Ensign how do you get 70 dps warrior?

Alright, I was planning on making my main be a mes/war with illusionary weapon, but on the "back to fire" thread you posted that warriors could get over 70 dps. Now that sounds like it will outdamage anything else handily. Why would anyone chose cloth then? Please elaborate?

To be honest, in GvG, I 100bladed some warrior right off the bat and did 24-35 or something. So that's around 60 right there :P

Because you figure he takes about 1/3 normal damage and the attack takes 1.33 seconds?

24-35 means one hit was 24 one hit was 35. Because hundred blades hits twice.

Second, most of the stats people put up are based on a certain amount of time. Moves like FT greatly increase the overall DPS.

Cleave, Penetrating Blow, Disrupting Chop, Frenzy, Sprint, Judge's Insight, Strength of Honor, Restore Life.

Axes: 12 + 3 Rune + 1 Hat
Smiting: 10
Strength: 8, +1 Rune
Healing: 2

Zealous Haft

That's a pretty vanilla Axe build that should dish out around 70 sustained DPS once skills are taken into account. You should have a critical chance above 25%, 115% normal damage, +7 damage per hit from Strength of Honor, plus the armor penetration from JI. Combo that with 9 attacks every 8 seconds with Frenzy, and that should get you up to the mid to high 50s in terms of DPS. Plus we haven't looked at Cleave and Penetrating Attack yet, which should easily make up the difference. The math starts to get ugly and the exact number depends on the order things stack in, but this should be reasonably close.

I wouldn't be surprised if a dedicated damage build could get DPS up into the 80s. There are plenty of attack buffs to stack, and no shortage of attack skills to top them off. The formula isn't all that hard - buffs + attacks - so get on it.

Peace,
-CxE

You typoed Axe again instead of Strength.

Oh questions questions!

1. Do axes critical more or something?

2. Why is it worth using JI on Axe, but not sword?

3. Theoritically, what has more damage output, axe or sword? Or are they roughly the same?

Heh, okay that still leaves my main question: if it's true you can get over 70 dps plus heavy armor, isn't that rather unbalanced compared to nukers that sustain about 40 dps and wear cloth?

And one additional question, why frenzy instead of flurry?

Ok one more Would you actually play that build rather than a more rounded warrior?

I can answer some of those questions.

Axes don't critical more often, but a critical on an axe does more damage than a critical on a sword.
Top notch Axe: 6-28 damage, customized +20% damage, +extra damage from stance/hex/enchanted, whatever
Top notch Sword: 15-22 damage, customized, +extra from stance etc...
Their average hits will do about the same, but a crit hit does 1.5 (I've heard 1.41 from Nash) times max damage.
When you take the irregularity out of the equation, axes get the nod.
28 max damage +20% customized axe is going to hit for over 50 damage.
22 max damage, +20% customized sword is going to hit for just under 40 damage.

Start adding in extra stance damage, strength of honor, armor penetration, and JI buff, and you start seeing some wickedly high numbers flying up there.
That's BEFORE you start adding skill damage, and with cleave, that's once every 4 seconds, minimum.

I ran the numbers a long time ago, without armor penetration, weapon attribute level at 12, and I'm too tired to do it again right now at 16, but it all looks good to me.

As for Frenzy vs Flurry: Unless you're an IW mesmer, frenzy is just about always the better skill.
The drawback on frenzy isn't much of a drawback- most people completely ignore warriors until the monks are down- so until that time, get in as much damn damage as possible.

As for would I actually play it? Why the hell not? It's doing great damage, it has disruption, and it can rez.
I'd probably want someone else putting SOH and JI on my axe warrior, since energy will probably be tight, but as a stand-alone build, it's pretty good.

Until the game changes, warriors should be running with superior runes to get as much damage as they can.
It's not an arena build, but it could be, people run some utter crap there. If you get lucky and have a good healer on your team, you could carry the team for a while.

Flurry reduces damage.

70 DPS is based on ideal situations. Your not always going to be hitting someone. Your not always going to be on frenzy specially when your getting hit. Being a warrior has alot of disadvantages because their melee. The 70 DPS is not guaranteed, it's just the achievable peak.

Say your monk died, but since your at your guild hall, you have to keep fighting. And uh lets just say that was the last monk with remove hex or something. So this elementalist cast blinding flash on you. What happens to your dps? Gone.

Lastly, warriors and rangers are sustainable damage dealers, while elementalists are spikers. Totally different.

EDIT: Scaphism, Ensign's build does have sprint.

Ok, I'll assume the melee range all balances out the damage of warrior vs caster so that nuking is viable.

I still have to ask whether you think my plan for primary mesmer Illusionary Weapon is viable, as the 43 damage hits at illusion spec 16 seem to be unenhancable in any way; Seems I'd be a cloth warrior doing less damage than your war/mon.

Warriors don't have distortion.

Illusionary Weaponry is good- mainly in the fact that it bypasses most warrior counters. Warriors can deal extremely high damage output, but they are the easiest-countered class in the game. Illusionary Weaponry bypasses most of these counters- Sympathetic Visage, Soothing Images, Ward Against Melee, Shield of Deflection/Guardian, stances, armor buffs, etc. About the only warrior counter that hurts an IW build is attack speed debuffs like Shadow of Fear or Faintheartedness. IW does have its weaknesses in enchantment removal and lower defense(for mesmer primaries), though- if your IW gets stripped, you'll be dealing pretty low DPS, and you'll be up in the action as an easy target with your low defense.

Doesn't Distortion evade projectiles too?

Judging from the last beta event, "pretty low" dps consists of 0-2 damage per hit when I'm denied access to my illusionary weapons I must admit, it worked fine for me in the arena, but that consisted of me plus a bunch of other noobs fighting yet more noobs on the opposing team heh. Sometimes I would club them like baby seals and sometimes they did the same to me.

Edit: Hmm, I been reading the descriptions of the various skills you mentioned such as ward vs melee and the warrior stances, and it doesn't seem like IW would bypass those. If it does, that would make it slightly more impressive. Does it really go through all those skills, and if so does it bypass blindness too somehow?

Well it's just as 'worth it' to use it on each - the reason not to use JI is because it's bloody expensive. Why did I use it here? Because I'm trying to get as much damage as possible out of a Warrior, and JI is the way you do that. Can you support JI + Strength of Honor, on top of Frenzy? Just barely, but, and you should have known this was coming, it leans heavily upon Zealous. Under ideal situations you can keep all three running non-stop. The reason you wouldn't run all three is because under non-ideal situations energy gets tight and JI goes down. If I wasn't going for the highest damage possible I'd probably live without JI and settle for DPS in the high 50s, but if you just want to steamroll things? Stack to your heart's content.


They're the same to within a very small margin. After taking criticals into account axes do slightly more damage on average. But once you start counting attack skill chains and the like the difference in base damage becomes negligible. There isn't a huge difference in damage output, maybe a couple DPS between swords and axes. So pick them for their secondary effects.

Peace,
-CxE

Axes and Swords have pretty much the same average damage, except on running targets where Axes are way better (100% criticals). However, at Level 16 with 26% criticals (since Ensign said above 25%) you're looking at a difference of 1.5 damage per hit.

Of course, Axes don't get 100 Blades, which might balance things out (I'm not going to bother doing the number crunching).

The factor I use for criticals is 1.414213562373 which is just derived from Ensign's mechanics article.

what determines the chance of getting criticals for warriors? (besides running targets)

Still looking for confirmation that IW somehow goes through Sympathetic Visage, Soothing Images, Ward Against Melee, Shield of Deflection/Guardian, stances.

Also looking for some way to boost IW damage. Can it be improved with say Penetrating Blow? I assume the holy damage warriors deal when monk-buffed is increased by such things. Any way to crit with IW?

IW bypasses Symphatetic Visage and Soothing Images because you don't need adrenaline to do damage with IW. Also IW cannot miss so Ward Against Melee and other blinding skills do not affect you at all.

Note, it's whenever you attack, not whenever you hit. Why would whether you're blinded or not make a difference? Blindness in no way hinders your ability to attack. Now, Pacifism or Amity would stop IW, since it stops you from attacking, which is what triggers IW.