Showing Posts For Graybones.7406:
Great compendium. I understand your reasoning for not giving people specific builds, but that is what many people want to see. When I was leveling my guardian, I tried lots of builds, but the most efficient one for me to level was the greatsword. When configured properly, it does a ton of AoE damage. So you quickly dispatch small groups. If there was a tough boss, then mace/focus would wear it down providing great active mitigation.
Understanding traits is extremely important. The difference between no Zeal or 30 points in Zeal is about 15% of your direct weapon damage, which is significant.
It is also important to know what traits effect which types of damage.
Power impacts direct damage, but has no impact on condition damage. Direct damage is mitigated by armor class and toughness.
Increased Condition Duration is what it says. What it does not say is that conditions tick periodically and if you do not meet the threshold for the next tick of damage, then that damage is not done, as the game rounds down to the last full tick. For instance, if you apply a 3 second bleed and you have a 30% increase in condition duration, you would actually gain no benefit from the 30% condition duration. 30% increase for 3 seconds is only .9 seconds and since bleeding ticks every second, you would not gain an additional tick. You would need an increase in duration of 34% to gain any additional damage.
Precision increases your chance for critical damage. Critical damage does a base additional 50%, plus whatever your increase in crit damage is. Critical hits can cause conditions to be applied, depending on your configuration. So you can gain additional benefits via conditions.
Increased Condition Damage increases the damage your conditions apply per tick. Condition damage bypasses armor and toughness. Some conditions stack up to 25 stacks of concurrent damage, other conditions stack duration of the conditions.
Toughness does the same thing as armor class. It mitigates direct damage, but not condition damage.
Increase Critical Damage does what it says. Your base increase in critical damage (without modifiers) is 50%. So if you increase your Critical Damage via equipment and traits to 100% on your character sheet, you would be doing 250% damage on crits (100% bonus for traits/equipment and 50% base increase). Conditions do not crit, critical damage only impacts the direct damage portion of your attacks.
Vitality increases your hit points by 10 per point of vitality. That is all. Each class has a different modifier for how many base hitpoints they have. Here is something interesting I found, but I have not validated all the numbers with my characters. The relevant thing here is that the base HP for classes are very different.
The 2 professions with high class Health are warrior and necromancer: 18,327 lvl 80 base hp
The 3 professions with medium class Health are engineer, ranger and mesmer: 15,082 lvl 80 base hp
The 3 professions with low class Health are guardian, thief and elementalist: 10,805 lvl 80 base hp
Increase Healing does what it says. It increases the amount of healing you do with weapons and skills. Each weapon and skill has a different modifier, so it does not work equally well with all.
Increase Boon Duration does what it says. Like condition damage, though, many boons apply benefits per tick and are rounded down to the last complete tick.
Increase Virtue Recharge Rate does what it says. The caveat is that it does not decrease the rate by that. So if you have 10% increase in the recharge rate, it is the recharge rate divided by 110% which is not as beneficial as decreasing by 10%, which would be 90% of the recharge rate.
And I will end on a pet peave of mine regarding the interface and damage numbers. A small white number is a normal hit. A ton of really small numbers streaming on your interface are your condition damage. Bold larger numbers are your crits. When you use a weapon skill that shows a number in parenthesis like Damage (10x):1,860, this means that your weapon will strike 10 times and the total base damage would do 1,860 damage or 186 average damage per hit. The interface will scroll 10 numbers showing you the escalation of the damage. The last number is your total damage from that series of strikes. It is not the damage of your last strike. People seem to think the last number was how much damage their last strike did and they say they hit for 10k damage. LOL!