Tank Classes Off Tank DPS

[Hachiko]

So, there has been a lot of talk about DPS disparity between PLD and WAR. One thing people often mention is that WAR puts out more damage than PLD, which makes them a better off-tank, because they can contribute more to DPS than a PLD on fights where they aren't needed to tank.

After I did a little write up about PLD v. GLD dps it got me thinking, What is WAR dps while not in their tank stance (Defiance), and how that compares to PLD dps while not using their tank stance (Shield Oath).


I want to note that I'm doing this all in terms of "unit potency" per 2.5 as a measurment of DPS, because the game system makes it very easy to measure unit potency and the global cooldown of 2.5 makes it easy to count and compare. What is unit potency? It's the % contribution of your weapon's damage stat. So, a weapon with 50 damage doing a 200 potency attack will end up with 100 damage (before other reductions such as target armor or tank stance).

Auto Attack Potency

To start off, I want to talk about how Auto Attack potency works. Ultimately, it works out to 83 per 2.5 seconds (global cooldown). You can check this by looking at a Weapon's Damage, attack delay, and auto attack.

For example, Take Curtana +1. 46 Damage, 35.57 Auto Attack, 2.32 Delay.

So, if you look at it, how did they get 35.57 auto attack from 46 damage? The way auto attack potency works in this game is that it is normalized based on damage. You end up with the potency of a single hit as (Delay / 3) * 100. So, for Curtana that would be (2.32 / 3) * 100 = 77.33- potency, or, 77.33% of the weapon's damage is applied to every auto attack. You can confirm this. 77.33-*46 = 35.57, exactly what is listed for Auto Attack.

Knowing this is the formula, we can generalize that Auto Attacks, over time, contribute 83.33- potency per 2.5 seconds, regardless of weapon type. (2.5/3)*100 = 83.33-.

Paladin Damage Dealt

So first let's take a look at Paladins. A PLD in DPS mode will be running Sword Oath, Using Riot Blade for all their weapon skills, and Circle of Scorn and Spirits Within on cooldown. They will also be using Fight or Flight on cooldown to buff their DPS. Let's look at what this works out to.

Here is how it breaks down:

• Auto Attack Potency - As noted before, Auto Attack Potency is 83.33- per 2.5
  
• Combo Potency - Here we have to average. Fast Blade = 150, and Riot Blade=230. (150+230)/2 = 190. That means, on average this combo contributes 190 potency per 2.5
  
• Sword Oath Potency - Sword Oath gives an additional 50 potency attack per auto attack (or you can also think of it as increasing your auto attack potency by 50). Since PLD attack speed varies with weapon, we have to choose a weapon speed. A faster weapon will get more out of Sword Oath than a slow weapon, for example. So for our purposes let's use Curtana's speed, since it will probably be the best option for most paladins for a while, and it's speed is on the slower side at 2.32. This gives us a Sword Oath contribution of 53.9 per 2.5. (50/2.32)*2.5
  
• Circle of Scorn Potency - Easy enough to calculate and use. Because it is off the GCD we're just going to assume that the target is in the circle for the full duation and it's used on cooldown. It has an initial potency of 100 with a DoT potency of 30 for 15 seconds. That is 5 ticks of 30 potency, or 150 potency of DoT damage over the duration. So a total of 250 potency on a 25 second cooldown, or 25 attack potency per 2.5.
  
• Spirits Within Potency - Again easy to calculate but a little different. Spirits Within is 300 Potency on a 30 second Cooldown. Or 10 potency per second, or 25 potency per 2.5, the same as Circle of Scorn.

Combining all of these, we have a total potency average per 2.5 seconds for a PLD of 83.33- + 190 + 53.9 + 25 + 25 = 377.23.

Paladins also have Fight or Flight, a Damage increasing cooldown which should be used at every available opportunity. This increases the damage by 30% for 30 seconds on a 90 second cooldown. That's a .3333-% uptime, or an overall increase of .09999% or 10%.

This gives a PLD total DPS output at ~414.96 potency per 2.5 seconds.

Warrior Damage Dealt

Warriors are a bit different. They don’t really have any skills off of the GCD to use, with the possible exception of Mercy Stroke, which can generally be ignored due to the limitations and power of it. Additionally, Warriors rely much more heavily on damage increasing buffs from Maim and Storm’s Path. Finally, a WAR has a single DPS increasing cooldown in Berserk, which comes with a penalty of no attacks for 5 seconds. For the purpose of comparison, we’re going to assume that Berserk is either canceled with less than 1 second left, or the healer dispels pacification as soon as its applied. Aside from that, a WAR should only do the Storm’s Path combo when not tanking, as it’s higher potency than Storm’s Eye, and they don’t want to run the risk of taking aggro with the Butcher’s Block combo. Finally, there is Fracture to deal with, which is a little challenging, since it’s on the GCD.

• Auto Attack Potency - Just like PLD, WAR auto attack potency is 83.33- per 2.5.
  
• Combo Potency - the WAR combo is a little stronger than the PLD combo at 203.33-. Heavy Swing at 150, Maim at 190, and Storm’s Path at 270. (150 + 190 + 270)/3 = 203.33-
  
• Fracture Potency - Fracture works out to a 300 Potency DOT over 30 seconds, for a contribution of 25 per 2.5. The difficulty with modeling it is that it takes the place of another combo move once every 30 seconds or so, which means that one global out of 12 globals will not deal 203.33- potency. So to approximate this, we can add in the 25 potency from Fracture, but remove one of the other attacks, which leaves it at 25 + 203.33- * 11/12 . This leaves the combo rotation at around 211.38.

Calculating this all out, WAR potency is 211.38 + 83.33- = 294.71.

But WAR has more buffs to deal with. For the purposes here we can assume 100% uptime on maim and storm’s eye, to make things more simple.

• Maim is a straight 20% increase up all the time.
  
• Berserk is a 50% attack power increase for 20 seconds on a 90 second CD. (I’ve done some testing. When your weapon damage is high, this works out to less than 50% additional damage. For me it was about 40% When weapon damage was low - Weathered Axe - this was basically a full 50% more damage) This should work out to ~40% increase in damage, and thus 8.88-% averaged over time.
  
• Storm’s Path is a 10% slashing resistance reduction. (Having tested this it works pretty much exactly as expected, 10% increased damage, multiplicative).

Also note that the WAR buffs are multiplicative. This gives us a total “buff” factor of 1.2 * 1.09 * 1.1 = 1.439

Multiplying it by the base potency per 2.5, and we see WAR at 424.0

At first this surprised me. It would put the classes so close in terms of DPS while not tanking. But perhaps this is by design, with SE working hard to make sure the classes are relatively balanced against each other, at least in terms of damage output, considering how important that factor is while leveling.


Some final notes -

• PLD could have had a very slight DPS increase if they were to use Fracture. I didn’t want to include this though because it’s generally not worth the slot as an off class skill for a PLD.
  
• If PLD was using the Rage of Halone combo it would increase the base potency by 13.
  
• If WAR was weaving Butcher’s Block combos in between Storm’s Path combos it would have increased the base potency by 8.5 (a WAR would be unable to only use the threat combo, because they would lose maim and storm’s path).
  
• It would have been ~1.8% more damage (multiplicative) for a WAR that was using Internal Release as one of their off class skills. Again, I feel that there are generally better choices for a WAR unless they are 100% going to be DPS and no chance of needing to tank.
  
• It’s extremely unrealistic to assume that you get all 10 ticks out of Fracture with the way this game’s DOT’s work, particularly without interrupting your combo. So assuming a 25 potency per 2.5 is not very realistic. For this reason I’m fairly sure the PLD would end up with more damage dealt in a real life situation, but only by a hair.

[GuyGamer]

I'm wondering if the default modus operandi should be to have Warriors off tank with Defiance inactive. While Paladin's obviously use shield oath and just be the Oh shit tank / pick up adds. But yah that's surprising when putting them both on level playing field it's so close.

You can also take into account Storm's path would also benefit DPS of the main Paladin tank and perhaps Dragoons??? If it benefits Dragoons I also wonder if that can stack with Heavy Thrust. Or is Dragoon's dmg Piercing or something?

[Kryzen]

Another thread that was mentioning the WAR ability to DPS was saying that as a MRD it parses higher then as a WAR. Have you had a chance to look at this yet?

[Hachiko]

I'm wondering if the default modus operandi should be to have Warriors off tank with Defiance inactive. While Paladin's obviously use shield oath and just be the Oh shit tank / pick up adds. But yah that's surprising when putting them both on level playing field it's so close.

You can also take into account Storm's path would also benefit DPS of the main Paladin tank and perhaps Dragoons??? If it benefits Dragoons I also wonder if that can stack with Heavy Thrust. Or is Dragoon's dmg Piercing or something?

Dragoon damage is peircing, but the Storm's path buff does help the tank. And theoretically it could have another upside of the tank not having to run storm's path if it was a WAR, which would mean a little more heals from Storm's Eye, though not much to write home about.

Another thread that was mentioning the WAR ability to DPS was saying that as a MRD it parses higher then as a WAR. Have you had a chance to look at this yet?

That's because MRD none of the WAR class skills increases a WAR's damage output. What WAR gets is: Inner Beast, Steel Cyclone, Unchained, Infuriate and Defiance. They all share something in common: They all require Defiance up to be used.

So the main difference is that with a PAL they get Sword Oath and Spirits Within from being a PAL, and both of these increase their damage outside of Shield Oath stance.

A WAR actually would gain an appreciable (though small) amount of damage staying as an MRD. They would get access to Blood for Blood and Raging Strikes. I haven't checked how much STR they lose though. There's also a chance that the STR difference from just being a WAR would be enough to offset Blood for Blood and Raging Strikes. Those 2 skills give ~7-8% damage boost averaged out though so it's unlikely that the STR loss from the change would nullify that big of a gain.

Aside from that though, you would lose access to Bravura (and +1) and even the ilvl 80 one would probably make up for the difference from the MRD cooldowns. Also, IIRC the Relic armor is also pretty significant. So if you have access to the best end game items, a WAR will probably outparse a MRD by quite a bit.

[Kiteless]

So PLD tanks better and does pretty much the same damage when they need to. Good to know that WAR is obsolete in pretty much every function.

[Ruminate]

Fast Blade --> Savage Blade --> Rage of Halone has an average combo potency of 203.

Berserk disables your skills for 5s.
8 attacks every 90s with 50% more potency, equivelent to 12 unbuffed attacks. And then subtract 2 attacks every 90s because of pacification. In other words, its a 5.5% buff to DPS.

[Eronn]

A few notes on this. Tank sustained single target damage is largely irrelevant so far outside of taking two tanks to Titan, even there is not that relevant. Burst damage is much more relevant. Warrior have a bit of a boost here with Internal Release and Berserk. Berserk is one of the best dps cooldowns available and its debuff is dispellable even.

Second, Warriors should not use Storm's Eye spam. It should be Storm's Combo > Butcher's Combo x2, repeat. With Defiance off, lead with 1-2 Storm's Combo and you should then be set with threat.

Third, are you sure Paladin's damage formula is the same as Warrior? You can not directly translate Potency -> Damage without the classes formula. They don't differ that greatly, but they do differ.

Also Fracture is not worth using on a Warrior, in simulations and in practice it is so negligible it is not worth any mental focus.

[Ruminate]

WAR burst is just as bad as PLD burst considering you need Maim and Storm's Eye up first before their damage is on par.

PLD has the same strength, determination, and weapon damage as the WAR. They both deal the same damage per potency with the same gear.

PLD > WAR for single target
WAR > PLD for AoE

[Eronn]

WAR burst is just as bad as PLD burst considering you need Maim and Storm's Eye up first before their damage is on par.

PLD has the same strength, determination, and weapon damage as the WAR. They both deal the same damage per potency with the same gear.

PLD > WAR for single target
WAR > PLD for AoE

I'll work on some numbers over the weekend.

I don't mean formula as in stats, rather as in the output of those stats + potency differs per class, though Paladin vs Warrior may be the same. I don't know.

Berserk also is a multiplier on your Strength. So it has some relation to weapon damage but not directly.

You also can not rely on potency due to Weapon Damage being a factor in the damage calculation of weapon skills.

It may be true that Paladins do more single target than Warriors, but my main point is the math in the first post is very incorrect.

[Ruminate]

Every single melee class uses the exact same damage calculation. If their strength, weapon damage, and determination are equal, then 100 potency from class X will deal the same damage as 100 potency from class Y. 100 potency is equivelent to 100% of the strength, weapon damage, and determination calculation. 200 potency is double that calculation. 50 potency is half. The math in the first post is correct.

Berserk is a multiplier on your damage. Your damage is based on your strength, weapon damage, and determination. You can multiply your strength, WD, and determination by 50% then factor in potency, OR you can multiply your potency by 50% then factor in str, WD, dtr. Either way, you get the exact same damage in the end.