Can someone explain why vorpal is so good?

bkloes

If I understand correctly vorpal increases how much damage you do on a critical hit. I think we are at 75% so this means that we normally add 75% more damage and with a regular vorpal (+25) crits would do 100% more damage.

So if my character has a 40% chance to crit.....I will do so slightly less than half the time. Without the vorpal I am still doing bonus damage just not the 25% bonus. I can see how this would be the best for PvP spike damage....but when considering PvE and continuous damage on a boss.......this is where I am confused.

If another shard adds damage with each hit.....I can 2x this effect since I only crit on half my hits. Also wouldn't the additional damage be multiplied by 75% on a crit....raising my end damage for that hit? I guess my confusing relates to how increasing the bonus by 25% on something that happens only half the time is any better than say 15% damage on every hit.....with other effects such as reduced defense or healing?

inthefade462

There is no enchant that adds +15% damage on every hit. There are enchants that add +x% of weapon damage to each hit. Weapon damage being only a small portion of the overall damage you do with powers, especially with encounter powers.

ie if your weapon is 400-500 base damage, and an enchant adds +20% weapon damage (perfect level enchant), it's only adding 100-125 damage to each attack.

None of your attacks are only weapon damage. at wills and especially encounters have their own factors and multipliers to base weapon damage.

edit removed some bad math, trying to figure out how to write the formula in layman's terms.

bkloes

One thing you said makes alot of sense...that is it is only weapon damage....That 15% was the plague fire but that is the defense reduction stacked 3 times or something like that....So vorpal adding a % to your total damage is alot....even if it is only half the time or so

tcarnce

i don`t know about % and stuf, but works prety good ;p for both pve and pvp.
plaguefire probably better when dpsing a boss alone.
but i`m not rich enough to buy perfects of both and the weapon to put in to.
i like pvp too a bit, so vorp`s the better choice.

fondlez

TRs are low weapon damage, low aoe class, extreme crit class.

1. This means DoT weapon enhancements and chaining enhancements will be the least effective on this class already.

2. On top of that, a very high crit rate, much higher than 36%, is possible (the point at which crit damage becomes higher than non-crit damage from random damage at the default crit severity of 75%).

3. Good TR's do not do random crit damage. They stack more damage and other crit damage during crits, e.g. from bleeds. They increase crit severity from crits, etc. So, critting becomes the key to most of your damage in many builds.

So, given the above synergies, this makes Vorpal an extremely strong enhancement for PvE.

Finally, most PvP builds on CW and TR classes are about burst. Nothing beats Vorpal in burst damage unless you use some very specific Greater Tenebrous builds (which are getting nerfed soon, according to a post yesterday by a Crytpic designer).