Guild Wars 2

Equip one, look at your skill bar tooltips, see what the damage is. Equip the other, look at your skill bar tooltips, see what the damage is. Compare. Whichever is higher is the better weapon, unless you want healing power for some reason. (Spoilers: You don’t!)

If you want the long version:

An attack’s damage is determined by the following.

Damage = (Weapon damage) * (Power) * (Skill-specific coefficient) / (Target’s Armor)

Your skill tooltips uses 2600 as the default value for the target’s armor when you’re level 80. In order to successfully calculate the damage you’ll do with a particular ability, you need to know the coefficient of that ability. This is a multiplier which determines how powerful that skill is compared to other skills. When you see skills on your skill bar that do more damage than others, they have a higher coefficient.

You can figure out the coefficient by simple algebra. If you’re using a level 80 one handed weapon which has an average damage of 952.5 (which is the average for 80 exotic 1 handers) and your tooltip says that your ability does 1000 damage, and your current Power as listed in your hero sheet is 1800, then you can figure out your coefficient by the following:

1000 = (952.5) * (1800) * (Skill-specific coefficient) / (2600)
- multiply both sides by 2600, multiply 952.5 and 1800

2600000 = (1714500) * (Skill-specific coefficient)
- divide both sides by 1714500

1.516 = Skill-specific coefficient

So we say that 1.5 is your coefficient for that particular ability, or nearly. Knowing this, you can now back-calculate to say which of those weapons is most powerful. So you would say:

For Avenger: Damage = ((174+192)/2) * (Your power (remember you’re adding some with this weapon)) * (1.5) / Armor (plug in whatever value you want for this to see your damage against it)

For Zweihander: Damage = ((186+206)/2) * (Your power) * (1.5) / Armor

Whichever’s higher wins. You can use this technique for theorycrafting later on when you’re 80. But yeah, for now all that matters is looking at the tooltip damage.

Half Tooth.1867:

My response to that is a little off topic but it basically comes down to: Every class can do everything all the time but none can do anything well. This makes it feel that while every class has a different playstyle, none of them are individual. I feel, each class needs a set of strengths and weaknesses that allows it to have its time to shine.

Please consider that in a game environment, this inevitably leads to players being discriminated against because of their choice of class.
Feeling great about your class choice because it can do something special also means everyone else feels like they got shafted.

If you want an example of what this can lead to, look up the discussions about class choice for Sunwell progression raiding in WoW’s Burning Crusade expansion. During that time, this design problem was brought to it’s ugly, but logical conclusion, rendering some classes completely useless. I’m not as familiar with GW1s history, but I’d wager there are similar examples.

If you design a class so it can do one thing better than any other, players WILL find a way to exploit that, and will discriminate agains other classes that can’t provide it.

If you look for that reward of being recognized for doing something really good, you’ll have to learn how to earn it by playing that good, with out relying on a built-in advantage.

Harder to give tip when you haven’t given your weapon preferance but this should help anyway. Prolly just a case of not understanding how gw2 combat works.

Surv:
- Dodge as regularily, avoid situations where you dodge 2 times in a row. Keep urself in that 50-99% endurance untill you learn some better timing and feel for the games combat timing.
- Keep eye on your gear and have atleast half of your gear with defencive stats (tough or vitality). Or even all.
- Learn the gw2 kite and avoiding, simply you avoid alot of dmg by constantly going around them or running through the mobs. → kite to staff fields/backpedal while channeling your dagger cones. And just run through mobs when the melee animation about to start, or dodge.
- great core for any build is 20water(V), 20 arcane (V VIII/VI(daggers)). You can work towards those. And experiment further yourself, untill you crawl yourself back to forums @80 and ask for the fotm spec.
- Get utility skill Mist Form asap and use it wisely.

Damage:
- Attunument rotation: change attunuments often because elementalists damage comes from skills 2-5, not 1s. So staff, E2→ W2→ F2 F3 F1… and so on are part of the basic skill rotation into which you mix in crowd control n buffs.
With daggers F3 F4 F2 F5 → E2 → W2 → A1 … and so on are part of the basic skill rotation into which you mix in crowd control n buffs.
Your rotation should feel like it’s in constant motion to the next step in cycle, but always make sure you actually want and gain advantage by changing the attunument.

I follow this list top-down every time I play, so far it hasn’t failed me.

Renown Hearts:
Use these like a connect-the-dots system for map completion. Head to your nearest one, and bounce to the next when you’re done. Biofringe explained all the rest about them.

Dynamic Events:
When you see an orange circle on your map, or an orange info box pops up on the top right of your screen, that’s a dynamic event. These are the bread and butter of your gw2 experience. Think of them like quests that aren’t always available. Joining in on a dynamic event will reward you with a big burst of exp, so it’s always in your interest to get in on the action, even if the event is a little out of your way.

If an npc runs up to you and shouts, “Hey, we need your help!” Speak with them and they’ll point you in the direction of a nearby Dynamic Event.

Daily Achievement:
If you open your achievements page, you’ll notice the top achievement set is your Daily achievement. Treat this like daily task to complete. You’ll have four objectives: # of kills, variety of kills, events completed, and resources mined. Each daily cheev you complete will reward some bonus exp, and completing all the dailies rewards you with both experience and a chest with some goodies.

This will give you a little more incentive to stray from the path to find events, farm nodes, and explore uncharted areas. Speaking of farming resource nodes, always keep resource gathering tools handy, as you’ll get a couple percent of your total level bar every time you farm a node.

Map Completion:
Finally, try to fully explore and complete the objectives on every map. That means, visit all the points of interests, see the vistas, get the skill challenges, and complete the renown hearts. You’ll get a big experience boost, as well as a chest of goodies, every time you complete a map.

Let’s say the drop tables have a 1% chance to get a green item. With 71% MF, you’d have a 1.71% chance. If the drop table chance to get a green item is really .5%, then your chance would be .855%. Different rare things have different tables, and we don’t know the various drop rates. We can infer two things through empirical evidence: (1) blues have a better drop rate than greens, greens than yellows, yellow than orange; and (2) over time, with a random distribution, someone with 71% MF all the time will get better drops than someone with none because there is a bigger range of numbers that will produce the rarer results. This may not manifest in any given finite time frame, however, because it’s random.

Point #1 = Stats don’t matter because of transmuting.

Point #2 = It’s mainly about the skin and accomplishment with legendary weapons.

So, if you want the skin then do it, if you don’t then don’t do it. Couldn’t be simpler, no debate required.

I don’t see any white boxes.

Some of you REALLY need to stop and think from their point of view.

ALL they are trying to do is to cater to EVERYONE’s needs, and quite frankly the uproar of the community is appalling. People need to stop caring about what they want and start caring about the game on a whole. I don’t know what the hell happened to this community but it seems all the children/elitists from other games have flocked to GW2 and made it their home.

Newsflash: There are plenty of us who appreciate not having the drama. Nobody cares that you only care for <insert game aspect here> because there is the whole game to be played. Stop pigeon-holing people.

Please explain to me why the answers given are not sufficient enough? They are perfectly sufficient. I’m tired of reading posts where people ‘guess’ or ‘assume’ or interpret things in ways completely different from what’s intended. Can you really blame Chris for being cautious in the way things are worded? This is not a conspiracy, this is not PR stunts, this is a real session.

Give the guy some slack, gosh.

Also: You people need to learn to read.