I did more testing and I’m back to share my conclusions; I consider them to be pretty much final this time.
- First of all, there is indeed a hidden (or at least not very visible) tick at 96%, as Vadren said. It seems that this might be because the bar you see isn’t the full 100% (more like 97% or something). As such you only notice this tick if it is made bigger by additional damage.
- Secondly, I repeated the experiment above with condition damage (Corrupt Boon and Blood is Power) instead of the bonfire. As before, I adjusted my condition damage untill I found a breakpoint in DS duration. In this way, I could relate the damage around the breakpoint to a multiple of 4% and deduce from this the eHP with a very small error. My results were very similar for bleeding and poison damage and showed that there is an extra (DS specific) modifier involved that is significantly higher than for direct damage (and that is the same for both (self) bleeding and poison).
- Applying this knowledge to my earlier results as well, I found that my eHP in Death Shroud was (pretty much exactly) 20% higher than my normal HP in all three cases (bonfire, bleeding and poison damage) as long as I doubled any condition damage taken (as suggested before by Vadren). For me, because these are finally nice round numbers, the puzzle falls in place with this.
- Allthough I had some very minor deviations from this ‘ideal’ result for smaller damages, that can imo only be explained by internal rounding, I found no evidence that this rounding would be as large as previously suggested (1%).
All that would be left now is to test this for different vitalities (this was all at base health), but because of how LF% scales with vitality, I would be very much surprised if this wasn’t a linear relation. And obviously, somebody should probably check if they can replicate this.
Yeah, Idk if this has been posted in this section before but I read a thread about the amount of hp you get from DS and did some testing. As I could not find the original thread again I made my own to share some info. I think we have a bug with a soul reaping trait line (or I should say another). It seems that by placing points in the line we only get half of the benifits… being the 30% increase to critical damage. The extra 30% to lifeforce bar seems non existant.
here is a link to my original thread:
If anyone can confirm my findings please follow up here or in that thread, I will be checking it later on again here and there. But in regards to what seems to be an apparent bug, I think someone should get on this right away as I dont seem to be aware of any other classes that suffer from only half benefits by putting points in a trait line. It is bad enough Gluttony does nothing, but if in fact we also do not get a bigger bar by using that trait line then what is the point of it dedicating a line for our main class mechanic. I may have a little over reaction to the severity regarding this, but im sure everyone knows what i am trying to imply here.
If you devs are out there reading this, a post would be nice but I recognize that you probably have your hands full either way. I just feel that this is a pretty important bug to fix, regardless of what class I play.
This needs to be added to the bug list asap, imo. Several people (myself included) have confirmed this both here and here. At least in my book, having our profession specific attribute doing squat is way up there as one of our most pressing issues. I can’t believe this guy is just getting ignored here…
TL;DR Life Force Pool (aka Hunger) isn’t doing anything: add it, cause that’s bad!
@ arvid you are using 24 sec as base DS. I think it is actually 25 and if you use that with your numbers you get 14,5k which is more in line.
As I said a bit earlier in the topic, the first tick takes you from 100% to 92% for some reason. It could be a hidden tick as Vadren proposes, or maybe this first tick actually takes two seconds (if you count the transition into DS as well, you might get to this), or it could be another bug (I tried it a few times and if you start at 92% for instance, your first tick takes you to 88% as you’d expect; in other words the transition suddenly isn’t counted there?).
Be that as it may, what I did in practise does not depend on this: I measured this using video editing software, starting with the first frame after the first tick (because ticks give a very distinct cue) up to the first frame after the next to last tick. This was to avoid any issues with the transition in and out of DS. Doing this, I measured 22 seconds for normal DS degradation. I then added 1 second before and after to account for what I cut off, which made sense to me at the time; this puts me at 24 seconds. Maybe I should have added 3, but as I said, this doesn’t affect the results as I’m looking at time differences (so this constant factor subtracts itself anyway).
I am very curious how others have dealt with this issue though?
No one else did tests while only taking condition damage?
I will try to reproduce this after the weekend, as it pertains to my results as well
- 1 Soul Reaping Point gives 0.21% Life Force health boost.
- 1 Vitality Point gives +11.53 Life Force health.
- 1 Blood Magic Point gives +115.3 Life Force health (0.56% boost)
Adjusted to account for whole time measurements instead of fractions of time.
I don’t really know how to bring this up a second time, without coming across as rude, so my apologies for that already.
I’m still convinced that there is 0% scaling on soul reaping and there reason you’re aren’t arriving at the same results is because you’re not taking your errors into account. To be more precise: what you say is 100% can actually be anything between 100% en 104% ([100%,104%[ to be more precise). Using this, your results become:
- Test 1: 6607 damage = [32%,36%[ -> eHP = ]18353, 20647]
- Test 2: 7051 damage = [32%,36%[ -> eHP = ]19586, 22034]
In my opinion, the size of these intervals does not allow you to make the conclusions you did. Specifically, there is some overlap between these intervals, I believe that the real eHP is the same in both cases and is situated somewhere in this overlap zone.
The difference between your value and mine is likely either because the condition part of my damage should be calculated differently (as stated, I’ll try to check this after the weekend) or there is some error in your number of ticks (see above).
Edit: the brackets for the eHP intervals were pointing in the wrong direction.
(edited by Arvid.3829)
I managed to narrow it down quiet a bit: I basically did the experiment I described above with the bonfire (I know some of the damage is %based, it doesn’t matter as the damage is printed on your screen anyway) at base health (18372). I recorded all my test and used video editing software to determine my time in DS as accurately as possible. Using appropriate runes and amulet, it was then possible to carefully adjust the damage I received by putting points in curses (since part of the damage you receive from the fire scales with your own condition damage):
- My time in DS went from 21 to 20 sec by going from 19 to 20 curses, at this point I was receiving resp. 2863 and 2866 damage. As such, 4×4% LF (at base health) must be somewhere inbetween these values. Using the average, that gives us 17903 as effective health for 100% LF.
- With the Vital Persistence trait, I got exactly the same results.
- I bet you can guess by now what the effect of 30 soul reaping was…
If anyone has any more questions on what I did/ how I did it, please feel free to inquire (I’m to tired at this point to go into too much detail).
Edit: changed 4% to 4×4%
(edited by Arvid.3829)
I am doing some more testing but I wanted to share some intermediate finding that had been messing with my results for a few hours: there is apparently no 96% tick? Starting from 100% life force, I can leave DS very quickly and stay at 100% or I can wait 1 tick and I’ll be at 92%. The same is not true if you start from 92% for instance.
That also means max DS is 24 seconds instead of 25…
Test Number 1: 0% Life Force Boost, 916 Vitality
In Death Shroud for 17.1 seconds (68.4% LF)
Took 6,607 Damage (31.6% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 20,908Test Number 2: 30% Life Force Boost, 916 Vitality
In Death Shroud for 17.24 seconds (68.96% LF)
Took 7,051 Damage (31.04% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 22,715
I’d like to propose an alternative calculation here (because I believe DS only ticks on whole seconds):
- Test 1: 17.1 seconds -> 17 ticks = 68%; 6607 damage = 32%
- Test 2: 17.24 seconds -> 17 ticks = 68%; 7051 damage = 32%
Now I don’t fully know the details of what you did, but let’s assume you ‘ticked’ out of DS in both cases and assume for the moment that 100% LF = 100% health: 4% of 18372 is 734.88. So if in test 2 you took only 444 damage more (due to randomness of hits/crits) prior to that last tick, then there is actually no difference between test 1 and 2 and soul reaping has 0% effect.
I have 2 final remarks on this: even if LF is internally not rounded to whole percentages (as proposed above), the fact that the value that we see is rounded induces a rather large error that we must be weary off. On top of that, 734.88 dps by just being in DS is huge compared to the damages sources all of our test have used up to now. So a lot of the finer details will probably be obscured by this (allthough having seen a 30% increase from soul reaping anywhere isn’t exactly a fine detail that is easily obscured…).
You could actually make an interesting expansion upon this experiment though: first of all you need to make sure you tick out of DS and aren’t damaged out of it. Then we know that if you take no damage you can stay in DS for 25 sec. Now if you can take a small amount of extra damage (500-1000 range) during this time, you can test whether the damage was higher than 1 tick (24 sec DS) or not. This way you can try to narrow down what 1 tick or 4% is.
Edit: I changed my proposal for an experiment as it was needlessly complicated.
Edit2: 31% should have been 32%
(edited by Arvid.3829)
Ok, I tried a somewhat different aproach: I bought all the pvp amulets that have different amounts of vitality on them, removed all points from blood magic, equipped the amulet with 0 vitality and made sure my LF was at 100%. By then equiping amulets with higher vitality, I could record my LF% in function of my health. I then further altered my vitality by adding 10, 20 and 30 point in blood magic and recording LF% for all amulets again. This gave me 20 points ranging from 18972 (100%) to 31202
(61%) health. I then tried to add 30 points in soul reaping to see if there was any effect (there wasn’t).
I could perfectly reproduce all my measurments by just dividing health by initial health (e.g. 31202/18972=61%). So I have to conclude that total LF at least scales liniarly with health. I saw no influence of soul reaping though, while I would normally expect to see one (e.g. 61/100 → 61/130 → renormalized to 100% = 57/100). It is still possible though that your current % is also adjusted by 30% (instead of only your maximum) wich would cancel eachother out, but seeing as it doesn’t work like that when changing your total health, I have my doubts about this.
As to your last findings XXVI Red, that is indeed puzzling. Just something I want to check: how sure are you that DS didn’t actually thick 11 times? Because 1200/24812 is only 4.8%, say that gets rounded down to 4% for some reason (either truly rounded down or mitigated by some DS related modifier), you end up with exactly 1 tick to much damage.
@Eileithia and @chuiu
Looking at the values XXVI Red posted for scaled vs constant damage from the fire thingies (2976 vs 342 and 2204 vs 342) I would understand if people say that the constant damage is too small compared to the scaled damage, and as such it is rather hard to discern it’s effect (although you’re right that it should in principle be possible, chuiu).
Looking at the scaled part though, there are 2 possibilities: the max health that it is scaled upon is always your ‘normal’ max health, or it is your ‘current’ max health (in other words max lifeforce if you’re in DS). In the first case you should see a difference in percentage lost with and without soul reaping, in the second case you don’t. For the latter though, there should be a 30% increase in that damage instead… So it is always possible to check if soul reaping has any effect.
PS. I tested it out and there is no 30% increase either. Also, since the damage I take in and out of DS are the same (but health is not, see XXVI Red’s calculations), it must be the former case.
(edited by Arvid.3829)
I remember I once tried to figure out how much health I had in Death Shroud by jumping off the ruined piece of wall in the Mists (behind the golems) and trying to relate the percentage loss to the falling damage taken. (I did this because someone claimed that 100% life force is basically the same amount of health as 100% normal health, I that was totally not how I felt it was in practise at the time.)
From the very rough results I obtained and although I don’t remember all of the details, I see some analogies with what you posted. First of all 100% life force actually seemed to be more than 100% health (even with no points in soul reaping, something you arrive at as well). But there was also a major inconsistency (and I think it’s exactly what you’re describing here) in my data, that made me end up stopping my experiments and shrugging it off on falling damage being % based in some weird way. I might have to re-evaluate that conclusion now…
(edited by Arvid.3829)
Gem store Arvid.
The Mad King’s Outfit and Witch’s Outfit (page 2-3) sure, but the exotics (page 1) as well? Can’t access the game at this moment.
http://www.gw2db.com/items?filter-item-date-added=10/23/2012
A lot of new armor mentioned here, no clue how to get it though
Defiant Stacks on NPCs also protect against it.
I noticed this only a few days ago and have successfully applied it to multiple bosses since then: defiant does not protect against fear and fear also doesn’t remove stacks of defiant. This actually completely changed my look on fear…
For what it matters, this was in low level areas (1-35) in group events with 3 people or less and with the Master of Terror trait. There might be some other (unmentioned) effect that protects against fear though as, as far as I remember, I was unable to fear Ralena or Vassar (the lovers) in AC, although they don’t even have Defiant or Unshakable.
I just skimmed trough the topic, so maybe this was mentioned before:
After a recent update (the October 18th one, I’m guessing), I noticed that the damage (1/2 of the healing amount, rounded down) from vampiric attacks (the 15pts blood trait in my case) now appeared above my target in white numbers. It’s possible that this was there before, but at least I never noticed it…
Now since this weekend (and afaik there hasn’t been any update since then so I’m a bit puzzled as to what could have caused this), these same numbers are now green instead of white. Long story short, it’s possible that this is just a colouring issue and we’re not actually healing our targets…
Edit: I just watched the video… There goes my theory. :P
(edited by Arvid.3829)
Axe > Dagger > Staff > Scepter for Life Force generation
dagger > staff > axe > scepter – in my opinion
I agree
Dagger > Staff > Axe for power damage
Que? Per your own thread (and I’m assuming you’re talking single target here, as you have a separate line for aoe), shouldn’t it be Dagger > Axe > Staff?
Also, and I’ve said this in your thread as well, if we’re looking at “damage in a power build” (as opposed to “power damage”) it’s actually Dagger > Scepter > Axe > Staff.
Frostfang seems cool (haven’t seen the animations yet though)… Too bad axe is no longer generally all that useful (filling more of a niche role).
I did some rough testing earlier comparing different weapons in a power build and found that the scepter outdamages the axe pretty significantly (even with 0 condition damage).
As I felt your numbers should probably also reflect this, I took the liberty of calculating the scepter’s ‘DPS’ for the 1839/0 case and found it to be 562.8. What’s interesting to me here is that the loss in DPS by going full power instead of full condition is actually a lot smaller than one would expect from what is generally considered our condition weapon.
PS. I also calculated the DPS for the 916/923 case, to see if we used the same formula, but I arrived at a slightly different result: ((118+445)*2+168+352)/2.5=658.4
So I think making the trait “Confuse in an area when you enter death shroud.” would solve a lot. In this respect, it basically boils down to an area confusion (similar to the area weakness combo) upon entering death shroud. This would just make the trait a lot more viable as it is obviously a lot less rare for enemies to do something than it is to hit you specifically and it doesn’t discourage good play (avoiding damage). Furthermore, interfering with an opponents ‘tactics’ without necessarily having to kill yourself over it just brings back a lot of the magic and flavour that was SS into the trait…
From my limited knowledge about general condition durations and in comparison to Weakening Shroud (another adept tier trait), I would tentatively suggest to make it 2-3 stack of 5s confusion, although the developers will obviously have more resources to judge this.
As stated many times, the necro is a condition class. (Although a lot of people seem to mean ‘condition damage’ when they say this, I specifically also want to include non-damaging conditions here, as power builds also rely on conditions in general; making conditions truly a defining aspect of our class.) So, in addition to the arguments above, when having the choice between two similar concepts, one a boon the another a condition, the necro will naturally have more synergy with the condition version (think Feast of corruption and Target the Weak for example). Also, it was recently argumented that the necro could really use limited access to confusion or burning.
Finally, I would like to point out that this (in my opinion) fits into the line of some changes that were recently made to skills like Blood is Power and Spectral Walk, in the sense that the developers are apparently not afraid to truly change some aspects of a skill/trait, instead of just messing with the numbers a bit.
Ok, that turned into a wall of text… Anyway, I would greatly appreciate any (constructive) comments on this suggestion, or any suggestions to make this more appealing to read.
First of all, I know there might be more pressing issues with the necro at the moment. Though seeing as pretty random suggestions apparently get read and implemented (or was that coincidence?), I felt this might be the right time to bring this up.
So, as all GW1 players will know, Spiteful Spirit (SS) was a cornerstone skill for the GW1 necromancer. For years, you pretty much played your necro as an MM or an SS and that was it. Having played and loved both, and seeing how iconic skills Hundred Blades can make such a comeback, it saddens me deeply to see how ‘my skill’ has been degraded to this. As such, I feel the need to step up and suggest a change to this trait that can give it it’s ‘former feel’ back.
I do realize SS is a trait now, not an elite skill, and as such it’s potency should reflect this. But I really do believe that, within this boundary, a rather small change can be made that will bring some of that ‘SS magic’ back. I will split up my case in 4 parts: the current state of SS (as I see it), a look back to what SS used to do in GW1 and how this translates in GW2, a specific proposal for a new version of the trait and finally how this new version could fit into the bigger necro picture.
SS is an adept tier major trait in the Spite line that currently gives you 3 seconds of retaliation. While I do believe retaliation to be an interesting mechanic that fits the necromancer flavour, it relies heavily on being on you for a long duration. The way I see it, in a fight (especially if you wield a MH dagger) you are going to get hit and if you can turn this into another source of damage, that’s a very viable and necrolike thing to do. This is only possible though if you have a reliable way to regularly apply this buff for a significant (10s+) amount of time. The necro has a few options to do this in axe 3 (3s per target hit) and in comboing with your well of blood’s light field (18s in an area if you putrid mark and putrid explosion 2 bone minions). Given this, I don’t even see a place for a 3s extra retaliation in a build that focuses on retaliation, let alone in another build. This is especially bad because a short duration retaliation forces you into a sour choice between playing ‘good’ and avoiding damage, or putting the trait you chose to use and just soak it up (returning like 2 auto-attacks worth of damage in the proces… wooptiedoo!). Suffice it to say, this trait doesn’t exactly leave you with a ‘fun’ feeling and, except maybe the most niche of niche situations, taking Reaper’s Might will always be a better option.
SS’s skill description reads:
“Elite Hex Spell. For 8…18…20 seconds, whenever target foe attacks or uses a skill, Spiteful Spirit deals 5…29…35 shadow damage to that foe and all adjacent allies of that foe.”
So in GW2 there are no hexes and ‘damaging adjacent allies’ seems rather not straightforward to implement (especially if it’s ‘only’ for an adept tier trait). That aside though, this description doesn’t exactly scream retaliation to me, on the other hand it does scream confusion… So when the problem with the trait boils down to factors related to the retaliation boon and the retaliation boon doesn’t fit the flavour of the skill, the solution seems pretty straightforward to me…
This might be what he means with mortal; it’s just combination of soldier’s and rabid pieces imo.
Ghastly claws is not 8×4%. The skill description seems to mean that you get a flat 4%, but you actually get 8%.
I did this dungeon yesterday and that golem is just an exceptionally tough opponent (and to spoil it for you: that wasn’t the last boss, allthough it was the hardest encounter :P)
Let me get this out of the way first: why are you all suggesting axe and staff? Axe stacks vulnerability and, unless you only use staff’s autoattack, staff dumps more conditions on your target than scepter does… So the only ‘viable’ weapon would be the dagger, which is hardly viable either given you probably run a condition damage build (and completely changing your build for 1 opponent seems kind of off to me).
The good news though is that I don’t really think your conditions are a problem here: we didn’t avoid conditions and I have never noticed hom healing… So if he indeed heals, it’s a rather minor effect and only extends the fight a little. Problem for us though was the crazy amount of damage trough burning this guy does. Imo the trick here is to all stay rather close from him. As far as I could tell, he picks a target and chooses an attack based on your range to him. His ranged attack shoots projectiles to everyone in your group that are hard to dodge (some classes have anti-projectile skills that could help here) and also burn the ground they land on, he also seemed quickly able to repeat this attack. His close ranged attack though looks spectacular (and I wouldn’t stay in it) but is much easier to dodge/avoid and seems to be on a longer cooldown. Also try to fight him away from the asura as that little guy shoots at you if you come to close. You can probably help out your team here with condition removal, of which we have quite a few options.
Trahearne is often missing lines for me (in pretty much all of the missions with him, there are 1 or 2).
I also seem to remember that Doern Velazquez was missing quite a few, mostly when he was first introduced, or at least when first started to talk (I don’t really remember if that was the same mission).
Axe is a fantastic weapon. With a power focused build you can jump into a group of 4-5 mobs and use unholy feast to gain 12-15 seconds of retaliation.
You have no idea how strong this skill is in such situations. The raw damage alone from unholy feast crits for over 1000 damage, and with 15 seconds of retaliation (with power ofc) it becomes a really hard hitting aoe spell.
With only 15 seconds cooldown and a bonus aoe cripple this spell stands in one line with our hard hitting wells. Besides, the combination with focus for the mass vulnerability only makes it more viable.
Granted retaliation can indeed be great, but how do you justify the use of a weapon for 1 skill? Imo, axe either has to compete with staff for aoe and/or support play, or deal solid single target damage. Since staff is such a no-brainer for the first 2 things (and with 2 of axe’s skills being single target), it can’t do the first thing. And since it indeed dealt solid damage in BWE1, but not anymore, it fails at the second thing too.
Or to phrase it differently: axe is somewhat usefull in both single target and multi target encounters, but it excells at neither. Since we don’t have any weapon that is similar in this regard, you can only pick either a solid single target weapon (dagger or scepter) or an aoe weapon (staff), leaving you sub-par in the other field…
@Nismu.4019 I thought the same about life force generation. Then I realised axe has 8% on a skill with an 8 sec cooldown, staff has 3% per target hit on it’s auto-attack… So it ain’t exactly ‘reaping the life force’.
@MoJoe.9063 I felt similar to what you describe at lvl 20, but that slowly changed with leveling up. I mean, during this experiment I had 11 stacks of vulnerabilty on the target for most of the ‘fight’. Turns out 11% extra damage is still lot less damage than an few stacks of bleed, even if you’re not specced for it.
The context Since BWE1 I’ve really liked the feel of the axe, so since lvl 1 I’ve been pretty much only using an axe/warhorn and staff set-up (I’m now lvl 65ish). I’m trying to go more into the direct damage direction, so I’m currently running 20-0-0-10-25 in traits. I’ve only done PVE, so I’d also like to limit this topic to just that.
The problem The higher level I get, the more I find it hard to find a place for the axe. I mainly use it for 1v1 against normal mobs (during which I try to kite as much as possible, but to be honest, I could just as easily facetank most mobs and come out with over 50% hp; so the added value of kiting is questionable…). Against veterans/champions, I tend to switch to my staff because it feels more forgiving in these situations. The only other time I sometimes pull out my axe is in Xv1 in situations where I don’t feel the added support from the staff is necessary and damage boost to the group trough vulnerability is more useful.
The biggest problem here is that 1v1 fights always last significantly longer than 1vX (mainly because I don’t like to blow well of suffering on a single mob, but still…). I can live with the fact that our class is just better at 1vX than at 1v1, but it just feels wrong when 1v1 takes longer than 1vX.
The experiment In light of this, I did a little test on the Heavy Armor dummies in the Mists. I used a 30-0-0-10-30 trait set-up and power/crit (35%, +50%)/thoughness gear (which is what I’m working towards). The only trait that affected damage in this test was the Spite grandmaster trait ‘Close to Death’. For all our main hand weapons, I timed how long it took to destroy a dummy using just the weapon’s auto-attack. These are the rough results:
Dagger 9-10 sec
Scepter 15-16 sec
Axe 17-18 sec
Staff 21-22 sec
Yeah, you read that right, the scepter outdamaged the axe in a power/crit oriented build (yes, I had 0 condition damage)…To be fair, using also the axe’s 2 skill on cooldown (so twice in this experiment) brought it’s time pretty much in line with the scepter, but that’s using 2 skills vs 1 to get the same damage output. I know I could have designed a better experiment by also testing the lower armor dummies (as the bleeds on the scepter favor high armor targets) and omitting the grandmaster trait (to be sure it doesn’t affect the experiment in any way); but I think the odds were stacked pretty high against the scepter here and seeing it outdamage the axe in this situation surprises me (to say the least).
The question I thought I knew the role for each weapon:
Dagger: high risk, high reward direct damage
Staff: support and multi target
Scepter: condition damage
Axe: direct damage at range
I was obviously wrong on that last one, as the scepter proved to do a better job at that. Now I might have missed some way exploit the axe’s conditions (vulnerability, retaliation) to overcome this. So the question becomes: what place do you think the axe can take in our builds? Or how have you made the axe work for you?
Edit: took another look at my data and staff was off by a second
(edited by Arvid.3829)