Critical Damage Changes

[Karizee]

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/l...amage-changes/


Learn About Critical Damage Changes

One of the balance changes coming in the April 2014 Feature Pack is the introduction of ferocity, a brand new stat that will affect your critical damage. Ferocity is being introduced to make bonus critical damage easier to understand, more easily scaled across the whole game, and to help foster a healthy balance environment that encourages players to experiment with their builds.




Converting Critical Damage to Ferocity

Ferocity will work the way a normal stat such as vitality or toughness works. It starts at a base of 0 points and can be increased with gear, traits, or buffs that add to your total ferocity value.

Ferocity will function very similarly to precision; both influence another stat. Just like your critical hit chance will go up as your precision increases, your bonus critical damage go up as you put more points into ferocity. As a result, critical damage will be displayed in manner that is consistent with the main stats on gear and skills, rather than just as a flat percentage.

All armors and weapons that currently provide a critical damage bonus will be updated to provide an equivalent amount of ferocity. As a bonus, you’ll notice that using ferocity as a stat is going to normalize critical damage across items so there isn’t a single item that’s clearly the best to equip for a critical damage boost. Areas such as trait lines, traits, and skills which provide critical damage have been rebalanced individually.




Reducing the Maximum Attainable Critical Damage

One of the main goals for balance in Guild Wars 2 is to support a wide variety of builds that cater to different play styles. The current implementation of critical damage works against this. Put simply, if critical damage-stacked builds are more effective than other approaches, the build diversity decreases. As we work to increase support and teamwork between players throughout the game, we examined how we could change critical damage to retain it as a fun and viable approach to build-making while also allowing other builds to shine.

The formula we’re using to convert ferocity into critical damage will reduce the current maximum obtainable values. At level 80, it will take 15 points of ferocity to gain 1% bonus critical damage, which means that there will about a 10% decrease in overall damage for a full “berserker” build.

This stat will still be incredibly valuable to a player looking to increase their damage output, but it will be more in line with other stats. Attainable critical damage currently in PvP will remain relatively untouched, as we feel that it is currently in a good place.




UI Changes

We have also made some changes to the way in which critical damage is displayed. Right now, if you were to open up your Hero Panel, you might look at your attributes and see that your critical damage is at 50%. What this really means is that you have a 50% bonus to critical damage. All critical hits have a base damage of 150% normal attack damage. So when you have 50% critical damage bonus, your critical hit damage is raised from 150% to 200%.

We’ll change the critical damage shown on the attributes panel to reflect the base as well as the bonus provided from ferocity, so that it will be easier to understand what’s happening when you land a critical hit on some poor foe.




Celestial Gear

Celestial gear, which provides a moderate boost to all stats rather than a significant bonus to a few stats, will be hit harder by these changes compared to other gear, since it provided relatively high critical damage values compared to other stats given out. To compensate, we’re increasing the overall effectiveness of Celestial gear by improving all stats by 6% of their current values.

Celestial gear in PvP had incorrect stat distribution so we’re increasing its effectiveness to be proportional to the new PvE values. This should open up more build diversity and allow you to bring your builds from other areas in the game into PvP.




These updates will help make other builds more viable, increase the clarity of the attributes panel, and fix core issues with critical damage.
See you all on the battlefield!

- Roy Cronacher

[Meledelion]

This just screams CLUELESS!

PFFFFFFFFFF, what a let down.

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This just screams CLUELESS!

PFFFFFFFFFF, what a let down.

[Valeron]

had to say it twice Mel?

anyway, I'm not really understanding why this change. Couldn't they just adjust the critical damage values? Instead they just seem to be adding a stat that only affects crit damage

[zito]

Complete merry-go-round change. What is the point of this? What did it even accomplish?

[Deleted]

So.. they changed the name of stat and nerfed it? Good that I'm using GS so my zerker will loose some dmg from crits but will gain some from new sigil xD

Btw... I don't remember that mob from first screenshot. Is it some unique model for a monster appearing just during some event? Background looks like Queensdale but I've never seen him.

[zito]

It's the troll event in queensdale.

[Deleted]

Thanks. I've completed Queensdale few times and really have never seen him.

[Meledelion]

had to say it twice Mel?

anyway, I'm not really understanding why this change. Couldn't they just adjust the critical damage values? Instead they just seem to be adding a stat that only affects crit damage

MMO-C was being slow so apparently it double posted, cba to change it though.

Complete merry-go-round change. What is the point of this? What did it even accomplish?

So.. they changed the name of stat and nerfed it? Good that I'm using GS so my zerker will loose some dmg from crits but will gain some from new sigil xD

Since you're all basically asking the same thing I grouped you together

The idea (all along) was to make other stats more appealing. I (and everyone else with half a brain) asked to buff other stats.
For dungeons there's two options: zerker vs conditions but because of the condition cap people don't go the condition route. To elaborate a bit in case anyone doesn't know.
All builds apply conditions on crit/hit be it burning, bleeding, poison,... regardless of if they want to or not. So let's say you have a necro (condimancer), a warrior, a thief, a guardian and a ranger. The pet, the ranger, and the war will apply bleeds (up to 7-10 stacks) that do (about)90dps per tick, the condimancer would do 202dps per tick so you're losing out on 935 DPS just because of the condi cap to bleeds, now bring in burning, poison and you see why conditions are in a horrible place.
So there's a couple of good possible solutions:
1. Remove the condition cap
2. Make better conditions overwrite bad ones without being able to be overwritten
3. Buff condition damage
4. Remove random conditions from zerker builds.

If you go into survival stats similar things happen. You simply do not get enough value for the points you're investing. You could make this better by making bosses hit for less but more often. You can also make the survival stats scale better so people can use less of it and be competitive.
Imo the best solution would be to just remove it completely from PvE since it's just training wheels and encourages passive/bad play (much like signets).
For healing the same bull shit happens, who cares if you can heal 2* better if you're still going to die in one hit? So now you need to sacrifice 2stats to get value for your gear since you need toughness/healingpower to make healing power worthwhile.

Now what they did was just nerf the output of the only viable setup all in the name of "build viability". Nobody will go with any of the other stats (aside from zerker) since the same issues are still there. Why would I bother going with conditions if I still lose 1k DPS just because of my team? Why would I bother going with toughness/vit? Why would I bother going with healing power?

The answer to your questions is simple. This is a short sighted change that won't even come close to achieving what they set out to do.

[carnifex2005]

had to say it twice Mel?

anyway, I'm not really understanding why this change. Couldn't they just adjust the critical damage values? Instead they just seem to be adding a stat that only affects crit damage

Why not? Now it's a number instead of a percentage. This is simply bringing it in line with all the other stats. Besides, nerfing crit damage a bit probably is for the best.

[zito]

Why not? Now it's a number instead of a percentage. This is simply bringing it in line with all the other stats. Besides, nerfing crit damage a bit probably is for the best.

Visually they brought it in line with other stats. Mechanically it did nothing and it is a pointless change that accomplished nothing but some "fluff" they can call part of their big "feature" patch.

[Valeron]

I suppose. I just think it was unneeded. I don't have an issue with nerfing crit damage but I do agree with Mel's post in that what was really needed was to adjust and change the other parts of combat such as conditions.

[Meledelion]

I'm doing some quick math to check the impact of ferocity. Just converting crit => ferocity without new optimisation.
Going with optimised builds for the team.

Thief: 18.66% DPS nerf
Ranger (excluding pet): 16.84% DPS nerf
Warrior: 11.29% DPS nerf
Elementalist 1: 18.92% DPS nerf
Elementalist 2: 16.87% DPS nerf
Guardian: 16.79% DPS nerf

Yup that's a 10% dps nerf allright...
/sarcasm

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Why not? Now it's a number instead of a percentage. This is simply bringing it in line with all the other stats. Besides, nerfing crit damage a bit probably is for the best.

It's fine if their goal was to nerf zerker but that wasn't their goal, well they claim that wasn't their goal anyway.
And besides if you want to tone down the "cheese" that comes from zerkers why not look at far more damaging things such as FGS(and the like), Frostbow, double/triple hit spots since they are far more damaging?

I hate liars, they could've just said "we don't like just how much dps zerkers do so we're toning it down" but instead they tout "we want to make all stats viable".

[Valeron]

there has to be a game engine limitation that is preventing them from really changing conditions. that is the only explanation I can think of

[zito]

there has to be a game engine limitation that is preventing them from really changing conditions. that is the only explanation I can think of

They did say that, but they also said the same thing about 2h not getting 2 sigil slots but... oh look

[Dezerte]

Visually they brought it in line with other stats. Mechanically it did nothing and it is a pointless change that accomplished nothing but some "fluff" they can call part of their big "feature" patch.

This sounds like a 'nerf' to me.

The formula we’re using to convert ferocity into critical damage will reduce the current maximum obtainable values. At level 80, it will take 15 points of ferocity to gain 1% bonus critical damage, which means that there will about a 10% decrease in overall damage for a full “berserker” build.

[zed zebes]

Hopefully its part of other changes to come. They still had to bring in line crit damage to go along with any other changes needed to diversify the PVE meta.

Why change crit damage to Ferocity? Well then you can do scaling off of Ferocity, like with other 6% of X is added to Y sort of stat bonuses.

[Meledelion]

And culling is another example.

They could implement simple stuff though, if you overcap conditions deal the dmg the condition would have applied.
For instance 10s bleed that ticks for 100/s => Deal 1k dmg to the boss.

[zito]

This sounds like a 'nerf' to me.

They could of done the same thing with the current crit damage visual. This transition is just fluff and serves no real purpose.

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And culling is another example.

They could implement simple stuff though, if you overcap conditions deal the dmg the condition would have applied.
For instance 10s bleed that ticks for 100/s => Deal 1k dmg to the boss.

Or you know create a separate stack of the same spell.

[Meledelion]

I was going with the scenario where they can't do that due to the engine.
We know "my" solution would work since they used that on the knights last zergfest.

[Valeron]

I actually proposed that solution (and I'm sure many others) a couple of months after the game came out.