but what was that duration? I got 2s repeatedly.
The problem could be that you’re counting frames. You may not be getting the framerate you think you’re getting, which would throw off the measurement. I’d slow down by time (i.e. 10% or 5% speed) and use that. Other than that, you tested it the same way I did.
I’ll retest it when I get home, and you should too. I’ll pay more attention to with sigil and without sigil, and I might even upload to youtube.
i can confirm what Adein said : it’s exactly the same duration, with/without runes/sigils.
The duration is 1.5 secs, since i started casting basilisk venom ( 1 sec cast) and it took about the same time for the cast time and daze duration to expire ( counting off delay, the daze was a bit more than the cast time on basilisk venom).
Again, S/D is not viable anymore at tourney level, don’t try to convince yourself about the contrary, altough i know it’s sad.
The confirmation came when on khylo, 3rd match, i’ve been stalemating with a bunker meditation guardian: i’ve never, NEVER been forced into a stalemate against a meditation guardian, but this time, he was overhealing my damage.
Because S/D doesn’t have damage anymore.
Into a min/max environment, those damage reduction on DD and C&D are too high , and they appear even worse when paired with the daze reduction on TS: basically now, against other classes competitive builds, we’re not dealing enough damage.
Just move on to condition builds, they’re the only thing we have right now.
Okay, but what was that duration? I got 2s repeatedly.
The problem could be that you’re counting frames. You may not be getting the framerate you think you’re getting, which would throw off the measurement. I’d slow down by time (i.e. 10% or 5% speed) and use that. Other than that, you tested it the same way I did.
I’ll retest it when I get home, and you should too. I’ll pay more attention to with sigil and without sigil, and I might even upload to youtube.
I added an edit to say I got ~2 seconds. I was using the timestamp, not the frame counter. If I remember correctly (I still have the video and can check the exact value), it came out to 1.9 something, or just shy of 2.
Not sure why it’s 2 seconds instead of 1.5 though. Maybe it’s just the graphical debuff icon that’s 2 seconds, or maybe it’s some rounding thing. But the important thing is that it’s 2s regardless of whether the sigil is used.