So baseline: With smiter perk, you get a static +0.5 stagger_value bonus for first target on top of any stagger it may have.
so when hitting three rats:
( Rat Rat Rat )
from right to left (first light attack), the first one get’s a damage bonus from smiter talent. So 0.5.
Now, since we hit them all, they all stagger:
( sRat sRat sRat )
Then hit em again from left-to-right: The first target hit (leftmost rat) Gets the smiter bonus (0.5) plus the stagger value it has, which should be 1.0 = total of 1.5. The two other rats get no damage bonus since smiter talent.
So two light attacks chained, from different directions would produce the following bonus damages with smiter talent:
( 0.0 0.0 0.5)
(1.5 0.0 0.0)
as opposed to without the smiter talent, which would have been:
( 0.0 0.0 0.0) - noone is staggered when you hit em the first time around
(1.0 1.0 1.0) - everyone is staggered from the first hit when the second sweep goes through.
don’t know if that just made everything more complicated…
I’m concerned that the damage buff have the same duration as stagger animation.
For most of the weapons and pushes, on high difficulties, the mobs are staggered for a very short duration, i don’t see it being a reliable teamplay mechanic. What it does good, is incentivize push-stab spam, and you personally focusing on one enemy, to attack-stagger-lock it until its dead.
I mean, the teamplay of hitting the same enemies together - have a lot of moving parts, and the time windows to capitalize on debuffed enemies are too short with most of the weapons.
First, a teammate must be very close to another teammate, which on itself takes constant attention. On top of that, you need to somewhat sync your swings between each other and choose the correct target (the staggered enemy) before it recovers.
Weapons&pushes with strong stagger (charged greathammer, shields) have more powerful stagger, thus a longer animation (still could be longer imo), but the knockback makes hitting the debuffed enemies from hard, to impossible.
Imagine a wide horde wave, a shielder pushes the first row, how a teammate can reach the staggered ones when they flew to the backrow of the horde, and new enemies took their place?
Or imagine a couple of stormvermins, a teammate with greathammer smashes them to the sides all over the place, it becomes really hard for teammates to hit them with anything but the most widest swings.
What’s your experience with teamplay aspect of the stagger mechanic?
(which i think is the main reason to include it)
Thanks for all the formulas, but I guess now we need something like the armory mod which would give us the up-to-date stagger values for each swing of each weapon
Oh, it doesn’t remove the stagger count for the enemy or others ability to gain bonus from targets hit. It just doesn’t add bonus damage to targets past the first for your own attacks when using the smiter talent.
All talents interact solely with the enemy and their current stagger count. So if you place a bonus on an enemy, whoever hits it will reap the benefits for the duration of the stagger(chain), including yourself.
I’m glad we have all this talk about how the stagger changes work, but I’m still left wondering why it was done. I can understand the dodge changes, but I’m rather mystified by the stagger changes.
What was the impetus behind it all? And doesn’t such a radical change devalue all of the prior data on weapon balance to the point of needing to be discarded? Would anyone care to comment on these things?
As is, given the limited resources available, it seems very plausible to me that if these changes go live the game will be moving from a state of relatively smooth weapon balance, where most weapons are of at least ‘acceptable’ quality, backwards towards the very uneven state it was in prior to the large scale balance changes of the 1.2 & 1.3 patches. I find this all very concerning.
That’s not even going into what these stagger changes do to complicate the math behind breakpoints, which muddies the waters enough that it could devalue loot on the high end even more so than it already is.
Removed ignore stagger/damage flag from M+ smiter and fencing damage profiles
Would you be able to explain what this patchnote means? In the previous patch, it seemed most single-target attacks weren’t getting the stagger bonus they were meant to automatically get; does this patchnote mean that that’s been fixed, or that the idea has been scrapped altogether?
I’m trying to calculate damage using the basic damage formula (damage = damage + damage * damage_multiplier * stagger_value) but it isn’t equating what I actually get in game.
For example, I have a ranged weapon setup that does 49.25 damage to the keep dummy, but I have +20% dmg versus Chaos as well, so the base damage vs chaos infantry would be 59.1 (which would round down to 59). So, due to ranged weapons using max stagger stacks automatically, the formula would be: 59 + 59 * 0.5 * 2 = 118. However, in game my actual damage vs chaos infantry is 104.
Similarly, my 1h axe does 20.50 damage versus the dummy, and I also have 20% vs chaos which makes it 24.60 damage. With the smiter talent selected, this number should get a 50% increase to unstaggered enemies, making it 36.60. However, in game I’m getting 31 damage.
Oh I see, so smiter is a modifier to the stagger value itself, before it’s multiplied by the usual 0.5 stagger damage. That has…questionable value on Cata, since it doesn’t give enough damage to hit any new breakpoints (what takes 2 hits to kill will still take 2 hits to kill), and at the cost of losing stagger damage against every other enemy hit. Hm.
It also seems hard to hit any real breakpoints with ranged on Cata with the +75% value. But, I suppose that’s what the eventual fine tuning of breakpoints and balance will be for.
This is a good point. With most high cleave weapons, mobs have stopped being staggered and are in fact winding up to strike again by the time my second hit strikes. Truly stunlocking only happens with one target, maybe two with faster attacks.
I share doom_hamster’s concerns. Even when moving as a group, most of the time you are going to have to split your focus in order to cover all angles. Meaning that in the majority of cases you can’t rely on an ally to apply stagger for you.
This increases the value of push-stabs significantly. They are already very much useful in live, and with the stagger mechanic they get an innate 50% damage bonus that you won’t get with regular attacks. Push-stabs should probably stay a tool to throw into a rotation occasionally, and not become most weapons main source of damage.
(for the exec)