Talk:Damage/Archive 1

Damage done formula incorrect?

I don't think the damage formula is correct it says "weapon damage * power", but when I look at my hero: the attack statistic is weapon damage + power. If the formula is correct, this would mean that the attack statistic is not directly proportional to the damage done.

Example:

if weapon damage = 1000 and power = 1000 then attack statistic = 2000 and damage done = 1.000,000 (when skill coefficient/armor = 1)

but if weapon damage = 200 and power = 1800 then attack statistic = 2000,and damage done = 360,000 (when skill coefficient/armor = 1)

this would imply that the attack statistic is useless, since it gives no indication of the damage you will do.

The attack statistic on the hero tab is indeed useless. If you can tell me of any skills that scale by the sum of weapon strength and power, I would be greatly interested to hear of it. ~ Capric 04:24, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Did what I could.

Feel free to savagely edit this article to your liking. ---~=Ѧrtѧxϵrxϵs (Talk) 11:11, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

What is your source for the second sentence? " It is one of the three main elements of the combat system in Guild Wars 2, the others being support and control." I'd like to use it but can't find it anywhere. ~ Bow 03:33, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

It is the healing and death article. -- Aspectacle  04:31, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Dance, baby, dance.

"Point blank skills cause an effect around the caster, like Cyclone Axe"

Cyclone Dancing is back in Guild Wars 2! A F K When Needed 21:38, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Melee damage

This section of the page was confusing me at first, I think because it doesn't fit with the others in the same section. Melee in gaming parlance is close range combat - it can be used to apply dots and can also be aoe. This means it is confusing when you try to talk about bows and attribute a particular damage type to all weapons which could possibly be used in melee. I'd like to change the section title to 'direct damage' and rework the section accordingly. Any thoughts or objections? -- Aspectacle  23:29, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

See what you can do. We can always undo if we don't agree ;D --71.206.69.248 01:25, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Re-organizing

Hmm...How do we go about organizing the types of damage...I was thinking of making a category for magic damage, but how would i organize things? I mean i don't think it would look very good to have a projectiles section in both the magic and melee damage sections. Someone try to figure this out. The solution is probably staring me in the face and I can't put my finger on it. ---~=Ѧrtѧxϵrxϵs (Talk) 09:38, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

IMO, if you want to be precise, you'll have to join several sub-categories to cover everything, like we do with the skill tree.

Maybe something like this?

+ Damage
  + Damage by type
    + Elemental damage
      + Fire damage
      + Cold damage
      + ...
    + Physical damage
      + Piercing
      + ...
    + ...
  + Damage by range
    + Long range damage
    + Medium range damage
    + Close range damage
    + Melee damage
  + Damage by duration
    + Immediate damage
    + Damage over time
  + Damage by magnitude
    + Single target damage
    + Area of effect damage
      + Spheric area damage
      + Conic area damage
  + Damage by intial position
    + Point blank damage
    + Ground targeting damage
    + Creature targeting damage

Chriskang 10:36, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

IMO, the type of damage (i.e. fire vs lightning vs piercing etc) should be either a side note or a separate section of its own. My reasoning is that most ways to deal damage can deal multiple different types of damage. For example (using GW1), Cyclone Axe deals slashing/piercing (depending on your axe) melee damage in a spheric area, whereas Inferno deals fire damage in a spheric area. A bow may deal piercing damage in projectile form, whereas a wand may deal all kinds of different elemental damage in projectile form. The most important thing about the damage dealt is in what form it's delivered (i.e. melee/touch vs projectile vs no-projectile spell, AoE vs single target, DoT vs one-time), and the type of damage then dealt is completely different. There's my 2 cents for the night. - ThatOneGuy 06:02, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Speaking of damage types, is there anything in existence that gives half of a damn about them? There doesn't seem to be anything that specifies armor against, say, fire damage or elemental damage in general. Or at least it's not indicated on this page and I can't recall any from my beta experience. I distinctly remember there being specific armor against fire or such in guild wars 1 (which i recognize is not the same game) and it seems that from what I can gather about GW2 it's all or nothing. You're either preventing all damage types or none of them. Am I incorrect? Milchut 23:16, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

As far as skills and traits go, no, none of them mention anything about damage types. In GW2, damage is damage is damage. —Dr Ishmael 23:34, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Life steal

Could I get a sauce for both the fact that life steal exists (instead of just damaging a foe and receiving an equivalent amount of health) and that it ignores armor? It says nothing about that in the article. Aqua (T|C) 18:17, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Falling damage

"The amount of damage is dependent on the distance fallen and it is possible to fall far enough to enter a downed state."

I'm pretty sure I've seen people falling and imediately going into defeated state. It wouldn't make sense to go into downed state, since there probably isn't any enemy nearby you can kill to rally. Anyone can back me up? I think I remember a charr dying in the Black Citadel from a fall in the Imperator's Core's spiral staircase. Also, is it dependant on whether or not the person was in combat? Because being defeated right away could be a little bit over the top for PvP. --188.250.31.187 11:24, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Any way of dying, even a fall, can lead directly to a defeated state. A stated in their Arenat's beta development update in February : "Each point of downed penalty you accrue will reduce the length of your starting downed bar by one quarter. This starts with the first time you are downed and each point goes away after one minute. This means that, in order to have literally no chance to rally, you would need to be downed four times within a minute." You can clearly see the system in place while watching some early dungeon videos (Ascalonian Catacombs during press beta).

As for rallying after falling too hard, the bandage skill (the universal fourth one) allow a character to completely self-recover their health... as long as they don't take damage (condition included). --  Leonim _{[talk·contribs]} 15:46, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

I know that, but I am pretty sure dying from falling is different from dying in other ways. Here is the video I was talking about (at 6:45, in case the link doesn't work correctly). He clearly didn't die for way more than one minute prior to the fall, and still goes directly to defeated state when he falls (even though the UI is turned off, the image becomes B&W and the camera zooms out, which is an indicator of the player being defeated). --188.250.7.159 01:32, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Hehe, I now remember MikeB's video tours, in another one (in Hoelbrak if I remember correctly), his character was running without clothes (he didn't thought of using the town clothes) because she had acccumulated too much death penalty elsewhere in the game (and was flat broke from testing stuff). As a side note, the vids were taken during the first press event (and published a few days after, on the 20th of February) while the blog article was published on the 21st. Anyway, you may be right about falling being a dangerous sport leading to a direct defeated state... more on that this weekend (no NDA).

I'm taking this opportunity to rebound on an interesting game suggestion I saw (and commented) about gw1:Feedback-talk:User/Aeranima/Parachuting/Engineer, aka parachute (both the article and talk page are worth the read). :) --  Leonim _{[talk·contribs]} 12:15, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

(Late to the party) Yes, you can go directly to defeated. This happened to me in Divinity's Reach. The bridges above the spoke roads are high enough (except the lowest ones nearest the outside) to do in a character of around level 9. Cynique 05:47, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

Could it be that the falling damage calculation is buggy anyway? When doing the jump riddle on one of the borderlands (wvw) you need to jump through a waterfall and get falling damage. I often get weird calculations. The weirdest happened yesterday: My warrior has ~27k HP... falling damage 9k and I was left with 3k HP (lowest I ever had when doing the riddle). You don't need to be a math genius to immediately notice that there's something off. Another thing... today I jumped off a cliff with a warrior friend. I'm level 80 and he is level 59. We both have the 50% falling damage reduction active. I survived with ~3k, he died. If falling damage was proportional % he should have survived too. --192.168.104.81 09:07, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

The Guild Wars Wiki has an article on

Do we really still need this tag on basic game mechanics? As were approaching launch I feel like we should remove stuff like this, there's really no realtion to damage in Guild Wars 1 except they both make red bars go down. --Indigo121 23:14, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree and will remove it right away. Mediggo 10:01, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Damage numbers on skill pages.

I always wondered, why do skill pages list damage numbers (condition damage and raw damage)? Damage is dependent on level and stats and the number will vary in each build, so I think having damage numbers on the pages is inaccurate. Thoughts? MrDark 21:39, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

It's all explained here - the damage/healing numbers reflect base stats at level 80. We haven't been able to derive the complete damage scaling formulas yet, so that's the best we can do. —Dr Ishmael 22:30, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. MrDark 22:32, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Actual Damage

Yes, i know the actual damage formula isn't out yet, but I have gather some data during the stress test on 8/15 and they seem pretty interesting. First off, i noticed that the weapon damage displayed in the Hero panel is the max damage of the weapon, if someone is equipping 2 weapons(main hand and off hand) it will display the average of the max weapon damage of both weapons. This makes using the attack value straight from the hero panel in damage calculations useless, especially when dealing with main and off hand weapons since each weapon skill calculates damage according the equipped weapon individually not the average of the weapons.The displayed damage on the skill panel though is based on the average of the min and max damage of the equipped weapon. The relationship between skill damage and weapon attack is also linear, similar to skill damage vs power. Tested on warrior and ranger. @ 2319 power, the skill damage shown on Chop while equipping a Steady Axe(127 avg wpn dmg) and a PvP Axe(952.5 avg wpn dmg) is 85 and 638 respectively. 85/127 = 0.6694, 638/952.5 = 0.6698. Same skill, same set up, but @ 1396 power (removed amulet and jewel) Chop displayed 51 and 384 dmg respectively 51/127 = 0.4016, 384/952.5 = 0.4031. Same for all other skill across the professions. But the displayed skill damage vs BOTH power and weapon damage is still unknown.

Now onto actually damage. It seems on a heavy golem, the actual damage is pretty much the same as the displayed damage on the skill,give or take 1(rounding?). And it seems that for most skills, when hitting the same armor with the same displayed damage with a steady weapon, the actual damage stays the same.This implies the only damage variation in game comes from the weapons only, no other random seeds are applied except from picking a random number from the weapon damage. Naturally, the damage shown on light and medium golems are much higher than the ones on heavy golem. But the strange thing is, i deal MORE damage on MEDIUM golems than on LIGHT golems. Tested this on different professions with different skills, the damage on the MEDIUM golem is ALWAYS HIGHER than on the LIGHT golem. Maybe it was a stress test and Anet messed up for the day, i would really like to test it out again. Delques1843 02:43, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Just to add to this, from my observations as well as looking at the numbers above, it looks like in general skill damage is proportional to the product (Power)*(Avg Weap Dmg). To use the numbers above for Chop with a PvP Axe, 2319 power gave a (skill dmg)/(weap dmg) ratio of ~0.6698, and 1396 gave ~0.4031. Notice that 0.6698*(1396 / 2319) = 0.4032, which suggests that (Skill Dmg) = k*(Power)*(Avg Weap Dmg), where k is a constant that depends on the skill.

From what I have seen, k tends to be on the order of (1/10000) = (1/100^2). Also, to be clear I have only investigated this at level 80, so I can't say if level should get factored in somewhere.

I can confirm that light and medium golems appear to have swapped armor right now. The most I can say about it is that it appears that the direct damage each golem takes appears to vary by a fixed factor (no surprise). Compared to heavy golems, medium golems take ~28% more damage, and light take ~19% more, at least from Steady PvP weapons. This would really have to be checked on an empty pvp server though to control toughness and armor. Timikoy 05:27, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Do you have data you could show backing your conclusions about damage being based on the product of power and weapon damage? The attack stat listed in the hero panel is the sum of power and weapon damage, which makes me think that's a much more likely baseline for damage. That would also match the way that armor appears to be the sum of toughness and defense, rather than their product. --Felbryn 22:56, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, Timikoy and Delques1843 did actually show their data; those numbers only make sense if it's multiplicative. I'm not aware of any comprehensive data summary of damage done by weapon strength and power, since honestly the multiplicative nature of formula has been pretty well accepted for quite a while (longer than it's been listed on the wiki for sure). Anyway most tooltips update their damage with your equipped weapon, so it's really trivial to go verify that part yourself. Hm, looks like the only actual damage done numbers (as opposed to tooltips) I have on a skill that scales with weapon strength is for Mind Wrack: 1 illusion, power 916, weapon strength 122 - 49 damage; 1 illusion, power 916, weapon strength 952 - 386 damage. I can throw you a bunch of bwe1 data too but that's tricky because it's formatted so I can understand it (read: and no one else probably can since things are labelled haphazardly) and the numbers may or may not match up precisely with current damage numbers for those skills.

But yes, the attack stat listed in the hero tab is completely meaningless. ~ Capric 00:52, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Types of skills which are not affected by power/precision?

The article says power increase weapon hits, but it does not explicitly state whether power does or does not increase condition damage. The same is true with precision. Can condition damage crit? How about healing? I hope these points can be clarified in the article.

Power only affects standard damage; Condition Damage affects condition damage. Only standard damage can crit. —Dr Ishmael 12:34, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Revamp

I am really not a fan of this page: I find it heavy on confusion and light on information. I have made a substantial revamp and wouldn't mind getting some input on it before I just update this page willy nilly. ~ Capric 23:59, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Quick comments:

• I would remove the "Dealing damage" header, that content can easily be absorbed into the intro section.
• Don't captialize "damage" in the other headers.
• Under "Condition damage," provide a list of the damage formulas; I don't think we have that summarized anywhere else, and it could be useful for making comparisons.
• Under "Falling damage," change the sentence before the trait list (which I know you copied from the existing article) to something like: "All professions except elementalist have a trait that reduces falling damage by 50%, along with triggering an additional effect." Maybe also list the trait line? I dunno.

I'll do a thorough check tomorrow to see if you left out anything that might be important. —Dr Ishmael 05:00, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Made those suggested edits. Any and all comments are greatly appreciated. ~ Capric 05:31, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Looks wonderful. I'm not sure if there's actually any need to saturate the article with all the icons for conditions and stuff, like previously has been done. Mediggo 05:37, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Icons are nice if used sparingly, like in Capric's condition damage table. I'd also think condition icons would be okay in the "Direct damage" section, mostly because the base presentation is so clean that they wouldn't be exacerbating an existing problem (like in the current article).

Comparing to the original article, I think the only thing missing is a line about positioning. However, I don't know if we know enough about this to be worth mentioning yet.

Additional comments/suggestions:

• "Some skills are not affected by weapon damage" etc. Isn't this the same as utility/elite skills? Are there any weapon skills that ignore the weapon damage? (This includes skills from transformations and bundles/kits, each of them have their own weapon damage stat.) Or are there any non-weapon skills that recognize weapon damage?
• To stay aligned with in-game terms, I think we should use target or foe instead of opponent.
• Specifically mention Might as increasing Power, it's the only boon that does so (everything else is a generic effect, not a yellow-pentagon-icon boon). Likewise, mention Fury as increasing crit chance.
• Move the glancing bullet immediately below the critical hit bullet, since they are direct opposites.
• Combine the two passive effect bullets: "Various other effects that increase the attacker's outgoing damage or decrease the target's received damage, including those from upgrade components, traits, nourishment, etc."
• Combine the block and dodge bullets, in terms of dealing damage they're essentially the same thing - the target actively did something to prevent the attack from hitting them.

Now I'm getting into the nitty-gritty stuff, so I think I'll stop. —Dr Ishmael 16:16, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

I am completely neutral on the whole icon thing, but I also have a terrible eye for layout. I'll probably adopt most suggestions, however I did want to address a couple of points:

• Positioning - I have no data that suggests positioning has any effect in general. Now, some skills have different effects based on positioning, but I feel that should be dealt with on skill pages. If I'm wrong here and have been missing something, please let me know!
• Yes, some weapon skills are not based on weapon damage. I'm most familiar with the mesmer skill set, but all phantasms are not based on weapon damage. As for any utility/elite skills that do use weapon damage, I am frankly not sure. However, profession mechanic skills are sometimes based on weapon damage (warriors and mesmers for instance), so it's not just weapon skills. I left it a little vague because I don't know precisely—in general what attacks are weapon attacks vs not weapon attacks is incredibly poorly documented anywhere.
• Block and dodge are to me substantially different, in that dodging generates a short duration 'evade' and is more like a very quick bit of invicibility--if anything I would think to combine dodging and invicibility; blocking is a pre-readied one hit cancellation. In my mind dodging is unique enough to warrant its own bullet point. But I do not feel too strongly one way or the other so if anyone does feel strongly I am more than happy to be overruled.

Anyway, I'll make another round of edits tonight and see if anyone brings anything else up. If not I'll probably switch it over tomorrow night-ish. ~ Capric 16:51, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

If the blocking persists more than one hit, it is more reliable "window of invincibility" than dodging. Personally, I think they should both be counted among "active defensive measures." Mediggo 17:08, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Agree with Mediggo. Not all blocks are 1-hit - many of them block all attacks for a set duration, Shield of Wrath blocks up to 3 attacks, etc. Neither blocking nor dodging has any effect on conditions, but invincibility makes you immune to them. However, since we can't all agree, let's leave them as separate points. —Dr Ishmael 17:28, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Actually after reading Mediggo's point I agree too :) ~ Capric 17:33, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Well then, ignore my last point. :)

Phantasms are a special case because the skill that creates the phantasm is not the actual skill dealing damage, the phantasm deals damage with its own distinct skill. I bet this caused a lot of headaches to the skill developers trying to map the phantasm's damage into the player's skill facts, and from your research it seems they were never able to get it completely right.

The only professions that deal direct damage from F1-F4 are warrior, engineer, and mesmer. I tested these during the betas, and burst skills do include weapon damage, while tool belt and shatter skills do not. That matched my expectations because burst skills are directly linked to the equipped weapon, while shatters are static and tool belt skills are linked to the equipped healing/utility skills.

I think it would be good to make the general statement that "Weapon skills (slots 1-5) include weapon damage in the calculation, while other skills do not." Then list the exceptions that Phantasm skills don't use it (along with having other anomalies), but Burst skills do. —Dr Ishmael 17:47, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

That's a reasonable argument, and I do think it's better to put general rules in the more high level articles and then exceptions in the more specific articles. My biggest problem with the current article is that is has too much extraneous and less-than-useful information. So yeah you can consider me convinced. ~ Capric 19:05, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

far right column of condition damage table

What on earth does it mean? "Condition damage per +10% increase at level 80". I have no idea what this means, or how the numbers below it were calculated. Please clarify.

I think that's the amount that you need to add to your condition damage in order to increase the damage dealt by that condition by 10%. For example, in order to increase the damage of Burning from 328 to 361 (= 328 * 1.1) requires that you raise your condition damage by 131. It's sort of a way of showing how important the condition damage stat is relative to the "base" damage of the condition, but I agree it's pretty confusing. --Felbryn 23:17, 25 October 2012 (PDT)

That was the intent. I wanted to show some very basic way of how condition damage scales with, uh, Condition Damage. My thinking was that since the tooltips tend to show the total damage dealt by the condition (ie the product of number of stacks and duration), the per-stack-second scaling was not that useful. And that instead knowing that for confusion, poison, and bleeding you get about +10% base damage with every 85 Condition Damage would be an easy way to eyeball gear differences, just like how you can eyeball power by knowing that every 92 power increases all your direct damage by +10% of base damage. I'm not sure that it ended up making that much sense to people that aren't me, though. If you have any other quick and dirty way of eyeballing condition damage scaling, feel more than free to update! ~ Capric 00:34, 26 October 2012 (PDT)

As aside, I don't feel like the current far right entry, which gives the damage of conditions with 1 condition damage at level 80, is really that useful. However, as I noted above, I'm aware that I'm not always a good judge on that sort of thing so I'd like to get other people's input on what makes sense here or not. ~ Capric 19:02, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree, and I already removed it. It seemed like it would cause more confusion about what new information the column was supposed to provide (i.e. none) rather than be useful to anyone. —Dr Ishmael 20:06, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Condition table entries

I removed the entries for the 25 stack of bleeding and the separate entry for the sPvP confusion. I would like to keep the condition table as simple and short as possible; this page is supposed to be the broad overview of damage, and a simple reference for all damage. I think mapping out various permutations of conditions and stacking would be much more appropriate for the various individual condition pages. ~ Capric 19:02, 29 October 2012 (UTC)