Guild Wars 2

I was just experimenting with some thief builds when I noticed something strange, from my limited perspective at least. Going through the combat log I saw that my Tactical Strike was out-damaged every single time by Slice and Slash. The only time it wasnt was when Slice or Slash was a crit and TS was not. Here is an example from my combat log:

Mesmer was hit for 31kittenage by your Steal <- stupid language filter lol
Mesmer was hit for 2008 damage by your Cloak and Dagger
Mesmer was hit for 1498 damage by your Tactical Strike
Mesmer was hit for 1622 damage by your Slice
Mesmer was hit for 1704 damage by your Slash
Mesmer was hit for 1682 damage by your Slash
Mesmer was hit for 2888 damage by your Crippling Strike

Thief was hit for 3083 damage by your Steal
Thief was hit for 1925 damage by your Cloak and Dagger
Thief was hit for 1514 damage by your Tactical Strike
Thief was hit for 1701 damage by your Slice
Thief was hit for 1566 damage by your Slash
Thief was hit for 2811 damage by your Crippling Strike
Thief was hit for 1716 damage by your Slice
Thief was hit for 1613 damage by your Slash

There is a consistent gap of 50-200+ damage between TS and Slice/Slash. Both Slice and Slash should do less base damage and should always do less than TS (assuming both are crits) if I am not mistaken. TS should always be a crit as I have the Hidden Killer trait. At first I thought it was because I was not positioning myself correctly behind the target after the C & D … but it was clear the position was correct because I could see my target get dazed. This was on testing a 10/30/0/0/30 build.

This build minus the gear: http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.0|c.1g.h2.8.1g.h1|5.1g.h1|1g.71b.1g.71b.1g.71b.1g.71b.1g.71b.1g.7j|1p.67.1g.67.1g.67.1i.64.1i.64.1i.67|a3.u36c.0.0.u57c|39.j|57.5c.5h.5f.5u|e

Very odd. Any ideas? I am probably missing something obvious here.

nope ur right. same problem ive been ahving. it sux. huge dmg hit. somethign is wrong.

You are loosing ~6% damage with Lead Attacks after using C%D which you will gain some back after proc’ing Opportunist plus normal regen. Also possibly another 10% depending how much initiative you had with First Strike.

Just realized the traits First Strike and Lead Attacks might be a factor. That first Cloak and Dagger costs 6 initiative, however with Preparedness I still have more than 6 left so First Stike should still be in effect.

Cloak and Dagger takes .5 seconds so I should still have 9 initiative after an opening with Steal. Tactical Strike is .5 seconds as well I believe, so at most I would an additional 1% more damage with my next attack of Slice. Slice being .5 seconds as well, this opens up the possibility that the next Slash could be with a bonus of 2%. But is this enough to bridge and eclipse the gap so greatly?

I didnt think my initiative was regening so fast that I would have a full 6% back so soon. However it does seem to be more of a ding to TS than a bonus to Slice or Slash. Thx.

After testing with HiS to enter stealth, the TS is still hitting ~50-100 lower.
Maybe it’s skill coefficient is lower so it doesn’t scale as well.

bottom line is devs said they will increase our base dmg on most skills. this is one that is very well needed. just like pistol skill 1.

Different skills have different power coefficients which cause their damage to scale differently. It’s not displayed anywhere on the tooltip, but they have posted them a couple times in former patches. That’s probably what is happening here.

Back stab has a bonus dmg wen behind the opponent, tactical strike doesn’t. It dazes if your behind the opponent and blinds it you are not behind the opponent.

And it’s dmg has always been low anyway since it is more a utility the a dmg skill.

@ Travlane.5948
Devs also said the base dmg increase will not be this patch and not to expect balancing changes next patch since it will be mainly bug fixes and tooltip rewriting.

Tactical Strike should be a knockdown behind, IMO.

well slash and slice are both around the 0.8 coefficient, tactical strike is at the 1.0 position so theres not a huge difference between them to begin with, throw in weapon damage ranges and you get to a situation where your looking at chances for the autos to hit more than tactical normally.

Then you add in damage losses from using up initiative with the lead attacks and first strikes traits it doesn’t take much for it to drop much lower.

It is rather silly though, but then so is thieves ridiculously low damage coefficients which I doubt the devs will fix any time soon regardless of what they say.