[Firebrand] Comparing various gear setups for DPS

[cat.8975]

It's hard to say which of these will be optimal (or if it'll be even another mix!), as it depends on average bleed/burn/power dps, but this is what I've come up with so far. Sinister is at the bottom just for comparison. These are also not meant to be the final trait/util choices either, as it's hard to say atm which ones you'll pick in FB, and if you'll run zeal or virtues.

All stats listed are assuming the meta raid buffs (the same ones qtfy uses for benchmarking).EP = Effective Power, or how well the build scales with power.

full grieving with burn dura food, 100% burn

• EP: 6921.38098
• Bleed Duration: 0%
• Burn Duration: 100%
• Condition Damage: 3157
• Burn Tick: 981
• Bleed Tick: 291

3 viper pieces + 100 exp food, 15% bleed dur 100% burn

• EP: 6531.17528
• Bleed Duration: 15%
• Burn Duration: 100%
• Condition Damage: 3229
• Burn Tick: 999
• Bleed Tick: 297

viper/grieving with malice, 100% burn, 35% bleed

• EP: 6204.68628
• Bleed Duration: 35%
• Burn Duration: 100%
• Condition Damage: 3229
• Burn Tick: 999
• Bleed Tick: 297

full sinister with burn dura food, 100% burn

• EP: 5180.41333
• Bleed Duration: 0%
• Burn Duration: 100%
• Condition Damage: 3381
• Burn Tick: 1036
• Bleed Tick: 309

[Knox.8962]

So comparing full sinister 100% burn to full griever 100% burn, you give up ~6% condi damage for ~33% power damage.

The value of those two setups relative to each other is solvable as a function of % power damage vs % condi damage. The two sets break even at roughly 80/20% Condi/Power. If you have more power damage than that, you're better off in the griever setup. Less, and you end up better in the Sinister setup.

Given the relatively reasonable power coefficients on the axe skills, I'm pretty confident that the Griever setup will be the better option.

That leaves the question of whether the full Griever setup can beat either of the viper mixed setups. That one is much harder to answer as we don't really know what % of the total damage output will be tied to burning vs bleeding. I suspect the bleeding as a portion of the total damage output will be fairly small, but I don't think we have enough info to really know at this point which setup will end up being the best choice.

[cat.8975]

Yeah I was initially just doing this to get an idea of the potential setups we'll use, and with these numbers it should be easy to do DPS tests in full sinister and then work out what the DPS would be for the other sets via logging with arc

Current tests against the golem I'm getting approx 9k power and 17k burn dps, so griever would definitely be worth it. The last thing we need to worry about is the power scaling of the tome skills, but it should still be pretty easy to break ~6k power dps.

[Animosity.5968]

Interesting numbers. I'm having a hard time hammering down a Casual PvE build for the Firebrand. Sadly all the good dps sets legit give me 11k hp and I'm too casual to play with that Hp Pool. If I'm looking to trade some DPS for some survivability what would you recommend subbing in if I were leaning more towards condi dps? (just because i've been power since launch).

[Knox.8962]

@Animosity.5968 said:Interesting numbers. I'm having a hard time hammering down a Casual PvE build for the Firebrand. Sadly all the good dps sets legit give me 11k hp and I'm too casual to play with that Hp Pool. If I'm looking to trade some DPS for some survivability what would you recommend subbing in if I were leaning more towards condi dps? (just because i've been power since launch).

Try something like this:

Carrion setup

[Animosity.5968]

@Knox.8962 said:Try something like this:

Carrion setup

Fast reply! For some reason I didn't even think about running carrion gear. Just wondering a few things; Is the expertise worth taking with the lower damaging bleeds? Should I take burn food instead? Really don't know what I would take as a second weapon, I like shield for covering people but we have literally no other condi weapons >.<.

[cat.8975]

Try this one instead ;) Just a tiny bit more optimized.

It's better to run the 100 exp 70 condi food than the 15% burn duration, as the 70 precision is worth less than the 70 condi dmg.

I've been adding some more potential setups to my reddit post, but I can't edit the first post here due to the new forum. Worth mentioning that some of them might see more benefit from geomancy over bursting, but it's hard to say atm. (Does swapping into a tome proc geomancy?)

[Mikau.6920]

So, for max DPS, full Grieving is the way to go? You give up too much EP for a bit more condi damage on other setups.

I also wonder if full Grieving is better for Power DH as well to increase the DPS than full zerker. Maybe even change traits/way to play - use passive SoJ instead of active and take Virtues (Permeating Wrath) instead of Zeal. Could even consider to use sword instead of GS to increase the number of hits to trigger the passive more often - to increase the DPS. I don't know how weaker the sword DPS is compared to GS in a power (hybrid) setup.

[cat.8975]

@Mikau.6920 said:So, for max DPS, full Grieving is the way to go? You give up too much EP for a bit more condi damage on other setups.

It's still too early to say anything about what the best setup will be. We still need to know the exact burn/bleed/physical damage ratios before we can plug in the numbers and compare everything.

[Atticus.7194]

Now if only we could find how to make grieving we'd be set to start doing real testing.

[CptAurellian.9537]

@Mikau.6920 said:I also wonder if full Grieving is better for Power DH as well to increase the DPS than full zerker.

Seems extremely unlikely to me. Even if you make some adjustments to get more burn sources, the amount of burns a power DH hands out is still low. Additionally, you'll have more or less no burn duration, so the condi dmg stats have only half the usual value. Essentially, I expect griever to be a poor (but probably expensive) version of zerker gear. If they had made ferocity the second main stat, it might look differently.