Flawless Dawnbreaker 3% Dmg or 991 Pen

ACamaroGuy

Khajiit Arcanist CP level 2088 Oakensoul build, PvE.
My current bar set-up in order from left to right...
• Pragmatic Fatecarver • Unstable Wall of Elements • Tome-Bearer's Inspiration • Cephaliarch's Flail • Rune of Colorless Pool • Flawless Dawnbreaker.
1) does the 3% increased weapon & spell damage from having Flawless Dawnbreaker slotted have any benefit over using the Unblinking Eye & receiving the Splintered Secrets 991 added penetration?
Thank you.

RaptorRodeoGod

Well Oakensoul provides Major Sorcery/Brutality, so you don't really need Tome Bearers Inspiration on the backbar for that reason

RaptorRodeoGod

And for your second point, it would depend if you hit the pen cap or not. If you haven't hit the pen cap of 18200, go for Unblinking Eye front bar

Stanx

You can't use a backbar with Oakensoul.

Necrotech_Master

i use the languid eye on my back bar with dawnbreaker on front bar

using a bow and medium armor im still sitting at like almost 8k pen, not accounting for debuffs on the target

ACamaroGuy

RaptorRodeoGod wrote: »

And for your second point, it would depend if you hit the pen cap or not. If you haven't hit the pen cap of 18200, go for Unblinking Eye front bar

Currently at 9308 penetration. I'll add the Unblinking Eye for the added pen. Thank you.

virtus753

ACamaroGuy wrote: »

RaptorRodeoGod wrote: »

And for your second point, it would depend if you hit the pen cap or not. If you haven't hit the pen cap of 18200, go for Unblinking Eye front bar

Currently at 9308 penetration. I'll add the Unblinking Eye for the added pen. Thank you.

Do you play with a group? Because tanks typically provide Major and Minor Breach and often a 2-handed infused crusher, which would put you over pen cap with 9308 pen from your own build.

Necrotech_Master

ACamaroGuy wrote: »

RaptorRodeoGod wrote: »

And for your second point, it would depend if you hit the pen cap or not. If you haven't hit the pen cap of 18200, go for Unblinking Eye front bar

Currently at 9308 penetration. I'll add the Unblinking Eye for the added pen. Thank you.

i think dawnbreaker is still better

if your already at 9300 pen, that is above the pen cap for most overland enemies without applying any kind of debuffs on the target

if you add major/minor breach, you would already be at 18.2k effective pen with your current pen amount

minor breach you can get from one of the armor skills in soldier line, and major breach you can get from slotting something like caltrops (if your running solo)

if your running with a debuffer tank (tremorscale + crimson oath + major and minor breach) they are already reducing the targets armor by around 12000-14000 or so

Lumsdenml

I hate math, that is why I love this site.. You can put in your build, then change stuff up and see which gives you the better effective damage. Super easy, though it does take a little time to figure out and put in your build.

El_Borracho

I run Dawnbreaker, Trap, and Camo Hunter on my front bar to get a 9% bump. I don't know if only running Dawnbreaker for 3% is better than running Unblinking Eye, which is a stronger ultimate

SandandStars

i think 3% dmg is approx 150 sdmg/wdmg

and 991 pen is 99 sd/wd

Vulkunne

ACamaroGuy wrote: »

Khajiit Arcanist CP level 2088 Oakensoul build, PvE.
My current bar set-up in order from left to right...
• Pragmatic Fatecarver • Unstable Wall of Elements • Tome-Bearer's Inspiration • Cephaliarch's Flail • Rune of Colorless Pool • Flawless Dawnbreaker.
1) does the 3% increased weapon & spell damage from having Flawless Dawnbreaker slotted have any benefit over using the Unblinking Eye & receiving the Splintered Secrets 991 added penetration?
Thank you.

An Oak build isn't as friendly to dmg rotations. Like if I want DW and then Bow or Staff AOEs or somethin I'm only going to get one. With that said, this principle factor precludes the added benefits provided by Flawless DB as it can only buff skills on one bar vice two.

Flawless DB is meant to be flexible, it does its damage and we move on. This arcanist ability howeverr is more like a Storm. Because you cannot completely leverage Flawless DB, this fact in and of itself means you're losing damage. Nothing else really to be said. The arcanist ability is better in this circumstance.

The fact that it also adds some pen makes up for the loss of dmg from Flawless DB's added buff while in a sense doing the same thing for your one bar. Not to mention the passive provides the pen per skill slotted. So if I only need 3 arcanist skills on one bar than that is further ahead then having a second bar and none of these slotted there, thus no bonus from the passive.

virtus753

SandandStars wrote: »

i think 3% dmg is approx 150 sdmg/wdmg

and 991 pen is 99 sd/wd

Except 3% of weapon damage and spell damage is based entirely on our current base weapon and spell damage, which varies build to build (depending on class, sets, CP, racial bonuses, etc.) and isn’t static in any situation with timed wd/sd buffs. Pen is worth a varying relative amount depending on how much of it you already have. 991 pen when you have none is worth more than 991 when it takes you to pen cap. Any amount of pen is also entirely useless past pen cap, whereas there is no cap on weapon or spell damage. If OP is already at pen cap with the debuffs present (or in overland self-buffed, where mobs have only 9.1k resists), 99 WD/sd is infinitely more useful than 991 pen.

The effectiveness of these alternatives is entirely dependent on the build and the target. They can’t be reduced to direct equivalents as a generalization.

WrathOfInnos

I wouldn't worry about the passives, both are good. On an Oakensoul build you have to pick your one ult based on which you want to cast. Unblinking Eye is a better ultimate than Dawnbreaker.

ACamaroGuy

Thank you all for your input.

Redguards_Revenge

This is a pure fact in eso pvp. Weapon or Spell DMG always BEATS OUT PEN....

virtus753

Redguards_Revenge wrote: »

This is a pure fact in eso pvp. Weapon or Spell DMG always BEATS OUT PEN....

That isn’t true as an absolute statement. It depends how much you’re getting of each, how much you already have of each, and how much armor your target has left.

For example, ZOS equates 129 weapon/spell damage to 1471 pen in their set bonuses. If your PvP target has 20,000 resists, giving yourself 1471 pen lowers their mitigation to 18,529. Your target has gone from 30.3% mitigation to 28.07%. ~2.23% more of your raw damage is going through, for a relative increase in this case of 3.2%. If your target started with only 10,000 resists (let’s say due to debuffs), then your 1471 pen brought them from 15.15% mitigation to 12.9% mitigation, the same extra percentage of raw damage is going through, but in this case it’s a relative gain of only 2.7%. The relative gain lowers to that ~2.23% absolute difference as you approach pen cap. But of course if you’re at pen cap already, you get an absolute and relative gain of 0%. (These mitigation and relative damage figures change in PvE, where mobs have resistances out of 50k instead of 66k. Pen goes even further there.)

The impact of weapon and spell damage increases is much trickier to calculate. Neither the stat itself nor the multipliers are capped, but they both factor into damage and healing in different ways. Damage and healing done with offensive skills (skills that scale off your max offensive resource, not health) combine your weapon or spell damage with your higher max offensive stat divided by 10.5. As a result, increases in weapon and spell damage will be less effective for those skills compared to simply taking the new weapon/spell damage value and dividing by the old one. Let’s say for argument’s sake you had 8,000 weapon/spell damage after 50% modifiers. Adding a 129 WD/SD set bonus would give you 193.5 due to your modifiers. (I believe that rounds down, but I’ll leave it as is.) 8193.5/8000 = 1.024, or a 2.4% relative increase. But that only applies directly to things that scale purely off your damage stat, like proc sets. (And 2.4% is still worse than the non-capped examples for pen above.) For damage and heals done with skills and things like status effects, you need to factor in your max resource too. Let’s say you have 30k mag or stam. That’s adding the equivalent of 2857 weapon/spell damage to your skill tooltips, and it isn’t buffed by modifiers. A skill that did 2857+8000 before is now doing 2857+8193.5 with the extra weapon/spell damage. That’s a 1.78% relative increase due to the fact that your max resource stays the same. Players using a combination of proc set and skill damage will see an increase somewhere between that 1.78% and 2.4%, depending on how much of their damage is done with procs vs skills. Light attacks are also capped well below these example stats, so in either PvP or PvE that 129 damage bonus wouldn’t help there, whereas extra effective pen would.

There are situations where you might prefer the weapon/spell damage over the pen, especially if you want better heals or if your starting stats are significantly lower than in these examples but you’re somehow at pen cap, and of course it depends on the amount you stand to gain for each stat. But pen is often the better option from a pure damage perspective provided you’re not at cap. There isn’t a clear winner in all situations.