Guild Wars 2

I think it’s time to step back and consider what some of you are saying… Because it’s completely illogical and just helps spread misinformation.

(Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

This is the equation for base damage. You can add protection, vulnerability, damage modifiers, etc, into it too, but those are also all multiplicative, meaning if you double for instance power, the total damage is also doubled. Add a 10 % modifier, and the damage goes up 10 %, add protection and damage is reduced by 33 % – pretty straight forward.

Now taking from wiki, we get these damage coefficient for some of the dagger skills:

Backstab: 2.4
Shadowshot: 1.25
Full auto chain: 0.56 + 0.85 + 0.85 = 2.26

So as we can see, backstab will always deal almost twice the damage of shadowshot (provided it hits from behind of course), and the damage is still around 6 % higher than the damage dealt by the full auto chain. You can make claims that backstabs hits too little, but if it hits like a wet noodle, you can be sure the rest of your skills will do the same. Adding protection and high toughness doesn’t magically alter the skill coefficients.