What Gaming Should Be

As an avid lifelong gamer, I try to describe what has worked well and poorly in games I've played, and in any given gaming scenario, to define how it could best be handled as a result.

Author: reillan

(This is the third part of a series on Champion Damage.  Please see Part 1 and Part 2)

Part 3: Managing Champion Power for maximum damage-over-time.

Introduction

If you've been keeping up with my series so far, you know that Dual Wielding and using Slow-MH, Fast OH is far superior in short-term combat to any other weapon set up.  But does that damage last for extremely lengthy combat, such as against a high-morale mob?  In this entry, I will examine just that issue.

What I find in this article: If your combat lasts over 1.5 minutes, go with a 2H weapon.  Good use of skills is still key, however, and Hedge is surprisingly one of the best of these.
 

Power over time

One of the great things about being a Champion is our ability to regenerate Power during combat.  In our primary DPS stance, we get a roughly +1200 in-combat power regeneration (ICPR) rate (plus any items we choose to wear that further boost that).  We don't get a high Power pool to start, but because we regenerate so much, we may not need it.

+1200 ICPR roughly comes out to +20 power each and every second during the combat - that means that if we can burn under 20 Power Per Second (PPS) as we deal DPS, we can maintain our power pool indefinitely, and other low PPS values can keep us in the blue for several minutes at a time.  If we can maintain ourselves below 20 PPS, we can even use our power to replenish the power pools of our party each time a mob drops.

As much as I've knocked around 2H weapons so far, they seem best suited for maintaining our power.  With all of the skills in the following chart, power used remains constant regardless of the speed of weapons we wield.  That means we can use our power more efficiently on skills with higher damage.

This chart assumes the same weapons from last time: a 2H Axe that has 3.1 speed, and a 1H Axe with 2.4 speed paired with a 1.7s dagger.

If we just look at these skills and how well we can hold up in a combat, the 2H weapon has a very clear advantage - much cheaper power consumption.  Just comparing averages, we subtract 20 from both averages to show the rate of return from ICPR, and we can see that we should burn 23.84 PPS while using a 2H weapon, 46.29 PPS while DW.  A champion with 2500 Power (and we don't usually bother to keep that much) could expect to last 54s without running out of power while Dual Wielding, but an amazing 105s with a 2H weapon!  In the 51s of time betwee, the DW person could regenerate enough power for another 22s-long burst, but that still means only 76s in combat, with 29s of downtime.

That's 38.16% more up-time when using a 2H weapon over DW.  

Now you may say, "but we'll use food to regenerate power" or "we'll pop second wind to regenerate power" - well yes, you could do that, depending on how fast you can kill stuff.  But while you're popping second wind, the 2H person is using Red Haze or possibly even Heroics.  And your Second Wind is reliant on you killing your target, but if you're in an extremely-long battle, that may be neither possible or desirable.  And what's more, the 2H person could be popping Second Wind, too, and just last through greatly-extended combat sessions that much longer.

But just out of curiousity - how much does food matter?  According to the lorebook ( I don't have the game sitting in front of me now), Superior Rack of Lamb with Mint Sauce provides +148 power every 30 seconds.  That means that a DW who uses it could get 3.2 more seconds out of it, then have to spend 2.8s downtime before the next blip hits.  When it does, he has another 4.4s of power he can burn through before he runs out again.

So yes, food does help.  Potions help.  But much more effective is using a 2H weapon.  Even at its worst, 38.16% up time is greater than 28.32% damage (the max damage differential of  DW/2H calculated in part 2) during combats lasting more than 1.5 minutes.

Effective power management

As you could possibly see from the charts, there are some skills that simply do not make sense in a long-combat setting.  This is especially true of Bracing Attack, Blade Storm, and Relentless Strikes, which are the 3 worst power-eating damage-dealers in our list.  Simply avoiding these skills during long combats will help a lot, but we can also maximize our returns by carefully selecting our skills ahead of time:

1: Pip Generation

Merciful Strikes wins my pick for the best power-management skill for two reasons: first, it's tied with Wild Attack for power consumption; second, because it deals more damage than Wild Attack.  All things considered, if you can pull off this skill, you should.  Yes, it's difficult to use, but the best thing you can do for yourself is to get into the habit of using it when it is available.

If you haven't learned by yet, Wild Attack should be your default PIP generator (excepting Merciful Strike, as described above). Avoid Swift Strike like the plague - if you absolutely need another PIP, and Merciful Strike isn't ready, consider Blade Wall instead.  It'll be more power consumption than your Wild Attack, but less than the other choices.  Of course, if you're already dropping AoEs like crazy, start with your Blade Wall for the additional damage it provides.

2: Skills You May Not Have Considered

Horn of Gondor, that AoE skill that you love because it stuns people but hate because of its long cooldown, is actually one of the best skills you have in terms of power consumption.  If AoE won't hurt you, be prodigious in its use - it turns the Champion into a master of Crowd Control, and good use of CC is what separates good Champs from just OK ones.

Hamstring and Clobber are good choices as well.  They take only one pip to fire, have very low power costs, and have desirable side effects.  Of course, if you've been charged with interrupting this particular mob, only use your Clobber when you're interrupting him.  These skills will not out-DPS your neighboring champ, so use them sparingly, but don't be afraid of them, either.

Rend is bloody brilliant - Armour debuff and bleed for everything nearby.  It doesn't have a high initial damage output, but if you can fire it off early and keep the bleed up, it'll drain everything for you.  And its power cost is still low.

3: The Ultimate Skill You've Never Met: My Case for HEDGE.

You read that right.  I said to use Hedge. Go ahead, get the laughter out of your system.

Hedge is an oft-mocked gem of power management.  This skill only costs 36 power to fire - that means that almost no matter what you're wielding, you actually generate more power than you use during the time it took to fire it!  And, because its damage is not dependent on having a weapon, it doesn't require any fervour, it provides a wound resistance bonus, and it deals a fair amount of damage (it's around the middle of the field for Champ damage), it can be fired at almost any time.

And when you're conserving power, I argue that it should be one of your main skills.

So don't burn that 1st age legendary with tier-6 Hedge cooldown quite so quickly.    You can do a fair amount of DPS with these low-power skills, and if you simply avoid Bracing Attack, Relentless Strike, and Blade Storm, you'll be able to last much, much longer.