Guild Wars 2

Hi all,

Here’s a post I made on gw2 guru that I felt could help some people. I’m happy to be corrected on any of it, but for now I hope at least a few people get some help from it.

Damage formula (best guess so far, appears accurate enough….)
(P + M * 35) * WS * SC / (T + D) = Total Damage
P = Power, M = Might Stacks, WS = Weapon Strength, SC = Skill Coefficient, T = Toughness, D = defense

We don’t need to know weapon strengths or skill coefficients in order to do comparative tests.
Let’s take base toughness+armor of a warrior; 2127 and assume the output of the damage formula was 2,127,000 to make the math easy. You will take 1,000 damage from this hit after mitigation. (2127000/2127).

It is clear that adding 100 toughness to the base results in the formula changing to 2127000/2227, or roughly 955.
It is then clear that adding 200 toughness to the base results in the formula changing to 2,127,000/2,327, or roughly 914.
It is then clear that adding 300 toughness to the base results in the formula changing to 2,127,000/2,427, or roughly 876.

We can see adding 100 toughness reduced our damage taken by 45, a further 100 reduced it by another 41, and the final 100 reduced it by a further 38.
This is the diminishing returns some people think they are seeing.

However, turn that into EHP terms… (Effective Health Points)
If you had 1000hp and base toughness, you would die in 1 hit.
If you had 1,000hp and +100 toughness, you would require 1.047 hits (1000/955).
If you had 1,000hp and +200 toughness, you would require 1.094 hits (1000/914).
If you had 1,000hp and +300 toughness, you would require 1.141 hits (1000/876).

And you can now see that toughness scales the same way for survivability as power does for damage: linearly.

The major difference between mitigation and damage is that you can double your base power (resulting in double damage) by simply adding 916. The same does not apply for defense because it is made up of 916 toughness (which you can double) and a further ~1000 or so from your profession’s armor class.

Taking the original formula you can see why this is the case…
(P + M * 35) * WS * SC / (T + D) = Total Damage.
Because the bracket on the left (which refers to power plus might stacks) is multiplied by the weapon strength and then by the coefficient.
Call it 2 * 3 * 5 for example.. we know this results in 30. Double ANY part of this… the power, weapon strength or the skill coefficient and you result in double your damage. Eg 4 * 3 * 5 = 60. 2 * 6 * 5 = 60. 2 * 3 * 10 = 60. This means that going from 916 power to 1832 power doubles your damage, adding a further 916 up to 2748 results in 300% of your base damage, or 50% more than you had at 1832 power.
This simpler logic does not work for the mitigation side of things because it is an addition of toughness and defense. rather than a multiplication.

As a contrast to that first 916 power doubling your base damage, you would need +50% crit damage and 100% crit chance to match that return (roughly 2500 points worth of stats!). As a contrast to that second load of 916 power giving you an extra 50% on top of your doubled damage (3x base), you would need either +50% crit damage and 50% crit chance (roughly 1500 points worth of stats) or 100% crit chance at 50% damage (roughly 2000 points worth of stats) or somewhere in-between those two extremes to match the return to dps granted by power. TLDR : Power is my favourite damage stat in terms of bang for buck. To maximise my character I go all out power, toughness and vitality.

Hope this helps at least one person, like I said I’m more than happy to be corrected if any of it is wrong.

Enjoyable read, thanks. I attempted to do something like this for Tera to figure out precise multipliers for differences in character level, but there was too much missing information. I enjoy seeing the straight-forward calculations though, and I’ll most likely start using this equation when working through things in the future.

Cheers.

This really helped me out. It sounds like a great way to be all around effective. I’m going to try it. I’ll post again after I redo my stats.

How did you stumble upon this forumla?

Weapon strength seems to be added to power to get “Attack”?

I go straight up Power/Toughness. Toughness helps for direct damage, Vitality’s only advantage over toughness is when you conditions applied on you, but that’s why I use ‘shake it off’ and the shout that removes conditions. You also always have someone like a gaurdian with you taking off conditions too.

@Cres: Yes that is how “Attack” is determined, but that number is never used as far as anyone has shown. I have no idea why it exists.

If you want to see evidence for this, go to HoM and get a PvP Steady weapon and a normal PvP weapon of the same type. Take off your armor and amulet and reset your traits, which puts you at 916 power.

Steady weapons do ~125 damage (attack ~1000) depending on the type, and normal ones do something around 1000 on average (attack ~ 2000).

If damage were proportional to attack, you’d expect switching from steady to normal to double your tooltip damage. It actually will go up by a factor closer to 10, roughly the same factor by which (average) weapon damage increased. This means that skill damage is not proportional to attack, and also suggests that it is proportional to weapon damage.

You can also watch what happens when you equip/unequip gear with power stats or invest in power traits to see that skill damage also appears to be proportional to power.

I’ve seen data (including my own) that supports this over a good range of stats and skills.

errr too long did not read but basically, are you trying to share with us, that the “best” stats combination is:
main: power
minor: toughness, vitality
????

thus, so is this the reason why anet made armor pieces with these stats expensive and not craft-able?
i.e.
- 42k karma per piece in front of arah dungoen.
- almost 400 badges of honor per armor piece / weapon in WvW for level 80 exotics.

Stacking power is nice, however if you get a weakness condition your damage would decrease substantially.
assuming weakness works like this:
(P + M * 35) * WS * SC / (T + D) * 0.5 <— the 0.5 is from the weakness as your damage reduces by 50% if its not a critical hit.

Great work Fadeaway

One thing I will note though is that there will be a break point somewhere that makes crit chance and crit damage more valuable than power. I’m guessing it’s somewhere around 2500 power. This is because your crit damage is a percentage of your base damage so it’s scaling with the damage you’re doing meaning 10 crit damage is less valuable at 916 power than at 2500 power.

Another thing to note and this is hard to quantify but there are many effects that work off of crits like bleeds for example that aren’t factored into the equation which would increase the value of crit chance as well. I don’t think it’s going to have a huge impact but it’s worth nothing.

Finally there are skills and effects that increase crit chance inherently without the need for raw stats from precision. For example “unsuspecting foe” grants a 50% crit chance to stunned opponents, and blademaster. These types of effects would increase the value of stats like crit damage significantly during the duration of the effect (good for burst builds).

The best way to do it would be to list out all of the different armor types available and in what stat combinations etc. Then I think it would be fairly easy to pick an optimal combination of stats. Without actually doing that though I think somewhere around 2500+ power, crit chance and crit damage becomes more valuable.

Asura is correct, weakness hurts non crit builds.
50% of non crits deal 50% damage while weakened. If your crit rate is 24% (Let’s say you have fury up) then 76%/2 = 38% of your hits will do half damage, aka 19% damage decrease overall.

Agree there will be a breakpoint somewhere, but I think it’ll be tough to reach. It’s alright saying power is great, but you can only get so much of it. pwr/pwr/+pwr gear doesn’t exist. To push past that barrier of dps you need crit gear, but it comes down to the age old question – do you want to sacrifice survivability for it?

Napkin math.. If you have 1800 power, 50% crit, and 150% crit damage… let’s say you do 100 base damage (200 after doubling your power) which goes up to 250 when you factor crits. 30% crit damage brings that to 280. An extra 300 power instead of the 30% crit damage would add ~33% of your base damage, bringing it to 283. Then keep in mind that crit is not valued the same on gear. Eg berzerker coat gives 72 precision but only 5% crit damage. I view that as 22 stat points going missing in addition to the poor scaling. If I was going to take crit damage the most efficient way is through the traits.

Anyway I’m jetting off to another country for a week so I won’t be around to make any posts (: ciao! Thanks for all the feedback.

I’m actually hoping ANet release a bit more info around the maths of the game (:

I stood at that post for like 10mins trying to figure out whatever I read. Took me a while to understand.. Then I remembered that monsters of higher level than you hits harder and someone had posted kitten of a mob hitting him for a huge number(above 1m I think), I understood afterward.

Nice post fade.

@ Fadeaway, Question: did you add the skill damage? such as Arcing Slice have 480 base damage? or 100B have Damage (8x): 1,624?

Besides, literally speaking game designers are trying to keep the balance of game, so they will would not give advantage to one stat another. I think you will have same overall result with Power vs Crit.

@Warsoul: You won’t have the same result from power versus crit, because crit can proc on hit effects. Power needs to be stronger by a lot to be in balance with crit.

Curious, has anyone disproved any of this yet or is it generally accepted?

fadeaway.2807:

Hi all,

Have you confirmed that the full 916 base power is used as power?

For example, other base stats do not directly translate as expected into secondary stats: e.g. 916 base Precision does not give you the same crit% as 916 Precision of gear/stats.

I suppose this wouldn’t be too complicated to test — equip and unequip a big power amulet and see if it really does double your damage (or close to it). I suppose I should go do this …