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Optimal Boonripping Spreadsheet


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So, I'm a theory-crafter, which means I go around analyzing game mechanics, and organizing the information I find in such a way, so that players can gleam alternate or optimal strategies to approach the game. Recently I decided to do some grunt work on boon-strips in particular.  In this work, what i do is find the Potential of skills, so that players can look into the limit for any individual skills, and develop priority rotations for them or use them in an efficacy calculation. This will allow players to at least understand a more effective approach to how often and when to use certain abilities over others, when given the opportunity to choose between them. 

 

The calculations are very simple. When looking at a skill there are two aspects you look at in order to determine how well this skill can perform. This is called the Potential and the Efficacy.

 

Potential

The Potential is the absolute limit of the skill for which it could ever be used...think of this limit as some imaginary person that is able to play this skill as if it were being played in the most ideal and optimal scenario's as possible at all times. This defines the upper limit to which the skill can be used. You can also think of this potential as the skill ceiling for a build. The potential is usually a reflection of it's ability to be used on cooldown and it's capacity to effect as many players as possible.

 

Efficacy

The efficacy, is when you take your current performance (the number of boonstrips you did after some engagement in ArcDPS) and you compare this to the sum of the potentials of all the skills you have access to, and this gives you a percentage. This percentage is essentially, your performance in comparison to a perfect being that used the skill as optimally as possible. The percentage can reflect all sorts of information...such as the difficulty of the fight, the effectiveness to which you were using your skills, and the ability to which one could use those skills....But in general it determines how effectively you were able to reach the potential in that fight, and is a much better indicator of performance, rather then looking at relative performance between you and another person in arcdps.

 

In the spreadsheet, which for now only contains necromancer skills, you will find the potential for all boon-strip abilities available to the class. In the future, I plan to add abilities from other classes, which might help players establish new builds that are also capable of boonstriping.

 

Length of Engagment

When looking at terms like "per engagement" each engagement is a 3 minute long fight from start to finish. To find the potential for any sized engagment, you adjust the numbers accordingly, by multiplying the number of uses per engagement, by the number of boonstrips you are able to do. So you have some skill with a 20s cooldown, and you have a 97 second fight. Then the number of uses per engagement is 4. 5 boon-strips used 4 times, means in the most optimal scenario, you could have stripped 20 boons during that 97 second fight. Always round down to the nearest cooldown and never up!

 

The Spreadsheet

 

Necromancer

https://i.imgur.com/YB9gxOM.png

 

Warrior

https://i.imgur.com/DIWPCW6.png

 

Hopefully you guys will find this useful and contribute your own information. The most interesting thing I believe seems obvious, is the incredibly high potential ceiling for Path of Corruption on Reaper. Looking at this skill in a practical sense, it doesn't seem that difficult to reach such a high potential...it's much higher then your typical skills one would prioritize in a fight, and it is worth looking into, reorganizing priority rotation on Reaper, if you play one in a zerg. The example of the most optimal rotation in shroud would be 2..1...1...1...2..1...1...1...   and so on.

 

 

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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59 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

So you spam all the buttons? 

Got it.

 

Skills with lower cooldown, tend to have much higher potential value.

 

Also I completely forgot about an entire branch of scourge boon strips. I'll update the post again with all the Scourge skills. 

 

Edit: Okay, updated with scourge skills. One that sticks out the most is Trail of Anguish...which can potentially strip boons from an infinite number of people, meaning it has an infinite potential. If you wanted to approach this skill realistically, the idea is that you want it to hit as many people as possible, as many times as possible.

 

So if you are fighting a zerg of 80 people, ideally you'd want Trail of Anguish to hit all 80 people, It seems to have an ICD per target, which I've only been able to hit the same person twice with it. throughout it's entire duration...so it seems that the lower bound of the potential is 160 boonstrips, giving it an upperbound 1120 boonstrips.

 

Such a potential seems rather difficult to reach so i think realistically, it has the same upperbound as Path of corruption...around 600 in which, the only requirement would be to hit all 80 enemies once (meaning all 80 enemies pass over the path). This seems like a more realistic goal. I'll be changing the infinite classification once i fully understand the boundary of the skill. 

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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single target skills are a waste of time, they don't determine fights unless you're spamming them on the enemy commander. i guess if you want to include both small scale and large scale thats fine, but i suggest separating them cuz as it is now the way the info is laid out you're comparing apples to oranges. also i think changing the length of engagement from 3min to 1min would make calculations easier for the user.

 

interesting to note, reaper has always been the best at boon rip. dunno when it got into peoples heads that scourge was better.

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31 minutes ago, Stand The Wall.6987 said:

single target skills are a waste of time, they don't determine fights unless you're spamming them on the enemy commander. i guess if you want to include both small scale and large scale thats fine, but i suggest separating them cuz as it is now the way the info is laid out you're comparing apples to oranges. also i think changing the length of engagement from 3min to 1min would make calculations easier for the user.

 

interesting to note, reaper has always been the best at boon rip. dunno when it got into peoples heads that scourge was better.

 

I just updated the spreadsheet. I added the scourge skills, and I made a few miscalculations with some of the scourge skills I had up there already, which I fixed.

 

In defense of Scourge, before nerfs, they had a way more powerful ability to strip boons, and they outclassed Reaper for a very long time. But this list isn't meant to be used to say which skill is better or worse kind of thing. Each skill has a potential and usually the higher the potential, the harder it is to actually attain that potential in combat....the point is that it's there and so a player can play better and better prioritize skills and know when to use them in accordance with the information so that they can better reach the often hidden potential of these skills 🙂

 

Quote

but i suggest separating them cuz as it is now the way the info is laid out you're comparing apples to oranges. also i think changing the length of engagement from 3min to 1min would make calculations easier for the user.

 

This is why i included the Suboptimal category. This category is the potential of the skill in the least ideal scenario given a 3 minute fight. Least ideal usually means you hit the least amount of targets...So this essentially means that if you are in a 1v1 situation, this category is more or less a better fit for that kind of that data. The reason for large combat times, is because engagement time acts as a continuum limit. So it better shows the dimensionless scaling of the skills potential at all combat times less then the limit.

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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34 minutes ago, Stand The Wall.6987 said:

single target skills are a waste of time, they don't determine fights unless you're spamming them on the enemy commander.

Why do people say such nonsense with so much confidence. Single targeting key classes has always been a way to whittle down a group that is hard to break... Kill a FB, 4 people lack support. Kill a dps, less damage to deal with. Chrono, pulls/strips. Warrior, dome/strips. Just a silly way to limit yourself...

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1 hour ago, RisenHowl.2419 said:

If only there were some kind of list on the wiki that included all the skills/traits that can strip boons separated by class...

 

There's no list like this on the wiki. The wiki doesn't even have a single listing of skills that strip boons...that's actually why I missed the scourge abilities in the first place...they weren't listed, so I had to go to each individual page. In addition this list is more informative because it includes skills that are integrated with traits, like Reaper 2 and Path of Corruption together. It's not obvious without doing a little math, that Path of corruption on Reaper can be more competitive then Feast of Corruption when used on cooldown for example.

 

11 minutes ago, lovemghool.7613 said:

I didnt see dagger 5?  

Let me go and check it out and I'll update the spreadsheet.

 

Edit: Updated the spreadsheet with Enfeebling Blood. Thanks....I suppose I should also check out the Curses trait that casts the lesser Enfeebling Blood as well, again i'll be back with an updated spreadsheet with that as well

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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Ah yes more comedy gold from the "wiki is wrong" player.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Boon#Skills_that_remove_boons
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition#Traits_that_convert_boons_into_conditions

The above use wiki code and templates to generate the list in order to be current with every patch.

Feel free to make a table similar to the defiance bar table, but prepared to update it every patch because I won't be personally cleaning up after you. If you have any questions you should contact Tolkyria for help with the templates.

Edited by Infusion.7149
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1 hour ago, Zikory.6871 said:

Why do people say such nonsense with so much confidence. Single targeting key classes has always been a way to whittle down a group that is hard to break... Kill a FB, 4 people lack support. Kill a dps, less damage to deal with. Chrono, pulls/strips. Warrior, dome/strips. Just a silly way to limit yourself...

sure, if every necro does that it will make a difference. but thats not the case.

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9 minutes ago, Infusion.7149 said:

Ah yes more comedy gold from the "wiki is wrong" player.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Boon#Skills_that_remove_boons
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition#Traits_that_convert_boons_into_conditions

The above use wiki code and templates to generate the list in order to be current with every patch.

Feel free to make a table similar to the defiance bar table, but prepared to update it every patch because I won't be personally cleaning up after you.

 

Boon strips, and boon conversions are two different things. Some skills that rip boons do not convert them into conditions. I didn't say the wiki was wrong...I said my list does not exist in your wiki. Otherwise you'd have a single page, of all skills that remove boons from a target....whether it converts them into conditions or not....which is what my list is. Also this list on the thread has other information that the wiki doesn't have, and it's meant to address questions that the wiki is impartial toward.

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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15 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

 

Boon strips, and boon conversions are two different things. Some skills that rip boons do not convert them into conditions. I didn't say the wiki was wrong...I said my list does not exist in your wiki. Otherwise you'd have a single page, of all skills that remove boons from a target....whether it converts them into conditions or not....which is what my list is. Also this list on the thread has other information that the wiki doesn't have, and it's meant to address questions that the wiki is impartial toward.

Instead of nitpicking you could talk with Tolkyria and get the ball rolling on that. Nobody thus far had such a complaint.

Like I said, it's easy to complain but when you actually have to maintain the page for years on end with every patch let's see how you fare on that.


Just this past year many pages were reworked to use trait templates to deal with trait interactions. I'm rather sure some of the pages are more basic than before including boon tables , but it is for the sanity of the editors.

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2 minutes ago, Infusion.7149 said:

Instead of nitpicking you could talk with Tolkyria and get the ball rolling on that. Nobody thus far had such a complaint.

Like I said, it's easy to complain but when you actually have to maintain the page for years on end with every patch let's see how you fare on that.


Just this past year many pages were reworked to use trait templates to deal with trait interactions. I'm rather sure some of the pages are more basic than before including boon tables , but it is for the sanity of the editors.

 

Right...and nobody is really complaining about the wiki. I just said that the list I have here in this thread is different and is for a different purpose then what is on the wiki, to address a specific question about optimal usage of skills.

 

I hardly believe that the wiki should have information about which skills are the most optimal to use. This is why this list is more like a "snowcrows" list then it is a wikipedia entry.

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36 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

 

Boon strips, and boon conversions are two different things. Some skills that rip boons do not convert them into conditions. I didn't say the wiki was wrong...I said my list does not exist in your wiki. Otherwise you'd have a single page, of all skills that remove boons from a target....whether it converts them into conditions or not....which is what my list is. Also this list on the thread has other information that the wiki doesn't have, and it's meant to address questions that the wiki is impartial toward.

FWIW mate, scroll up on the page and look at the table of contents:

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22 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

 

Like i said above, not all skills that strip boons are listed on this page...For example, none of the scourge skills are on that page, Nightfall, Sand Flare, Enfeebling Blood... They are all on different pages, and the Wikipedia is organized in a way that's convenient for the Wikipedia...not for optimal or alternative WvW strategy.

 

Perhaps a better way to explain...is that this list has more information that isn't on the Wikipedia explicitly (it's implicit in that if you were to do a bit of number crunching, then you can determine the same information...I'm merely crunching the numbers and putting those things into a single list...for that information to be explicit)

 

The purpose of this list is to organize the information that is otherwise not obvious, into an obvious framework.

 

For example...If someone were to tell you that Feast of Corruption is better then Nightfall, then this list is another way to determine the answer to that question.

 

Speaking of which, I updated the list with Nightfall and Sand Flare. Take a look it's quiet interesting to see the comparison.

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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Boon corrupt is linked (not listed) on the main article because it was deemed nesting so many queries is going to tax the server. If you actually read the page you would see it is listed in "Convert boon to condition".
 

In addition, there's a similar scenario with the defiance bar page which is manually updated and linked by discretize not snowcrows. If someone misses a patch it could very well be out of date.

Edited by Infusion.7149
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20 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

 

For example...If someone were to tell you that Feast of Corruption is better then Nightfall, then this list is another way to determine the answer to that question.

 

2 completely different skills in nearly all regards (not to mention mutually exclusive since while in shroud you have no access to FoC and the decision to shroud or not is again dependent on many other factors). The deciding factor in which skill to use is in 99% of all cases not dependent on their boon corrupt potential.

 

Your list is a nice thought experiment and theory exercise, but given a very small cross section of actually competing skills, aka skills which are interchangeable in the first place, not more than that. As mentioned by Infusion.7149, it is subject to constant change with nearly every patch.

Edited by Cyninja.2954
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11 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

2 completely different skills in nearly all regards (not to mention mutually exclusive since while in shroud you have no access to FoC and the decision to shroud or not is again dependent on many other factors). The deciding factor in which to use is not in 99% of all cases not dependent on their boon corrupt.

 

 

Nightfall is a weapon skill on Greatsword not a shroud skill. But i get your point...i think you were talking about Path of Corruption & Shroud 2.

 

Your right that the question of whether something is better or not is a silly question because it's dependent on the situation and how well you are able to utilize the skill in a certain environment...the question itself is a general example of what a typical non-educated player/commander might tell you when running along in their squad.

 

The list is meant to empower the user with knowledge of their own skills, and is meant to be used in combination with an efficacy calculation, to determine how well you are effectively using a skill in an environment, to determine a priority, in the event that you have to choose between one skill and another skill. 

 

A much more practical example is...You exit shroud, and you have the choice to either swap weapons to use nightfall, or to wait 5 seconds till Feast of Corruption is off Cooldown. One answer, is that based on this list, you are more likely to strip a lot more boons by switching to your Greatsword right now, then you are waiting 5 seconds for FOC.

 

 

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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6 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

 

Nightfall is a weapon skill on Great-sword not a shroud skill.

My bad, in GvGs atm and only semi present. Correct. Still very different skills in all other regards.

Quote

 

A much more practical example is...You exit shroud, and you have the choice to either swap weapons to use nightfall, or to wait 5 seconds till Feast of Corruption is on Cooldown. One answer, is that based on this list, you are more likely to strip a lot more boons by switching to your Great-sword, then you are waiting 5 seconds for FOC.

 

 

 

Again, no. Other factors would be far more relevant:

- distance to enemy

- enemy movement and situation in the engage (are you on the offensive or defensive, which cooldowns does the enemy still have). What type of distance to enemy is to be expected in the next 10 seconds.

- which weapon set do I start out to begin with when exiting shroud and is wasting the weapon swap worth it? In this situation if maximum boon denial is the goal, making use of as many skills as possible BEFORE swapping weapons and essentially wasting cooldowns will be better

 

Again, I could go on, but to any seasoned WvW player it should be very clear that a pure comparison of boon denial between skills is VERY limited. If boon denial was the be-all end-all, necromancers would have a full set of utility skills all dedicated to this. Most do not.

 

It matters in weapon of choice, yet even here RANGE would be a far more important factor to consider.

Edited by Cyninja.2954
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8 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

 In this situation if maximum boon denial is the target, making use of as many skills as possible BEFORE swapping weapons and essentially wasting cooldowns will be better

 

This is actually not true. Again you can do the math on this kind of thing. You are converting less boons, by waiting 5 seconds for FOC then you are just swapping to GS right now and using Nightfall.

 

That's kind of the point of establishing priority rotation. If you are prioritizing small value skills...then you are essentially wasting the potential of your build. 

 

Other factors like distance from the yadah yadah and so on... all those things are inherent in the numbers too. Using shroud 2->1->1->1->2->1->1->1->2 and so on to maximum effectiveness is a much harder thing to do then simply cycling  "Nothing can save you!" on cooldown. The point is that... there is no amount of mechanical skill or intelligence that will make "Nothing can save you!" strip more than 130 boons in 3 minutes. It's simply not a thing that is possible, while a skill like nightfall can.

 

 

 

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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2 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

 

This is actually not true. Again you can do the math on this kind of thing. You are converting less boons, by waiting 5 seconds for FOC then you are just swapping to GS right now and using Nightfall.

 

Do your math again and apply limits to actual boons on target and adjust for boon removal/corruption spikes.

 

You should realize that back to back boon removal/corruption with skills before and after a weapons swap comes ahead in the burst aspect. Which is what is relevant for WvW.

 

That's also exactly the point at which the entire "rotation" assumption for WvW falls apart.

 

Edited by Cyninja.2954
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21 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

 

Do your math again and apply limits to actual boons on target and adjust for boon removal/corruption spikes

 

That's one reason why i have the suboptimal category in my list...it's for situations that are not ideal...situations in which you only hit one target, or don't strip a boon. Theoretically, the suboptimal usage of all skills is 0...because there are many instances in which any skill can fail to do anything for one reason or another. There's not much information to gleam from the least optimal scenarios...

 

It's like healing your squad when they aren't taking damage... It doesn't matter how you use your skills...your not getting any value from them. Thinking about using skills at lower limits are pointless exercises because I can be healing non-optimally, or optimally and have the same result...my squads HP doesn't change. The only important information in a fight is the total limit of my abilities and how much value you are actually getting from them.

 

When the values of skills reach a certain point, the relevance of their usage becomes comparable to simply dropping whatever you are doing, and using the alternate skill instead. If you have a skill that strips 1 boon every 10 seconds , and another skill that strips 10 boons every 1 second, it's going to outvalue this skill in every conceivable manner...no matter how many boons or how much time will elapse, there is no practical situation in which the first skill is ever gonna be more useful then the 2nd skill.

 

One can even generate arguments where the first skill is ridiculously passive and easy to use...while the 2nd skill is incredibly difficult to land. You can calculate the time in which the value of Skill A becomes comparable to the value of skill B. In this exact example, you would have to fail stripping boons with skill B 100 times over the course of 100 seconds before the value of skill A becomes comparable to the value of skill B.

 

So like I said previously, all this talk about situationals are for the most part inherent in the math.

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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16 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

That's one reason why i have the suboptimal category in my list...it's for situations that are not ideal...situations in which you only hit one target, or don't strip a boon. Theoretically, the suboptimal usage of all skills is 0...because there are many instances in which any skill can fail to do anything for one reason or another. There's not much information to gleam from the least optimal scenarios...

Except if you are using the skills as I had mentioned. In fact in nearly all cases a suboptimal usage is beneficial or even required in WvW. You will never wait for a maximum amount of targets to boon deny. You always make an on the spot cost benefit analysis in regards to effect now versus effect a bit later with potentially better payoff.

 

There is tremendous information to be had, especially when ideal or perfect scenarios are near non existant iun regular game play.

 

It's called theory versus reality.

Quote

 

It's like healing your squad when they aren't taking damage... It doesn't matter how you use your skills...your not getting any value from them. Thinking about using skills at lower limits are pointless exercises because I can be healing non-optimally, or optimally and have the same result...my squads HP doesn't change. The only important information in a fight is the total limit of my abilities and how much value you are actually getting from them.

The correct comparison would be if the healing skill in question also added other benefits and using the heal skill prematurely makes any sense at all. Because that is the case for boon denial skills and potential affected targets.

 

In which case the early usage of the heal skill in question might not provide healing, but potentially other beneficial effects which are of more value. For example: Mantra of Solace with Liberator's Vow in an engage scenario where chances are high no one affected will need the aegis yet, nor the healing, but the quickness will be very beneficial.

 

Edited by Cyninja.2954
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