Guild Wars 2

natsos.3692:

Bug is pretty simple.
F1
3
The moment you ENTER DS use your Doom. The target won’t be feared but the skill will be on cooldown. The doom has to be almost instant with the time press F1

Just want to point out that there seems to be a system factor to this bug: as in what system you’re playing on seems to determine whether or not it is reproducible. Personally I can hit F1 & 3 (For my key bindings, Ctrl + R) simultaneously and still have Doom hit correctly every time.

It could be that some of the protection code that keeps this from happening with weapon swaps isn’t in place for DS.

Is it possible for anyone experiencing this to cause a false recharge on any of the other DS skills?

Dredlord.8076:

Arrakiv.8703:

I haven’t run it since the patch, but…

Think about how much power a juggermancer generally has. Think about the new SR grandmaster trait where you get +50% crit chance while in Death Shroud. Now consider how long a fully soldier-geared necromancer can stay in Death Shroud due to their high vitality and toughness (and imagine tossing in some spectral utilities…). Then figure in the 30% critical damage you’d get for going 30 points deep into SR…

That requires a different trait set up than the basic Juggermancer, but it seems like it could be pretty neat.

considering the juggermancer build has what? 4% crit chance…

the extra 2% crit sounds pretty underwhelming but I haven’t tried it so maybe its just amazing. Let us know how that works out for you.

The 50% crit chance of Deathly Perception is additive, not multiplicative.

swiftpaw.6397:

Only problem I have with this.. is this. This is the destroyer. He’s rubbish easy. You can stand there without issue and whale on him while a guardian blocks his dragon’s tooth every so often.

The real problem I have with ranger is that it can be good dps, in select situations like the destroyer.. But these situations are few and far between. I’d like to be able to run ranger for every speedclear, and have it be viable for every part of a speedclear, not just the parts where it doesn’t matter what class you brought as long as it was glass.

I’m guessing a way around the crappy ( but high damage, yes) sword auto attack lock could be to pick up an ele weapon. He only really needs one hammer per alpha encounter anyways if you kill him fast enough.

Vox Hollow.2736:

@swiftpaw
Like, seventeen billion slave driver videos later and people are only just now getting a conscience about strawman science? Doesn’t it seem a little late for that?

I cropped out pieces of both posts in an attempt for clarity.

As is true of every dungeon, you can pull all mobs to the same spot and cleave / dps them down before they can actually threaten you, but for us mortals who run in groups with insufficient damage / coordination for such tactics:

• Reflection & projectile block is essential. There will be multiple times you are faced with a set of riflemen / scatter-shots, and even a single thief smokescreen can buy a lot of time to breathe.

• Condition clear is essential. The number of times I have seen cutpurses of all things wipe groups because nobody has a good response to 12 stacks of bleed is depressing. Bring a cheap cleanse for yourself at the absolute least.

• There are parts of this dungeon you simply should skip. Whether you do a full stealth run or a crazed group chicken-run to the exit, sometimes the mobs aren’t required, and that means they’re not worth the trouble.

Any specific parts of the path you want to ask about? The only part I can think of that I really hate is after the bomb-gate in the Seraph path, with all the canons and mobs there. Everywhere else I can think of a trick / tactic.

Kitedyou.1720:

PinCushion.7390:

<shrug>

And it hits so fast

…Seriously? 2 hits every 3/4 of a second…that is slug speed compared to daggers 4 hits in roughly 1/2 second…

You can’t seriously believe that the dagger 1 chain completes in 1/2 a second.

Alright, as for the actual thread: Axe currently makes more sense at 600 range: it’s a ‘near-melee’ option, so you’re close, but you don’t have to literally stick to your target like with dagger.

I honestly think they could afford to up the damage. IIRC, the direct-damage of the scepter 1 chain matches (exceeds?) the damage of axe 1, while having 300 more range and applying some fundamental conditions.

Edit: Axe isn’t a keep-away weapon, like Ranger longbow or Mesmer greatsword. It’s a chasing weapon.

Edit2: Nevermind, Axe still does more direct damage if you ignore the conditions inflicted by both weapons. Not so sure now if they should up it’s damage. I think so, but I need to do a more stringent examination.

You’re actually running into a bug I’ve known about for a while, but usually isn’t important: while bloodthirst does boost the healing of dagger 2 by 50%, it also decreases the heal-per-pulse by about 5. So in your case, 17 × 1.5 = 25.5, 25 – 5 = 20.

May I ask what your effective level is, which is causing those (low) healing values?

Regen / heals not healing a necromancer while they are in Death Shroud is currently intended. As noted by others, this may change in the future.

I seriously can’t get this to reproduce.

Any other advice or details? I’m using path of midnight and hitting Doom right after using death shroud, and I can’t make it go on cooldown without causing an effect on the target.

Edit: Naphack has the right idea, I think. Unless people can start reproducing this on their end, a bug report from your machine is about all that we can do.

crestpiemangler.7631:

As Softspoken stated, they are WORTHLESS in PvE dungeons, since you have to move around a lot or get one-shot by the myriad AoE attacks… or traps.. etc. while avoiding aggro. For the more difficult dungeons you won’t want to use any pets.

That’s not what I said.

Softspoken.2410:

PvE (Dungeons) – Some fights will kill off all your minions ruthlessly, and there’s not much to be done about it. In others you’ll have some good fodder / extra damage though. Once you know what fights are coming, you’ll be able to switch out a few of your minions for specific skills that fit the fight.

I’m going to try and clarify on this: certain boss fights and veteran pack compositions are not minion friendly, but for everything else, minions are a pretty solid choice. Having all your minions killed off every few minutes in a run isn’t a big deal: it’s when you can’t keep any of your minions active through a fight that you’ve got a major problem. Once you run dungeons a little, you can identify bosses that use single target / small cleave attacks, or just have poor AoE damage. Those are the ones that you can keep minions up on. Some other bosses, like say Subject Alpha in Crucible of Eternity, will gib your minions relentlessly. For those battles, you’ll want to substitute other utility skills.

So minions very much can be used in dungeons. Some of the other cons listed there by crestpie I want to talk about:
Traps – Typically you will avoid going through these and fighting simultaneously. If you lose all your minions to them, in 30 seconds they’ll be back up – poor for speedrunning, but acceptable for your typical pug that hesitates at most bosses anyways.
Running / Skipping – Minions won’t pull non-aggressive mobs, but they will take aggro and serve as a handy distraction if something latches on to you anyways. Having your flesh golem charge through a pack can give your team a necessary window of opportunity.

stof.9341:

Condition conversion into boon isn’t the same as condition removal. You’ll have to redo the tests.

I agree, and will do so when I find time for it, which will not be today. In the meantime, others that are curious could try and play around with it. I recommend using long duration / low intensity conditions that are applied in bursts, so it’s clear exactly what condition is applied in what order, and there’s plenty of time to react.

DanH.5879:

Softspoken.2410:

This is why it behooves you to not blow your entire initiative bar and caltrops in 4 seconds. Learn to share, and push your bleeds onto the stack when it drops to 20, not before.

Yes, having 3 build-heavy builds ‘working together’ is counter productive, and should probably be fixed somehow. But if there’s two people in a group, they ought to be able to coordinate so the stack is permanently above 20 rather than spiking from 12 – 25 as they try and burst their bleeds back on.

i WANT to blow all my ini and trops in 4 seconds ! what’s the problem here?

and if 5 identical condition thieves happen to be in the same party?
2 fight, the other 3 stay and watch ?

You just told me the problem in your other post: if you spike 25 bleeds all on your own, you’re forcing any other bleed applied, intentional or otherwise, to push one of your (high damage, high duration) bleeds of the stack. And once some of them get pushed off by 2s bleeds that have expired (And by other 10s bleeds that have not), you’re sitting at low initiative with your bleed utility skill on recharge, and the boss only has 18 stacks of bleeding on it.

Whereas if you cap yourself intentionally at say, 14 bleeds, you can probably maintain that stack indefinitely, while the rest of your party manages another 11 bleeds to cap out against bosses. Then none of your initiative / caltrops bleeds will be wasted on the boss because they got pushed off the stack.

It will also allow you the flexibility to always boost the bleeds back up if the stack falls below 21, and still have some initiative if you need to C&D for stealth or want Heartseeker through a combo field for an aura.

As to the “5 identical condition thieves” question? Yeah, you’re kind of screwed. I won’t sugar coat it, you simply should not bring 5 condition builds to the same dungeon, and thieves are especially bad for this. I question the probability of this occurring in a PUG, but if it did, you would all be fighting over the bleed stacks at every boss. I think 2 thieves could get along, but 3 would definitely have conflict.

Edit: As to Death Blossom itself, I’d love to see them extend the evade portion of the skill, to give it a sort of safety even while in melee. They could also change the bleeds to be more intense on a shorter duration (Something like 5 bleeds for 5 seconds) but that would just make it easier to cap out and harder to maintain a tall stack of bleeds.

Cempa.5619:

I use the same build but end up with near 400 more power, thoughts?

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAW3djMah7VbGbM8JEpCPD0jepWcGqHwD78hA-jEyAYMBZyCMRIQJwioxWJLiGraBTVSEV7OKiWtUARMGA-w

Having more power will only further increase the value of Close to Death. So I’d suggest taking Close to Death.

loseridoit.2756:

Softspoken.2410:

loseridoit.2756:

Last condition applied is always the first condition to be removal first

This behavior follows the LIFO philosophy. Bleeds tend to be the first condition cleansed because it is applied so frequently

Except I can regularly observe older conditions being removed and newer ones being ignored.

Edit: if anyone is reading this thread right now and is interesting in investigating, please message me in-game. I’d like to get into a PvP arena and test this thoroughly and I’d rather do it with someone I can talk to instead of open-world mobs.

tested with a traited warrior warhorn and softspoken is right. bleeds seems to take higher priority

sigh… if this bug is fixed, then necros will completely be op

For the record, this was a condition conversion instead of a cleanse, so it may still be suspect. But the trait / skill was converting the bleed regardless of application order, before it would convert poison or torment. At the very least, LIFO is not a hard-and fast rule for all condition removal.

I think in the future… Something like a thief a with shortbow, spider venom, ice drake venom and cluster bomb will be in order. I’ll be the target as a mantra mesmer with this trait on Mantra of Recovery.

But I’m a bit too tired to keep going at that tonight.

loseridoit.2756:

Last condition applied is always the first condition to be removal first

This behavior follows the LIFO philosophy. Bleeds tend to be the first condition cleansed because it is applied so frequently

Except I can regularly observe older conditions being removed and newer ones being ignored.

Edit: if anyone is reading this thread right now and is interesting in investigating, please message me in-game. I’d like to get into a PvP arena and test this thoroughly and I’d rather do it with someone I can talk to instead of open-world mobs.

Alright, the reason I was asking about your current hits is that if you want to compare DPS, then for a realistic comparison you can take Dhuumfire as a 5 second burn every 12s, and Close to Death as a 10% multiplier to your damage. So if a 5 second burn every 12s is > 10% of your DPS to all targets around you, well, there’s your answer.

So first, 5 second burn with 0 condition damage (your described stats) is 1640 damage. Since that’s every 12s and we’re assuming you’re not managing to Epidemic that, we can re-state it as 136.7 dps, single target. We’ll call it 140dps for now because less digits and this is far from an exact analysis.

Now, for 140 to be worth the same amount as a 10% boost, that means you’ll need 1400 dps, counting all targets, before near to death. This is where your dagger auto comes in. I’m going to do ~magics~ here and announce that the last hit of the dagger chain is about 43% of the total damage of the chain. I’m also going to make the (somewhat questionable) assumption the dagger-1 chain takes 2s to complete, including after-cast.

Thus, your average necrotic bite, divided by 43%, divided by 2, is your average dps while auto-attacking. You gave 1976 as your highest critical without Close to Death traited. Thus, at peak, you have 2298 dps. (2300 because Ugh Digits) which is far more than our 1400 threshold mentioned earlier. But that’s at peak.

To normalize your dagger damage, we have to take into account that your 228% damage critical strikes only happen 41% of the time. So it’s sort of like an effective 150% damage multiplier overall. As well, since that may have been from the high-end of the random distribution that weapon strength has for damage, I’m going to assume that strike was about 103% of the median damage.

So we’ll take 2300 / 2.28 / 1.03 to get your ‘flat’ damage, then multiply by 1.5 (2.28 * .41 + 0.59) for 1469 dps. Or 1470 because I have a rounding addiction.

So you are just eking out enough damage from using dagger 1 on a single target for Close to Death to be better than Dhuumfire.

Now again, I have been dropping digits everywhere, so all I’d take from that similarity is that they’re nearly equivalent, for the limited scenario of only using dagger 1 in a single-target fight, where you are fighting the same target from 100% health to 0%.

Edit: For the love of Grenth… ArenaNet. ArenaNet, “as__a__5s__burn” is not me trying to sneak butts by you.

Edit2: This is not the conclusion I expected, so I suspect I missed something. I realize the situation is limited (what about multi target, and this guy is probably using Deathly Perception! And what about when the target it already burning and yours doesn’t go through for a long time?) but still, did I make a major mistake with the form of my calculations or something?

From what I have heard:

PvE (Open world) – Yes, you’re fine.
PvE (Dungeons) – Some fights will kill off all your minions ruthlessly, and there’s not much to be done about it. In others you’ll have some good fodder / extra damage though. Once you know what fights are coming, you’ll be able to switch out a few of your minions for specific skills that fit the fight.
PvP – You’re exceptionally powerful in a 1v1 situation, but opponents with strong AoE damage can still neutralize you. I can’t advise much here, since I’m still foggy on the roles in sPvP, let alone how necromancers fit into them.

One thing to note about PvE is that while minions are OK for levelling, they get much more powerful after you put a couple of traits (Training of the Master, Flesh of the Master) into them.

I’d think you’d get more damage from Close to Death there, with that much power. How much do your critical Life Blasts / Dagger 1’s last hit / Ghastly Claws hit for without Close to Death?

I believe you can only charge 25 to make one charged quartz crystal each day.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Has anyone else noticed any change in this? I haven’t been on the past few days so was wondering if it was ever fixed. I did notice it once right before I originally saw this post. I didn’t see anything about it in patch notes yet.

I tried it in HotM today when I was looking at how marks work with interrupts, and it was still only transferring 3 conditions per target hit by the mark.

Edit: I didn’t think to try and test the allied cleansing though, which is arguably the more important change.

Marijan.4175:

The actual question imo is, why Magic Find and Critical Damage aren’t only 5/8 of a secondary attribute like all other attributes on Celestial Gear and if that is intended and going to stay that way.

This is what’s bothering me as well. I realize that ArenaNet won’t split the critical damage values into things like 1.4%, but as it is, the Celestial set has a disproportionately strong focus on critical damage. Although, giving more crit damage than a comparable armor piece that has it as a dedicated secondary stat just seems flat-out wrong to me.

I’m not even sure if it’s a problem from a strength / OP perspective, it’s just that the asymmetry bothers me.

I’d like to see it fixed, for sure, but I’m curious about how well-known this bug was / is. I think this is the first time I’ve really heard of it, hence some of my confusion in my first post in this thread.

Ugh that reminds me I didn’t actually submit an in-game bug about it yet. It’s best to go through all channels, after all.

krippler.9826:

It is and isn’t a stun. Where’s the confusion?

On combo finishers with spectral wall. [/rimshot]

Fear’s been stated to be both a control effect and a condition, but which parts of the game effect / respond to it are still kind of foggy right now.

ronpierce.2760:

He’s not lying. If you start casting a Mark and get feared (maybe even interrupted but I notice it most vs other necros when we try to double mark one another) the spell will not trigger and goes on a full CD.

Ah, that’s a bit more comprehensible.

It took some doing, but I managed to reproduce this against the Warrior sparring partner in PvP. It’s a very narrow window, but you can have the skill interrupted while casting and receive the full recharge instead of the typical ‘interrupted’ one. And since they’re not channeled skills (Life Transfer, Ghastly Claws) it shouldn’t be going on full recharge.

DanH.5879:

dude, are you a noob or something?
pop caltrops, spend all your 15+ini on the mob, see how your bleed stacks are removed by lol damage bleeds from party members (in pve)
should i mention the bounty missions where there is instant 25 bleed on them ?
where is YOUR damage there?

and if you have a fellow thief with the same build you can suck each other finger because damage is severly capped by the 25 stack limit

This is why it behooves you to not blow your entire initiative bar and caltrops in 4 seconds. Learn to share, and push your bleeds onto the stack when it drops to 20, not before.

Yes, having 3 build-heavy builds ‘working together’ is counter productive, and should probably be fixed somehow. But if there’s two people in a group, they ought to be able to coordinate so the stack is permanently above 20 rather than spiking from 12 – 25 as they try and burst their bleeds back on.

If you’re going to be stuck at range anyways, it’s acceptable. But I have to point out that the fastest way to clear most bosses involves getting right in their face and dodging effectively.

What are you even talking about.

RockonHarder.7235:

Tears.5627:

Thedenofsin.7340:

I’ve played around with Plague Signet a bit in zergs and it seems pretty worthless overall. It pulses a bit slowly and doesn’t seem to really draw enough conditions to be beneficial to the team. If anything, it seems to do more harm than good, as you need to wait a while to get enough conditions drawn before you can unload them.

I’d like to offer a suggestion to make this more useful. I’d suggest changing Plague Signet’s passive effect to something like: increase boon duration by 20%, or increases critical strike chance by 3% or the like. For the active, I’d make it draw “x” conditions per player around you, up to a total of “y” (e.g. 3 per player, up to 20 conditions). Activating the signet again within “Z” (5?) seconds transfers the conditions.

I used it in beta and a bit after release until I noticed it was copy and pasting conditions instead of removing them from allies. I traded for wells after that.

Does it still do that?

It hasn’t done this for months and months but people still keep bringing it up.

Rennoko.5731:

Necromancer:
•Mark of Blood: Updated the skill fact to display the proper regeneration duration.

So does this mean that Mark of Blood always gave 6s regeneration at base, and I just never knew?

I actually recently hit something like this. It was a separatist catapult (possibly a trebuchet?) that absolutely tanked my FPS. The smoke cloud was much bigger / denser than normal and didn’t look like most of the others I had seen.

I noticed this specifically because I upgraded my graphics card recently, and previously smoke effects like blinding powder (curse you Order of Whispers!) would make me hit a small lag spike, but the upgrade had fixed that.

Edit: This was in the Oldgate Clearing section of Diessa Plateau though, iirc.

I like the change to the Chaos Armor effect – as mentioned earlier, it puts it in line with the elementalist auras (1s icd) and I can really see adding protection & blind to its effects as a solid buff.

But the staff 4 skill really seems underwhelming now. I honestly think a reduction in its recharge is in order, or something.

Sepreh.5924:

Rennoko.5731:

•Dark Path: This skill will now cause the necromancer to shadowstep the full 1200-unit distance when hitting at max range.

What was Dark Path doing before?

Before, if you managed to make Dark Path activate at 1200 range, it would only pull you about 900 distance, probably a holdover from when Dark Path was 900 range only.

Aeoleas.9721:

I don’t know where this stereotype stems from, but I’m here to nip it at the root.

I can’t even

The wiki can screw up on complicated details. In personal testing, I’ve found condition cleanses to not have a strict order, at least not based on order of application or type. Take a single-condition cleanse (thief is not so good for this I used a necro with a trait to cleanse one trait on entering Death Shroud, you could try the remove-on-stealth trait) and play with spiders outside Lion’s Arch for a while. (They apply long durations of cripple / poison, without being dangerous in the slightest.)

Question: does anyone happen to know if -Condition Duration affects the conditions you pull? I’m just curious if a Melandru / Lemongrass Poultry Soup combo could turn you into an actual condition tank for your team.

Edit: To be on topic, I really love the idea of the passive / active combo. Pull conditions from friendlies, throw them back at enemies if you’re truly overwhelmed / need a stunbreaker. But the execution makes it frustrating to use. Sometimes I pull the wrong condition (1s cripple instead of the 7s poison) and sometimes I just can’t pull enough conditions. (I am nearly at full health and my teammate is dying beneath a stack of 8 bleeds)

I can’t wholly recommend buffing / nerfing the transfer rate either, because it’s such a double-edged sword either way.

timidobserver.7925:

LOL anet is going to give the people in this thread exactly what they want. They are going to nerf torment into the ground, and then switch dhuumfire into torment instead of a burn.

I find torment to be very useless in a single target applications. IF they do make these change, dhuumfire should be changed into aoe.

If only condition necromancers had some way of making single-target conditions apply to multiple opponents.

Photoshopped

you can tell by the pixels

In a PvE dungeon team:

• Thieves can add some combination of melee cleave damage, the ability to skip content quite easily via extensive stealth, a projectile blocking skill, and great access to blind to control any non-champion / non-boss mob.
• Necromancers can add extensive control conditions to groups / bosses (weakness, chill, poison) can now do fairly well at single target direct damage, make passable group healers, and tend to be incredibly durable between their high vitality and death shroud.

To my knowledge, the current meta doesn’t really want thieves or necromancers when playing at the highest levels possible. That said, I’d worry about what people need at the highest level possible when you actually get there, not before. And until then, they can be pretty great.

Really I think a deeper problem with this trait is that it doesn’t alter how you play that much, and doesn’t really make many choices for the player. It just encourages you to stack toughness, which the option of stacking more or less of it. Compare it to Powerful Aura, which adds the goal of applying Auras to your teammates, while making you choose which auras to bring and when to share them. Or to Written In Stone, which would encourage the use of signets but still requires you to choose which ones you bring.

I mean, maybe it’s underpowered, but does anyone else find it boring?

I’ve got this listed as a bug in the list, but it may very well be the intended behavior. However, they’ve got the wording as “Whenever a minion dies” not “Whenever a minion is killed”. Right now, there’s three mesmer traits that use “is killed” to differentiate between dying from combat damage and being shattered: I think it’d be fair to use the same wording for minion sacrifice, for clarity.

tl;dr – The tooltip doesn’t quite agree with the behavior, but the behavior is probably correct.

foofad.5162:

You really need two people to test it thoroughly and I haven’t done the work myself, but I’ve seen other people’s verification and believe it to be the case. Not only does the highest condition damage take priority, it also updates every tic based on your CURRENT condition damage. In other words, if you go to the Mists and burn something for a long duration and then Empower yourself, your damage will go up. So who’s burns actually fire can change in the heat of the moment (forgive me).

I knew that burning’s damage would change as you gained/lost condition damage: it’s something I think is mighty cool, given other limitations of the GW2 system.

I just got a nice person in the Mists to help me test it, and it turns out that there is no priority. If you apply burning after someone else does, with higher condition damage, yours doesn’t tic first. So I’ll need to amend that. Wiki (or wherever I got that from) got it wrong.

Thank you for testing this. I was following around a player (seemed like a bot, but who knows really?) and it seemed like priority was based on application order, not intensity.

In PvE environments (dungeons, fractals), adequate skill with dodging and some party coordination can basically replace all defensive requirements. This is why berserker is demanded by the players seeking the fastest clear times: if everyone involved is good enough, you don’t need toughness / vitality / healing power, so the only relevant stat on your gear is damage.

Edit: That said, if you’re using pick-up groups, are a bit inexperienced or are generally not seeking the fastest times possible, berserker equipment might not be the best idea since the coordination and skill required to keep you alive probably won’t be there.

In WvW and sPvP, it’s much less clear-cut since other players tend to be a lot more clever about applying damage than NPC bosses.

Gideoknight.4736:

I haven’t been able to play since the patch, but read that Death Nova now deals damage. Tried searching the web but could not find any information on how much, in what Aoe and so on so forth.

Regarding the new Death Nova, I think its damage is similar to the damage you get from Putrid Explosion (bone minion active), and I’d guess it is applied to the same area that the poison field occupies.

Sugoi Travis.2651:

Reaper.1695:

So a 10 min run is not bad is you ask me.

He was directly referring to a speed run group i.e. 4 warr/1 mes, full zerk and fully traited in dps. Within these circumstances, a 10 minute run is quite bad. However, for a casual speed run, depending on the party make up, a 10 minute run is rather acceptable.

It really is a matter of expectations, and finding groups that have the bar set at a level similar to your own.

Zelyhn.8069:

Do we have any data on the size of targets?

Just for funsies, I took my necromancer to HotM and tried to figure out the hitbox size for some of the target golems. As far as I can tell, heavy golems have a radius of about 60, while light golems are closer to 30.

foofad.5162:

Burning stacks in duration, not intensity. However, the highest damage burning takes priority.

Question: have you been able to test this yourself? Because I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how stacking and condition removal order works (please, please do not refer me to the wiki on this, I find it conflicted) and it seems like burns tick through on a first-in-first-out basis, rather than having a prioritization system based on condition damage.

That said, I haven’t been able to do really good testing myself just yet, so I was curious if anyone else had researched this.

frans.8092:

While occasionally preventing damage, weapon evades are too short too time reliably with GW’s wacky timing.

I specifically time Pistol Whip to replace dodging when fighting subject alpha in Crucible of Eternity. While I doubt I could time Death Blossom to do the same (It is just too short for me to trust myself with), I bet I could also avoid the massive AoE spike with Flanking Strike.

It’s actually kind of nice since it means you don’t have to stop attacking so you can dodge.

Granted, this is something of an edge case since subject alpha’s attacks have a lot of lead time, but since the dungeon forum is currently dominated by “All berserker, learn 2 dodge or GTFO” it could prove relevant yet.

Zelyhn.8069:

Wow, I feel dumb.
I read the wiki countless times and I even made a spreadsheet to calculate damage output. I always ignored base damage because I thought it was somewhat negligible. It turns out I was right without knowing it. I will re-edit everything.
But what about heals?
Thank you so much for your attention!

Heals work on a base + scaling with healing power system. With the exception of heals that don’t have any scaling at all. :P

Really, direct damage is just special.

Zelyhn.8069:

I am not sure I understand what you mean by only having to list its coefficient to calculate the damage of a skill: the base has to be included in the calculation, doesn’t it?

As for the values themselves, I am not the one who calculated the vast majority of them, I just gathered them here and I take no credit for their calculations. I have rechecked a lot though, and I am confident that the authors calculated them accurately.

Ah. Let me refer you to this wiki page, especially the formula

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

The thing to note here is that there isn’t a “+ Skill-base / Target Armor” term in there or anything. Often when the term ‘base damage’ is used in the context of GW2, it just means the damage against a target with standard armor (I think it’s 2600, because that’s what tooltips use, but I’m not sure) and the lowest amount of power possible at level 80, or 916.

It’s still sort of misleading though, since the general usage of ‘base damage’ and ‘scaling’ implies a sort of 500 + 0.6*<stat> type of formula like what you might see in League of Legends or something, and GW2 just doesn’t work like that. Skills are just the 0.6*<stat> part, with the understanding that you’ll always have a non-zero value of that <stat>.

Einlanzer.1627:

What Thieves need are better support options and a better ability to avoid or mitigate damage. One of my biggest complaints is that they don’t get good Endurance regeneration despite how reliant on evades they are.

Um. 15 in acrobatics, withdraw, and the 10s of vigor on heal trait (Acrobatics Adept Major) beg to disagree. Dagger auto also generates endurance.

If I want to make a thief that spends most of the day rolling around, believe me I can. Couple it with something like Death Blossom or even Pistol Whip and I just have to balance initiative and endurance regeneration.

So does this mean that TA forward / up is the new Subject Alpha?

Technically, you only need to list the coefficient for the damage of a skill. Although I’m impressed by the consistency of your base values: multiplying the (total) coefficient of a skill by 335 is consistently within about 5 of the expected damage.