Sharp Sword vs Nirnhoned Mace HotR?

Vapirko

Anyone done any testing on this? I would be interested to know which one might come out on top.

TheRealSniker

Nirnhorned maces if you dont run any additional penetration since they apply AFTER FLAT PENETRATION
Sharpened Swords if youre playing a Stamblade or use something like Spriggans

Trashs1

TheRealSniker wrote: »

Nirnhorned maces if you dont run any additional penetration since they apply AFTER FLAT PENETRATION
Sharpened Swords if youre playing a Stamblade or use something like Spriggans

well that depends how much resistance you asume as the pro media in cryo / Bgs

asuming that light armour users have something like 12k
medium maybe 16k
heavy something like 22k

now when u calculate flat pene from spriggs or skills before mace you have your answer. if u fight mostly against heavy armour users ofc maul. if u are a sneaky assassin who like to eat light amrour users than sword

nCats

TheRealSniker wrote: »

Nirnhorned maces if you dont run any additional penetration since they apply AFTER FLAT PENETRATION
Sharpened Swords if youre playing a Stamblade or use something like Spriggans

Actually not, it does apply to the resistance before any penetration. You can check it yourself on a 18k resistances target skeleton: a Spriggan maul will give more damage output than a Spriggan sword. This is because a maul starts overperforming a greatsword at 13k resistances (I can give you the math if needed).

I was first surprised about the above fact myself, but there is a wrong stereotype about maces and swords in the community, with few people done the actual calculus. Two-handed maces are already better except against shieldstackers.

To answer the op's question, it all depends. I think swords should be let in the dust regardless. As for mauls, let X denote the damage increase from a nirn weapon to your tooltips. Then to decide which is better, sharpened maul or nirnhoned maul, you have to analyse the equation (D+X)(1 - 0.8 M) = D(1 - 0.8M + 0.04), where M is the enemy's mitigation (=armor) and D is your damage. 0.04 is the new sharpened damage increase. In other words, we have

X/D = 0.04 /(1-0.8M). (***)

Let us remember that M cannot be more than 0.5, so for the right side we have

0.04 /(1-0.8M) is less or equal than 0.04/(1-0.8*0.5) =0.06(6)

In other words, if your tooltip grows by more than 6.7 percent from nirnhoned, the nirnhoned maul is always better than sharpened maul. If it is less, then you can insert the X/D ratio in the equation (***) above and see at which mitigation value your sharpened maul becomes better.

Example. For non-cp, let's say you run a 9k dawnbreaker tooltip. It becomes, say, 9600 with nirnhoned weapon. The increase is 600, so 600/9000 = 0.06(6), so we get that in this case you better go with nirn. Say now you have a 12k tooltip, the increase is the same, 600, but the ratio is now 0.05. If I plug that into the equation (***) and compute, I get that M=25%, or around 16.5k resistances. After that value, sharpened is better than nirnhoned in such a case.

So, the simple conclusion is that you have to check how much damage you get from nirnhoned. If it is 7 percent or so, you're better with nirn, if less, sharpened will be better at some point.

And then there is infused which leaves both in dust for single target solutions.

Vapirko

@nCats awesome thank you. So unless Infused gets a nerf prior to next patch it's going to outperform other weapon traits in pvp? Let's see what the final patch notes say. It seems weird that ZOS would choose Infused to be the next meta by such a great amount. If torugs pact is going to be so strong mag builds and mag sorcs in particular are just going to be so over the top.

nCats

@Vapirko see my other thread over there

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/363572/balancing-issue-a-small-calculation-explaining-the-imbalance-of-infused-and-oblivion-damage-in-pvp

I would not say you need to nerf infused, you rather need to nerf oblivion.

To be extremely precise, you have to factor in your playstyle. I run a 2h build which shines in the ultimate phase, and there I need as much penetration as I can carry. However, even I think I might profit from infused to slam the most annoying targets, blockplars and stacksorcs, quickly.

Also if you keep running Selene/Velidreth, you may notice that they benefit from sharpened.

I think a really great solution is an infused Spriggan maul, especially since they will deploy the appearance change system for items in future updates (it is true that Spriggan's maul is one hell of an ugly weapon)