Todays topic of conversation from me is going to be food. Specifically Butternut Squash soup stuffs, and omnomberry ghosts. Is 350 life steal every 3rd hit better than 10% crit damage and 1 crit chance?
Before I begin with math and explinations, let me start by saying how I believe ghosts work, and if you have any difference of opinion or notice any mistakes I may have made, please point them out. When ghosts activate, they remove an extra 350 HP from your opponent and give it to you. Creating a 700 HP swing in your favor. I believe it works this way, because for awhile, you could kill buffed WvW camp supervisors with the effect from life steal foods. While this isnt exactly the same as doing 700 damage, it has the same effect in the end, because youre up 350 and your opponent is down 350. Ghosts state that they have a 66% chance to steal life on crit, if we have a 50% crit chance (its actually 59~ from the back and 52~ from the front), then we can half that number and get 33% or 1 in 3 hits steals life. Since we’re slightly above 50% than we’re slightly above 1 in 3 hits steals life (like 34%). If we look at the basic thief rotation, Backstab > auto attack > Cloak and Dagger, it’s 6 hits. So we’ll generate a 1400 HP swing in our favor using omnom ghosts on average. (2 procs for 350 each, so 350*2=700 HP stolen, which means 700 gained as well, 700+700=1400)
When fighting something like a guardian with big defense and protection, the answer is that omnom ghosts obviously win. The less damage you do overall to your target the more useful a static damage increase number becomes over a % modifier. The question is when do they balance out and when does butternut curry become better.
To start with, lets determine the damage increase from 10% crit damage and 1% crit chance. To do this, we’ll take our damage (1) and multiply it by none-critchance (42 with ghosts) and take our crit damage (crits are +50% damage (1.5) to start, and we have 102 crit damage without curry so 2.52) and multiply it by our critchance (58 with ghosts) then add them together. Then we’ll divide that into the the same thing but with butternut squash’s stats added. This will give us a 1.xxxxx number, where xxxxx is the % increase.
So it looks like this:
(1*.42) + (2.52*.58)=1.8816
(1*.41) + (2.62*.59)=1.9558
1.9558/1.8816=1.0394345~
Or simply speaking, a 3.9% damage increase from +1 crit chance and +10% crit damage.
Now what we need to do is determine how much you need your rotation to hit for, for a 3.9% damage increase to be 1400 damage. To start, rather than determine what our averages would be or anything else, lets just use high end numbers and see what happens. Lets say our BS does 10k, auto attacks hit for 2k then 3k, and CnD does 5k. This is what you can expect to hit an uplevel or GC for in my experiance with crits, so we’ll go with this. But keep in mind, against a target with a clue, your numbers wont be this high, and the lower these numbers, the worse off butternut squash is.
10,000+2,000+3,000+3,000+5,000=23,000
23,000*1.0395=23908
Which is an 908 damage increase per rotation. Which is more than Ghosts actually just steal, but not by much. If you gain health from them, the ghosts clearly win, even when we use “Im attacking a glass cannon” type numbers for our damage.
Conclusion
So we know that butternut squash soup stuff is the best food for effective power increase, and we can see that if you take any damage at all omnom ghosts beat it, even when dealing with uplevels and glass cannons. So we have to base this on playstyle really. If you take any damage at all while fighting stuff, ghosts win. If you take 0 damage ever, Squash wins if youre fighting weak stuff. If all you do is CnD dagger and BS stuff, and nothing else, Squash wins.
