test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Forums > Home› Class Forums›
GWF - Why is WS better then WMS for AOE?
mandragore139
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 13 Arc User
Hello, as you can read in the topic I'm wondering why exactly WS should be favored over WMS.
I realize that Group Assault gives a 5% dmg buff per mob hit. On the other hand WMS gives you basically a free second attack from your "mirror".
However, WMS does roughly 5-6% less dmg then WS - per hit. But if you consider that you get two hits, you still get 188-190% dmg vs 100% +5% per mob.
Well, we need to consider that WS 3rd attack does get roughly 70% bonus dmg, so it should look like this:
WS 100%(+5%per mob) +100%(+5%per mob) + 170%(+5%per mob) = 370%(+5%per mob)
WMS 2x88% + 2x88% + 2x88% = 528%
And this means that WS might become stronger as WMS - But only if you actually hit enough mobs, and I mean quite a lot of them.
Now I don't claim to be correct on this, nor do i claim that my numbers or calculations are. So I would be happy to get some feedback on this matter, especially If you favor WS and why.
On a side note, thanks to its 2 attacks WMS seems to be the best single target dms At Will power, or am I missing something
?
I realize that Group Assault gives a 5% dmg buff per mob hit. On the other hand WMS gives you basically a free second attack from your "mirror".
However, WMS does roughly 5-6% less dmg then WS - per hit. But if you consider that you get two hits, you still get 188-190% dmg vs 100% +5% per mob.
Well, we need to consider that WS 3rd attack does get roughly 70% bonus dmg, so it should look like this:
WS 100%(+5%per mob) +100%(+5%per mob) + 170%(+5%per mob) = 370%(+5%per mob)
WMS 2x88% + 2x88% + 2x88% = 528%
And this means that WS might become stronger as WMS - But only if you actually hit enough mobs, and I mean quite a lot of them.
Now I don't claim to be correct on this, nor do i claim that my numbers or calculations are. So I would be happy to get some feedback on this matter, especially If you favor WS and why.
On a side note, thanks to its 2 attacks WMS seems to be the best single target dms At Will power, or am I missing something
? Post edited by mandragore139 on
0
Comments
A couple quick notes in the interim:
2. Neither WMS nor WS alone can match even a poorly woven combination of both.
3. From my tests, a full 3 hits of WS per WMS buff (Tap WMS, hold WS through the entire strike, then tap WMS again to refresh the debuff) has the highest overall dps assuming you are not using animation canceling tricks to increase the number of hits.
The thing is, WS hits dramatically harder than WMS (about 50% harder for the first two hits and about twice as hard on the final hit), but because the WMS damage increase also applies to subsequent hits of WMS you don't notice this when you use either ability in a vacuum.
For single targets, and I haven't really stored the data for this because I haven't really had time yet, WMS is only slightly worse than comboing with WS, and Sure Strike overall appears to be slightly better than either set. I would assume that for a single target comboing SS with WMS would provide the overall best output, however I have yet to test this hypothesis because I haven't got to single target stuff yet.
I'm also trying to work out what the exact reduction in damage per target hit is, and how that interacts with Group Assault. I haven't finished my tests on WS yet but I have done the first few sets for WMS. So far it appears that per target hit, WMS loses ~15% of its maximum damage. I would appreciate any input to help confirm this number.
I haven't actually done any calculating ,but I can tell you from lots of experience that SS is worthless at level 60. There's a slight delay in your final swing, which can be dodged by observant players, and I didn't find nearly the same amount of visible damage via HP bars that I did with WMS. Same with WS. Pretty sure you're wrong about the -15% dmg as well. Again, I haven't actually calculated anything, I'm just going on what I see being done to enemies and opponents as I play. With the proper skill set, both WMS and WS can do significant damage.
Regarding Sure Strike:
This is nothing more than pure hypothesis based on some earlier rough tests, I have nothing really to back it up. This is also situation dependent, all of these are based on the assumption that we're dealing damage to PvE mobs that are standing still. PvP damage is a different beast entirely and should always be treated as such.
That said, I will still test it when I can get the chance, for SCIENCE!
Regarding the -15% per enemy:
I don't have a full data set yet, however I do have a WMS only data set for both 2 and 3 targets and the damage difference per average hit is ~15%, which is where I draw that number from.
To demonstrate:
Average Damage
Median Damage
2 Targets
821
624
3 Targets
697
531
The damage against 3 targets is roughly 85% of the damage against 2 targets, which in my mind is ~15%. This is taken from a 2 sets of ~10 minutes of just chaining the attack against the target dummies in the Trade of Blades. That works out to ~900 hits per dummy over the period, which is a fairly significant sample size. My end goal is to fill out this table for WMS to include single target data as well. I also intend to do a similar test set for WS and RS as well as a single target test set for SS, and SS with WMS debuff applied.
None of these tests will include dash cancelling, as that brings consistency of execution into play, and really doesn't effect the damage a given hit will do. An overall dps comparison between a normal rotation and one that is dash canceled will eventually follow, but if someone who is really consistent wants to test that they can go right ahead.
Hhaah, I'm actually interested to hear what you have to say. I've created my build solely on my own, there were no "guides" online at the time and I'm very happy with the results. I play very well in good groups in PvE, and I'm consistenly around 1st to 4th place in level 60 PvP. I'd be interested to see what you find. Again, I'm just going by my own experience, which has been awesome. I'd love to see actually stats of findings and calculations, it would be interesting. But from my experience, SS went into the trash when I got WMS. I was already using WS for its awesome buffs in groups, but SS was giving me problems. WMS allows you to focus on single OR groups effectively.
EDIT: Also, they just eliminated the dash bug, so it doesn't matter.
If you're using Sure Strike in PvP it's solely to get stacks of Weapon Master and Plague Fire up as fast as you can. You're not using it for DPS. DPS in PvP is primarily off of Encounters.
Blitz is one of the ones to use for PvE, but I switch it out for PvP. I've actually seen a number of GWFs for some hellish reason using SS in PvP at 60. And I enjoy running them down and then doing one on one. They never win.
I think that may be the most important thing to take away....
I see it as deeply amusing that the game's mechanics are so obscure that only reverse engineering tells us how they work, and that the difference in performance between different abilities is so irrelevant that only statistical analysis lets us see them.
i just assumed since WMS is a specific branch and later they might add better single dps encounter that you stuck using WS for that branch. add other class branches is profit for them
WMS on it's own does more or as much damage as Sure Strike.
Sure Strike is a tanking at-will, so you should not be surprised by this. It looks flashy, and it looks like it does damage, but if you really look at the numbers Sure Strike is an all around fail if you're trying to be a damage dealer. The only thing Sure Strike has going for it is an increased chance to crit and increased threat on a crit in the Sentinel tree.
The strongest single-target at-will attack you have access to is Reaping Strike as a Destroyer. If that's what you care about, anyway. If you're building purely for single-target damage, you've already done it wrong. This is one reason out of many why people do not want GWF in their groups.
WMS alternated with WS is great AoE damage, which is what the class is literally for and the only thing it does well. Why you would use a subpar single target ability on a class that can never hope to match even half of a TR's single target damage is a mystery to me.
I mean, seriously, you could do every single thing right and min/max your heart out but you are just not going to pump out the same single target numbers. It's not even in the same ballpark, TR are going to make you look like a fool if you're going single-target.
So why are you trying?
I automatically subbed WMS out in lieu of ws for the one-click spam system when I first got it. Currently, the 3 hits of ws outpace the 2hits of wms by a reasonable margin when you aren't unstoppable.
You'd probably be surprised to find out that the buff it provides is probably somewhere in the realm of 25% or 30%.
Again some more with the data! (keep in mind this is far from a complete table, however it should show the effect reasonably well.) What follows is Wicked Strike damage, both buffed and unbuffed with WMS.
Average Damage
Median Damage
Buffed
1178.41
1175
Unbuffed
916.93
915
The buffed damage is roughly the unbuffed damage * 1.3, so a gain of about 30%. This is from 3 target dummies, 10 minute tests that allow all 3 strikes of Wicked Strike to hit. A sample of a little over 1400 hits buffed and 1800 hits unbuffed.
I'm going to try to finish up my tests tonight and then get everything sorted out to start drawing conclusions from it.
No offense... but you clearly haven't even clicked on your combat log let alone actually read it.
Debuffs for other at-wills (including itself)
Sprint cancellable for max damage
1 click commitment which goes well with sprint cancelling
If you get a crit, applies 2 stacks of SoTS for 1 attack
Amazing single target + aoe damage, but used better when combined with other at-wills
Great in pvp and pve
That clone attack is ****in awesome
THE BEST.
You must use level 60 to 65 creatures that have defense so you can see the real #'s. There are many posts of players that have taken the time to test ArP, CRT, etc... and using 3rd party tools to log the data have real raw hard data and facts.
And it's obvious that your social skills are non-existent, but your signature already told me that. So you can feel free to ignore the rest of this post.
I based my decision on testing the different attacks on the target dummies, and I used an external combat log parsing tool rather than the in-game log which is far more limited. I just ran it again to make sure that something significant hadn't changed in a recent patch and also to try the tactic which was suggested about using WMS and then immediately using another attack before the animation could finish.. I didn't go for 10 minutes like whatsisface, more like 2-3 minutes per test, but that should still get a decent approximation. Testing DPS was, to my mind, a more valid test than using average damage numbers since the attacks all have different speed/frequency. Obviously wicked strike does more damage than sure strike... sure strike also makes 4 attacks in the same time it takes wicked strike to make 2.
So,
Total damage output on a single target with Sure Strike by itself was 1055 DPS. This includes the mostly irrelevant bleeding damage from Deep Gash and occasional hits from Steel Blitz. It's the big picture. Obviously this number is highly reliant on what gear you have, so look at it as a relative rather than absolute result. Total damage output on a single target with Sure Strike, with WMS mixed in using the recommended technique, was 1124. Improvement but pretty much tiny.
For Wicked Strike on 1 target, total damage was 744 DPS. A big step down. Wicked strike on a single target with WMS was 998. Not quite beating Sure Strike. But it's interesting that WMS gave a much larger performance boost to WS than it did to SS, for some reason. Possibly because wicked strike has slower animations overall, so canceling out of them saves you proportionately more time?
On 3 targets, Wicked Strike by itself was 2216 DPS. Total damage output on 3 targets with Wicked Strike, with WMS was 2851. Now that's a pretty big jump.
WMS by itself on both single targets and groups was roughly comparable to Wicked Strike by itself.
So, in my retest, it seems like on the whole WMS + WS is probably the best solution. It does significantly more damage to multiple targets than WS alone, and comes very close to Sure Strike's single target performance. SS + WMS had the best single target performance, but not by enough to care. It appears that the tactic of using animation canceling to reduce the time between usage of WMS and the usage of other attacks is necessary to see useful performance gains from using it.
As an aside, using the recommend WMS tactic makes my animation state glitch out frequently. Animation canceling also feels extremely exploitive and I wouldn't be surprised if this was patched.
For the type of testing I'm doing Target Dummies are fine, optimal even. I don't care if I'm getting 'real' numbers all I want are sets of data to compare to each other, as long as the only variables are the abilities that I'm testing then that is perfect for SCIENCE!
The problem with 'real' mobs is that they move around, they have variable stats, and they die. That makes getting large, consistent, samples difficult, which is where target dummies come in. I make the assumption that defense effects all the numbers equally and I can ignore defense as a variable in my tests.
That said, these numbers obviously cannot be taken as wrote for a dungeon, or even for random questing, but they are valuable for understanding how the abilities work, and work together.
WMS is worst case scenario in that it always starts and stops at a specific location, and will always start and stop at a specific location. The hit time is at the "longest" radius from animation to target, and this causes the delay in the first attack sequence as it goes n, n+1/2n, n, n, n... where n is the t-cycle rotation. This is in addition to the already delays that are now apparent. Our focus position plays little in fixing this problem.
As unstoppable, WMS gains the most benefit out of the increase in time values due to this nature, but still gets bugged with the time delay.
I like you already. = )
It also seems to me that some people forget to add the mirror strike dmg to the dps calculations...
From my calculations SS and WMS should be roughly the same dmg output. While singletarget wise WMS will beat WS so obvious that there shouldn't be any discussion necessary.
However, I overlooked a few points myself and have to do more testing.
BTW anyone testet our charge attack with the 25% singeltarget dmg boost?
The problem with sprint is less to do with animations, and more to do with the fact that while sprinting you can still be hit. If you're a wizard or cleric, you only have to be in "mid dodge" to be immune to the attack. A GWF has to actually physically clear the area/range of the attack before it arrives, i.e. sprinting has less chance to succeed than teleporting.
Character is what a man is in the dark
So yes it makes sens to mix WMS with one of the other at wills. Wich one seems to be situaional and the reasons vary wide.
SS for max singel target dps - and for fights where you can't allow yourself long "castingtimes" or get deathlocked.
WS for max aoe dps with group assault or for better attack arc.
At least for PVE I'm still considering reaping strike. I realize that this one won't be very popular, but from the numbers I see it has the potential to be viable. I'm especially interested in the 25% bonus vs a single-target from executioner's style. Because then it would be an universal alternative for SS and WS, especially if you spec Destroyer.