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

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.

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.

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.

i think 3% dmg is approx 150 sdmg/wdmg

and 991 pen is 99 sd/wd

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.

Thank you all for your input.

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.