Parameters of Spell/Weapon Damage

Caroloces

I've recently become attuned to the importance of Spell/Weapon Damage in your stats. The thing that's always puzzled me is that the numbers seem meaningless at first glance because you don't have a sense of the overall range of these values. All you know is that more is better, but if you have 1500 weapon damage, and the upper limit is 2000, that's more impressive than if the upper limit were 20,000! Anyway, so I recently read that an attribute pool of 2000 spell/weapon damage is about right. So my basic questions are these: Is that reasonable? What are the upper limits to these stats? Does healing benefit from a higher spell damage stat? What are the best ways to improve these stats?
Thanks for any help!

Rianai

Technically there are no upper limits, but ofc there are limited sources for those stats. Stamina builds can reach 8k+ weapon dmg, for magicka builds the maximum amount of achievable spelldamage is lower. However, spell/weapondmg is not the only factor that increases your dmg and healing output (yes, many heals scale with spell- or weapondmg). Resource pools, crit chance and damage, penetration, damage done buffs, ... are just as important, so only focusing on one stat is usually not optimal. This also means it is not possible to tell whether a value of x is reasonable without context, because the answer depends on the rest of the build as well as the intended purpose (tho for a DPS build 2k wpn/spelldmg is rather low).

Some ways to increase your spell or weapon dmg stat are the use of gold quality weapons, sets which provide those stats, warrior/apprentice mundus (+ evtl. divine gear), Major Sorcery/Brutality buffs, (infused) weapon or spell dmg glyphes on jewelry, (infused) berserker enchant on a weapon.

Vajrak

You ask for the Parameters:

Gold Weapons, CP160, with No Trait, and no skillpoints:
1h Weapons, Bows, Staves: 1335
2h Melee: 1571

Boosts to Spell/Weapon Damage:
Major Brutality/Sorcery: 1885 2h Melee, 1602 all others
with Minor Brutality/Sorcery: 2042 2h Melee, 1735 all others

~2000 Weapon/Spell damage as a baseline value (no traits, no armor boosts, no skillpoints, no enchantments) -- is just that -- a value that is easily achievable and extremely low. That is about the Weapon/Spell damage that a fully defensive tank has.

As Rianai noted, Stamina Builds can reach 8k+, Magicka builds can reach 5-6k+.

Then you have all of the other considerations, of penetration, damage buffs, crit factorization, mob debuffs.

All of that said, to answer your questions in order:


Is that reasonable? No. 2k is on the extreme low end for a DPS or Healer; for a tank it is acceptable.

What are the upper limits to these stats? Variable. As noted above, it is easy to raise the baseline value to 2k+ on just Major/Minor buffs. Infused weapon/spell damage glyph adds another 400 on top of that, sets can add easily another 600-800 on top of that, then you have "unlisted" values like Automaton/War Maiden/Netch/etc. give for another 600 (400+major/minor boost). I can't speak for Stamina as I've never maximized, but I know for Magicka you start hurting your overall DPS when you push it over 6k buffed Spell Damage.

Does healing benefit from a higher spell damage stat? Yes. But there are also builds that go with a lower spell damage but raise heal % boosts instead. Different healers and builds will utilize high spell damage versus high recovery in different manners.

What are the best ways to improve these stats? Experience and experimentation.

Caroloces

Fantastic! Thanks so much for the information. I'll print both of your answers out, and do a lot of experimenting in the coming days.