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WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

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Dabbart
Posts: 2248

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#11 » Mon Sep 11, 2017 7:47 pm

Yes. It depends. How much armor the enemy has is a factor as well. Once you overcap armor the math starts to get funny. My rule of thumb for DPS classes is that you need 800+ main stat minimum. After that it depends what you are doing, what your group style is, and what you find kills or beats you the most.

Good breakdown though.
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Karast
Posts: 554

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#12 » Tue Sep 12, 2017 7:24 am

I am largely of the opinion that WS is simply not worth running on an engi.

You have to give us a lot, and I mean a lot of BS to get into the 700 range. Getting to 800 takes the combination of renown + tali's and you still will not scratch most tanks and medium armor classes, and your BS will be low in the 900 range.

I actually have found it better to go balls to the wall BS. To overstack to the point where you can be capped at 1100 with pot without BS tactics, by running 3 2 piece bonuses + genesis.

It hit squishes hard, you hit medium armor hard, tanks don't take much damage. But your AoE does really well and it makes LR / FB hit and crit hard, 700-900 without morale, 1500-1600 with morale 2. No amount of WS seems to make blunderbuss work effectively.

As far as ST goes. Snipe works off of spike. Spiking tanks just doesn't work if they are properly spec'd, same for Mara's if they swap stances. So WS gains you nothing.

What I have found is most of the people you support WS stacking haven't personally tested it both ways, or take their information from being a melee stacking WS. It just doesn't work. The math doesn't add up.

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Halhammer
Posts: 300

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#13 » Tue Sep 12, 2017 7:45 am

Last time I did a little testing on my own (few months back) I couldnt see any difference really between my two specs:

BS + crit vs. BS + WS + wep dps

I usually just ignore tanks and most DoKs tho, regardless of whatever spec.
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Kragg
Posts: 1769

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#14 » Mon Sep 18, 2017 6:30 am

Karast wrote:
I actually have found it better to go balls to the wall BS. To overstack to the point where you can be capped at 1100 with pot without BS tactics, by running 3 2 piece bonuses + genesis.

It hit squishes hard, you hit medium armor hard, tanks don't take much damage. But your AoE does really well and it makes LR / FB hit and crit hard, 700-900 without morale, 1500-1600 with morale 2. No amount of WS seems to make blunderbuss work effectively.
You prefer this over a +morale build where you can have Cannon Smash as finisher up in a minute? The Merc/Ruin/Conq setup is quite intresting indeed.
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Karast
Posts: 554

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#15 » Mon Sep 18, 2017 10:00 am

Kragg wrote:
Karast wrote:
I actually have found it better to go balls to the wall BS. To overstack to the point where you can be capped at 1100 with pot without BS tactics, by running 3 2 piece bonuses + genesis.

It hit squishes hard, you hit medium armor hard, tanks don't take much damage. But your AoE does really well and it makes LR / FB hit and crit hard, 700-900 without morale, 1500-1600 with morale 2. No amount of WS seems to make blunderbuss work effectively.
You prefer this over a +morale build where you can have Cannon Smash as finisher up in a minute? The Merc/Ruin/Conq setup is quite intresting indeed.
Well the issue with + morale is you need a lot of it for fast cannon smash. Belt, all jewelry and as much as you can get on gear which is around +5 for a total of around 12-15. You give up a lot for only cannon smash.

I like max BS because I hit hard all the time. It also lets me side spec into rifle or tinker and still be able to do nice ST damage on squishies (1.4-1.6k GB crits on a debuffed sorc / sh) or get some AoE in with lightning rod / friction burn (700-800 crits)

I found that I got more dps with blunderbuss from spec points, and trench fighting than I did from any amount of WS. Right now I run ~270 damage bonus with 186 WS and trench fighting, and I do better dps than when I had 240 damage bonus and 780 WS on largely the same targets.

On targets like doks, maras, all the tanks, and even SH if they choose to run gas squig, you can't really cut through that mitigation with WS. It does help a bit with things like choppas, we's, zealots, and shamans. But those are already squishy so you don't gain much.

To even hit 780 I had to go full renown, with set bonus, tactic, and a few tal's. That is a massively amount of stats for a tiny gain. Melee dps seem to work differently when it comes to WS. On an engi I do not think WS is worth the investment since outside of snipe our best abilities are corp.

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Glorian
Posts: 4976

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#16 » Wed Jun 27, 2018 7:35 am

Conclusions:

After Testing on a BS 1050 and WS 680.
With that High BS and WS you are doing a lot of Damage. Also vs Tanks. If they are on a 800 Toughness Build your dots still tick like -1 Damage.

So here is what to keep in Mind:
Don’t start to think of getting more WS if your BS is below 850.
If you are around 500 BS or lower, more BS is a LOT better than more WS.


Keep in Mind though Karast Point:
If you go like a Grenadier or Tinkerer and mostly use Corporeal Abilities, all the WS in the World will not help you. Acid Bomb helps you.
Also you can put that 380 WS you get from Talis, Tactics and RR into Toughness/Armor/Wounds, get a free Tactic Slot and will be A LOT harder to take down by Destro.

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Crumbs
Posts: 199

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#17 » Thu Jun 28, 2018 3:24 am

For grenade and tink, max bs + defensive abilities

For rifleman, I have 1080 BS, and 620 WS, 28% crit, with phosphorous shells for the 10% armor debuff and the extra points increase rifleman damage. All tactics are towards pure ST burst including hollow points which has a tooltip of 880 damage. And on top of that +15% damage tactic on single target by all sources, including your own turret and each dot tick. Makes a huge difference. I’ve seen 800+ signal flare ticks.

WS is very critical to making rifleman work like a true deadly rdps, I don’t use any utility/defensive tactics. I can greatly feel my damage loss if I swap in a utility tact
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Glorian
Posts: 4976

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#18 » Thu Jun 28, 2018 7:36 am

You have it pretty much on point.

Phosphorus shell though don't have an armor debuff. But it does a lot of damage after it was patched.

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Ramasee
Posts: 457

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#19 » Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:19 am

In general, don't trust tooltips as they cannot be changed much (although client control is being tested among the population right now). Don't trust .ab changelist since it is often out of date. Same goes for the wiki, much of the information is out of date.

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Karast
Posts: 554

Re: WS vs BS – What to take on your Engi! Empirical Data.

Post#20 » Fri Jun 29, 2018 9:08 am

Glorian wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 7:35 am Conclusions:

After Testing on a BS 1050 and WS 680.
With that High BS and WS you are doing a lot of Damage. Also vs Tanks. If they are on a 800 Toughness Build your dots still tick like -1 Damage.

So here is what to keep in Mind:
Don’t start to think of getting more WS if your BS is below 850.
If you are around 500 BS or lower, more BS is a LOT better than more WS.


Keep in Mind though Karast Point:
If you go like a Grenadier or Tinkerer and mostly use Corporeal Abilities, all the WS in the World will not help you. Acid Bomb helps you.
Also you can put that 380 WS you get from Talis, Tactics and RR into Toughness/Armor/Wounds, get a free Tactic Slot and will be A LOT harder to take down by Destro.
The thing to remember is that even with max WS you will not do any meaningful dps to a tank, mara, dok, sh with gas squig, if they pop in some armor tali's and have armor buffs. WS does nothing for you, weather you have 300 or 900. So gutting your defensive stats and running around at 5k health for little to no increase just doesn't flesh out well if you are going to be fighting premades and organized groups. If you are wall sniping from safely or holding behind a warband then you are fine.

But there is very little reason to go full WS when you could pump that into defensive stats and end up with max parry via renown, and 8k wounds, for a very minor dps loss.

If you want to do dps as rifle they key is armor debuffs, and you ideally want an IB that is deep vengeance with M1 for double debuffs.

Even in the deepest rifle spec with max WS, you will always do better damage to a high armor target with a 0 point firebomb. It's just a sad fact of life, that won't be changing anytime soon.

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