As most people are aware, the trial dummy was adjusted on PTS such that parses are not directly comparable with Live. From the patch notes:
- Adjusted the Crusher Enchant on Target Dummies to mirror an Infused value, rather than an Infused + Torug's Pact value.
- Engulfing Flames now matches the proper 6% maximum value, down from the old 10%.
- Alkosh's Roar is now the maximum 6000 Armor reduction, up from the old 3010 value.
- Attackers now gain Minor Courage and Major Slayer when hitting the targets.
To try to understand how to compare the numbers between the two, I ran the following experiment:
- Use the loadout station to completely reset my magcro’s skills, CP, and attributes, and remove all gear except for a gold Inferno Staff of Willpower with an Absorb Magicka enchant (it’s what was on the character; I haven’t played Magcro in a while)
- Assign all attributes to Magicka, and purchase Force Pulse but no other skills or passives.
- Hit the dummy with Force Pulse a bunch of times, and use Combat Metrics to read the maximum damage done by each component, which is the value of a Critical hit. The actual DPS of each test is meaningless since with only a handful of hits, a few crits dramatically impacts dps.
I did this on Live, then did it on PTS, and compared the two numbers. Since Force Pulse wasn’t changed and no passives are in play, the difference between the numbers on PTS and Live isolates just the impact of the dummy changes.
Results
Most of the damage sources saw a roughly 19% damage increase on PTS versus Live. The fire-based ones were a bit less, at around a 15% damage increase, which makes sense given the reduction in Engulfing Flames damage that impacts only fire. The damage of the Absorb Magicka enchant is an outlier as it also had a 15% damage increase, despite not being fire. I don’t have an explanation for that one.
Roughly averaging those a bit, that means
damage numbers on the PTS dummy are roughly 18% higher on PTS than live, not counting any balance adjustments. You can divide a PTS parse by 1.18 to get the equivalent Live parse, so a 100K parse on the PTS would be roughly equivalent to an 85K parse on Live.
Obviously, this will be affected by your build, specifically how much of your damage is fire damage, whether you reach the pen cap on either server, and whether you already have any of the new buffs they added to the dummy. But I think it provides a decent ballpark.
Raw Data:
Live:
Force Pulse (Fire): 4128
Force Pulse (Lightning): 3798
Force Pulse (Frost): 3798
Absorb Magicka: 5024
Overcharged (non-crit): 544
Burning: 2131
PTS:
Force Pulse (Fire): 4759
Force Pulse (Lightning): 4523
Force Pulse (Frost): 4523
Absorb Magicka: 5743
Overcharged (non-crit): 647
Burning: 2452
Ratio (PTS/Live):
Force Pulse (Fire): 1.152
Force Pulse (Lightning): 1.191
Force Pulse (Frost): 1.191
Absorb Magicka: 1.143
Overcharged: 1.189
Burning: 1.151
Please feel free to poke holes in my testing methodology. I felt like doing some quick science and this is the best I could come up with.