Yes I was trying for ballance as well. How much condition damage would you say? I can not get above 100 without giving up too much power/precision. Is that any help at all or would that be better served moving to all power?
Okay, this could be a while. I’m going to start talking about stats.
I have 1,098 condition damage. My sources of this, exclusively, are my carrion amulet and my 30 points in wilderness survival. This is enough condition damage to make bleeds do 92 per tick, burning 603, and poison 194. If I was going absolutely full-out condition damage I could get another 371 from runes of the undead and carrion or rabid jewel, but I don’t.
Carrion amulet gives me a decent chunk of power—and, after looking at the math, power is definitely the most important stat for scaling physical damage. The way I’ve come to see it is that power is your -core- physical boosting stat; precision and crit damage are bonuses (though it’s worth noting sometimes useful effects are attached to scoring critical strikes, which enhances their value). For instance, with ranger base stats in the mists (totally naked, no bonuses from traits or gear), a basic sword slash (the first in the 1 chain) will be listed in the tooltip as doing 202 damage, and have a 4% chance to crit for an extra 50% damage. You can calculate the average damage the crit factor will add with this formula:
((1.5 * (1 + [Crit damage/100]) – 1) * [Crit chance / 100)
I think you’ll find that with a crit chance of 4% and crit damage of 0 (crits add 50% damage), overall you’ll receive an extra 2% damage from critical strikes, making the base sword slash’s effective average damage 202 * 1.02 or ~206.
If you increase the power by 569 but don’t increase precision or crit damage, your basic slash will do 327 damage and still receive another 2% on average from crits, making its average damage ~333.5, a ~62% increase in damage. If you increased the precision by 569 but nothing else, your sword would do base 202 again but you’d now be receiving an extra 15.5% damage from criticals instead of 2%—but this would bring your average sword attack up to only 233, a 13% increase. From base stats, adding 569 power increases your physical damage by 62%; adding 569 precision increases it by 13%. See what I mean?
This isn’t to say the critical damage bonus can’t get quite good. For instance, with double berserker amulet, runes of the ranger, and 30 points in skirmishing (+1109 precision, +50 crit damage), you’ll have 57 crit chance and 58 crit damage. This will have each critical strike do 237% of normal damage and increase your damage on average by 78%, which is a sizeable chunk—but compared to that 1109 precision and 50 crit damage, 78% isn’t as good as a mere +923 power that still increases your base damage by a solid 100%!
So crit damage is very useful, but it’s not for being a core damage stat. It’s for pushing the envelope on just how much damage you’re doing once you have a solid power core. This is why I recommend a power amulet over a precision amulet. In the build I described above, basically my current build with berserker amulet, the average sword slash would do about 756 incl. +5% damage from ranger runes. In the build I’m currently using, with carrion/berserker, my average slash does about 500. So full berserker would have me doing about 50% more physical damage, but my carrion setup has me doing 59% more bleeding, 70% more poisoning, and 50% more burning. It all balances quite nicely, doesn’t it?
THANK YOU!