Guild Wars 2

Holl.3109:

What has this to do with PROFESSION balance? I Find it a good idea mostly but maybe post it in the dungeon forum?

Because there’s already like 40 of these threads in Dungeon forum and we give the same response every time which is basically “deal with it”.

Net Turret used to be really dumb for locking down kiteable bosses. Unfortunately you can’t reach 100% uptime on immob solo with them anymore and I don’t think any other class has substantial access to immob uptime.

spoj.9672:

Bhawb.7408:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

I have no idea where you heard a silly number like 3rd highest, it’s more like 2nd worst. I suppose there could be some room for debate whether they’re worse than rangers but either way it’s either worst or second worst.

I’ve heard it from multiple sources.

Guangmath.

Necro is middle. But necro also has one of the highest amounts of burst within a 10 second time period. As far as i can tell the only thing that beats it is conjure burst. Or if you count less overall damage but a smaller time frame then other classes beat necro by a bit..

Give me a necro build (including utils) to model and I’ll pop it into the spreadsheet and that’ll decide it. I suppose there is a small chance they might be able to beat guardians if specced right which would put them in 3rd which I guess could be considered middle-tier DPS, we’ll see.

Atherakhia.4086:

Prysin.8542:

well, i am only accounting for what the ranger brings on its own. If you are going to do calculations, then you must consider your own maximum potential before looking into what you may or may not get from others. However, yes, i agree that you could also look at base damage without might stacks and it would be a fair comparison too, just not very valid in terms of how it is ingame.
its like saying, i could deal this much damage with my sword, but i left it with a blunt edge, just to be sure i didn’t account for something i may or may not achieve.

But yes, pet DPS is imperfect, if anything, they may need a slight increase, or rather, i think their stats should be revised completely. As certain pets should function otherwise.

Like, why does my spider and devourer who obviously have poison attacks, not have atleast SOME condition damage as base stat? Why does my moa’s have 0 boon duration when boons is what they are good at?
Why does my Canines have 0 condition duration when they specialize in AOE conditions.

However, if i compare ranger DPS and warrior DPS, ranger stays ahead marginally. But if we add in conditions, warrior wins.

Right, you can’t just ignore the fact that the Ranger can provide some might and fury on their own. But the idea is that a group of 5 will bring enough might and fury that they will be stacked the whole fight so factoring them in is trivial. Vuln has the opposite problem. It has a very short duration and tends to stack early and fade off after 20 seconds or so and is never really maxed during the bulk of a fight. Plus it’s a enemy debuff as opposed to a self buff and everyone will have it. As such, it’s better to not include it in calculations either.

This leaves the raw DPS potential of each class that is only impacted by trait based damage multipliers which Guardians, Ele’s, Thieves, and Warriors each cap out higher I believe? So even if you factor in those, the Ranger is kind of at a disadvantage. This leaves really the unadjusted raw value as giving the best picture of the Ranger as most other scenarios leave it at a disadvantage.

So what is the Ranger’s base raw damage considering an optimal sw+gs or GS only build?

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/91678-post-april-2014-patch-dps-calculations/

It’s already all been done. As you can see Ranger sucks.

Prysin.8542:

Atherakhia.4086:

Prysin, be sure to adjust for the correct crit dmg by using the 0 column as base. It will throw off your numbers some. The table already considers base crit.

You may be right. But i realised something else. Pet crits much more often then you’d think. Which can be seen in my video.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Your number seems a bit screwy, I think because of the cast time. When I tested it I was getting an average rate of 1 attack per 1.2 seconds on Feline. Divide your number by 1.2 and you get about 1400 which is closer to what I was getting in own estimates.

Either way both are estimates so I’m not going to quibble over a 20% difference especially when pet DPS is already as low as it is.

But that is in addition to our own DPS. Now i know that sword CAN compete with most of the best DPS professions. Although it is considerably weaker. However i need to see proper DPS rotations for other professions to make a good comparison.

I like how you say it can “compete” then immediately say it’s “considerably weaker”.

I would complain about the obvious lack of banners in that build. If it’s really that important for you to have Endure Pain so you don’t die or whatever at least take Banner of Discipline over Signet of Fury.

Your number seems a bit screwy, I think because of the cast time. When I tested it I was getting an average rate of 1 attack per 1.2 seconds on Feline. Divide your number by 1.2 and you get about 1400 which is closer to what I was getting in own estimates.

Either way both are estimates so I’m not going to quibble over a 20% difference especially when pet DPS is already as low as it is.

Bhawb.7408:

Why bother? Don’t, not worth it.

You can reach the third highest single target damage, IIRC (although I have heard some people question that), but you bring very low support, and the little you do bring others will do better.

I have no idea where you heard a silly number like 3rd highest, it’s more like 2nd worst. I suppose there could be some room for debate whether they’re worse than rangers but either way it’s either worst or second worst.

UrMom.4205:

umm….how did you miss the nerf that mesmers got this round….

“Skritt burglars are no longer affected by Polymorph Moa.”

Un-freakin-believable, mesmers get nerfed literally every single patch…it’s insane..

That is probably a bugfix that in all honestly affects more players than the iLeap fix.

Leeching off your team is objectively the best thing you can be doing in a dungeon format, in terms of effort expended versus reward gained.

Darox.8069:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Darox.8069:

I can’t wait for a Guangmaths post

I don’t really need to maths

That’s exactly the meaning of guangmaths

(Edit: and he stealth-edited his post haha! Courage is not for everybody.)

Huh what? Do you see a “Last Edited” mark under my post? Cause I sure don’t.

I don’t have the spreadsheet on me right now to check directly but I basically just pulled the numbers for the pet based on attacks on 2600 armor golem dummy. Then I extrapolated based on bonus power/precision/ferocity/etc. stats from traits and boons. If I remember correctly a feline pet has a base DPS of around 700 and gets approximately a 100% bonus from having might and fury.

Darox.8069:

I can’t wait for a Guangmaths post

I don’t really need to maths, I did this a while ago.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/91039-updated-dps-rankings-april-2014/

Did they ever fix the thing where potions also increased incoming damage as well as outgoing?

Full Cleric with banner regen and the above, obviously.

You’re also the only person attacking trash so a 50% hit in DPS in a direct doubling of kill time, as opposed to in a dungeon where it’s only a 10% increaste.

Why would you want to REDUCE your damage for open world? That’ll just make things take exponentially longer to kill. If anything the damage reduction is less noticeable in dungeons since you have teammates to leech off of, solo you take that DPS hit 100%.

Rainshine.5493:

Gothos.3970:

Nice guide but after reading this subforum I’m resigning my ranger – didn’t know they’re in such a bad state. Shame.

People also said eles were awful at launch when they were pretty kitten overpowered. (I mained one, I know.) I would take forum wangst with a grain of salt.

(Not suggesting ranger is perfect either, just that things get blown out of proportion.)

@ OP: For someone who only occasionally plays ranger I found your guide a better starting point than Dulfy’s. If I get into it seriously at some point, I’ll check that one out.

That’s because no one ever bothered to do the math and figure out actual DPS numbers, they just went by “warrior stacks lots of buffs and HB looks like a lot of damage so they’re probably the best class”. Then people came along and actually started crunching numbers for it and we’re here now.

At this stage it’s unlikely that people are suddenly going to discover that ranger DPS is amazing, that’s already been discussed widely and it’s pretty widely agreed that it isn’t that great at this point.

I like how you just totally ignored what I just said.

Ele has better sustained AND better burst than a warrior. It’s not like you can’t do a reasonably fast clear using only warriors (people used to do that before they learned better) but if you are aiming for a record time ele is just better.

Also, ele burst is practically useful even if you’re not aiming for fast times because the massive burst means you can kill a lot of trash and bosses before they even use any of their annoying mechanics. That’s how people kill Lupicus so fast, they burst him and instakill him before he even does any of his annoying phase 3 stuff like bubbles or lifesteal.

BlankHearts.8216:

Oh..I just realized I missed this part ‘’This is guide is not meant to be used for leveling, open world, sPvP or WvWvW.’’ I can’t believe I just noticed that >.< I just bought a whole berserker set and 6 ranger runes.

It works just fine in open world. A burstier spec like 30/10/0/0/30 might be better depending on the content but either way the berserker gear and runes aren’t wasted.

It’s considerably more. Somewhere in the range of 20-30% more and skills like Fiery Greatsword can be used to create a massive DPS burst that is capable of one-shotting dungeon bosses. Right now a lot of the dungeon speedrun tactics involve pulling bosses into walls or other obstructions then using Fiery Rush for a 300k+ burst of damage that can sometimes instakill them.

Even if you can’t FGS them, staff ele still deals massive DPS across the board, and a lightning hammer spec gives the group tons of might and fury.

Simmu.9405:

Mix of Soldiers and berserker is good.

If you have to mix anything mix Berserker and Celestial or Knight. Soldier is simply the worst stat for both DPS and survivability since:

1) It has approximately the same base DPS as a Knight or Celestial set, but:
1a) It increases your power only, reducing the marginal benefit of additional power from other sources (might, traits, etc.)
1b) It does not give precision or ferocity, which means you will get less benefit from the Berserker pieces you are currently wearing.

2) It gives both toughness and vitality, which results in a high effective health pool, but:
2a) Although your initial health pool may be high, you will not be able to take as much damage overall before dropping because your armor is lower.
2b) Your heals will be relatively weaker because you are refilling a larger health pool that is easier to deplete. Compare this to knights which gives you a smaller health pool that is harder to deplete or celestial which increases the efficacy of your healing skills.

Both knight and celestial gear are also very cheap to make (although celestial is time-gated) so they’re comparatively easy to mix-and-match with.

Tree.3916:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Again, the problem is that you are comparing the much more consistent axe DPS with peak GS DPS, since EA build is an axe build.

This is where you’re mistaken. You seem to be in a world where 100b are impossible to land without interrupting by axe chains never get interrupted, or Rips always happen perfectly after an auto chain. Both chains are equally fragile or equally easy depending on how you look at them. Neither I, or anyone else experienced with Warrior and the boss fights in this game, have much of a problem landing consistent Hundred Blades.

Interrupting axe chain is a much smaller DPS loss than interrupting HB. For starters, Axe chain has a smaller interrupt window (only during the last three hits, versus the entirety of HB) and more importantly, axe chain doesn’t have a cooldown. I mathed it on DnT’s board a while back, assuming you are interrupting the chain at equal points in the channel, axe chain only results in a bigger DPS loss if it’s interrupted in the split second between the fifth and sixth hits.

You also make it sound like experienced players can control exactly when and where bosses swing at them so they can always land full HBs on cooldown even in pugs. In my own experience I’m lucky if the pug doesn’t kite the boss out of the HB mid-channel, much less control it enough in a wall that I can always land a full HB the instant it recharges. Keep in mind that even with a walled WWA adding to DPS, you only need to delay your HB on average about 2 seconds before your overall DPS starts to drop below axe DPS.

Mork vom Ork.2598:

I don’t think anybody here denies that Berserker is the best choice for raw damage.
The question was just by how much Zerker beats celestial.

In the best case scenario for celestial (highest possible power/precision/ferocity bonus from “outside” the gear) it gives 24% less direct damage.
With a smaller bonus this difference will be even bigger: e.g. with no stacking sigil, dungeon potion & condi duration food, strength runes and no buffs, celestial’s direct damage is 32% lower.

The lower effective hp (-40% compared to celestial) and condition damage of Zerker gear will lower this difference, just by how much is hard to calculate.
Conditions need to be stacked up first, take time to do damage and can be overwritten by other party members. Effective group play (reflects, blinds, aegis, positioning) makes the higher hp obsolete in many cases.

In my opinion celestial gives the best balance between damage and toughness, making it the ideal engi gear for PvP/WvW.

PvE at the moment does not offer enough reward for toughness/vitality/heal stacking. Even after the crit damage nerf, pure direct DPS is still king, making Zerker the best choice.

P.S.: Unless the boon stripping is needed, Acid Bomb gives better damage than Mines (even if traited) for any fights that last at least 5 seconds, along with all the utility of EG.

According to my spreadsheet, an all-buffs grenades Engie in zerk with Strength Runes is 11433 DPS. Replace zerk with celestial and you get 9635 DPS. Knight is 8852 btw. That gap is in part because of the bleed scaling though, if you use bombs like OP does it becomes 11337 vs 9152 which is a bigger gap. If you also cut out buffs like might and banners the gap becomes even bigger.

tigirius.9014:

Ameno.6813:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Damage reduction between medium and heavy with no bonus toughness is only like 5%. It doesn’t make a huge difference and heavy armor looks ugly.

You sure about that? A 100% glass zerker warrior will have the equivalent to what I would have in terms of power, precision, crit damage, with about 2 ascended soldier trinkets worth of toughness and vitality. I’d say that’s pretty huge.

That’s what I’m seeing too, not to mention certain builds in Engi benefit from higher toughness which is added to damage when certain traits are used.

Engie has better effective healing and overall better survivability so it’s actually tankier than the warrior even with the warrior’s slightly higher armor and health pool.

http://i.imgur.com/fWQPufA.jpg

I made this mostly as a joke but the numbers are in fact accurate. As you can see the only real difference between a meta warrior and a meta engie is about 5k effective HP, and engies can spec for much higher defense with a smaller DPS tradeoff.

VodCom.6924:

What we call meta builds are “speed clear meta builds”. We should not confuse both.

The speed clear meta is a proof of the lack of experience the dev had when they first designed dungeons, since most mobs can be los’ed and bosses killed before they can do anything interesting (spider in AC).

Things are starting to change however: I noticed woodenpotatoes stated that mobs during LS2 are “convincing” him to move away from berserker, just for extra survivability since mobs are much less forgiving in dry top.

The only Dry Top mobs I’ve had any problem facetank-DPSing to death in full Berserker are the champion boss event mobs for obvious reasons.

LordByron.8369:

The difference is that with warrior you can facetank some slow attacks, with ele its a great problem if you get hit by normal Attacks.

If you interrupt your 100B you have it readi in 6,5 seconds, if you interrupt meteor shower you get it back way after.

If you need to cleanse conditions or few HP you lock yourself out of damage with an ele.

If you switch weapon with a war for a parry etc, your axe main hand and sw 4-4 will still give you good damage.

And so on.

Btw i totally agree that almost ant META build for PvE is the proof of the failure of the lack of trinity.
You can choose to play a skill intensive build and do kittenty damage or play a build that requires you to know and use 10% of your profession and be a “pro speedrunner”.

That is sad but its the price this game pays to the capture point centric balance.
At least PvE meta builds are nerf proof because they are unviable in pvp.

Even if you interrupt Meteor Shower you are still getting massive damage from Lava Font + Fireball, which basically can’t be interrupted in any meaningful way. By comparison the warrior who interrupts HB is down to like half DPS until it recharges.

Celestial scales better than Knight or Soldier DPS-wise and offers comparable survivability. Of the four possible “defensive DPS” sets:

Zealot is highest DPS but gives the smallest boost to survivability overall.
Celestial is second-best DPS (since it scales best with buffs) and very high overall defense.
Knight is highest sustain (best damage reduction, which equates to more healing effectiveness) but lowest effective health pool.
Soldiers is highest health pool but worst overall DPS and worst sustain.

Easier versions:

Interrupter: Go find a Rider (Breeze, Storm, whatever) type enemy and spam Head Shot on it. It will always attempt to attack again immediately after being interrupted so you can get multiple interrupts in a row super easily.

Remover: Go to Lowland Burns (where Shatterer spawns) and stand next to one of those Chaos Storm bush things. They will apply a random condition every second making it super easy to cleanse 5+ conditions in one shot using whatever fast-cooldown mass removal skills your class has.

Dodger: Go to any area with Dredge Resonators (i.e. the big dredge base in Frostgorge). They will do their wave attack repeatedly which you can dodge backwards through for 3-4 dodges per shot.

Events: The Legendary Dredge Generals in Frostgorge Sound are 4 easy-to-kill veterans who each count as an event. Killing them spawns the Commissar General who counts as a 5th. Unfortunately if someone else has killed any of them you need to wait for the chain to reset but it’s worth checking out when you log in.

Sunshine.4680:

Maybe the problem is too many boons, might stacking and stacking in general and some classes making bosses/dungeons jokes. Maybe that is what really needs to be looked at seeing how the meta players are so rabidly against anything new. Makes me wonder why?

People say ranged is a crutch yet isn’t Zerker gear wearing, melee stacking burning down the boss asap pretty much a crutch? After all you’re just burning down the boss asap so you won’t have to really do much other than burn down an HP punching bag.

It’s a “crutch” to have 5 competent players in the party now apparently.

If you have one zerker DPSing Lupi while the rest run around at range pulling Lupi away from ideal positioning, making AOEs explode on allies instead of reflecting them, and causing bubbles to happen, I’m not sure that zerker is crutching on anything very hard.

I have it on reliable authority that engie DPS is infinity because Surprise Shot is instant so if you divide the damage by the cast time then…

lordhidetora.3189:

TKiller.6829:

I’m under an impression that you consider warrior a class with the highest dps value.

I thought this was the meta everyone compared DPS to.

It’s more like the average insofar as you can still say “Well I’m not the best but at least I can do as much as a warrior and the warrior doesn’t totally ruin everything”. Comparing to ele or something would be silly since they’re the best DPS by a wide margin so everyone else just looks bad by comparison.

The warrior has about 150 more armor than a medium and about 3k more health than any medium-HP class. So basically you get a guardian to put Strength in Numbers on you and congratulations, you’re now a heavy. Except the difference is miniscule so you probably wouldn’t even notice.

At this point, warrior DPS is like the baseline acceptable DPS, so yeah, it does pose a problem if you drop too far below it.

Because when a good player making a good decisions is on par with a bad player making bad ones because one is playing a good class and one is playing a class that sucks, you have a class balance issue.

NOTE: NOT A SERIOUS POST

Just for fun, I decided to see if warriors really were the easiest class. Spoilers: They’re not.

I took some plausible-looking warrior and engineer builds with different stat types and multiplied together DPS, Effective HP, and Effective Healing. In other words, one build may be considered easier than another because it is easier to deal high damage, while in other cases it may be considered easier because it’s easier to stay alive. The higher the ease rating, the higher the ultimate balance of stats (it’s DPS x EHP x EHealing / 1 billion).

Time/Effort Tradeoff is a function of loss of DPS versus gain in survivability (i.e. it takes more time to kill things but less effort). It’s percentage-based so it’s a slightly different number than the above which is based on absolute numbers.

Anyway, image is linked.
http://imgur.com/fWQPufA

As you can see, engineer is actually easier across the board to play than axe warrior, and the respective carebear specs (Adrenal Health warrior and Backpack Regen bombs engie) are always easier to play than full zerker. Knights is also easiest to play generally across the board, and Clerics is actually relatively hard to play, even coming out lower than zerker in one case.

So basically what I’m saying is that the cleric players are the most hardcore and zerkers are scrubs.

I’m curious as to how everyone’s ending up with stat calculations that are so different but I don’t think it really changes the general conclusion which is that Knight scales better overall. Frifox if you want to run Celestial as well that may be good to check the numbers with because I’m getting higher max buff numbers with Celestial than either Soldier or Knight.

Again, the problem is that you are comparing the much more consistent axe DPS with peak GS DPS, since EA build is an axe build. Here are some numbers from my spreadsheet:

4/6/0/4/0 A/M (EA): 10200
6/6/0/2/0 A/M (axe DPS. no EA): 11000
6/6/0/2/0 GS (perfect walled rotation): 11300
6/6/0/2/0 GS (perfect unwalled rotation): 10900
6/6/0/2/0 GS (no WWA): 9600

So you’re looking at a DPS loss of approximately 1500 DPS at most. The absolute worst case boost from EA is a PVT with full points in power line but who manages to not take any DPS traits and is using a crap weapon. Let’s say 6/0/0/6/2 staff guard with Hoelbrak and crap sigils, using Empower on cooldown:

With EA: 2636
Without EA: 2554

That means you’re only losing about 700 DPS tops even with the worst group ever. Realistically it’s going to be a bit better than that, all I have to do is switch that staff guardian to GS and leave everything the same and he now goes up to 5600 DPS without EA, 5800 DPS with, and that’s basically break-even point.

Condi staff actually isn’t terrible as for as condi goes, with Eruption you’re looking at like 12 stacks of bleed at base. With a bit of extra condi duration and crit procs that should get you up to 25 pretty easily.

People are really hung up over the longbow thing.

I’d really like the engie’s rifle to be their best DPS weapon too because rifles are cool but that’s just the way things are. Something’s gotta be the best and someone’s not gonna be happy with whatever it is.

“Hurting” is all relative. If you’re doing half the DPS of a staff ele and there’s another condi necro in the party, the two of you together are collectively losing out on the potential DPS of a whole another party member. If you were afking at the start of the dungeon for the reward most people would probably agree you’re “hurting” the party by doing that even if the remaining four players are skilled enough to complete the dungeon without you.

NinjaEd.3946:

Just another day in pve. Ever punish yourself with a 3+ hour fotm run only to have the party leader disband because he can’t stop dying to the dredge boss’s bombs? And it was the last fractal in the chain before the boss bonus….

Wish I could report people for being terrible sometimes. With great power would come great responsibility.

There’s a reason I stopped doing Fractals around mid-20s. The constant ragequits/wipes were getting really dumb. I guess it’s probably easier now with the vastly higher AR you can get but that kitten still takes forever so meh.

Celestial also pushes total DPS more towards bleeds so even in terms of percentages Celestial is less.

Don’t forget that ele staff stuff hits faster than once per second. So to get 14k DPS on a staff you’d actually only need to be seeing numbers in the 8kish range between Lava Font and Fireball.

It is more damage for everyone (including you) and doesn’t significantly hurt your own DPS. Your pug has to have really crap DPS to not break even from EA. Keep in mind that most DPS “comparison” calcs are using perfect GS rotations whereas EA DPS uses the much more consistent axe rotation.

Go ahead and disprove it then. Otherwise please leave, grownups are talking.

You can’t factor in runes and traits because we’re basically looking at pugs here. If you could control what they were running the whole soldier vs. knight thing would be irrelevant anyway cause you’d put them in zerker.

If you do want to look at exact numbers, though, let’s just look strictly at multipliers.

Full Exotic Knight: 210%
Full Exotic Soldier: 219.5%

Knight with 25 might: 321.7%
Soldier: 315.1%

Knight with fury: 227.6%
Soldier: 241.1%

Knight with might and fury: 348.7%
Soldier: 346%

Knight with banners/EA: 270.5%
Soldier: 268%

Knight with fury and banners/EA: 296.3%
Soldier: 297.6%

Knight with might, fury, and banners/EA: 428.3%
Soldier: 410.7%

Now obviously you can adjust those numbers however you like using consumables, traits, runes, etc. but those will vary wildly depending on the actual player. The takeaway though is that Knight’s generally benefits better from situations where you have comparatively more power and ferocity boosts and soldier’s is better when you are getting precision and crit chance boosts. I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone but as you can see from the multipliers above it’s actually quite close.

Incidentally Celestial actually scales better than either; it has a lower base damage but the lower power stat, lower precision stat, and presence of ferocity means it benefits the most from any given buff and with max buffs it actually has more damage than either knight or soldier.

Warrior has a bunch of defense utilities and heavy armor and high health but:

1) Heavy armor is only like 5% more defense than medium armor and 10% more than light.
2) You won’t be using those defensive utilities in any group meta build. Even if you’re making heavy DPS sacrifices it’s still not that amazing since most of them are just the average stun breaker on long cooldown.
3) High health means you can take 1-2 more hits than a medium or low health profession but that’s really all it is.

Apart from that, their heal skills aren’t very good (Healing Surge recovers a lot of health but has a relatively long cooldown, Heal Sig has a good regen rate but the active sucks) and warriors lack easy access to defensive boons. They don’t get vigor normally (although they do have an extra, shorter dodge with WWA), they don’t get access to regen (apart from the Heal Sig passive), they don’t have blinds or aegis or weakness or protection, etc.

On top of all of that, if you’re using a GS like most pugs are prone to doing, you’re rooted a good 40% of the time which means you will be taking WAY more damage than anyone else.

Casmurro.9046:

From what dungeon he was kicked?

He was standing in some snowy area so I’d guess SE or HOTW.

Rozbuska.5263:

You never dodge everything. In dungeons ok its possible but for example high lvl fractals try survive lvl 49 grubs on fire shaman in zerk:-) In celest you can easily:-)

Show vid of you facetanking Fractals 49 grubs in Celestial please.

Damage reduction between medium and heavy with no bonus toughness is only like 5%. It doesn’t make a huge difference and heavy armor looks ugly.