Guild Wars 2

All honor to Tree for posting this:

Have in mind this is from a warriors viewpoint, but I think it pretty much sums it up

“originally posted: http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/13612527-strength-runes-vs-scholar-groups-solo

Hey all. Wanted to show how the strength rune nerf played out in actual terms. So I ran the comparison to scholar in both solo and group DPS.

Solo Assumptions: Banner of Discipline (100% for simplicity sake), 23 Might for strength runes, 17 Might for Scholar, 3 Vuln on average. Greatsword Camping rotation, Curry Butternut Squash Soup, 65003 build, Scholar Runes 100% uptime. 100% bleeding uptime, Fury 100%.

Group Assumptions: Both banners, 25 Might, 25 Vuln, GS Camp rotation (for simplicity) CBN Soup, 65003, Scholar Runes 100% uptime, 100% bleeding uptime, Fury 100%

Solo Strength Rune Post Nerf: 8,187 DPS

Solo Strength Runes Pre Nerf: 8,343 DPS

Solo Scholar Runes: 8,170.22 DPS

Group Strength Runes Post Nerf: 10,616 DPS

Group Strength Runes Pre Nerf: 10,818 DPS

Group Scholar Runes: 11,364 DPS

Conclusion: The nerf wasn’t terrble in terms of whole numbers to be honest. In a solo setting you lose less than 200 DPS, which is probably only vaguely noticeable. The big change is that they are essentially the same as Scholar when solo, assuming you can keep Scholar uptime at 100%. Any Scholar downtime will obviously drastically lower the DPS. But the end result for solo play is if you already have Scholar there is no real need to buy Strength runes unless your goal is to push solo boss kill times as far as possible.

For groups, scholar was always clearly better, now much more so, by about 7% instead of 5%. This just confirms the superiority of Scholar for group play, especially since fights are short enough that maintaining scholar bonus is significantly easier.

The total conclusion, for me, is that Strength Runes have become niche for pro solo’ers rather than the go-to rune for everything. I didn’t feel bad before about using Strength in a group, but I likely would now. And before I would have considered the advantage of Strength over Scholar in solos (3%-7%) to make using Strength for everything a fairly smart move. Now, I would only recommend Strength if your main gameplay is solos AND you care about pushing times. If you enjoy doing solos but you aren’t out to compete with Dub, Goku or Miku you should probably just use Scholar."

So as you can see, the damage is a bit lower,(du-uh) but if you have spent a lot of gold on this set, you can still use it and be effective.

You champ! Thanks so much

Any other runes even come close to strength now I wonder? Would love this guy to do the maths for alot of the major runes.

Anyway free bump to keep this near the top. I will keep using strength since they are good for most things I do. Staying above 90% is hard in wvw/fractals so strength is still better. Really miss my travelers though.

I like pack runes

I like pancakes, a lot. And I also enjoy pack runes. And also strength runes. I enjoy a lot of things apparently.

As for strength runes, I still find them viable. Think I will use another set on my second thief tho, unless the price gets dropped further.

Nice work op informative stuff like this is useful.

Thank you Vince. I take no credit for the math, that’s all Tree’s work. But for sharing this with you guys, you are quite welcome :-)