VMA bow math

dwig · July 2019

At this point we just need to wait for next patch notes to decide between master and vma. If they leave the vma bonus as it is right now then master's looks better, but I think they meant to keep the vma bonus the same, and just did the math wrong. They need to increase the scaling part of the bonus from 55 to ~150 to keep the total bonus the same for hail.

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO · July 2019

e-rwan wrote: »

by the looks of this, this is about the same as the damage per tick that is added by the master weapons to twin slashes, the dot that is added to stampede by the vma 2h and the light attack damage that is added by the vma destro, that cant be an accident.

Onefrkncrzypope · July 2019

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

Bow on pts right now is 2 ticks shorter than it should be, so keep that in mind too when using real values vs. calculated values to infer % nerf.

Aimed at no one in particular, just saw some people doing both calculations and posted this to make sure there was no confusion as to why PTS testing values differed from theoretical values.

Exactly. Both theoretical application and in game are suffering from issues.

John_Falstaff · July 2019

Just as predicted, it's 13 ticks, yes. Nothing to do with tick frequency, just when you section a length in intervals, always one more point than the number of intervals.

And still, the bow is ninja-nerfed, there's no even standard text with "this will result in damage loss" or anything. Would like a comment on that nerf, wonder if it's intended, or an oversight.

@ZOS_GinaBruno

MashmalloMan · July 2019

John_Falstaff wrote: »

Just as predicted, it's 13 ticks, yes. Nothing to do with tick frequency, just when you section a length in intervals, always one more point than the number of intervals.

And still, the bow is ninja-nerfed, there's no even standard text with "this will result in damage loss" or anything. Would like a comment on that nerf, wonder if it's intended, or an oversight.

@ZOS_GinaBruno

Except the reliance on sets like Relequen and VMA bow have always been too powerful for stam builds, the fact that it was ninja nerfed is a good thing imo because DW/2H and Master bow have become more enticing. I'd like to see some of the power from Relequen given back to the classes so we can have more build variety too.

e-rwan wrote: »

Should be noted this is just for the VMA bow, Arrow Barrage does 20% more damage and falls within a 10s rotation where most stam dots are 10s making it a lot easier to manage.

Endless Hail has a 14s duration which proves to be much more complicated, the set bonus also only applies once the damage from the bow starts ticking. With a static rotation you have a 4s downtime (71% uptime) on your Poison Injection and Soul Trap vs Arrow Barrage where you can easily get 95+% uptime on all your dots.

You can use a dynamic rotation to fix this, the problem is VMA bow's set bonus only activates if you are using the weapon when Volley's damage ticks, that's what makes it so much easier to cast Arrow Barrage -> Soul Trap -> Poison Injection -> Bar Swap. The damage starts ticking at about 1.5s between your 2nd and 3rd ability cast.

The plus side (on live) is the VMA bow's set bonus updates based on the duration of the ability, so even if it didn't proc for the first 4 ticks, it will update when weapon swapping to the escalated bonus on tick 5 instead of acting like it's tick 1.

Endless Hail originally seemed enticing on paper with Anti-Calvary Caltrops (Similar duration) but with all things considered, I'll be dropping Caltrops for Soul Trap and switching to VMA Arrow Barrage.

e-rwan · July 2019

Marshall1289 wrote: »

John_Falstaff wrote: »

Just as predicted, it's 13 ticks, yes. Nothing to do with tick frequency, just when you section a length in intervals, always one more point than the number of intervals.

And still, the bow is ninja-nerfed, there's no even standard text with "this will result in damage loss" or anything. Would like a comment on that nerf, wonder if it's intended, or an oversight.

@ZOS_GinaBruno

Except the reliance on sets like Relequen and VMA bow have always been too powerful for stam builds, the fact that it was ninja nerfed is a good thing imo because DW/2H and Master bow have become more enticing. I'd like to see some of the power from Relequen given back to the classes so we can have more build variety too.

e-rwan wrote: »

Should be noted this is just for the VMA bow, Arrow Barrage does 20% more damage and falls within a 10s rotation where most stam dots are 10s making it a lot easier to manage.

Endless Hail has a 14s duration which proves to be much more complicated, the set bonus also only applies once the damage from the bow starts ticking. With a static rotation you have a 4s downtime (71% uptime) on your Poison Injection and Soul Trap vs Arrow Barrage where you can easily get 95+% uptime on all your dots.

You can use a dynamic rotation to fix this, the problem is VMA bow's set bonus only activates if you are using the weapon when Volley's damage ticks, that's what makes it so much easier to cast Arrow Barrage -> Soul Trap -> Poison Injection -> Bar Swap. The damage starts ticking at about 1.5s between your 2nd and 3rd ability cast.

The plus side (on live) is the VMA bow's set bonus updates based on the duration of the ability, so even if it didn't proc for the first 4 ticks, it will update when weapon swapping to the escalated bonus on tick 5 instead of acting like it's tick 1.

Endless Hail originally seemed enticing on paper with Anti-Calvary Caltrops (Similar duration) but with all things considered, I'll be dropping Caltrops for Soul Trap and switching to VMA Arrow Barrage.

on pts hail = 12s and barrage = 8s

PS and barrage keeps it's 7m radius over hail 5m. so barrage all the way.

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO · July 2019

@e-rwan yeah, the cast time says "instant" but the damage does not start ticking until 2 seconds has passed, effectively making that 8 and 12 seconds, 10 and 14.

John_Falstaff · July 2019

@Marshall1289 , there's nothing good about nerfing vMA weapons, I already wrote about it. For one, make no mistake, bow backbar will keep position of being meta, nothing will change about it after the patch. For another, vMA weapons hold a special position of being a personal achievement of a player expressed in a weapon that gives a steady bonus to their damage; take their prevalence away, and whole layer of personal growth for a player goes away with them. vMA bow, a player can only get on their own, other weapons is a product of team's skill, not personal one. I can't even recall how many times I helped guildmates and friends to farm vDSA, and I see farm carries sold in Craglorn zone chat every day. Some weapons should be better than others.

MashmalloMan · July 2019

@John_Falstaff You can nerf something without completely destroying it which is what happened here. I was specifically speaking about the VMA bow, not all VMA weapons. I agree that the solo achievement of completing VMA should be rewarding by offering something of greater power, but it should not be the end all be all to the point where nothing else seems competitive.

VMA Endless Hail has been near the top of every single stam dps parse for years. Relequen has joined that category and I'd like to see some of that power given back to the classes instead of sets. The fact that Master bow is a little more enticing for Single Target than it was before is really nice to see simply from a build variety concern.

The re-balancing of Volley and buffs to pve DW/2H have brought those builds to a more acceptable level making players feel less pigeonholed in to DW/Bow. It was such boring design in a game that touts the option to "play as you want" and the game is 1 step closer to that vision.

John_Falstaff · July 2019

@Marshall1289 , it never was 'end all be all', that's the point. vMA bow used to give 2k self-buffed damage, tops, ~4k raid-buffed (and that's compared with non-set bow, after Summerset set bow backbar closed the gap even more), any build was absolutely viable and even competitive - save for top scores - without it, and at the same time, it was an edge a player could get through own achievement. Relequen on body? Day of farming nCR with pugs. Lokke or AY daggers? Bit longer, but still group effort and not much personal one.

Moreover, Master bow was parsing practically the same as vMA one for single target, the difference was below noise floor. The AoE gain was that edge players earned by themselves, and single target - something that matters most - was the same, could use Master just as well and see no difference in single target. Now? Now we'll see the weird situation where it's still not any more acceptable to run anything but DW/Bow (yup, still have to keep your Relequen stacks even while doing mechanics, if nothing else, go figure how to do it with 2H backbar), but at the same time players will have to swap bows for ST / AoE cases. So, no more diversity than before, but a lot more annoyance, especially for console players.