Power Harbinger and Weapon Strength

[Fend.4956]

So, I know that not many folks play power harb, but in testing some builds I noticed that Harbinger Shroud skills are affected by your main hand weapon strength.

 

This can easily be tested by equipping a staff, going into Harbinger Shroud, and looking at the damage tooltips, then doing the same with say, dagger or pistol + offhand. It's easy to see that the numbers are lower with one hand weapons, and in my testing, playing power harb with a dagger equipped rather than staff leads to about a 12% DPS loss in shroud. I ran the same test with Reaper Shroud, and the tooltip numbers, as well as DPS, stayed the same with either weapon. I've heard that kills in Reaper Shroud count as hammer kills, so I think that may explain the difference.

 

Now, I know that power harb needs a lot of love, but this bug certainly isn't helping. With the upcoming dagger changes, I'm hoping someone will take a peek at this issue and iron it out!

[Dr Meta.3158]

5 hours ago, Fend.4956 said:

So, I know that not many folks play power harb, but in testing some builds I noticed that Harbinger Shroud skills are affected by your main hand weapon strength.

 

This can easily be tested by equipping a staff, going into Harbinger Shroud, and looking at the damage tooltips, then doing the same with say, dagger or pistol + offhand. It's easy to see that the numbers are lower with one hand weapons, and in my testing, playing power harb with a dagger equipped rather than staff leads to about a 12% DPS loss in shroud. I ran the same test with Reaper Shroud, and the tooltip numbers, as well as DPS, stayed the same with either weapon. I've heard that kills in Reaper Shroud count as hammer kills, so I think that may explain the difference.

 

Now, I know that power harb needs a lot of love, but this bug certainly isn't helping. With the upcoming dagger changes, I'm hoping someone will take a peek at this issue and iron it out!

Its been like this for Core and Reaper for ever. You can see it more easily by just going to the guild wars 2 build editor site and swapping between weapons and looking at shroud damage. Overall, two-handed weapons are best for shroud damage which is why dagger as a power weapon just isn't going to be good for pve.

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

Basically, 2-handed weapons give an extra 10% strike damage, so one-handed power weapons need higher coefficients to be competitive.

[Yasai.3549]

6 hours ago, Fend.4956 said:

This can easily be tested by equipping a staff, going into Harbinger Shroud, and looking at the damage tooltips, then doing the same with say, dagger or pistol + offhand. It's easy to see that the numbers are lower with one hand weapons, and in my testing, playing power harb with a dagger equipped rather than staff leads to about a 12% DPS loss in shroud.

This is the same for Reaper and Core or any Shroud based skill set. That's why we use Staff/GS on Reaper. 

 

 

6 hours ago, Fend.4956 said:

Now, I know that power harb needs a lot of love, but this bug certainly isn't helping. With the upcoming dagger changes, I'm hoping someone will take a peek at this issue and iron it out!

Power Harb is... okay. I've tried Power Quick Harb and it's really not bad at all, it's just that Harbinger is just much better as Condi due to the nature of Blight and how it's meant to be used in conjunction with Shroud 3 and 4. I feel that Power Shroud 3 and 4 are just garbo. 

[Noodle Ant.1605]

shroud skills 4/5 use offhand weapon strength too, where pure offhand weapons (focus/warhorn) have even less wep strength than mainhand/hybrid weapons (dagger)

reaper shroud does indeed use its own unique wep strength separate from the currently equipped weapon. whether or not core and harb shrouds should be the same is truly worth considering (although people will lose their legendary/alternate projectile effects)

[Uete.3805]

Yeah, I think this is one of those long-standing issues that will be eventually resolved. With the current balance design and team I'm hopeful it will get fixed, rather than forgotten. Nonetheless, thanks for reminding us all. Cal, Roy, do your magic 🙂