Saturday, December 8, 2012

Berserker Strength or Agility?

There is a big concern over Strength vs Agility for Berserkers. Gemming for either is viable on certain circumstances but Strength comes out on top.

Gemming for Crit:
When a player gems for crit damage they are gemming for burst. When a player gems for burst they gain additional chances are creating massive damage strikes which is always fun, especially in PvP, but they are also weakening their overall damage in exchange for the ability.

Now, for a lot of players, they dive in, blow their cooldowns, then run away. For this type of play style gemming for agility as a Berserker definitely feels better. The downside is that when you gem for crit, if you don't get the strike, you do very little damage. It's a gamble.

Gemming for Damage:
When a player gems for damage they are gemming for consistency. When a player gems for consistency they get fewer big spikes in damage, but they get fewer low strikes as well. Gemming for damage is less fun because you don't get that lucky three smacks that makes an enemy wonder 'what the hell happened'.

Gemming for Strength as a Berserker requires a player to pepper in a lot of normal strikes to get extra use out of the strength since your normal attacks will be very powerful. The downside is if you're hanging in the fight to do additional damage you can be targeted and take damage.

Why should Berserkers gem for strength?
Consistency. All of your strikes will do more damage and your crits will do more damage. If you go into a fight with a crit build and lay on the opponent and you get a bad run, they will escape with decent health. If you go into a fight with a strength build and have an equally bad run, they are more likely to die. If you get a great run with either build they're going to die.

Both have their advantages but in the end, the crit from using mail and two handed sword brings more than enough crit to the table. You can never have enough pure damage.

Finally, some math.

Base: 100pts damage, 10% crit. 100 strikes. 11000 damage.

STR: 150pts damage, 10% crit. 100 strikes.  16500 damage.

Crit: 100pts damage, 30% crit. 100 strikes. 13000 damage.
Crit 2: 100pts damage, 50% crit. 100 strikes. 15000 damage.
Crit 3: 100pts damage, 70% crit. 100 strikes. 17000 damage.

4 comments:

  1. Your point of view is very interisting Lucarda, i've taken a lot of info from it, btw i'd like to ask some questions. I'm a 33 lvl berserker, i'm not an experienced guy at "gemming", yesterday I put 6 strength gems in my set ( armor + 2h sword), before I do this my max damage was around 473 then it reached around 505, a difference of 32 dmg for 42 str. If I had put the same 42 with Agi gems i'd have 4% more p. critical chance, my critical chance would raise from 17% to 21%. Does 32 dmg really worth this much??? Can you show me in numbers, if not asking too much, how much plus 32 dmg would raise my damage? (sorry for the spelling errors, english is not my nativa language)

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    1. You don't actually gain a pt of damage per str, just like you don't gain a point of Crit per agility. The above example was just to help people realize that increasing base damage increases crit damage.

      If I were to go with your example using 100 Strikes assuming Crit is giving 200% damage.

      505 damage X 17% crits on 100 strikes = 17170 from crits + 41915 from normal strikes = 59085

      473 damage X 21% crits on 100 strikes = 19866 from crits + 37367 from normal strikes = 57233

      So, yep, STR is better. Now, don't get me wrong, Crit builds are viable, especially if you have +7 weapons since your damage would be so damn high. But doing a viable crit build would cost a LOT more than a viable STR build.

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    2. I got it, and yes, you're right, i thought there were some kind of pattern to dmg and crit gain, but there's not, since i got my faded necklace yesterday and it says i'd gain 30 p. crit. I was hoping to have 3% more crit. chance, but it only gave me 1% hahahahaha, from 14% to 15%, so, I assume that there's no such pattern. Now I'm completely lost, my beliefs are now broken hahaha, I don't really have not even the knowledge i thought i had about the equipments, I got find out a whole new build so, thank you Lucarda, many ppl will be helped through this post

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  2. Remembering to consider the critical chances frequency differences

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