Results of damage testing set combos - Spriggan, Leviathan, Automaton, TBS, VO, Dragr Hulk, Hunding

Donmanzullo

I wanted to test which set combination gives the best damage so I compared the damage done by 4 different skills/abilities while wearing 15 different set combinations.

SETS TESTED:

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METHODOLOGY

I used Slimecraw in Veteran Wayrest Sewers I as my test dummy. I did all this on my CP 600 Redguard Sorc.

For these tests, I had to standardize my gear, skills, buffs, passives, and everything else about my character in order to make sure the only variables between each test were the set bonuses. That way the sets can be directly compared. Many things had to be considered to keep damage consistent:

• I suppressed my weapon enchants with a hindering poison on both bars, which effectively removed the RNG of the enchantment without modifying damage output.
• Poison Injection was only used when Slimecraw was above 50% health, and was cast standing as close as possible to avoid Long Shots passive damage bonus which increases damage based on how far away you are.
• Light and heavy attacks were not used within 5 seconds of Poison Injection or its DOT to avoid the Hawk Eye passive damage bonus.
• Dual wield attacks were never used when Slimecraw was below 25% health to avoid the Slaughter passive damage bonus.
• Slimecraw was never stunned, disoriented, immobilized, or silenced to avoid the Ruffian passive damage bonus.
• I kept Crit Surge, Bound Armaments, and food buff (max health max stamina) up 100% of the time.
• All skills and relevant passives were max level.
• I only bar swapped when there were no DOTs running.
• I used each ability at least 4 times with each set combination to make sure I got the same damage numbers and wasn’t overlooking some detail.
• All armor was gold medium divines with gold stamina enchants.
• All front bar weapons were dual wield gold sharpened daggers and all back bar weapons were gold sharpened bows.
• All jewelry was purple quality with robust traits and with gold weapon damage enchants.
• No monster sets used, any extra armor/weapon/jewelry slots were filled with mismatched or duplicate pieces so that they gave no additional set bonuses
• Front bar: Bloodthirst, Blood Craze, Crit Surge, Expert Hunter, Bound Armaments, Flawless Dawnbreaker
• Back bar: Poison Injection, Resolving Vigor, Crit Surge, Expert Hunter, Bound Armaments, Flawless Dawnbreaker

Each of the 15 different combinations also shows what Mundus boon was active. I ran more than 15 tests - I tested each non-TBS combination with the Thief and with the Shadow. The graphs only include the Mundus boon that gave more damage. One exception is with Hunding's Rage + Vicious Ophidian, I included both boons because overall damage between the two was almost identical.
I chose to test these particular skills because each has something unique about it. Bloodthirst is the dual wield spammable, Poison Injection does poison damage, Blood Craze applies a bleed which is mitigated differently than other physical damage, and Heavy Attack (fully charged) since the way it scales appears to be more related to weapon damage than max stamina.

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RESULTS

Each graph shows the total (as in sum of DOTs if applicable) average damage done by one cast of that ability.
Average damage was calculated with the following formula: [base damage] x [1-weapon critical] + [crit damage] x [weapon critical].

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The bottom graph ranks each combination by overall damage output. This is an easy way to rank them best to worst, but it is crude because it assumes that in actual gameplay, each attack is done an equal number of times. For this reason a set that is good with Bloodthirst is more impressive since it gets used most.
Hunding's Rage+Automaton, with its massive boost to physical weapon damage, was very effective for Blood Craze and Heavy Attack, but mediocre for Bloodthirst, and predictably terrible for Poison Injection. All Spriggan combinations did poorly with Blood Craze, because bleeds are not mitigated like other physical damage. Bloodthirst (which is arguably more important for DPS than Blood Craze) paired excellent with Spriggan. All 6 combinations that included Spriggan took the top 6 spots in Bloodthirst. I was surprised Leviathan + TBS, with its huge crit chance and crit damage, did as poorly as it did.
This data is fun to look at but it has limitations. For example, although Leviathan consistently performed at the low end, it would do better if you have good uptime with Major or Minor force. Spriggan did well, but if your group can reduce enemy resistance to less than 4k obviously it won’t grant as much damage.

Sorry the graphs are cramped but there was a lot to stuff in there.
Hope somebody finds this useful.

GlassHalfFull

Awesome post, now I need to read it a few more times to understand all of it.

WarpigFunk

That.... must've taken awhile.

Donmanzullo

Took a couple afternoons. Being max level with not much left to do and having farmed all this gear I thought it was worth the time.

Everstorm

Kindda amusing that a crafted and BoE set combo came out on top.

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO

Everstorm wrote: »

Kindda amusing that a crafted and BoE set combo came out on top.

I find it more amusing that they are all within less then ten percent of each other at the end.

This also doesn't take into account the classes, Templar and dks especially will benefit tons from having a lot of max stam, for PotL and the helping hands passive respectively and for stam temps, repentance only scales on max stam.


Other then that, have an awesome, great work OP.

Trihugger

Would be interesting to see how these sets do with the actual meta rotation/skills. Maybe test the best few to see if the trend continues.

superleeds19

Great post. So why does anyone run TBS.....?

bebynnag

amazing work, really well done

theres just 1 thing...

so sorry 2 be this person

u dont have the automoton & vo combination on the list

Donmanzullo

I did every combination that my gear allowed me to do. I didn't have enough complimentary pieces of automaton and vo to run both together.

bebynnag

Donmanzullo wrote: »

I did every combination that my gear allowed me to do. I didn't have enough complimentary pieces of automaton and vo to run both together.

im currently having to run a precice VO sword so i feel your pain!
my other options would be a sharpened maul or a powered dagger!

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO

puffytheslayer wrote: »

Donmanzullo wrote: »

I did every combination that my gear allowed me to do. I didn't have enough complimentary pieces of automaton and vo to run both together.

im currently having to run a precice VO sword so i feel your pain!
my other options would be a sharpened maul or a powered dagger!

The sharpened maul would give you more dps then the sword.

raj72616a

superleeds19 wrote: »

Great post. So why does anyone run TBS.....?

because crafted, no farming required, and gives you some health and magicka too?

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO

raj72616a wrote: »

superleeds19 wrote: »

Great post. So why does anyone run TBS.....?

because crafted, no farming required, and gives you some health and magicka too?

And not 2 months ago, it was BiS for most stam builds. So people might not want to get a whole now set.

hmsdragonfly

Thanks a lot for your effort!

Clearly Hunding + Spriggan is the winner.

superleeds19

@raj72616a @Lightspeedflashb14_ESO

It's crafted yes .... if you have 9 traits

Hundings is crafted too, is 6 traits and Peforms better!

as proven above TBS has had its day

Izaki

hmsdragonfly wrote: »

Thanks a lot for your effort!

Clearly Hunding + Spriggan is the winner.

Depends for what content.

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO

Better in a controled test like this and even then it is a single digit difference, though the health you get from TBS might be the difference between life and death. As you surely know, a dead dps gives no dps.

For my stam toons, one stam NB and a stamplar, I use spriggan on my stamblade because I have yet to get sharpened vMA weapons, only precise. I have 2 sharpened master daggers on my stamplar, I use hulking dragur over hundings on that toon because it made my PotL go from 20k to 25k and my repentance go from giving 3.1k stam back to 3.9k. I can get 30k+ dps on both, which is more then enough for any content I run.

casparian

Excellent work and thank you!

Don't forget that this testing was done solo. This data is really useful for planning out what your VMA build should be. But if you're making plans for vet trial gear, there are many other variables to take into consideration (group buffs, the DPS impact of avoiding the conservative playstyle OP adopted for the sake of consistent testing, enemy debuffs applied by others, etc.). In fact, I worry that the conservative playstyle of the test) might undermine the test results even in solo situations like VMA. The reason TBS is so good (in theory) is that it scales very well when you are getting off a lot of attacks in a very small amount of time (because it increases damage by a percentage, not by a flat value like Hunding's etc.). OP's test is thus heavily weighted against TBS and toward flat-bonus sets.

Strider_Roshin

Great testing. I wonder how much more damage you'll put out by using Twice-Fanged Serpent over Spriggans.

Strider_Roshin

casparian wrote: »

Excellent work and thank you!

Don't forget that this testing was done solo. This data is really useful for planning out what your VMA build should be. But if you're making plans for vet trial gear, there are many other variables to take into consideration (group buffs, the DPS impact of avoiding the conservative playstyle OP adopted for the sake of consistent testing, enemy debuffs applied by others, etc.). In fact, I worry that the conservative playstyle of the test) might undermine the test results even in solo situations like VMA. The reason TBS is so good (in theory) is that it scales very well when you are getting off a lot of attacks in a very small amount of time (because it increases damage by a percentage, not by a flat value like Hunding's etc.). OP's test is thus heavily weighted against TBS and toward flat-bonus sets.

Well tbh stamina isn't really ideal for competitive PvE anyways. This testing was mainly useful for those wanting to do undaunted dungeons or VMA.

Donmanzullo

Trihugger wrote: »

Would be interesting to see how these sets do with the actual meta rotation/skills. Maybe test the best few to see if the trend continues.

Agreed, the only thing is doing a rotation would introduce variability by how well I go through the rotation. I'd like to do a test that combines it all into one DPS number per set. Maybe some day.

Strider_Roshin wrote: »

Great testing. I wonder how much more damage you'll put out by using Twice-Fanged Serpent over Spriggans.

TFS sounds amazing considering how much damage Spriggan did. We can estimate the damage increase with TFS because we know that 660 pen = +1% damage, so 1000 more pen would be +1.5% damage compared to Spriggan. But that's only taking into account the 5 piece bonus, because you loose stam and gain crit with TFS which complicates things slightly.

Zvorgin

Worth mentioning that there are some non-damage benefits to consider such as skills that return a % of stamina will benefit significantly from Hulking Draugr and I think it buffs self heals such as Rally the most if I recall correctly. I run Spriggan plus Hulking Draugr for PvP and really like it.

cpuScientist

Strider_Roshin wrote: »

casparian wrote: »

Excellent work and thank you!

Don't forget that this testing was done solo. This data is really useful for planning out what your VMA build should be. But if you're making plans for vet trial gear, there are many other variables to take into consideration (group buffs, the DPS impact of avoiding the conservative playstyle OP adopted for the sake of consistent testing, enemy debuffs applied by others, etc.). In fact, I worry that the conservative playstyle of the test) might undermine the test results even in solo situations like VMA. The reason TBS is so good (in theory) is that it scales very well when you are getting off a lot of attacks in a very small amount of time (because it increases damage by a percentage, not by a flat value like Hunding's etc.). OP's test is thus heavily weighted against TBS and toward flat-bonus sets.

Well tbh stamina isn't really ideal for competitive PvE anyways. This testing was mainly useful for those wanting to do undaunted dungeons or VMA.

I take offense to that. StamDK especially still pulls the best single target on the boss. And that's what matters.

phillyproduct

Donmanzullo wrote: »

Trihugger wrote: »

Would be interesting to see how these sets do with the actual meta rotation/skills. Maybe test the best few to see if the trend continues.

Agreed, the only thing is doing a rotation would introduce variability by how well I go through the rotation. I'd like to do a test that combines it all into one DPS number per set. Maybe some day.

Strider_Roshin wrote: »

Great testing. I wonder how much more damage you'll put out by using Twice-Fanged Serpent over Spriggans.

TFS sounds amazing considering how much damage Spriggan did. We can estimate the damage increase with TFS because we know that 660 pen = +1% damage, so 1000 more pen would be +1.5% damage compared to Spriggan. But that's only taking into account the 5 piece bonus, because you loose stam and gain crit with TFS which complicates things slightly.

With tbs and levithan set equip u shouldnt have run thief shadow imo you should try warrior-shadow mundus combo 250 wep from a mundus is almost equal to the 300 from hundings rage

jeskah

Hmhmhmh... impressive work.

Could you do an Endless Hail parse too? just out of curiosity.

Ep1kMalware

Donmanzullo wrote: »

I wanted to test which set combination gives the best damage so I compared the damage done by 4 different skills/abilities while wearing 15 different set combinations.

SETS TESTED:

---

METHODOLOGY

I used Slimecraw in Veteran Wayrest Sewers I as my test dummy. I did all this on my CP 600 Redguard Sorc.

For these tests, I had to standardize my gear, skills, buffs, passives, and everything else about my character in order to make sure the only variables between each test were the set bonuses. That way the sets can be directly compared. Many things had to be considered to keep damage consistent:

• I suppressed my weapon enchants with a hindering poison on both bars, which effectively removed the RNG of the enchantment without modifying damage output.
• Poison Injection was only used when Slimecraw was above 50% health, and was cast standing as close as possible to avoid Long Shots passive damage bonus which increases damage based on how far away you are.
• Light and heavy attacks were not used within 5 seconds of Poison Injection or its DOT to avoid the Hawk Eye passive damage bonus.
• Dual wield attacks were never used when Slimecraw was below 25% health to avoid the Slaughter passive damage bonus.
• Slimecraw was never stunned, disoriented, immobilized, or silenced to avoid the Ruffian passive damage bonus.
• I kept Crit Surge, Bound Armaments, and food buff (max health max stamina) up 100% of the time.
• All skills and relevant passives were max level.
• I only bar swapped when there were no DOTs running.
• I used each ability at least 4 times with each set combination to make sure I got the same damage numbers and wasn’t overlooking some detail.
• All armor was gold medium divines with gold stamina enchants.
• All front bar weapons were dual wield gold sharpened daggers and all back bar weapons were gold sharpened bows.
• All jewelry was purple quality with robust traits and with gold weapon damage enchants.
• No monster sets used, any extra armor/weapon/jewelry slots were filled with mismatched or duplicate pieces so that they gave no additional set bonuses
• Front bar: Bloodthirst, Blood Craze, Crit Surge, Expert Hunter, Bound Armaments, Flawless Dawnbreaker
• Back bar: Poison Injection, Resolving Vigor, Crit Surge, Expert Hunter, Bound Armaments, Flawless Dawnbreaker

Each of the 15 different combinations also shows what Mundus boon was active. I ran more than 15 tests - I tested each non-TBS combination with the Thief and with the Shadow. The graphs only include the Mundus boon that gave more damage. One exception is with Hunding's Rage + Vicious Ophidian, I included both boons because overall damage between the two was almost identical.
I chose to test these particular skills because each has something unique about it. Bloodthirst is the dual wield spammable, Poison Injection does poison damage, Blood Craze applies a bleed which is mitigated differently than other physical damage, and Heavy Attack (fully charged) since the way it scales appears to be more related to weapon damage than max stamina.

---

RESULTS

Each graph shows the total (as in sum of DOTs if applicable) average damage done by one cast of that ability.
Average damage was calculated with the following formula: [base damage] x [1-weapon critical] + [crit damage] x [weapon critical].

---

The bottom graph ranks each combination by overall damage output. This is an easy way to rank them best to worst, but it is crude because it assumes that in actual gameplay, each attack is done an equal number of times. For this reason a set that is good with Bloodthirst is more impressive since it gets used most.
Hunding's Rage+Automaton, with its massive boost to physical weapon damage, was very effective for Blood Craze and Heavy Attack, but mediocre for Bloodthirst, and predictably terrible for Poison Injection. All Spriggan combinations did poorly with Blood Craze, because bleeds are not mitigated like other physical damage. Bloodthirst (which is arguably more important for DPS than Blood Craze) paired excellent with Spriggan. All 6 combinations that included Spriggan took the top 6 spots in Bloodthirst. I was surprised Leviathan + TBS, with its huge crit chance and crit damage, did as poorly as it did.
This data is fun to look at but it has limitations. For example, although Leviathan consistently performed at the low end, it would do better if you have good uptime with Major or Minor force. Spriggan did well, but if your group can reduce enemy resistance to less than 4k obviously it won’t grant as much damage.

Sorry the graphs are cramped but there was a lot to stuff in there.
Hope somebody finds this useful.

It is pretty useful, I did some testing with alot of these sets as well, only changing 5pc set bonus for the most part. I did several slimecraw tests to find averages and what I found was that tbs performed best with raid buffs, leviathan+shadow wasnt far behind but worked best with low resistance mobs and sharpened weapons. Automaton and thief worked better, but really only if using sharp weps or someone was using nmg. If not using sharp wepsnI found spriggans was often best performing. tbs with raid bufs always gave the best score but unsharp weps was definitely noticable.

They're all good sets, tbh they're all kind of niche to help compensate amd balande whatever your build is lacking. Not all my vma weapons are sharp atm so spriggans is giving me the highest overall dps, but in a trial setting with many more damage buffs, penetration buffs, amd critical damage modifiers TBS still outperforms.

Tested sets with 3gold vo, gold vma weapons, gold kra'ghs

Valderis

What is your CP breakdown?

How come Warrior Mundus wasn't tested?

How many times were each set combinations tested?

Thanks for the info

GilGalad

One thing that has to be mentioned:
In combination with MSA weapons every set that gives stamina or weapon dmg is suppressed by the MSA dual wield enchant. Therefore in dot heavy builds sets like VO, Leviathan and TBS should be much closer to sets that increase weapon dmg or stamina.
If you have the time you could run the tests with for MSA buffed dots.

smithist

Very interesting. NMG is conspicuously absent though. Is it so out of vogue as to not be worth testing? I thought it was still considered fairly competitive. If not solo, at least for the group debuff?

cpuScientist

smithist wrote: »

Very interesting. NMG is conspicuously absent though. Is it so out of vogue as to not be worth testing? I thought it was still considered fairly competitive. If not solo, at least for the group debuff?

Spriggan for solo beats it. It would just be a weaker spriggan in all these tests the