Weapon mods, and inscriptions

I have been reading alot about differnt mods lately. I see alot of people saying 20/20 is crap, so i was wondering why. I see that they say elemental mods are better. I also read that -5 20% sucks, but i understand that one. Anyways, please let me know which mods you feel are best for melee weapons and shields. I know all about casters so i am fine there. Thanks. I know the builds matter, so if you have different types of builds that go with the mods you choose please tell me also.

on martial weapons elemental mods avoid warriors physical dmg boost
20/20 is bad because it is outclassed by vamp

This is just more leet sheeple expounding about things they obviously don't understand. The vamp vs sundering argument has been done to death. It usually comes down to basically "If you observe a few thousand (yes thousand!) hits", you'll see that Vamp is better than sundering for total damage done."
What utter crap! Basically NO damage type is inherently better than any other. In PvE it makes very, very (if any) difference. There are times and/or enemies that respond better to one type of damage than to another, and in those cases a particular damage type may be preferable. It is, therefore, prudent to have a variety of weapons to use as the situation calls for.

Go out questing and equip yourself with 2 of the same type of weapons that have the same stats, except one is sundering and one is vampiric (max in both cases of course). Try to see if you notice any significant difference in the time it takes to kill any mob - especially if you have a full group.

Use whichever floats your boat. If you are a teenager concerned about sounding cool, tell everyone you use Vamp and call 20/20 crap.

Mathematically speaking, vampiric does significantly more damage then sundering except for in a few specific builds... and it heals you. Sundering only affects the hits on attack skills, not auto attacks (something most people who claim sundering damage is about the same often forget to add to their calcuations).

Warriors have 100 armor vs physical damage and 80 vs elemental. Using an elemental weapon on a warrior is equivalent to 20% armor penetration all the time (compared to 20% 20% of the time and only on attack skills).

http://guildwarsguru.com/forum/showt...php?t=10224318


And that is the end of any vamp vs sundering discussion in this thread.

Read this post too... http://guildwarsguru.com/forum/showp...39&postcount=8


Now.

You'll want to use elemental mods against warriors, because they have +armor vs physical damage, and an elemental mod negates that. And well, vampiric is nice vs protted monks, as it ignores protection. And uhm, yeah. Sheesh I'm bad at explaining at 1 am <_<

And I'm pretty bad when it comes to shields, so I'll just ignore that point.

Weapon mods also depend on the rest of your team to be more even efficient.

barrage ranger with a fiery bow teamed up with an ele casting Mark of Rodgort will do major damage.

Its more a question of synergy then witch mod is better.

At 12 axe mastery, including criticals, an axe deals about 16.2 DPS with no mods, 16.9 DPS with sundering, and 18.4 DPS with vampiric against a 60 armored opponent. And since vampiric is armor ignoring while sundering is only affecting base damage, vampiric gets even better against higher armor targets.

Vampiric deals significantly more damage over time then Sundering. If you seriously want to give up free damage you are stupid.

The reason, as several folks have mentioned already is that the damage output is significantly lower than vampiric over the long run.

As for elemental weapons, warrior players have 20 less AL versus elemental, and many, many kinds of PvE monsters have weakness for a particular element. Since you can switch weapons, you can choose whichever one is strongest for each foe on the fly.

For PvE, I would take a vampiric, plus 2 elementals on swap (fourth slot reserved for a pulling bow), plus 2 more elementals in your inventory. (I should also note that your party in PvE may, if it's good, often include a curse necro with Mark of Pain + Barbs. Switch to your vampiric when hitting this foe, even if the foe has an elemental weakness.)

(Is sundering ever good? Very rarely. Pretty much the only build I'd use it for would be a critical-scythe assassin. "Sunder-crits" do a buttload of damage, especially on weapons with high maximums like scythes, but they happen so rarely that they're not worth it unless you build around making them happen.)

Good don't have to go into it then.

Already been over weapon prefixes above.

15^50 is almost always the best inscription. It's basically always active, since your monk has to really suck to leave you under 50% health for long. Plus you'd probably be kiting instead of attacking if you were under 50% health anyway. The only other inscription to really consider is +5e if you have a very, very hungry skill chain.

For PvE, the best suffix is +5AL. That adds the most survivability for general circumstances. For PvP, it's +30hp, because PvP opponents are (often) smarter than monsters and tend to pack a lot of armor-ignoring damage.

On to shields.

For serious PvP, to be "fully equipped" you need to have a full collection of +10AL vs X Damage Type shields, one for each damage type, and switch to the best one after scanning the opposing team during the opening seconds of a round.
For PvE, if you're only going to use one shield for everything, -2 physical damage while stance/enchanted is probably the best (whichever suits your build better). +10AL vs Slashing may be a close second. If you're willing to bring multiple shields, there's some debate. I feel that many PvE mobs are mixed enough that a -2 shield is the best choice, but many respected forumgoers think that a collection of 10AL vs X shields is a better idea. You're on your own there.

As for shield suffix, use +45hp stance/ench if you have a stance/ench in your build that can be expected to stay up continuously. Otherwise use 30hp.

At 14 axe mastery, including criticals, an axe deals about 24.0 DPS with no mods, 25.1 DPS with sundering, and 26.2 DPS with vampiric against a 60 armored opponent, assuming normal attack speed and no armor penetration. (16.2 is very low for axes at 12.)

Wrong. The only armor penetration that functions like that is Strength.

First of all I am not a teenager, I have a graduate degree in math. I just dont know how all the mechanics of the game work as i havent played as long as most of you. I would rather ask people that know than reinvent the wheel and run experiments. This is the kind of answer I am looking, thanks to all that are replying.

Thanks I think that answers my questions, now one more thing. I am planning on starting a derv as well, i have never used one. Is the best mod for a scythe zelaous and enchant or does it again depend on build? seems dervs are very enchant reliant.

I play mostly casters so i am new to the melee characters. Thanks for your time all.

16.2 is the correct damage unmodded. Factoring in the 15% inscription and 20% customization buffs I believe, along with another 2 in axe mastery, those numbers sound right. Was trying to present a simple example

And yes, hawk is wrong about sundering working only on attack skills. Sundering has a 20% chance to work on ALL hits, otherwise it would be completely dog shit. Do note that bonus attack damage from skills is armor ignoring and not affected by a sundering mod, only the base damage is boosted

Yes, +enchants are very useful for most dervish builds, but DON'T make a build with too many enchantments. You want at most 1 or 2 to buff yourself, then you tear things apart with your scythe. Any more time spent casting enchants takes away from the dervish damage machine. More specifically, every single dervish should at least be using Aura of Holy Might if they can, and extending that to 24 seconds out of its 25 second recharge is very nice.

As for your other mods on the scythes, the best choices would be one with zealous, another with vamp, and a third with elemental.

Other then that, Chthon summed up everything pretty well for general melee.

It is also very good to use an Ebon Scythe for your elemental mod. This allows you to make use of Ebon Dust Aura without relying on another skill to convert your damage type.

Assassin and Dervish can both benefit nicely from a 15% damage while enchanted mod, as they both have significant build options using Enchantments. However, remember that the damage mod on a weapon (15^50, 15^stance, 15^enchanted, etc.) only apply to the weapons base damage, not the damage from a skill. This means boosting a 9-41 hit from a scythe by 15% will add nice damage. However, the boost to a 7-17 dagger hit will be quite small. Since you only gain 1-2 damage from a damage mod on daggers, I recommend +5 energy instead. So when you look at a weapon to set mods, consider the damage mod compared to the base damage for the weapon.

Then you might find SonOfRa's "Damage Explained" article informative. I had to go find a link on the wayback machine because gwonline dropped their non-forum aspect from their site: Link. There's a few places where the game mechanics have changed since the article was written, and sometimes you can find stuff like this showing those changes.

Well, my dervs tend to be very enchant-reliant, so I tend to find the enchant mod very useful. But it's possible to make dervs that don't need it. In this case it all depends on your build.

Pretty much the same deal with zealous. Dervs tend to be energy-intensive (mostly because they are enchant intensive), and you may need the energy input from zealous to keep that going indefinitely. Of course, if you don't need that much energy to keep your build running, then go with damage-optimizing mods described in my previous post. There's also a middle ground where you normally don't need energy, but occasionally run low -- in which case use damage mods until you run low, swap to zealous, refill, then swap back to damage mods.

It still tends to be inferior to 15^50. The odds of finding yourself attacking after getting your enchants stripped are usually much greater than the odds of finding yourself attacking with health under 50%.

I would almost never run +5e on daggers. As we all know, increased max energy is NOT energy management. Increased max energy only helps with two things: (1) It allows you to deliver an expensive combo in rapid succession. (2) It allows you to "deficit spend" for a little while longer, hopefully long enough to finish the battle. Assassins can run combos that require an extra-5e-deep energy pool to deliver, but they tend to be PvP gimmick builds rather than PvE builds. The possibility of prolonged death penalty in PvE tends to make those builds a poor choice. Deficit spending ability is a poor substitute for actual energy management, especially in PvE where winning the battle isn't the end, but only a prelude to another hundred battles. Deficit spending is even less useful for a sin because they have such great energy management available -- just swap to some zealous daggers and auto-attack something, and, between zealous and critical strikes, your energy will be full in no time.
So that's zero benefit from +5e versus a small, but real, benefit from 15^50. I'll take the 15^50. (Only time I'd take +5e is if I had a positively fantastic build with a combo that needed the 5e (and consumables to make sure DP didn't break the build).)

Sundering + enchant with 15^enchant (Extra damage with Avatar running)
Zealous + enchant with 15^enchant (Should be your main, energy for thosse heavy energy skills)
Sundering + 30 with 15^enchant
Zealous +30 with 15^enchant

^^those are generally the best combinations

Also try:

Ebon + Enchant with 15^enchant
Ebon +30 with 15^enchant

If you are going to follow the ebon dust aura advice

Most of my derv builds revolve around stripping enchantments so a 20% mod doesn't really help me unless I'm farming or something. I tend to take a +30 instead. It's all dependent upon your build.

I didn't say +5 energy was energy management. But adding 1-2 extra damage is insignificant damage. The +5 energy does allow you to deal with more expensive attack combos, defense skills, and damage boost skills (hexes and enchants). Death Penalty can make using a normal attack chain difficult, but the +5 energy helps get it done easier.

An Assassin using no skills will get laughed at when stabbing someone with their daggers. Why? Because the damage is low, and easily healed or ignored. The damage an Assassin has that is deadly is from their skills. A damage mod on ANY weapon does not increase the damage from skills, just the weapon. With pathetically low damage (7-17) an increase of 15% won't do much.

7x15% = 1.05 Impressive, a total of 8 minimum damage.
17x15% = 2.55 Even rounding up, you get a total of 20 max damage.

8-20 is still worse than 11-22 from a caster weapon with no damage mod. I'd take the utility that other options provide instead. +5 energy allows for several things to occur (more costly attack chains, DP, etc.) and spell casting time and recharge bonuses can be used for builds relying on Hexes or Enchantments.

Since you damage comes from your skills, and not your weapon, make sure you can use those skills when you want to. Higher max energy allows that, as does casting speed or recharge of skills that allow you to use those attack skills.

MagmaRed, you've forgotten the 20% customization bonus.

There's also the fact that you can run with the 15^50% until you need the extra energy, then swap. The extra damage dealt that way is still extra damage, no matter how small.

7-17 with 15% and 20% modifiers becomes 10(9.6)-24(23.5).

Wand/Staff without any modifier does 11-22. Give it a 15^50 inscription and customize it and you get 15(15.2)-30(30.4).

I'd rather give my Assassin the utility of +5 energy than do less damage than a caster wanding things. Don't expect many to understand that though.

unfortunately, you forgot to factor in the fact that dagger attack speed can be anywhere between 1.33 sec/swing to 1.1 sec/swing (depending on double attacking), while wands attack at 1.75 sec/swing. this means that the "insignificant" damage rapidly adds up.

Also double strikes occasionally from daggers

good point, though in all honesty I can only see adding up +dmg% mods on a dagger to use with [Locust's Fury] add an IAS on that and it'll rack up some damage, still can't see the dps being close to other assassin options, but hey it's all about having fun right?