Precise or Sharpened for VR16 2H Weapon in Imperial City?

Dagoth_Rac

I am going to upgrade my VR14 Hunding Greatsword to VR16 now that I have enough mats. What is the best trait in Update 7? I had been using Precise in Update 6, partly force of habit from the early days when crit was great because it had no softcap, and partly because my crit is not very high. Is Precise still a good way to go? It seemed like the 5% bonus damage from greatswords and 7% crit from the trait would work out to roughly 5% + 3.5% = 8.5% extra DPS. But I have heard that mobs have really high armor in Update 7. Should I be going for a Sharpened 2H Maul instead? To break through all the mitigation they have given mobs? In prior releases, I would just craft both and compare. But crafting mats are rarer and you need a lot more of them in Update 7. I don't feeling like wasting them on test items. Perhaps some people have already evaluated what is better? Thanks!

Nestor

My goal is to have Criticals at 50% and if I can achieve that or close to that without a weapon*, then I used Sharpened on my weapons.


*Some Weapons like Daggers increase your Critical Strike chance just having them equipped, so keep that in mind.

Asayre

To answer your question I'll use the base damage and average damage formulas.

Base Damage = Tooltip*Attacker Bonus*Defender Bonus * (1-Mitigation)
where
Mitigation = Armour/(Level*1000) - Focus/(Level*1000) - 0.12*Piercing

Note that for your question, we can combine Tooltip*Attacker Bonus*Defender Bonus into a single variable, T.

Average Damage = (1-Crit chance)*T + Crit chance* Crit modifier * T

With these equations we can analyse the damage between using a precise greatsword, sharpened greatsword, precise maul and sharpened maul.

To make a long story short and to reduce the number of equations. I'll just present a few graphs. To interpret these graphs simply find the graph titled with your target's armour (or the closes approximation) and then locate your critical chance and critical damage modifier along the abscissa and ordinate. Dark blue means that precise greatsword is the best, light blue is for sharpened greatsword, yellow is for precise maul and red is for a sharpened maul. The calculations were made for legendary weapon traits (14% sharpened, 7% precise) and two points in Heavy Weapons (5% increased damage for greatsword and 20% penetration with maul). The calculations also assume 0 focus and 0 points in Piercing. As you can see, below ~11000 you should go for a precise greatsword and for targets with resistance >17000 a sharpened maul would be preferred. If your focus were to be taken into account this would shift the thresholds (11000 and 17000) down a bit. Please note that the Focus used is not the same as that shown by Harven's Extended Stats. The focus I used is 100 (base Focus) + skills that say increase penetration by a contant number.

Dagoth_Rac

Wow, @Asayre! That is some really detailed analysis! I appreciate the time and effort you put into this. Unfortunately, I am not sure of mob armor. Do you know what kind of armor values the monsters and bosses in VR16 dungeons have? The sewer sweeper bosses and district bosses in Imperial City? Are they mostly rocking 10,000 armor or 25,000 armor? I have no idea!

Also, for this:

Base Damage = Tooltip*Attacker Bonus*Defender Bonus * (1-Mitigation)
where
Mitigation = Armour/(Level*1000) - Focus/(Level*1000) - 0.12*Piercing

Can you go into these stats a little deeper? Or let me know a place where they are defined? I don't know what "Attacker Bonus" or things like that refer to.

FWIW, my crit percentage is about 45% in combat (52% with my current precise greatsword). My crit multiplier is about 1.56, and I have 5 points in Piercing star (most of my points are in Mighty).

Asayre

Unfortunately, I don't think anyone really knows the armour of mobs. I'm hoping to rectify that in the near future!

Attacker Bonus refers to things like champion points like Mighty but there are some race specific ones like the Altmer 4% increase to elemental damage. Similarly most defender bonuses are champion point related like Hardy and Elemental Expert. I can't really help any further since I have no clue what armour the mobs have =(

Cuyler

why not nirnhoned over sharpened @Dagoth_Rac ?

Dagoth_Rac

Cuyler wrote: »

why not nirnhoned over sharpened @Dagoth_Rac ?

Doesn't nirnhoned give spell penetration only? I am mostly using stamina skills which I believe need armor penetration.