How to fox dps?

_Kawaii_ - Harshlands

Title says it all.

I recently respeced to Heavy armor and was wondering what I should be doing to max my dps in fox form?

Should I still be dpsing in caster?
Should I keep amp up then switch back to caster?
Or should I just Use Amp and melee every boss?


Thx so much fox Venos!

Solandri - Heavens Tear

Depends on your equipment.

http://pwi-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=502212

WaffleChan - Sanctuary

do everything a normal venomancer would do in robes or LA. ]: you kinda gimped your damage dealing capability going into heavy armor though lol.

Peritia - Lost City

WaffleChan - Sanctuary wrote: »

do everything a normal venomancer would do in . . . LA. ]: you kinda gimped your damage dealing capability going into heavy armor though lol.

I don't understand why people have such a hard time with this.

Damage for a uncompromising or armour-compromise heavy build is exactly the same as that of a standard Light Armour build.

It's also worth noting that a respec on veno is not like a respec on any other class as your pet makes up a fair portion of your damage output.

For instance, if your pet's damage makes up half of your combined damage output then a reduction which would reduce your own damage by half will only reduce your combined damage output by 25%. Considering that Veno skills are more oriented towards debuffing than damage-dealing and the difference becomes even less relevant.

WaffleChan - Sanctuary

absolute BS.

there are very many renditions of the LA build, whereas they can have significantly higher m.atk than HA. if you dont have the money to pimp yourself out, you wont see much higher than an 8x vit arcane in terms of m.atk.

lets give them equivalent refine comparison, an LA and an HA.
allowance of a more flexible build will show you how wrong you are lol:

LA: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=d1d43b6ee17cf164
HA: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=ad1c95410ece8a10

look at how much better the m.atk is on the LA when given similar gear to the HA. your claims are invalid, because quite frankly its upto the LA if they want to continue in mag and leave their vit at 3, or cap mag, and go for other stats. really, HA sucks offensively.

Isala - Sanctuary

There's a catch here, of course, that nobody ever stops to think about. Are you HA, or HA/AA? There is a HUGE difference. Because, if you are HA/AA, you can get a hell of a lot more power by making sure every piece of your robes comes with + Mag, or -%channeling. And it's quite simple to do. Wear your HA when you're going to take hits, and wear your robes when you want to blast the ever loving **** out of things. Most LA gear doesn't come with Magic, whereas on the other hand a lot of AA does. So, combine your pieces of AA and HA, and you'll have the + Mag on the AA giving you power, and the def on the HA giving you more survivability, and it should equal out to more than the equivalent resists of an LA Veno.

Now. As for the original question, it varies by mobs. Wood mobs? Smack on them. Your wood damage won't hit them as hard. Earth mobs? Blast them. Wood hurts them like no other. As for the other 3 elements? Know the mob. Does it have high Mag Def, or high Phys Def? Work the stats. Got a mob with a bonus stat on it? Work around it. Increased Mag Res crumple when hit by Amp and Melee.

Peritia - Lost City

WaffleChan - Sanctuary wrote: »

absolute BS.

there are very many renditions of the LA build, whereas they can have significantly higher m.atk than HA.

Peritia - Lost City wrote: »

Damage for a uncompromising or armour-compromise heavy build is exactly the same as that of a standard Light Armour build.

Please read what people post carefully before you start making assumptions. I never disputed that a LA has more room to play with bonuses on their gear than a heavy does. Heavy gains defensive capability while LA can tweak more toward damage (or defensive).

And you failed to address the fact that, as I stated, as the venomancer themselves is not the sole source of damage, it's not as simple as directly comparing the stats of two venomancers alone.

When the pet is factored in, the "gimped damage dealing capability" is simply not reality.

* * *

EDIT: Going to add in one more thing before you come roaring back to bite my head off.

I AGREE that the Heavy Venomancer, when taken by themselves, will have lower magical offensive power than a LA Venomancer who has put any effort into improving beyond base requirements. I disagree that it "sucks", but that's a matter of opinion. I will state again that as the Veno's true damage output is a combination of their own damage and that of their pet, the Veno's lowered magic attack taken my itself does not reflect the pair's full damage. The Heavy Venomancer as a general rule strives to increase defensive capabilities of the master... The pet is unaffected and that's part of why it can work.

I will note as well that Heavy Venos have a (proportionally) much higher P.Atk than LA counterparts, although obviously Physical Damage is a side-effect and not a goal.

Solandri - Heavens Tear

WaffleChan - Sanctuary wrote: »

LA: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=d1d43b6ee17cf164
HA: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=ad1c95410ece8a10

look at how much better the m.atk is on the LA when given similar gear to the HA. your claims are invalid, because quite frankly its upto the LA if they want to continue in mag and leave their vit at 3, or cap mag, and go for other stats. really, HA sucks offensively.

Interesting. I tossed the mag and phys attack numbers for those builds into my attack DPS spreadsheet. I turned on sage fox form and sage melee mastery, and the spells were all sage versions. For the heavy, I also swapped out the magic rings for two rings of the heavenly lord (might rings).

Normalizing everything to the heavy's regular melee damage, I got:
Regular melee: 1.00
Regular melee w/ -0.1 interval sleeves: 1.14
Sparked melee: 1.43 (avg over time 1.26)
Sparked melee w/ -0.1 interval sleeves: 1.63 (avg over time 1.43)

The spell damage for the light build, I got:
Venomous: 0.99
Ironwood: 1.31
Blazing: 1.29
Lucky: 1.28

So it seems like the melee offense of the heavy pretty much matches the caster offense of the light (the lack of channeling really ends up hurting). If the heavy has -0.1 interval sleeves, it exceeds the light's DPS. The only thing I'm unsure about is how sparking would affect spell damage. It's tough to factor into an average DPS because of the long cooldowns on the different spells. I have no way to tell which spells would be cast while sparked.

Incidentally, with the builds you posted, the difference in spell damage is not as dramatic as the difference in m.atk. Spell damage of the heavy ends up 7%-12% less than the light. Pet heal is 14% less. Course if I'm spam healing, I put on my arcane armor with +mag bonuses...

Isala - Sanctuary wrote: »

There's a catch here, of course, that nobody ever stops to think about. Are you HA, or HA/AA? There is a HUGE difference. Because, if you are HA/AA, you can get a hell of a lot more power by making sure every piece of your robes comes with + Mag, or -%channeling. And it's quite simple to do. Wear your HA when you're going to take hits, and wear your robes when you want to blast the ever loving **** out of things. Most LA gear doesn't come with Magic, whereas on the other hand a lot of AA does.

Well, arguably, the LA veno could do the same thing too to boost her mag stat. I know most of them don't while most HA venos do. But just saying.

Peritia - Lost City

Very neat... Wasn't expecting the melee damage to be that significant. Certainly helps credibility of heavy builds endgame when sage/demon skills are factored in.

Thanks for posting that, Solandri. ^^

If the same calculations were redone without Sage skills, the melee component would fall to approximately 73% of that of Sage, I believe... It would be interesting the quantify the DPS difference without Lv.11 skills as well.

Solandri - Heavens Tear

Peritia - Lost City wrote: »

If the same calculations were redone without Sage skills, the melee component would fall to approximately 73% of that of Sage, I believe... It would be interesting the quantify the DPS difference without Lv.11 skills as well.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Heavy melee DPS with level 10 melee mastery is 83% that of Sage melee mastery.

Light build with level 10 spells (normalized to level 10 melee mastery DPS):
Venomous: 1.01
Ironwood: 1.39
Blazing: 1.28
Lucky: 1.42

Heavy with level 10 spells does 9-14% less damage. Pet heal is still 14% less.

Brael - Dreamweaver

Are you factoring in the skills that are a damage gain for a heavy or is it straight up melee? I would think sage befuddle, and especially demon fox wallop would significantly alter those results.

Solandri - Heavens Tear

Brael - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Are you factoring in the skills that are a damage gain for a heavy or is it straight up melee? I would think sage befuddle, and especially demon fox wallop would significantly alter those results.

Straight up melee. The fox skills still perform rather poorly in terms of chi and mana efficiency. Once you add the level 90 -0.1 interval sleeves, your regular melee damage exceeds all the fox skills which don't require chi. And the chi skills perform worse than if you used the chi for a spark and did regular melee. DPS of Sage versions of the fox skills, 3% channeling, normalized to regular melee:

Regular melee: 1.00
Regular melee, -0.1 interval: 1.14
Fox Wallop: 1.21
Befuddling: 1.08
(the following are 92 and 99 skills)
Stunning Blow: 1.32
Leech: 0.81
Consume: 0.39
Malefic: 0.73

I only looked at Sage since I plan to go sage and aren't really interested in Demon. Here are the numbers for Demon versions (including fox form and melee mastery), again normalized to Sage regular melee = 1.00.

Regular melee: 0.89
Fox Wallop: 1.14
Befudding: 1.00
Stunning: 1.24
Leech: 0.77
Consume: 0.35
Malefic: 0.70

Edit: I should clarify that these numbers are for the heavy build and equipment Waffle posted.

Demon fox wallop has a 20% chance to make all hits critical for 5 sec. It's 0.7 sec channel + 0.5 sec cast and consumes 20 chi. 20 chi needs 5 regular melee hits to generate, which takes 4 sec. So if you spammed wallop as often as chi allowed, 20% of the time every 5.2 sec would have 5 hits for 2x damage. Otherwise there's a 8% crit rate. I'm not sure if wallop's damage is doubled, or if only hits afterward are doubled.

Regular sage hit: 1.08*4850 = 5238 avg
Regular demon hit: 1.08*4338 = 4685 avg
Wallop: 1.08*5538 = 5981 avg

If wallop is doubled:

0.2*( 2*(5338 + 5*4338)) + 0.8*1.08*(5338 + 5*4338) = 34416 per 5.2 sec
= 6618 DPS
= 1.26 normalized to regular sage hit

If wallop isn't doubled:
0.2*( 1.08*5338 + 2*(5*4338)) + 0.8*1.08*(5338 + 5*4338) = 33397 per 5.2 sec
= 6423 DPS
= 1.23 normalized to regular sage hit

The time-averaged sage sparked regular melee DPS was 1.26, so a sage fox using his chi for sparks on average does the same or slightly better than a demon fox using his chi for Fox Wallop. The demon would of course do more damage in the 5 sec after the crit buff from Wallop fires, but on average the sage does the same or more damage.

This might change if facing multiple opponents and using Befuddling Mist.