Introduction

 

Spoiler

 

 

On 2/16/2023 at 10:25 AM, Warspear Online said:

Lesser talents

 

 Heavenly Light+

Increases skill power gain from character's magical damage by 2 \ 4 \ 6%.

 Harad's Call+

Increases skill power gain from character's magical damage by 8%.

 Purifying+

Increases the gain of the strength of the periodic damage from the character's magic damage by 1 \ 2 \ 3%.

 Sun Seal+

Increases skill power gain from character's magical damage by 8%.

 

Key Class Talents

 

 Inextinguishable candle

The "Light Aura" skill additionally restores health to the character and all party members every 2 sec. at a rate of 30% of the healing received by any member of the group under the effect during this time. Each subsequent party member restores 4% less health.

 Faith reward

Increases the character's magical power by 15%. All character skills that deal damage have a 20% chance to additionally inflict the "Faith reward" debuff on the enemy for 8 sec. The effect deals magic damage equal to 25% of the character's magic power every 2 sec. The maximum number of effects from the talent on a single target is 5.

I recently I got to play with 1st Paladin Branch, Reckoning, and while testing it out, I gotta say, initially, I wasn't impressed by the damage that the branch seems to advertise. After all, it does say in its description that it provides "combat power that brings fear into the hearts of their enemies". But after testing it in reality, it got me thinking, how much damage does it really do in the grand scheme of things.

Since we can't make conclusions based on our feelings, in this topic I'd like to examine the damage contribution of this branch to the overall Paladin damage and compare it to all magical Paladin damage sources and multipliers/buffers.

This includes the following parameters:
- Reckoning branch +15% magical power
- Reckoning branch DoT (Damage over time)

- Sacred Shield talent "Sacred Teaching" +15% damage buff

- Harad's Banner damage + 25% damage buff

- Harad's Call

- Sun Seal

- Paladin's Prayer

- Purifying DoT

 

This will accomplish two things: 1) Not only we can have an objective, mathematical view to the effectiveness of this branch in providing damage to the Paladin, but also 2) it gives aspiring Paladins an idea of their damage skills, and what to prioritize in using and leveling up, if they want to maximize their damage output.

 

Methods

 

You can skip to the results if you don't care about how I generated the data.

 

To make things simple, yet representative, I went to solo Spawn. This boss has 1.5m HP, I recorded the fight, and I went back and looked at how many times the DoT debuff "Faith Reckoning" activated and other damage skills were used. Then, I did some maths to calculate much damage each skill contributed to. Additionally, I was able to computationally determine the amount of damage that accounts for the 15% additional magical buff from the last talent.

 

Basic paramters

First of all, some basic parameters that go into the calculations (Figure 1). The total damage dealt killing Spawn is obviously, Spawn's HP of 1.5M. The total amount of time spent to kill it was about 11 minutes and 20 seconds. The DPS was also calculated. Crit Damage is x2 of a normal hit + the Critical Hit Strength stat that you have, since I have 20.5%, the final multiplier would be x2,205. The magic values were taken from the game with or without the mentioned modifiers (Figure 1). Finally, since I had 51% Critical Hit, all damage numbers were simulated with 50% critical hit rate, so I multiplied half of the hits by the Crit Damage multipliers.

Figure 1: Overview of base stats.

 

Data collection

Here, you kind of need to trust me that I didn't prioritize using or not using certain skills deliberately. Even though, not all skills were used immediately when off cooldown. This could be for several reasons. 1) There are many skills off cooldown at once, here we prioritize skills that hit harder or buff up the next attacks, for example Banner always first. 2) Getting Fear'd by Spawn, after that, typically, I would prioritize jump or banner. 3) Getting a combo, I would not waste Purifying before I try to use Fetters first to get the DoT. That being said, I did not play it perfectly, I did not want to even, I wanted to rather capture an "average" fight, that is not being meticulously played to optimize the damage out of every move. Even the skill build is not a perfect damage dealer build, it's rather a balanced defensive/support damage build that I can recommend for end-game content (Figure 2).

 

Figure 2: Skill build

 

Different aspects were collected differently depending on the quickest and most representative ways. For the easy to count damage skills, I counted how many times I used the skills throughout the fight (Figure 3A). I didn't bother counting how many times I proc'd a critical version the Paladin's Prayer, so I just assumed that half of them were critical since my Critical Hit is 51%. I wrote down the damage multipliers for each skill. Of note, Harad's Call and Sun Seal have an additional 8% from the Reckoning branch. For Harad's Banner, I accounted for an average of 9 hits on Spawn (10 is max on a single target, but since the mobs eventually come in, it gets reduced sometimes). The same was done DoT procs from Reckoning branch and Fetters of Justice + Purifying. Here I additionally multiplied the number of ticks by the multipliers 4*25% and 3*36%, respectively (Figure 3B). To complete all damage sources, I also counted how many auto attacks and Purifyings were done in 1 minute and multiplied that by 11 (11 minutes total fight length) to estimate the total number of hits without having to sit through and count every hit (Figure 3C).

 

Figure 3: Overview of the damage skills that were applied

 

Finally, to calculate damage buffers' contributions, I calculated an uptime for Banner, this means the % of time where Banner is active on field. For this I multiplied its duration of 12 seconds by the number of usages (12*31), giving us 372 seconds, which is about 55% of the entire fight.

!Note: Banner's own damage is always buffed by the 25% buff (unless resisted of course). Therefore, for Banner's damage I separately calculated it with 100% uptime.

For Sacred Shield's additional 15% damage, I estimated an uptime of 50%, this is purely an estimate according to me watching back the recorded fight. In reality this could have been +-10%, but such variation won't be of any significance at the end. As for Rage, I measured the time I had the buff on for 5 minutes of the fight to end up with about 75% of the time being under Rage, which itself, adds about 6% damage to skills (since in my case it added 6% magic overall). Finally, the additional 15% magic was accounted for. For this, simply, I saw how much did the magic value increase by +15% magical power (of the raw magic), and it ended up increasing my magic from 1074 to 1186, which is about 10% damage increase for 100% of the time. 

 

Figure 4: Damage buffers

 

Now, all we need to do is calculate the damage that is be expected from each skill with these mentioned parameters!

 

Results

 

 

But who likes to look at numbers only? Here is also a visual representation:

 

 

 

Take your time, take all these numbers in, and let's talk about it:

 

1. Banner - The ultimate offensive skill!

Calculating the damage dealt by each skill by how many times they were used, we can see that for example Banner dealt 21% of the damage on its own, this is by far the biggest portion of damage of any damage source. Additionally, Banner. buffing damage dealt by 25% for about 55% of the fight, also contributes to an additional 14% damage. totaling up to a remarkable 35% of the total damage of a magic Paladin!

 

In comparison, Harad's Call, Sun Seal, and Paladin's Prayer did 11%, 6%, and 7% of the total damage, respectively. But it is important to note the # of usages, and their proportion to their cooldowns. I calculated a "Spam factor". Which basically means how efficient I was in "spamming" the skills. In other words, what is the amount of time wasted when the skill was ready to use but I didn't use it. 100% spam factor means I would immediately use the skill all the time as soon as it is off cooldown. Using this factor I can also calculate how the damage would look like with "100% spam factor" (corrected DMG):

 

Spam factor Corrected DMG% Banner 91% 23% Call 76% 14% Seal 52% 11% Prayer 50% 14%

 

Even though all skills having 100% spam factor is unrealistic, this gives you an idea on the damage potential of each skill if I spammed them equally.

Regardless, it is still not a completely fair comparison because all skills except Sun Seal are 4/4. If maxed, Sun Seal would have contributed to 8% of the total damage (15% corrected), which would be the 2nd highest damage skill for Paladin. But obviously, only on a single target, that's why I don't level it up.

 

2. Reckoning - Does it really bring the heat?

The main reason why I even wanted to look into this was to see how good is Faith Reckoning's damage potential, specifically the last talent. According to my data, it does contribute to a significant amount of damage. The DoT alone did slightly over 10% of the damage. If we count every hit that could trigger a Reckoning Proc that is: Banner x9, Call, Seal, Purifying, and Purifying DoT x3 (yes they can trigger it; and I don't know why Prayer hits don't seem to trigger it), that counted/calculated in my model, and use that to calculate the probability of Reckoning procs, I ended up with about 19%, which is on par with the 20% described. So, on average, it triggered every 7.5 seconds, dealing pretty much 100% of the magic over 8 seconds each time. To put it into perspective, Harad's Call (178%) was used at a rate of about once every 14.5 seconds. Thus, it is not a surprise that they both did almost the same amount of damage.

But we should also not forget that it also adds 15% magical power, which in my fight, contributed to about 7% of the total damage. In comparison, Rage, which added 10% power (phyiscal and magical!) for about 75% of the fight, only contributed to 4% of the total damage. In total, The last talent of the branch adds to about 18% of the Paladin's damage, which is the second highest damage contribution after Banner!

 

Next, I wanted to see how does Reckoning contribute to AoE damage, and since it would be very time consuming to count Reckoning procs on multiple targets, I just did a purely mathematical simulation based on my results, since I know that the data that I have is pretty accurate.

 I won't bore you with the details, but here is an overview of the calculations if you want to check it for yourself:

Spoiler

But basically, I assumed a 30 second fight vs 1-6 players/monsters. In 30 seconds we can use 2 banners and 3 calls (this 2:3 ratio checks out with my fight vs Spawn so I kept it). Then, I calculated the damage for each scenario and calculated an average with and without Reckoning:

 

First of all, Reckoning would increase the average magical Paladin's damage output (including single target damage and AoE) by almost 40%! This includes 27% from the DoT alone (52508 = 100%), the rest is from the +15% additional magic power:

 

If we look at the damage distribution of the 3 offensive abilities over the increased number of targets, we see that while Banner becomes relatively less effective, and Call becomes relatively more effective, the Reckoning DoT remains more constant:

 

 

3. Physical Damage is not very negligible for magical Paladin

You would think that physical damage is not meaningful for the magical Paladin, but these data show that it deals more than 15% of total damage. Additionally, Purifying can trigger a magical damage DoT, both of which can trigger magical Reckoning DoT.

But also, it is important to note that it is only 10-15% damage, that means in cases of potentially receiving heavy damage from melees, it might be worth to keep your distance, sacrifice this 10-15% damage and stay alive. This is more for PvP, as a magical Paladin, I would not recommend staying in melee range of other melees for extended periods of time.

It would be interesting to compare this ratio of phyiscal to magical damage with a one-handed magic mace + shield.

 

Conclusion

 

Important! Limitations of this analysis

Even thought this method provided a pretty accurate representation damage distribution in my fight against Spawn with less than 5% error margin, it still is only representative of soloing a boss, be it Spawn or any other boss/mini-boss. Because it is based a fight of "spamming" skills, apart from short interruptions by Spawns fears. 

 

The simplicity of this model brings a couple of consequences, few examples include: 

 

1. This does not factor in AoE which disadvantages Banner, Call, and Reckoning DoT that also applies on these two AoE hits. The latter would markedly have an increased activation rate, when for example Banner hits 5 targets 6 times (30x hits vs 9 hits here).

 

2. The Solo aspect disadvantages Paladin's Prayer, which contributes to more damage with bigger party sizes. 

 

3. Skill build is not "fair" for all damage skills measured here (e.g. Sun Seal)

 

4. The way damage buffers were calculated is not very optimal, I assumed that all skills are being buffed equally, when that is not true. Also an uptime of Sacred Shield of 40% is very variable. Sometimes, you don't receive much damage so it is 100%, and sometimes it gets destroyed before you get to do more than 1-2 hits. This varies Shield's contribution from from 0% to 15% each usage depending on the fight's nature.

 

5. Purifiying DoT is the lowest damage (2%), but, this a boss fight, where Fetter's of Justice is mostly resisted.

 

6. The AoE simulation for Reckoning has a major flaw: It assumes 100% of the Reckoning damage is dealt, and that mobs don't die over the period of the DoT (Same for Banner)

 

Summary and overall review of the branch

Here, I wanted to answer the question. Does Reckoning actually add any significant damage the Paladin's current damage?

The question of whether or not this branch is good for in relation to game's current meta, i.e. when comparing to the environment and other classes is NOT addressed in this work, for that we'd need to compare with other skills/classes. The question of balance is also NOT addressed. 

 

With this work we can mainly get out with this conclusion for the Reckoning branch: Reckoning Branch is arguably the second best offensive aspect of magical Paladin. It's contribution is comparable with a maxed out Harad's Call. However, one big flaw is that the damage is dealt over a relatively long period of 8 seconds, which means the damage could be wasted.

 

Side conclusions:

1. This should not be a surprise for anyone, Banner is the best offensive skill for Paladin by a large margin. Must 4/4! 

2. Prayer, Seal, and Call have an equal damage distribution potential of about 15% each (on a single target)

3. Perhaps another interesting result here is that Sun Seal might need a buff. Sun Seal does not deal significantly more magical damage than the AoE skills Harad's Call and Paladin's Prayer (Not AoE but ally buffing) even on a single target level to justify leveling it up, nor is the healing effect good or better than the effects of Call and Prayer beyond the single target damage anyway. But that's off-topic!

 

So, does it add to the Paladin's damage? Yes, depending on how you look at it, theoretically it can add from 20% and up to 40% more damage. The question whether this addition of Paladin's magical damage (which is already pretty low) of any practical significance in the grand scheme of things. Overall, I'm happy with the amount of damage I can deal whilst being this tanky and support-y. Because, of course, this is not the only aspect that this branch offers. Everburning Candle (Aura's talent) is a very strong defensive support talent that was not the focus of my work. It would be interesting for the future to do a breakdown of the defensive contribution and compare it with the Bulwark of Faith branch as well as the damage potential of Holy Warrior to see if overall, this branch is well worth the investment.

That being said, I do think the branch does serve a purpose, and I don't think Paladin itself in its current form deserves to deal too much more damage than it currently can do with this branch, perhaps if the damage from Reckoning was a bit more immediate, or if it had an additional damage support aspect to the party like the Priest's Valor Aura talent, it would more fitting to branch's advertisement of the offensive capability in the description. 

 

I'll leave it at that! Thank you if you read this thing :)

Edited May 25, 20242 yr by Gladiator

A barb stand there afk. Pala in 1st branch almost can't kill him.

8 hours ago, LeafAutum said:

A barb stand there afk. Pala in 1st branch almost can't kill him.

Not wrong. But that's not the topic