Critical, Weapon/Spell Damage and Penetration

bdyid

can someone give detail about this ? like chart or graph difference. i'm really curious about this especially when you're doing solo content to maximize your damage output.

for example, i have 3500 weapon damage and 8000 physical penetration(with major breach) so to maximize my damage i have to use lover mundus stone. but is there any kind of explanation for this?

Sangwyne

If you are solo, you want to maximize penetration, even at the expense of other stats, until you hit 9100. If soloing dungeons or arenas, you will need up to 18200. Penetration is the single most important stat you can gain until you hit the cap. The resistance on enemies works differently than ours; we need 33k to cap at 50% damage reduction, but 25k is considered 50% mitigation cap for mobs so 18200 resistance translates to 36.4% damage reduction. Negating all 18200 of that increases your damage from 63.6 to 100%, a 57.2% increase, which is way better than some weapon damage when most people already have 3-4k of it. Crit works well when you have good base damage and penetration to back it up, but requires both good critical chance and damage to make work; don't worry about it if you don't have penetration capped. Focus on pen.

zaria

Correct except that for maelstrom and the reach solo arena the pen cap is 9100. dungeons, trials and group arenas its 18100.
As tank is supposed to reduce this a lot.
Another reason to kick fake tanks unless they do good damage .

virtus753

zaria wrote: »

Correct except that for maelstrom and the reach solo arena the pen cap is 9100. dungeons, trials and group arenas its 18100.
As tank is supposed to reduce this a lot.
Another reason to kick fake tanks unless they do good damage .

Maelstrom has bosses with 18.2k resists:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/314221/list-of-physical-resist-in-maelstrom-and-best-dps-set

laksikus

zaria wrote: »

Correct except that for maelstrom and the reach solo arena the pen cap is 9100. dungeons, trials and group arenas its 18100.
As tank is supposed to reduce this a lot.
Another reason to kick fake tanks unless they do good damage .

Why?
If i fake tank on a mag char, im using ele drain for myself anyway and if there is a stam dd i can slot caltrops.

Its not as if its tank exclusive

Athan1

Please don't hijack this thread to rant about fake tanks, the OP is clearly asking about armor penetration and damage.

Another thing to note is that penetration is DPS exclusive and useless for anything else. Increasing your spell/weapon damage also buffs your healing and pretty much any ability that is based off it. Crits as well, your heals can crit. Just something else to consider. While pen is important, I prefer investing in raw stats and weapon damage so that I can heal and tank depending on the need.

Also pen is so dependent on group composition and debuffs used that you have to build your pen around this. It's a waste of resources to invest it in just a little, as a DD you'd normally need to go for the cap.