6 réponses à ce sujet

[Deadly dwarf]

These are some questions I should have asked on my first play through, but oh well....

 

Regarding staves, I typically make one of my mages a fire expert, another a winter expert, and the third the storm expert and I always outfit them with the corresponding staff.  My assumption has always been that if you have a fire staff that causes 50 damage and an ice staff also at 50 damage, the fire staff will best execute the "immolate" power and the ice staff will best do "Winter's grasp" and an electric staff is best for the Storm tree powers.  Is this assumption correct or am I mistaken?  (I appreciate that staff type doesn't matter for the powers in the mage specialization powers that become available in Skyhold.)

 

With respect to warriors, I have always defaulted to whatever weapon has the highest DPS.  That usually means that my "sword and shield" warriors usually end up armed with hatchets rather than swords because, even if the sword causes the same damage as the hatchet, the hatchet always has the higher DPS.  And for Iron Bull, he usually ends up with Great Axes as opposed to Mauls and Great Swords because the Great Axe has the higher DPS.  Am I right to make decisions based on DPS alone?  Or are the different weapons better against specific targets regardless of DPS?  (Is one type of weapon better against demons versus humans?  Animals?  Etc.)

 

In both sets of questions, I'm assuming runes are not involved.

 

 

[capn233]

Power damage is calculated off of the base weapon damage, which is not the DPS.  It is usually listed under DPS just as "100 damage" or something like that for a sword, or as you saw with staves something like "50 fire damage."  So for any character using offensive powers, the higher damage usually comes from picking the weapon with higher base damage.

 

For the 2H, things are only muddied in that you have a choice between AOE and single target damage.  But generally I would go for the higher base damage and let my AOE powers give me AOE if need be.  IIRC though the best 2H schematic is the Hossberg Twainer though, which has AOE, as does Sulevin, which is a good sword.  The different classes shouldn't be different against enemies unless they are enchanted.

 

I think the elemental damage of a staff only matters for the auto attack damage, not granting boosts to spells.  Usually those boosts come from magic or willpower bonuses that may be on rare or unique staves, or from mods you craft.  And in fact it might be better to mix them so for instance if your ice mage has all ice spells it might be a good idea to run a fire staff so you can still do decent damage against enemies with cold resistance.  Of course you can also keep an inventory filled with different types of staves and just switch them out when need be.

[PapaCharlie9]

These are some questions I should have asked on my first play through, but oh well....
 
Regarding staves, I typically make one of my mages a fire expert, another a winter expert, and the third the storm expert and I always outfit them with the corresponding staff.  My assumption has always been that if you have a fire staff that causes 50 damage and an ice staff also at 50 damage, the fire staff will best execute the "immolate" power and the ice staff will best do "Winter's grasp" and an electric staff is best for the Storm tree powers.  Is this assumption correct or am I mistaken?  (I appreciate that staff type doesn't matter for the powers in the mage specialization powers that become available in Skyhold.)

No, that is not correct. You can Immolate the heck out of everything with the most powerful frost staff in the land. The lore hints at this; recall prologue when you have your first fight with demons as Cassandras prisoner, you pick up a random staff and she turns her sword on you after it is over. One of the dialogue options is, "I don't need a staff to be dangerous," or something like that.

It's a perfectly reasonable self-imposed RP restriction, but not a game mechanic.
 

With respect to warriors, I have always defaulted to whatever weapon has the highest DPS.  That usually means that my "sword and shield" warriors usually end up armed with hatchets rather than swords because, even if the sword causes the same damage as the hatchet, the hatchet always has the higher DPS.  And for Iron Bull, he usually ends up with Great Axes as opposed to Mauls and Great Swords because the Great Axe has the higher DPS.  Am I right to make decisions based on DPS alone?  Or are the different weapons better against specific targets regardless of DPS?  (Is one type of weapon better against demons versus humans?  Animals?  Etc.)

No, you should not base decisions solely on DPS alone. See @capn233's explanation about base damage.

I use DPS more for internal ranking. All things being equal (buffs, level restrictions, etc.), is this 1H axe better than that 1H axe?

Example: you have a 100 DPS weapon with base damage 80, and an 80 DPS weapon with base damage 80. The 100 DPS weapon has no buffs or procs, it just swings faster. The 80 DPS weapon procs On Hit: Gain 3 Guard and gives you +6 Constitution. The 80 DPS is usually the better choice.

Counter-example: Same setup as before, but the 80 DPS has no procs or buffs. In that case, the 100 DPS is usually the better choice.
 
Finally, consider mixing elements for mages. I usually specialize skills in one (Fire) and gear another (Ice). That gives you recourse if you are up against an enemy that has some kind of resistance to one or the other.

[Digger1967]

These are some questions I should have asked on my first play through, but oh well....

 

Regarding staves, I typically make one of my mages a fire expert, another a winter expert, and the third the storm expert and I always outfit them with the corresponding staff.  My assumption has always been that if you have a fire staff that causes 50 damage and an ice staff also at 50 damage, the fire staff will best execute the "immolate" power and the ice staff will best do "Winter's grasp" and an electric staff is best for the Storm tree powers.  Is this assumption correct or am I mistaken?  (I appreciate that staff type doesn't matter for the powers in the mage specialization powers that become available in Skyhold.)

 

With respect to warriors, I have always defaulted to whatever weapon has the highest DPS.  That usually means that my "sword and shield" warriors usually end up armed with hatchets rather than swords because, even if the sword causes the same damage as the hatchet, the hatchet always has the higher DPS.  And for Iron Bull, he usually ends up with Great Axes as opposed to Mauls and Great Swords because the Great Axe has the higher DPS.  Am I right to make decisions based on DPS alone?  Or are the different weapons better against specific targets regardless of DPS?  (Is one type of weapon better against demons versus humans?  Animals?  Etc.)

 

In both sets of questions, I'm assuming runes are not involved.

 

Ok, on the question of staves - a fire staff doesn't do any more damage when a mage uses immolate than any other staff type.   The only advantage to having your "fire" mage use a fire staff would be that a spell like energy burst uses the same energy type as the staff, so if you want to have a mage who specializes in Fire so that they are best against opponents that are susceptible to such damage,

[Deadly dwarf]

Many thanks!  That clarifies a number of things for me.  Rather annoying that all of my supposedly logical assumptions turned out to be wrong!  Oh well...live and learn.  Good to know I won't have to lug around so many exta staves as I got into the habit of doing during my first run-through.  Also, it does encourage me to experiment with more weapons which may make the game more interesting.

[Cydh]

Note that for one-handed & shield weapons, there are attack skills on very short cooldowns (8 seconds base), so you can definitely build a character that ignores completely the "DPS" portion and focus only on the base damage by cycling between four of those (charging bull, shield bash, lunge and slash and payback strike) - these characters benefit a whole lot from using swords in general, since these babies (well, the unique ones at least) tend to have high base damage and low dps, and you very rarely end up using the auto attack at all as a result. It's also better for AOE since pretty much all of these attack skills (except lunge and slash) deal damage to a cone, with payback strike doing its thing to everything in a very wide angle.

 

If you're going to use a sword on an AI character, remember to lower the stamina threshold down to 0 so they don't stand around swinging their crappy dps for too long.

[Digger1967]

Many thanks! That clarifies a number of things for me. Rather annoying that all of my supposedly logical assumptions turned out to be wrong! Oh well...live and learn. Good to know I won't have to lug around so many exta staves as I got into the habit of doing during my first run-through. Also, it does encourage me to experiment with more weapons which may make the game more interesting.

No worries, happy to help. I prefer to get the mages schematic perk as soon as possible and build my own. I also love fade touch items that are on hit for mages, with energy burst you have a pretty good shot at triggering it more often.

Last one I built had a chance of shield bash on hit and man it was awesome. Nothing more fun than watching one of those pesky archers going arse over Adams Apple after being hit with a barrage. Lol