How much better is sharpened?

pizzaow

Everyone seems to unanimously agree that sharpened is BiS for DPS buids. I'm curious, by how much?.. would you expect a 2/5/10% drop in DPS? Does it matter as much in groups and trials where the boss's resistances are significantly lowered (elemental drain/major fracture/breech/crusher/alkosh...)?
Are there any situations where a precise/infused/charged/nirnhoned weapon will outperform sharpened?

Izaki

When you reach 18.2k penetration Precise > Sharpened. Except its borderline impossible to reach 18.2k penetration without sharpened and gimping your build. IIRC, Sharpened is around a 10% increase in damage, Precise around 3% and Nirnhoned around 2%. <= note I forget the exact values and these may or may not be correct

Nestor

pizzaow wrote: »

Are there any situations where a precise/infused/charged/nirnhoned weapon will outperform sharpened?

Against Shields

Foxic

Nestor wrote: »

pizzaow wrote: »

Are there any situations where a precise/infused/charged/nirnhoned weapon will outperform sharpened?

Against Shields

Some of those, precise is just as useless as sharpened against shields

Liofa

About 1000 penetration means 2% damage increase . So , using Sharpened weapon will increase your damage by 10% ( or a bit more) if you are using all of it .

Czirne

i did some math here https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/311052/viper-mace-dagger-or-sword-a-poll-on-my-math-problem#latest

feel free to corrent me if im wrong:

"Sharpened gives you flat value of penetration, therefore it is as efective on light armor target as on heavy armor target. it always reduce enemy armor by 5160.
5160 armor is about 8% damage reduction. For example, lets say you hit someone with 5160 armor for 10 000 damage, after reduction(8%) its 9200 damage. with sharpened trait it will be full 10k(800 damage increase).

Now lets say you hit someone with 20 640 armor for 10k damage - after reduction(4x8%=32%) its 6800 damage. with sharpened trait you ignore 5160 armor(32%-8%=24%), you hit for enemy for 7600 damage, again 800 damage increase.

You see, if you have 10k tooltip, sharpened trait ALWAYS incease your damage by 800, no matter if you hit light or medium or heavy armor target(unless your target have less than 5160 armor, of course).

But percentual damage increase is bigger to heavy armor, regardless it is a same flat value of damage - 9200 to 10k is 8,7% damage increase, 6800 to 7600 is 11,76% damage increase.
From this perspective is sharpened stronger when fighting person in heavy armor than when fighting person in light, altough its 800 more damage in both cases."

DRXHarbinger

Basically on my double destro magdk. Same magika in both bars, with molten armaments.

Heavy attack on precise staff (same spell damage and same staff vma inferno) 24k crit.

Sharp vma inferno, 28.4k. Effective as of about 2hrs ago in a solo instance same buffs.

Lava whip is 12.7k to 14.6k going from precise to sharp.

Minalan

IzakiBrotheSs wrote: »

When you reach 18.2k penetration Precise > Sharpened. Except its borderline impossible to reach 18.2k penetration without sharpened and gimping your build. IIRC, Sharpened is around a 10% increase in damage, Precise around 3% and Nirnhoned around 2%. <= note I forget the exact values and these may or may not be correct

Pretty much this.

Sharpened is a symptom. The problem is that ZOS designers are miserably horrible at basic math.

There's a whole thread that details the problem, they ignored it of course.

cpuScientist

You bet they did lol

cpuScientist

Myself and many others have made threads about this, only to be met with ZOS Silence......

Masel

Everyone rages about proc sets. All I want them to do is balance those traits, so my nirnhoned and precise weapons become useful again and the mindless sharpened grind is over. Sharpened is just too good, period. I can get bosses to less than 3 k resistance with twice-fanged serpent, sharpened vma weapons and noxious breath on my stam dk alone.

Buff the other traits, there are a lot of great ideas out there to do that, and all it needs is basically a tweak in numbers. That can't be that hard to do, really. Precise to 16-18% and nirnhoned to 33%, that closes the gaps and keeps the respective advantages (precise for critical builds / e.g. with tbs and healing, sharpened for solo play, raw damage and high resistance enemies and nirnhoned against shields and enemies with low resistance).

I can confirm the numbers of @IzakiBrotheSs, they are about right.

Izaki

@DRXHarbinger did you know that my firat vMA clear was with Precise and not Sharp? Because it was good back then

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO

pizzaow wrote: »

Everyone seems to unanimously agree that sharpened is BiS for DPS buids. I'm curious, by how much?.. would you expect a 2/5/10% drop in DPS? Does it matter as much in groups and trials where the boss's resistances are significantly lowered (elemental drain/major fracture/breech/crusher/alkosh...)?
Are there any situations where a precise/infused/charged/nirnhoned weapon will outperform sharpened?

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/262295/nirnhoned-precise-and-sharpened/p1

Narvuntien

Is it worth the extra 30K gold to change from spriggans from Precise to sharpend. that is soooooo much more gold than I spent on my spriggans bow. I think I am just going to get Kra'ghs shoulders to make up for it.

aLi3nZ

It does help for dps in over and pvp. When I used to run high spell damage and magika regen but only 33k magika I prefer to use defending trait though. I could still pump out a ton of damage. Now that I run 43k magika my sorc sheild is strong enough to run sharpened while still tanking a lot of damage. Current running infused master lighting staff as it's the best I got. About 1200 extra magika with that.