Vamp Or AP

Witch does rly do more damage? Vampiric Mod or Armour Penetration?

Just a stupid new question since im making 3 perfect axes & 3 perfect swords (each of these sets are Zealous, Vamp Or AP & double adrenaline) & one Perfect Storm Bow (Zealous). time to go leet W ^^.

Answer fast thanx in advance

constant damage or a unreliable spike chance

best 3 upgrades are:
- vamp
- zealous
- elemental

followed by
- condition lengtheners
- furious

ending with
- sundering

Try searching for " vampiric sundering "
You'll find a comparison sooner or later where is being explained that sundering, even at 20/20, still can't match the AVERAGE damage of vamp.

However, if your sundering strikes while you're hitting a critical hit, that's a lot of damage. But vamp is reliable, letting sundering strike is too low a chance.

Use vamp to fight rangers and monsters/people who have high armour against ele damage (rangers, elementalists).
Use an elemental upgrade to fight people/monsters with higher armour against physical (warriors are a good example)
Use zealous as utility or to power things like flurry

I have not used furious long enough to have a decent opinion about it so moo

I actually use Vamp, Zealous & Furious Axe & Swords & i like the furious more than elemental damage cause i an do more adrenal ataks.

Anyway you answered my question NICELY thanx thanx thank YOU!

Thanx again

The information Don Zardeone gave about elemental upgrades is not exactly true! For the AL it doesn't matter which kind of damage the weapon deals, as long as the armor has no additional modifier. Elemental is only of use if a specific enemy has a weakness agains that specific type of damage (eg. Titals in the last missions agains cold damage). In general you can say that elemantal damage is too specific to be useful (with the exception of e.g. cold damage when there's Spinal Shivers on the target) Against Warriors Sundering is definitely the best mod as you will penetrate 20% of a strong armor with a chance of 20%.

Alright let's see here...and I'll base this on a 60 AL target.

Customized 15^50 axe at 16 Axe Mastery deals 63 damage with Wild Blow. With a vampiric mod and 5 attacks, that's 66 * 5 which is 330 damage.

Same axe, same attribs, but with a 20/20 sundering mod...

It will likely deal 63 * 4 + 77 damage over five attacks. That's 329 damage.

The actual probability that the sundering mod will take effect once in those five attacks is...

1 - .8^5, or about 68%.

This means Vampiric should deal more damage in the long run, but even so, the two mods in this case are pretty equal. Sundering is probably better for spiking, due to the chance that you'll get that extra damage, whereas Vampiric is better for extended dps.

For those who want to verify or contest these tests results, here are the relevant stats. Also, the results of another test are shown near the end.

Attribs:

Axe Mastery: 16
All others: 0

Skills:

Wild Blow

Weapon:

Furious PvP Axe
Double Adrenaline on hit (chance: 10%)
Damage +15% (while Health is above 50%)
Damage +20%
Customized

Target: Suit of 60 Armor on the Isle of the Nameless

Results:

Wild Blow with this weapon dealt 63 damage, 5 times in a row. This ensured what I already knew: that Wild Blow always deals the same amount of damage if there are no changing modifiers.

With a 20/20 Sundering weapon identical to the one above, save for the changed mod, the 14th hit with Wild Blow dealt 77 damage. The next set took 11 hits to trigger. The next took three. There was no variation to the increased damage; it was always 77.

I will now conduct a test of 10 Wild Blows each for a Sundering and a Vampiric Axe.

Total damage from Sundering: 630
Total damage from Vampiric: 660.

The Sundering mod, as you notice, did not activate even once out of those ten possible times. The probability of this is 10.7%.

It took four more hits to trigger the Sundering mod, meaning that on the 14th hit it triggered. The probability of the mod NOT triggering 13 times in a row is...about 5.5%. This is disturbing in that three times out of four, Wild Blow had to be used 10 or more times to trigger the Sundering mod. So perhaps it is not as reliable as math would have it, therefore increasing the power of the Vampiric mod.

Vamp is good for constant damage addition, but sunder is good for the spikes to suprise the monk.. thats how i see it and after reading numerous articles i'll stick to my vamp..

Vamp FTW and a Switch Elemental Bow For other purposes.

@Relambrien you can't say that it's not activated in 20% of the cases unless you've made hundrets of repetitions to minimize the relative error. It's too late here to calculate the average amout of hits you need to get a correct result. But it's definitely more than 28
I am sure that Anets RNGs are good enough to satisfy such an simple distribution.

btw... as I said before: Sundering is only effective agains high-AL-targets!

Vamp
Zealous
Elemental
Furious
Sundering

That's how I'd number them.

I will say it now, I take no credit for these numbers whatsoever.
This shows how much extra damage the respective mods do to what target.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10033346

@Ess Age: You're pulling information out of nowhere, just stop.
Typical warrior armor: 80 AL + 20 AL vs physical
Sundering = Physical damage against 100 AL. It has a 20% chance to reduce it to 80 AL.
Ebon = Elemental damage against 80 AL. It's 80 AL all the time.
Guess which mod is more effective?

Also, sundering is less effective against higher AL targets.

@Relambrien: you, like ubermancer in the above link, are making the rather flawed assumption that you're getting a critical hit every time. At 16 axe mastery it's about 23% of the time. The chances of you getting one critical+sundering hit in 3 hits (where it supposedly counts) is 10%; the chances of two of those are 0.6%.

@Ulivious: look at the link and percentages above.


To be honest, sundering isn't as bad as it used to be, but it still trails behind vampiric. And it still would be at the bottom of my list of mods to use. (10% always would sound a bit nice.)

I never claimed my tests were complete, thorough, and totally accurate. Quite the opposite. Thanks for trying to help, of course. As always, the more opinions the better.

Vampiric by a mile, and as Savio points out, Sundering becomes even less useful as AL increases (yeah you penetrate more armour, but your bonus damage is a multiple of your base damage, which is smaller due to high armour).
I've heard this "spike" argument for Sundering a few times, but really, it makes no sense - Sundering also unreliable so you cant count on it when you unleash a spike, and since +damage from attack skills is added AFTER armour, you dont get any more bonus damage from Sunderig than you would from an ordinary attack.
Sundering is rubbish, and really has little reason to exist.

sry, I didn't see that four out of six armor types have +20 vs. physical. Then of course elemental is better. So it's not warriors, it's high-AL-level in common.

But altogether your dmg output with elemantal dmg is reduced as there is a strong penalty against rangers and elemantarists and absolutly no bonus agains all the other clases (except most warriors).
On the other hand sundering does 20% AP in 20% of the cases agains all enemies...

That's why warriors typically have both an elemental (usually ebon) weapon and a vampiric weapon. Elemental is used against warriors and targets with +armor versus physical, and vampiric against rangers, elementalists, other targets with +armor versus elemental, or targets with no damage type resistance. Two weapons do a whole lot more than one weapon trying to cover all the bases.

Don't underestimate Furious in an adrenaline-heavy build. When you can get a few double adrenalines in row you can get a pretty awesome spike. I think Furious is key on a hammer warrior, cause more adrenaline is more KD chains.

i refer vamp or zealous on a warriors mods depending on what skills you use a zealous or furious one would be good

While vamp appears to do more damage everyone seems to forget you are LOSEING 3hp per second EVERY second while useing one. This to me anyway makes it pretty much useless. I prefer ele damage or even sundering to loseing HP all the time.

OMG.

Warriors have 80+20 vs ele ( gladiator's )

Thus, use elemental.