Crusher Enchantment

kojou · November 2019

The accepted standard for DPS is infused weapon/spell damage on your bow backbar and Nirnhoned + Precise or Sharpened for Dual Wield with poisons.

I usually spec for group play because most solo content doesn't really require damage optimization. Killing a delve boss in 5 seconds vs 6 seconds doesn't really matter as much as making DPS check in group content does.

For pvp most players I know (myself included) spec enough damage to be somewhat lethal then spec for sustain and survivability. Damage optimization is less important than you would think.

All that said...

Crusher is best on an infused 2 handed weapon. I wouldn't bother on a 1 handed weapon, but an infused weapon/spell damage glyph would yield more damage than Crusher in most situations if you are looking for damage optimization.

Using the Lover mundus, Spriggan armor, or a skill or armor that gives Major Fracture would be more effective ways of optimizing penetration.

MashmalloMan · November 2019

Urzigurumash wrote: »

OG_Kaveman wrote: »

Bumping threads is against forum rules, pretty sure harassment is too

You are right, I apologize to @MiguZ for this, and I appreciate their input.

Clearly I am not a DPS scientist by any stretch but this question I have might be distilled to: is it possible to do 500k damage in 10 seconds without raid buffs/debuffs and without bonus execute damage? If it is possible, it may be possible that even on a high health target, 10 seconds of Crushing uptime and 10 seconds of Berseker uptime or 5 seconds of Berserker uptime on a Nirnhoned/Sharpened weapon can outpace 10 seconds of Berserker uptime and 2 procs of a Oblivion/Elemental Damage Gylph on a Nirnhoned/Sharpened weapon, no? Poisons being difficult to quantify on paper. This is something I had recently contemplated, so this seemed an appropriate place to ask those who appeared to have a definitive answer supporting their posts in this thread.

If I had the skill or knowledge to do 50k non-raid-buffed parses I wouldn't need to ask of course.

My suspicion about Crushing sometimes being optimal is less about standard DD builds and more about unusual builds with all offensive output loaded into a few extremely high tooltip but seldomly cast skills: a high crit damage build who intends to put all of their offense into their ultimates, or something like that. To be clear, a build where the backbar is only for buffs/debuffs, where the Sharpened trait is not useful and would not substantially increase damage. I would be surprised if Sharpened ticks of Endless Hail would provide more damage output than adding Crushing to frontbar skills.

You're over thinking things a bit here.

Penetration just cuts out resistance on the target. I will save the advice about it being used for tanks, you know this already. Here is why, even without a tank in a solo experience, it's not as useful as other enchantments for dps.

In pve, resistance is 500 = 1%. Most Bosses in the game have 18200 resistance, I think overland mobs have 9100 resistance. VMA has a combination of the 2 with some enemies at around 12k from my memory. Penetration get's wasted beyond a certain point thus why most people just build their characters to work in solo and group content. In a group, it is redundant as every tank will carry 1, you will end up with less damage or be forced to swap to another weapon for such a minimal potential boost in damage, that you could also get from other enchants.

If 2100 infused crusher is correct based on another person's comment, you only cut 4.2% resistance out.

Let's say you have 0 penetration against a boss before crusher. 18200 = 36.4% mitigation. By reducing their resistance to 32.2%, your damage goes from 63.6% to 67.8%. That would be an increase of 6.6% dps, but only against a single target.

So let's say for a moment your TRUE dps is 30k, against a boss with 18200 resist, you would only do 19,080 dps.

With infused crusher, that would bump up to 20,340.

Now let's choose infused Poison instead of infused Crusher. This is also single target enchantment and easily quantifiable. You could gain around 4.6k damage every 2seconds, this is on the lower side, CP can boost it to around 5k. So 2.3k/s * 0.636 (63.6% mitigation) for the 18200 mitigation and you would get 1463 damage/s.

So lets go back to that 19,080 dps without crusher + 1463, you get 20,543 dps. Now.. the Poison enchantment can actually crit as well as apply a small dot, so the dps increase is actually more than what I've illustrated.

As you can see, you get slightly more dps with another single target enchant, but you no longer need to worry about it not being viable in a group. Now, the weapon/spell damage glygh is even better, because it affects ALL your damage, not just 1 target and as a back bar enchantment on a ground dot like Volley, Wall of Elements or Stampede will net you better results with 100% uptime to all the damage you do. Minus damage procs from sets.

There is almost no scenario where you should use an infused crusher enchantment over other damage options as a dps, solo or group. It just complicates your build, it is a support enchantment best slotted on tanks and sometimes healers.

Urzigurumash · November 2019

@MashmalloMan

I appreciate the thoughtful reply.

Based on these numbers, at 30k "true dps" Poison outperforms Crusher by 203 dps. At 40k, Crusher outperforms Poison by 217 dps, and at 50k, Crusher outperforms Poison by 637 dps.

Or am I mistaken about something there?

I understand there is the additional chance of crit, and the DOT from the Poison enchant, but you can see how these numbers are close enough that this matter does not appear to be as cut and dry as earlier posts in this thread alleged, no?

Any and all matters which pertain to groups are impertinent to this question

Urzigurumash · November 2019

MashmalloMan wrote: »

Now, the weapon/spell damage glygh is even better, because it affects ALL your damage, not just 1 target and as a back bar enchantment on a ground dot like Volley, Wall of Elements or Stampede will net you better results with 100% uptime to all the damage you do. Minus damage procs from sets.

It's also worth noting that Crusher does apply to damage procs from sets, unlike Berserker, although in none of my posts did I suggest going without Berserker.

SodanTok · November 2019

Urzigurumash wrote: »

@MashmalloMan

I appreciate the thoughtful reply.

Based on these numbers, at 30k "true dps" Poison outperforms Crusher by 203 dps. At 40k, Crusher outperforms Poison by 217 dps, and at 50k, Crusher outperforms Poison by 637 dps.

Or am I mistaken about something there?

I understand there is the additional chance of crit, and the DOT from the Poison enchant, but you can see how these numbers are close enough that this matter does not appear to be as cut and dry as earlier posts in this thread alleged, no?

Any and all matters which pertain to groups are impertinent to this question

You are not missing anything, you are just looking from point of view noone else is. And I dont meant just 'being in group' point of view. You need to play solo yet also group content (dungeons, trials) to have enemies with 18.2k resistance yet also have two variants (infused berserker and infused crusher) of backbar weapon for aoe/single targets and all of this is sitting on very weak 'if' - if infused crusher is actually better than infused berserker against dungeon/trial boss that has no adds (or no adds where it would matter how fast they die). Infused Poison isnt even part of this equation.

And I forgot the other If - when boss indeed has adds and you indeed can ignore those and not cae about DPS to them IF you can actually consistently manage to keep crusher proccing just on that boss and not go to any of those adds.

Urzigurumash · November 2019

SodanTok wrote: »

You are not missing anything, you are just looking from point of view noone else is. And I dont meant just 'being in group' point of view. You need to play solo yet also group content (dungeons, trials) to have enemies with 18.2k resistance yet also have two variants (infused berserker and infused crusher) of backbar weapon for aoe/single targets and all of this is sitting on very weak 'if' - if infused crusher is actually better than infused berserker against dungeon/trial boss that has no adds (or no adds where it would matter how fast they die). Infused Poison isnt even part of this equation.

And I forgot the other If - when boss indeed has adds and you indeed can ignore those and not cae about DPS to them IF you can actually consistently manage to keep crusher proccing just on that boss and not go to any of those adds.

Yes, this was my point. I suspect there are scenarios where Infused Crusher is the superlative choice for a solo build, to the contrary of the inflexible dogma propagated in this thread that "Crusher is for tanks, case closed".

BejaProphet · November 2019

The real reason nobody can wrap their minds around this is that nobody makes solo builds.

They don’t make solo builds for the same reason you don’t see any delve builds.

I’m not meaning to write with a “jerk” tone, it’s just the real reason you aren’t getting a helpful discussion.

EDIT NOTE: to be fair I should qualify that. Because of course some people make solo builds, but the community doesn’t debat and fine tune them like builds for content that is challenging.

WrathOfInnos · November 2019

BejaProphet wrote: »

The real reason nobody can wrap their minds around this is that nobody makes solo builds.

They don’t make solo builds for the same reason you don’t see any delve builds.

I’m not meaning to write with a “jerk” tone, it’s just the real reason you aren’t getting a helpful discussion.

EDIT NOTE: to be fair I should qualify that. Because of course some people make solo builds, but the community doesn’t debat and fine tune them like builds for content that is challenging.

There is some truth to this. I would say the main exception is vMA builds. There are plenty of builds made and optimized for this solo instance, and I don’t believe any of them use a Crusher enchant because it is inferior to Berserker and damage proc enchants if you are the only one hitting the debuffed enemy.

Urzigurumash · November 2019

@BejaProphet @WrathOfInnos

Thank you, that makes sense. I would not suspect this would be optimal in VMA, since most targets die so quickly and sustain is a greater challenge than damage output.

However as for soloing some of the more difficult and durable DLC World and Dungeon bosses, I think it is worth consideration.

Anyhow I'd say the current Delve meta is Fiord's Legacy + Marauder's Haste.

WrathOfInnos · November 2019

Urzigurumash wrote: »

@BejaProphet @WrathOfInnos

Thank you, that makes sense. I would not suspect this would be optimal in VMA, since most targets die so quickly and sustain is a greater challenge than damage output.

However as for soloing some of the more difficult and durable DLC World and Dungeon bosses, I think it is worth consideration.

Anyhow I'd say the current Delve meta is Fiord's Legacy + Marauder's Haste.

IIRC World bosses have lower resistances, around 9k, so Crusher is likely not needed. And yes, in vMA things die too quickly for Crusher to even get applied to them all (5s cooldown with Infused, vs 2s for infused damage proc enchants). For soloing vet DLC dungeon bosses I could see Crusher approaching a Poison or Flame enchant, but I think it would still be a couple % lower if you consider the status effects caused by damage enchants.

I think most avoid Crusher to make sure their enchant is never made redundant. Other Glyphs don’t become useless if someone else nearby is using the same one. The tank using it makes sense because you’ll never have multiple tanks holding the same boss. I know you’re primarily interested in solo, but you never know when someone will randomly join in to help with World bosses. And in group content it’s a pain to constantly be changing enchants depending on what others are using.

Bladerunner1 · November 2019

Urzigurumash wrote: »

Clearly I am aware of everything in your first paragraph, hence I ask:

Is Infused Crushing Backbar + Nirnhoned/Infused/Sharpened Berserker Frontbar universally outperformed by Infused Berserker Backbar + Nirnhoned/Infused/Sharpened Oblivion Glyph/Damage Health Poison Frontbar?

I suspect the answer is yes, but Build Editor isn't quite working for me at the moment. My very quick calculator math based on casting Endless Hail on my backbar and then spamming Wrecking Blow on my frontbar says the second setup will give me roughly 1k more DPS than the first.

I only ask this question to expand on @Major_Lag 's statement: "For solo play, you would be much better off using a weapon damage enchant instead."

I'll take a stab at an answer because why not, theory crafting is fun.

TL/DR
Infused crusher: 4.2%
Infused beserker: 8-9% (if you have 30000 of a stat+ 3000 unbuffed damage.)
Infused poison: ~3700 DPS (if you have the solo stats I list below)

Crusher
An inused crusher enchantment bypasses 2108 armor for you and everyone else hitting an enemy, which may theoretically add 2108/50000 damage, 4.2% more damage if your glyph is bypassing the last bit of a mob's armor. But overland mobs generally have around 9,000 armor, and bypassing more than their max armor capacity tends to be a total waste. This number is easy to get with a solo build without the need for crusher. Some CPs could get you 4000+ penetration. Major fracture or breach would add 5280 penetration for everyone hitting the target. Light armor gives 4800 penetration all on its own. Staff skills bypass armor along with maces.

Berserker
The % damage added by an infused weapon damage glyph would be (348x 1.3 x damage multipliers)/(total buffed weapon damage + total stamina pool/10.5) if you are using stamina skills. If you use magic, swap weapon damage with spell damage and stamina for magicka pool. So for a theoretical build with 3000 UNBUFFED weapon damage and 30000 stamina, an infused glyph provides approximately 9% more damage to you alone. This doesn't buff proc damage like glyph damage, relequen, viper, zaan or stormfist, etc, so it could be more like 7% with Relequen and a monster helmet slotted.

Poison
A single target damage glyph like poison can give a lot of damage as well. In my own personal experience with a build that has 11,700 penetration against a target with 18,200 armor, where I have ~76% crit rating, +103% combined crit multipliers, 20% Thaumaturge, 12% Mighty, I get about 3200 DPS from an infused poison glyph on a back bar weapon + an additional 500 DPS from the poison status effect that procs from the glyph. Results will vary between builds.

That's a pretty reasonable number if you're busy with fight mechanics, even if you're in a group, considering it's entirely passive damage. It works as long as the enemy is standing in the AOE, but always shifts to the enemy standing closest to the center of your aoe circle. But then again beserker glyphs and crusher glyphs depend on something standing in your circle too.

As far as my solo/small group build is concerned, poison glyph is far and away better since I don't really hit those bosses for more than 3700/.07 (53,000 DPS) all that often.

When you have all the trial buffs in tamriel like on an iron atronach and you slot crafted poisons, berserk tends to be better. The crafted poisons will apply the poison status effect, so a poison glyph gets a bit redundant and deals around 5% of the damage. I never use crafted poison in a small group or solo, and that final 1% more DPS provided by berserker isn't all that important to me in trials, so I keep poison glyph on my back bar weapons/ berserker in front.

Bladerunner1 · November 2019

*Had to make an edit to the berserker math

madman65 · November 2019

Well, I got my answer and the way it seems to workout is... To put crusher on a weapon with sharpened trait. So that`s what I did. I went on solo delves, not that helpful. Went to Undaunted pledges that had other players that had good penetration/lower resistance and players that didn`t. The combo helped period, some of the players were low CP and they probably hadn`t set the character correctly. Now the trials were similar but the players that had good penetration/lower resistance, we cleaned house. All in all, if your sure the players on your team are weak in these areas then use it. As far as solo, there is probably no help that I have found. Yes I had 2 1H weapons and a bow. Still wondering if poison/disease is worth it but Velidreth/Deadly/Vicious is a nice set that I use, Thx.

SirMewser · November 2019

Major_Lag wrote: »

madman65 wrote: »

What I`m after is, I want to lower the penetration of the target to kind of help in a way to raise mine. If you get what I`m trying for. It`s kind of raising my penetration.

In group content, it's the tank's job to handle that.
Crusher enchants don't stack, so the damage dealers should not use one (they would have no effect).

And for soloing PvE content, penetration is not the most important factor; it's much more important to build for sustain and survivability, than to worry about a few % more damage done through extra penetration (or debuffing the target).

Is that to say that the OP isn't building for sustain and survivability by other means?
What about the question that was given?

So your recommendation would be to use absorb health/magic/stamina or hardening enchant on a weapon, over pure damage enchants. Not to say that you're wrong, but that doesn't seem to be holistic.