Both builds are hard to use but with mine you have a better survivability in 1vs1 and zerg vs zerg. See you
What? Mine has 100 more armor and 1500 more health than yours.
snip
What did you run before this? The damage you get in Altruistic Healing builds like this is mediocre at best, there are much higher sustained and burst builds out there. This is also way, way tankier than most zerked out burst builds, too. I’m not sure if more tank is going to help you out much.
It’s not an exploit, toss turrets to your hearts content. If Anet doesn’t like it, they’ll nerf it before they ban anyone.
Are you including patches in your figures? Because there are a lot of patches an that seems consistent with some of the more recent content.
You should be able to apply that to any other skill in the game, by simply replacing the weapon damage and coefficient values with their appropriate values. Don’t see why it wouldn’t be accurate.
Zerk works in almost every context, if not every context, if you can make it work. I’f you don’t have the patience to learn the encounters in pve, or find out how to pull off the optimum burst for WvW, and learn when to use what to stay alive, then Zerk isn’t for you and you’re going to spend your days cosplaying an expensive rug.
The best damage always comes from Berseker gear. End of story. That’s just the way it is: it has all three direct damage stats on it.
All that said, though: run whatever build you think is fun. Only speed runners will get angry at you for not running all berserker.
Don’t get rid of it, save it. You may use it in a different build in the future.
Since tagging also has a damage done component, you’ll often fail to do enough damage with a staff to actually get credit for the kill. Highly recommend greatsword over staff for busy events.
Per projectile, sorry. Should word that better. So, less than half of the strike damage.
Now that we have better information it’s clear that I was under-shooting on his power, as well as his multipliers, so that explains why I was coming in at a lower figure.
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There is diminishing returns as I illustrated, but that’s not what soft cap means. Soft cap means that you don’t directly benefit from it in the primary fashion but still receive benefits tangentially. Hard cap means that you do not receive any benefit at all from going beyond that point.
All that matters is effective HP and each point of toughness boosts effective HP by the same amount as the last. Looking at % damage reduction creates the illusion of diminishing returns, but it is not relevant.
That’s what I meant to articulate but failed to do so; There is no cap of any kind, so there’s no point at which adding more toughness ceases to be functionally useful. That said, you’re always giving something up in return.
Then it should still show up in the combat log properly – when meanders had the iBerserker issue, the damage still showed there correctly.
Well, I’m stumped then. My understanding of how the damage should calculate doesn’t allow for hits that high. I’ve been able to verify smaller numbers but nothing that huge.
Sword: single target DPS
Mace: Healing support/personal defense with burst capability
Scepter: ranged single target DPS with some AOE capability
Greatsword: general AOE DPS with some crowd control/interrupt
Hammer: Defensive AOE DPS with utility, best weapon for combo finishing
Staff: Party boon and healing support
Focus: Defensive utility with burst capability
Shield: AOE defensive party utility with healing
Torch: Burning, some burst capability; but avoid skill 5, due to extremely poor damage
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.
Also, Tarsius – torch 5 actual DPS is abysmal. Scepter Power doesn’t affect torch damage, either.
Two thoughts:
First, weapon damage is variable, so that could have been hitting consistently high. Check how much damage it would do if it maxed out at 1100 weapon damage instead of the average 1047.
Second, there may also be some strange multiplication going on with multi-hit attacks. Shield of Wrath has a coefficient of 2.5 and you neer ever see it hit for that high.
Greatsword coefficient should be accurate, you can identify it yourself as the formula:
Tooltip damage = (weapon average damage * power * coefficient)/2600
Keep in mind that the WW tooltip is inaccurate. You’ll need to test in the mists against heavy golems, which have 2600 armor, with steady and regular weapons.
PW has exactly the same range as Purging Flames, so you can use that as a guide for how far it reaches. It’s 240 radius, or twice your autoattack range.
Hrm. There must be something screwy going on with how the game calculates damage multipliers, because how I figure you shouldn’t be able to get more than 27k maximum damage out of Whirling Wrath (not counting projectiles). That’s including full might, vuln, bloodlust, your warrior friend, the works. Do they stack multiplicative or additively? Even if it stacks multiplicative I’m only getting 29k. That’s a pretty huge discrepency. Adding it all up from your earlier posted build I’m getting 85% worth of modifiers including full Vuln, does that sound right?
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There is diminishing returns as I illustrated, but that’s not what soft cap means. Soft cap means that you don’t directly benefit from it in the primary fashion but still receive benefits tangentially. Hard cap means that you do not receive any benefit at all from going beyond that point.
There is no soft cap, 3k is an arbitrary figure touted by most people as “good enough.” Adding 100 armor to 2900 armor yields 3.3% more reduction, adding 100 armor to 3000 yields 3.2% more reduction. You don’t even dip below 3% per 100 until you hit 3400 armor.
Ruby orbs work, but 5x Citadel +1x Ruby will get you slightly lower stats in exchange for free Fury for 37 seconds at a time, which is spectacular and will work well with your already respectable critical damage. Citadel runes are also cheaper than Ruby orbs.
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Good stats selection, has a lot of damage potential for the amount of armor it runs. I would consider something other than Generosity sigils though as the price is prohibitive.
Since your crit damage and power are pretty good, I would consider getting a burst set together for your WvW endeavors. That’d be Mace+Focus/Hammer. Chain Protector’s Strike/Shield of Wrath with Mighty Blow for an enormous burst if you land crits. I’d also consider sticking a Sigil of Endurance in there to compensate for your lack of vigor.
I’d also consider a dedicated rune set. Even though your crit damage is high with Beryl orbs, a rack of Citadel runes +1 orb in the head slot would net you a long fury uptime plus more base power which will increase your critical and noncritical damage. I’ve been a huge fan of Citadel recently; it’s cheap and insanely effective.
With Fury and precision consumables your critical chance will be 91%.
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Considering you can walk right through it with stability anyway, it’s kind of a ridiculous skill that’s fairly worthless except for pinning people against walls on those rare occasions you can pull it off.
DPS is meaningless, it’s true. Burst damage is king though.
In case it isn’t clear to someone, what this means is that when adding critical damage to your gear you should always start with exquisite gems, followed by berserker/valkyrie shoulders, gloves, and boots, then an amulet, and so on. This maximizes your non-critical damage stats as you increase your critical damage.
Second part, yeah i know, this is why food is so deceptive and makes it hard to compare.
I cant see that he uses that food in his last iteration btw.
No, I mean it does more damage and has higher health when using either no food or the same food.
Yeah, I checked in game before I posted.
It’s REALLY bad. I’m not near the game right now but it’s something abysmal like half or less of your autoattack damage. Even without cleaving on the last hit, you’re always better auto attacking than using it.
Poison doesn’t do very much damage, so the ones that give poison you can probably pass on but I’ll give them a look. It’s also not clear to me how much of your gears stats carry over into transformations. If stats carry 1 for 1, any transformation that has access to either a lot of bleeding or multiple conditions would be good. That said, snow leopard is the only Norn one I would ever use on account of not being able to attack and move at the same time with the others.
HE might not, but whatever party he carries will.
Oh hey, it is three stacks on Geomancy! I’ll add that to the guide. That’s neat. That definitely helps tip things toward condition damage, but not a lot.
Edit: Woah. Not only does it give three stacks, it also counts toward VoJ hits. If you hit 5 enemies, VoJ goes off too.
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Decent stats but your condition cleaning is pitiful. Also, use Shelter instead of Dwayna. All you have to do is block one or two attacks to make Shelter heal for more, and you can use it proactively to block heavy boss hits. I’d also chuck the Divinity runes for something more worthwhile. Soldier would drop your DPS but increase survivability on account of the shouts, or you could go with something that’ll increase your damage output more meaningfully like 5 Citadel 1 Ruby, Pack, Eagle, etc.
may i ask you to post unbuffed builds, its really difficult to make comparisons when there are different buffs in builds.
Which buffs are you referring to?
Adding fiery wrath is huge but lets be honest here, its not a straight dps increase even though presented that way in the calculator, it requires burning which more or less require either specific utilities or an engi/ele around. In pve its a given but in wvw/tpvp im more than sceptical tbh. Its in situations like this that i wish i had a parser.
Even without Fiery Wrath active, it still does more damage and has higher effective health.
For purposes of DPS calculation I gave his and my builds identical consumables and assumed he also had a Force sigil equipped.
DPS for autoattack chain is given as the following:
((((Autoattack 1 + 2 + 3)) * (1+(critical damage multiplier * critical chance)))/AA chain total time)+(Burning damage * Burning uptime * AA chain total time)
Burning uptime is assumed to be .4 (aka 40% from passive VoJ from sword AA). for burning DPS.
All other things being equal, except for Fury uptime (of which he has 23% and I have 73%), I arrive at 2096 DPS for Kjel’s build and 2187 for mine, where mine peaks out at 2297.
Edit: Wording, math error
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This isn’t like other games (I think WoW did this?) where all of your skills scale off of one particular stat. Everything scales as you would expect – Your tooltip damage values scale off your Power stat. 40% critical chance means you crit 4 out of 10 swings on average. Critical damage is an additional increase in critical damage over the standard 50%. So with 0% crit damage a swing that normally hits for 1000 instead hits for 1500. If you have 50% critical damage it instead hits for 2000, because 50%+50%=100% which is double damage.
Toughness increases armor which directly decreases damage as the formula damage = (power * weapon damage * skill specific coefficient)/armor. The higher your armor, the less % reduction you get per point of armor; this is sometimes thought of as diminishing returns even though it isn’t strictly.
Switching around 10 points and leaving everything else roughly the same yields this:
Has higher effective health, and more damage, using cheaper runes and only an ascended amulet. On top of that, it has extremely high Fury uptime due to the combination of SY! and Citadel runes.
Try to swap the knight chest and the berserker legs with each other. if i remember correctly its favorable to have crit damage in the chest, you gain a couple of points. A bit uncertain here so Foofad or Akamon might perhaps fill in for me.
Shoulders, Gloves and Boots have the cheapest crit damage, followed by chest, then the rest is the most expensive. For trinkets, Amulets have the cheapest crit damage followed by Accessories, with Rings being the most costly. This no longer holds for Ascended Berserker/Berserker gear, which favors Rings and Accessories fairly equally followed by Amulets.
All soldier armor with berserker coat: 315 power, 152 toughness, 72 precision, 5% critical damage.
Soldier helmet, coat, leggings and berserker shoulder, gloves, boots: 315 power, 152 toughness, 72 precision, 6% critical damage.
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Near the end of the Pyroclasm sticky there are two sample builds, I reccomend the first one. It’s a good boon support build with lots and lots of Might for your party, and does reasonable damage on its own as well. You can swap armor and trinkets to taste, if you want more or less defensive stats.
I’d come off of some of that armor. 3.4k is a lot. You don’t have much critical damage to take advantage of your decent critical chance, so I’d swap in some Valkyie (chest and amulet to get the most crit damage for lease crit % cost) and consider using Berserker weapons.
Also, do you really need Energy sigils of you have permanent vigor anyway? Consider on-kill stats or something else to get you some more damage.
Try Runes of the Wurm. It gives Vitality, critical damage, and a flat damage bonus. Works well with high toughness builds. It also doesn’t cost as much as Divinity.
Of course. It’s a unique buff, it just doesn’t stack with itself.
It works well with Save Yourselves for obvious reasons, but aside from that you will almost never see all 9% of it. Kind of sad really because it has the potential to really help out the Virtues line and make it more attractive.
Guildwars2roleplayers.com btw, if you haven’t found it yet, has a massive guild listing.
3) i would not consider foodfad, he just want the “full berserker” equip because he thinks that “stunningstyles” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgYhGde9Qmc&feature=c4-overview&list=UUTR1RaHwL3UEx4DB6SzoiBQ) is really a pro gamer… anyway please dont use references to his useless posts.
Lol, what? I didn’t even post in Stunningstyles’ thread.
I don’t know why you have such a huge problem with me, but any time you’d like to address it substantively instead of trying to insult me every other post in this thread without me even being a part of the conversation, please: send me a PM instead of kittening up your own thread. You’d be doing yourself a favor.
That first sample build has 100% might duration and can keep a minimum of 12 stacks going indefinitely, it tops out at about 20-22 and can hit 25 in dungeons.
My impression was that Geomancy only put one stack out. If it is 3, then that’s much more worthwhile if you’re constantly weapon swapping.
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Empower + Purging Flames is a great combo, followed by a swap for Whirling Wrath or Mighty Blow.
I’m not really the authority on bunker builds, and I’m not even really sure that you can be a bunker build without capture points. That’s what “bunker” means – you can sit on a capture point in sPvP and not die. Since WvW is by its nature much more open and mobile, it makes much less sense to build specifically for durability since you are no longer talking about defending a small static location against at most a handfull of player. Instead you’re talking about defending a large open space and a half dozen NPCs against a horde potentially.
All that is to say that in my opinion, building for tanking alone in WvW is not wise, and instead you should build for a balanced approach at the tankiest. You need to be able to kill the glassy players and run away from the tanky players that can’t kill you in time. I know of a few hybrid builds in the 50-65% of full DPS build range that you might like though, if you want that. I’ve never spent much time with trying to tank WvW.
Show me the hybrid builds! ^-^
Thanks, Lurock!
This is one of the better ones I’ve run in WvW.
Run whatever food you want. Good Fury uptime, decent health and armor, extremely high burst potential via Shield of Wrath, Zealot’s Defense, and Mighty Blow. Downside: No sources of swiftness, but you do have two teleports. Decent condition cleansing between the two Meditations and Focus. Hits like a truck.
If you feel like you aren’t tanky enough, swap the runes for Melandru and jewels for Soldier. You may find that you really don’t need the -condition duration though on account of all your cleansing; that being the case, swap to Wurm instead, which gives you a decent amount of damage on top of an extra 1.5k health. You can also just go ahead and commit to -condition duration and rock Melandru and Lemongrass Poultry Soup for maximum reduction.
I haven’t run the actual numbers yet but with about a thousand condition damage and decent crit, you get roughly 300 DPS out of Earth. That compares more favorably than Fire sigils against a single target. So that’s neat. But Fire gives you a ton of AOE. Geomancy is IMO not worth it, because it’s at most one tick of bleed, maybe two if you have it on your other swap as well. So you’re looking at adding 100-200 DPS AOE that way, but if you have Permeating Wrath you’re already doing pretty good on that front.
The main advantage is in PVP giving them yet another condition that procs very often that they have to cleanse. It’s great for saturating out your target’s cleansing ability, which gives you a better chance of landing things like immobilize on scepter or Signet of Wrath and so on.
Use Unscathed Contender instead of Vengeful, in conjunction with Retreat! in order to score a DPS boost for the duration of the shout, or until you get hit. If you don’t like that, I’d get rid of Virtues altogether in favor of Zeal 10 + Fiery Wrath. I also wouldn’t use Generosity runes; They’re very expensive for what you get, and Force will help your anemic damage out, especially paired with Fiery Wrath.
Even with those changes, the damage from this isn’t the best, but it’s not terrible. Personally I would exchange the Knight’s armor for Valkyrie in order to take advantage of more critical damage and higher Power. You’ll in turn get more value out of Fury any time you have it, and the loss of critical chance won’t affect your Empowering Might much. If you’re zerging, swap the Valkyrie for Soldier’s.
Alternatively, suck it up and use Berserker armor as well. You’ve already got Pure of Voice and Altruistic Healing, you’re not going to die easily.
I have noticed when I have this trait equipped I don’t see it appear on any nearby allies, is this a bug? Is it just not showing that it’s affecting them?
IIRC it only shows up in combat.
I’d take Justice is Blind over Zealot’s Speed in that second build. You need more damage mitigation and that’s a good one. Also, your crit chance is so piddly anyway you’re better off with Purity or Strength in Numbers. I’d also take Writ of Exaltation over Persistence unless you’re using a hammer, because you’ll want to cast as wide a net as possible to get AH ticks when people are moving around.
Swap Hold the Line for Stand Your Ground, wear Valkyrie armor and Berserker trinkets and weapons. Take the 5 out of Valor and Virtues and put them into Zeal, pick up Fiery Wrath. It’ll help your DPS tremendously. Swap Valkyrie armor for Berserker armor once you get comfortable with the class.
Good rune combos are Lyssa, 5 Citadel + 1 Ruby Orb, Soldier for Shouts synergy, or Pack. Lots of options there. Good sigils would be Force and Fire to compensate for low Sword AOE damage.
I’m not really the authority on bunker builds, and I’m not even really sure that you can be a bunker build without capture points. That’s what “bunker” means – you can sit on a capture point in sPvP and not die. Since WvW is by its nature much more open and mobile, it makes much less sense to build specifically for durability since you are no longer talking about defending a small static location against at most a handfull of player. Instead you’re talking about defending a large open space and a half dozen NPCs against a horde potentially.
All that is to say that in my opinion, building for tanking alone in WvW is not wise, and instead you should build for a balanced approach at the tankiest. You need to be able to kill the glassy players and run away from the tanky players that can’t kill you in time. I know of a few hybrid builds in the 50-65% of full DPS build range that you might like though, if you want that. I’ve never spent much time with trying to tank WvW.
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