Thought Experiment: What is Viper's Weapon Damage Equivalence?

Sandman929

Good read. But lets look at this from ZOS's side:

Does it feel awesome when Viper procs?

Merlin13KAGL

Perhaps I'm oversimplifying this, but with the cooldown in mind, the DPS equivalent of these sets at Legendary are:

• Viper: +1680 (6720 once every four seconds)
• Selenes: + 2100 (in conjunction with rapid strikes 4.6 chances per second @ 15% chance x 12k damage every 4 seconds)
  That's ~70% chance of 3k dps, less if used with other melee skills.
• Skoria: +900 ( that's 9000 damage every 5 seconds @8% chance per dot. Assuming you've got 6 dots going full time, that puts you @ 48% proc chance to get 1800 dps...thus the +900 equivalent)

While I realize it's not the DPS that kills you so much as the burst, when broken down as DPS they seem less impressive?

(Would you be happier if they doubled the chance but halved the damage, or would this not change enough in the grand scheme of things?)

Legit asking here, not trolling...

out51d3r

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

(Would you be happier if they doubled the chance but halved the damage, or would this not change enough in the grand scheme of things?)

Higher chance(even guaranteed proc) with reduced damage is highly preferable. I hate randomness in pvp. A 5% proc for 10k is just as frustrating when I get hit with it as a 10% proc for 10k. Don't use low proc chances to balance anything in pvp.

Minno

out51d3r wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

(Would you be happier if they doubled the chance but halved the damage, or would this not change enough in the grand scheme of things?)

Higher chance(even guaranteed proc) with reduced damage is highly preferable. I hate randomness in pvp. A 5% proc for 10k is just as frustrating when I get hit with it as a 10% proc for 10k. Don't use low proc chances to balance anything in pvp.

I wish there was a condition in which we could actively counter. Like skoria, purge the dots (though return skoria back to 6%. Same for all procs).

Overall, the skills should be there for players to burst in PvP with visible animations not have phantom attacks you need to look at your death recap to learn what killed you.

bubbygink

WhiteMage wrote: »

If I were to give rough estimates of the weapon and spell damages equivalents of the proc sets Viper, Selene, and Skoria, it would be at roughly 900, 1900, and 800 unbuffed.

The crazy thing is that this is for sustained DPS. In pvp where it is all about burst, these sets are really worth MUCH more than these amounts of spell/weapon damage. I'm going to do short calculation for my Magblade's burst combo in no CP:

In no CP, Skoria hits for about 5k damage. My typical burst combo is an empowered soul tether + spectral bow. I think most would agree this is a typical Magblade burst combo and it is very deadly. When I have skoria on I will try to time my tether when I hear skoria coming and then fire my bow so it all hits at the same time. So I get an extra 5k damage to my burst combo from Skoria. So the question I want to ask here is this: how much more spell damage would I have to get to for my soul tether + spectral bow to do that extra 5k damage on their own without Skoria? I.e. how much spell damage is that added 5k skoria hit really worth in my burst combo?

This will be a very over simplified calculation and it will ignore dots (path, entropy for me typically) which may tick in the couple second burst time frame. I am just going to assume the target has no damage mitigation (which truthfully will be pretty common in no CP with 5.2k pen from sharp, 4.8k from light armor, and 5.2k from ele drain) for simplicity and will put my stats at 30k magicka and 3.5k spell damage - not unreasonable.

First, I look at if neither crit: According to UESP my Tether hits for almost exactly 5k in PvP (I typically empower so we will say 6k) and my spectral bow hits for almost 7k. If neither crits this is 12k damage. So how much spell damage do I need to add to get it to 17k (the amount I'd do with skoria hitting simultaneously)? Nearly 2500 spell damage! If I had 6k spell damage my empowered tether would do a little over 8k and my bow would do 9.5k for around 17.5 k damage.

Second, both crit: I am going to assume 1.4 for crit modifier which is generous (equivalent to just 5 piece impen) - it will usually be much lower because remember that almost everyone (or at least competent players who actually require this burst combo to kill) will be running full impen or impreg and all good teams will have 100% uptime on trans for near crit immunity. Nonetheless I will assume just 20% crit reduction for a 1.4 crit modifier for my Magblade with 30k magicka and 3.5k spell damage - this gives a 7k crit, empowered tether and about a 10k crit bow for a total of 17k damage. With skoria this would be a total burst of 22k damage - quite the punch and lethal to almost any target! So how much spell damage would I have to add now to make up for losing the 5k damage from skoria? About 1700 spell damage! If I had 5200 spell damage then my empowered, crit tether would hit for about 10.5k and my crit bow for about 12k for a total of 22.5k damage.

Tl;dr: While not the perfect test this shows that proc sets are really worth even more "equivalent weapon/spell damage" in PvP because the key to getting kills is getting off as much damage as possible in about a 2 second burst window. Here, just by example, you can see that Skoria can easily be worth around 2k or more spell damage in a burst combo. I'm sure it is similar for other combos like heavy attack + incap -> surprise attack. So proc sets are over performing much more drastically for PvP burst than one would even first expect.

Super Tl;dr: PROC SETS ARE EVEN MORE OP IN NO-CP PVP!

out51d3r

The other trade off is that weapon damage increases your heals, and damage procs don't. Not going to argue that's a reasonable trade(it clearly isn't), but it should be considered in discussions like this.

WhiteMage

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Perhaps I'm oversimplifying this, but with the cooldown in mind, the DPS equivalent of these sets at Legendary are:

• Viper: +1680 (6720 once every four seconds)
• Selenes: + 2100 (in conjunction with rapid strikes 4.6 chances per second @ 15% chance x 12k damage every 4 seconds)
  That's ~70% chance of 3k dps, less if used with other melee skills.
• Skoria: +900 ( that's 9000 damage every 5 seconds @8% chance per dot. Assuming you've got 6 dots going full time, that puts you @ 48% proc chance to get 1800 dps...thus the +900 equivalent)

While I realize it's not the DPS that kills you so much as the burst, when broken down as DPS they seem less impressive?

(Would you be happier if they doubled the chance but halved the damage, or would this not change enough in the grand scheme of things?)

Legit asking here, not trolling...

No, it's a good question. If you are comparing it to the DPS numbers the top tier PvEers can achieve, then the DPS contribution from these sets are rather disappointing. What these situations (trials) have in common are very long encounters in the sense that burst is negligible. Evaluations are simpler in PvE because of this. The strongest attack that any player can muster is far less than a percent of the boss's health. If viper only contributes to roughly 5% of your DPS, one may even be tempted to call it underpowered in PvE.

PvP is an entirely different issue. Ignoring resistances, a 20k health pool has 40k "real" health and a 25k health pool has 50k "real" health. A single viper proc of 6720 removes roughly between 13% and 17% of a player's health. Selene is roughly 25%. Remember knight slayer removes exactly 9% of the target's maximum health on a heavy attack, but it can be used more frequently (and even was nerfed from 10%). It is fairly typical for players to not be concerned with their survival until they drop to around 50%, give or take 10%, and that is arguably a good use of resources given burst capabilities/limitations. What that means, though, is that they are probably 3 to 5 attacks away from death (you can fairly safely count an execute as two), something you would expect to take 3-5 seconds, less against a potato. A proc is an extra hit that defies the GCD which removes time that could be used in counterplay, on top of any forced loss due to CC. This is just one proc from one player. This argument has been made countless times before though, so let me put some numbers to it.

At the beginning of the thread in the major TL;DR, I gave an estimate for viper's weapon damage equivalence of 900. That is on the low end for many PvP encounters. 900 weapon damage is the equivalent of using 4 attacks in 4 seconds with a weapon damage coefficient of 1.866. There are some problems with that. First, using 4 attacks in 4 seconds is unreasonable imo, especially in PvP. On a training dummy I couldn't get attacks off faster than once every 1.3 seconds, according to combat metrics. Secondly, there are no attacks that you can spam with a weapon damage coefficient that high. Uppercut's morphs are 1.613 and snipe's morphs are 1.669. Now, you can bring that 1.866 down to 1.623 with a 30% crit rate at the base crit damage modifier but it would be hard to lower it appreciably more. If you instead kill your opponent right after the viper proc (within 1 or 2 seconds as opposed to just less than 4) even with an attack that has an unreasonably high weapon damage coefficient of 2 (Ice Comet), viper is worth 1600-3400 weapon damage, or 1100-2200 if the meteor crits.

But often--and I'm just guessing here because I have 0 experience using it--an opponent will take 2-3 viper procs and die almost immediately after the last proc. The build I have in mind is viper/tremor 2h/SnB build, you know the kind. In this situation viper contributes about 2500 (or about 2000 with 50% crit at base CDM) weapon damage because the fight took just over a multiple of 4 seconds (assuming viper procs every 4 seconds). The sad truth of it is, according to my calculations, proc sets have no rival, especially when a fight ends shortly after a proc.

Ultimately, because of the vast difference in health pools between players and NPCs, proc sets cannot be balanced for both PvE and PvP at the same time. As long as they deal flat damage numbers, they will be either useless in PvE or vastly overpowered in PvP. If you were to insist that they must exist everywhere in the game, the least damaging proc for PvP would be one that procs for very low damage very frequently, somewhat like grothdarr (which I have not evaluated as of yet).

bubbygink wrote: »

WhiteMage wrote: »

If I were to give rough estimates of the weapon and spell damages equivalents of the proc sets Viper, Selene, and Skoria, it would be at roughly 900, 1900, and 800 unbuffed.

The crazy thing is that this is for sustained DPS. In pvp where it is all about burst, these sets are really worth MUCH more than these amounts of spell/weapon damage.

You nailed it.

Merlin13KAGL

Thank you for the in depth answer.

I'm all about counterplay and definitely agree that some of these sets make that all but impossible. I've been on the receiving end of Veli/Viper/Red Mountain and various others. It seems like they get certain things situated in game then they turn around and add things like Defiler.

Sadly, I have a hunch they use the "DPS" formula to come up with some of the new sets, as you can compare (again, simplistically) as I did various sets and you'll see similar damage/healing/additive effects. They look at one side or the other (PvE/PvP) and never consider the opposing venue.

I suppose they could add differing effect/values for players vs monsters, but I don't see them going to that kind of trouble. Proc damage could be flat capped at % player health, but that creates its own issues.

There definitely needs to be a change of some kind. I'd rather get outskilled than outgeared.

Waffennacht

To the dps dude, just real quick. Take that 30k dps and divide it by the number of abilities it takes to achieve that number (including buffs) and then compare that number to viper etc. You'll get a much better comparison

nCats

My rough estimate would be that viper is around 600 weapon damage, buff-able by major brutality, but not affecting critical hits. I guess that coincides with your considerations.

But that's not the point of viper; point is that you can kill folks in one click and then wait for the cooldown.

There is a set I like, spriggan's, and it is really great if you want to build stats and use ultimate, but in small scale it does not compare to viper; for steady dps reliant on crit, spriggan outperforms.

WhiteMage

nCats wrote: »

My rough estimate would be that viper is around 600 weapon damage, buff-able by major brutality, but not affecting critical hits. I guess that coincides with your considerations.

But that's not the point of viper; point is that you can kill folks in one click and then wait for the cooldown.

There is a set I like, spriggan's, and it is really great if you want to build stats and use ultimate, but in small scale it does not compare to viper; for steady dps reliant on crit, spriggan outperforms.

Are we talking PvP? If so, 600 buffable weapon damage is far too low. That 900 weapon damage that I gave was actually the buffable, unbuffed value. In fact, almost every weapon/spell damage value I gave shows the buffed value with the buffable, unbuffed value in parenthesis beside it. I think the only exception is in post #38, which numbers' you can divide by 1.20-1.37 to get the buffable, unbuffed values.

So no. I think 600, while it sounds nice to think that viper can only be twice as strong as Hunding's at most, is far too conservative of an estimate for the value. Again, in PvP, best case as far as I can tell is viper is three times as powerful and hunding's. Worst case, situationally, viper can be expected to be maybe 12 times as effective as hunding's. It seems rather absurd, but that's what my numbers tell me.

If you have a different way to evaluate it numerically (or better yet, with in-game parses!) please share. Guesses though have not gotten us very far: it removed the crit from procs, for all the good that did/didn't do. It takes something more tangible to get through to the devs, if anything can.