So…after running 1-2 (figuratively speaking) dungeon run and a couple regionals/lairs I realized people dislike casting exposed on enemies or at least that many fights end up without exposed applied.
Since I am not really in the best position to apply it myself (while I can it’s attached to a lot of ifs) I started to question:
What is it’s worth? When does it become useful (How much dps can you sacrifies for exposed to still make it worth it)? And who can cast it even how easily and why would or wouldn’t they do it?
Thx for every bit of input…since I lack the knowledge in 8 out of the 9 weapons.
About half the weapons can do exposed with various 20 second abilities and the bigger the boss the more useful it is. In a group of 5 it’s way better than any other active and in a group of 10 you’re just wasting time if nobody has it.
I don’t think solo it’s a net win vs. most utilities unless it’s double purpose. For example Eruption adds exposed and is also generally the dps elite of choice for hammers. Blindside interrupts and exposes so if you need to interrupt anyway, it’s a nice bonus.
10% multiplicative damage debuff on target(s), so relevant for the whole group or even raid. It is the strongest group debuff that exists.
When does it become useful (How much dps can you sacrifies for exposed to still make it worth it)?
In theory, in a group with 3 DPS and a tank, a DPS can sacrifice up to 15% of his total DPS if he can in turn bring a 10s exposed on a 20s cooldown, which will average out 5% extra multiplicative damage for the entire group. In a group with 4 DPS + tank, this number should become 20%. In a raid, any exposed source is more valuable than personal DPS. Of course, this does not matter if, as DPS, you contribute more to the parses than other DPS, so your DPS sacrifice to bring an exposed would be more significant.
And who can cast it even how easily and why would or wouldn’t they do it?
Among the most efficient ways to apply exposed, any pistol user can pretty much solo-expose and debilitate by playing with Kill Blind and Trick Shot. Hammer DDs put a 10s exposed with Eruption. Chaos users can use Reality Fracture (i do it sometimes as sustain-tank if i can free up a slot). As shotgun user, you can solo-expose a target with Bombardment, and it actually becomes a DPS increase over Full Salvo with its passive on targets with big hitboxes such as Ur’Draug (for small targets, you can probably remove Bombardment’s passive and take something else). For the rest of the weapons, it is a matter of special abilities.
Then, whether you “need” an exposed or not is mostly relevant on how much you’d like to bother people to slot something else then their comfort-zone build.
@Onevia Blindside does not expose but purges. You’re mistaking it with Rampage.
I wonder about the math. While on paper it looks like a simple thing it doesn’t always work out that way. I know that bombardment can keep exposed at a 100% uptime IF the enemy isn’t moving (for example the golem in HE or the tyrant in HR).
So I wonder how effective it still is once put to the test in real combat. As you probably will lose effective uptime due to either the enemy for example porting out/shielding himself or the ability coming with a hook.
Like the saying goes: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
It’s like saying Crystallized Blaze is OP when in fact it can loose lots of value when the targets move, it is pretty obvious. But everything’s relative, and not that many bosses move. What i said is a general idea / guideline, i didn’t deny one shouldn’t have to adapt - after all, fully expose a target with 1 ability has to be paid in some way.
If we were to discuss every single ability that puts expose and its strengths / weaknesses, we could spend the rest of the day doing only this .
If you were to bring exposed on MT, i’d probably go for Kill Blind with pistols offhand (since it also debilitates and even stuns if needed on his AoE). You could fully expose by adding Trick Shot instead of your shotgun elite, but this will bring you big gameplay modifications and probably a higher DPS loss, especially if your pistols are weaker than your shotgun. Pistols offhand also makes you able to bring Clean Slate for that encounter if a group cleanse is needed.
At least in tsw, and i would assume here too, dps generally wouldnt run it, because they lose “personal” dps. It’s typical of ppl that are more concerned about their own numbers rather than the overall group numbers. The simple fact is that the lose in personal dps is minor compared to the increase in group dps.
The exception until recently was groups with chaos users, apparently we had a bug where hitting an exposed tarking or getting a crit hit, would not yield paradoxes when it should, that should however be fixed now =P
Yeah, in TSW, Exposed was absolutely 100% the tank’s job. In SWL, it’s the DPS’s job; healers weapons don’t have Exposed, and tanks can rarely spare the space for a CD specifically for Exposed when they could have a mitigation or taunt instead.
DPS just, in my pugging experience, don’t want to do it.
I won’t be that specific about defining arbitrary rules. Healers playing with fists have access to exposed, and healers also have access to an offhand which can provide an exposed as there are rarely a need to have 2 healing weapons at once. If it is the case, most often it means that the tank doesn’t use enough cooldowns to mitigate damage, which in turn could mean he has a slot to use exposed. Going overboard into tanking with full cooldowns and adding a healer using full healing build AND both healing weapons is just about as overkill and reticent to changes as a DPS not willing to slot an exposed, purely and simply.
There are no rules in SWL as anyone can have access to any weapon, people can still be creative enough with this matter.
Fist has exposed? Last I looked for an exposing skill in fist I couldn’t find it, but I must have missed it.
That said, while I’m tanking sometimes I can bring exposed (usually I’m doing the impairs so there’s not much room for it), but I almost never can bring two.
Cool, that changes my opinion a bit. It was formed largely when asking a group to bring exposed for Traumadriver and having only the healer offer, but they couldn’t find any such skill to use with the weapons they had.
When I pug I always bring Trick Shot, Kill Blind, and a Fleshwired Fetter (arguably overkill, but it gives me a little wiggle room when I’m juggling Trick Shot and Kill Blind).
This regularly results in snarky commentary about my choice of wrist talis at the start of the run, followed by compliments to the Hammer/AR players for bringing such great DPS at the end.
Speaking from personal experience, in some cases it’s people not even thinking about doing what they do anyways.
I run Warped Visage chaos doppelganger dps, so I don’t really have any reason not to bring expose and purge for group content. They’re just about the best specials I have, right?
When someone actually asks for either, I usually need a few seconds to process that I should say, “Yeah, I do that.”
Well, how could you know? Every group you are in obviously has exposed since YOU are in. So what’s the problem?
Reality is usually different though. There often is no pistol/hammer in the group. All glory to AR.
Exposed itself is not a problem solver in most cases. If you struggle to beat the boss on DPS check then taking exposed for a price of like changing comfort weapon of strong DPS won’t probably change much. The tactical view says that OS/exposed should be taken by the weakest combatant. Except most of time the reason why people are low (the reason why you can’t get over DPS check in the first place I mind you) are because they “just” mash skills they don’t understand but somehow got into their build, which in consequence means asking them to take another skill and actually use it well (like expose/OS) doesn’t really work. (AKA you get one-first OS during the entire fight.) While being the only strong DPS in the group (by having twice the damage then the guy just behind you) you loose more then what group could possibly gain.
This is standard pug-gadget problem. People with negligible damage, usually using some pretty obscure DPS gadget, which does exactly nothing, don’t take utility gadgets either. Not because they are worry about DPS, but because they don’t even understand what you are asking them to do (also they often die fast).
On the opposite when we run the dung with at least two strong DPS, we just kill things. Buffs don’t really change much. 10% is not that much to bother. If we have hammer DPS, fine. If we don’t nobody will change a weapon. So what is the “model group” that actually should care for exposed/OS more then “it’s there, good, it isn’t, no problem”? Maybe regionals to lower time from 39s to 35s.
The only puzzle for me is why people care so much for OS and so little for expose when expose provides 3x more damage boost.
Probably cause OS is burst damage, so for the first 5 seconds of the fight you get more than expose, then next 15 seconds you get less. People are bursting then anyway so it works out.
Also people still think crit’s good like it was in TSW, in low level groups (like up to 7) nobody has enough crit for it to be good anyway.
In practice, there’s no scenario where Opening Shot can ever be better than Exposed, be it for burst or not.
Let’s consider “c” the product of base damage by the sum of additive coefficients, “c” being strictly positive. The following inequation aims at finding out if 30% additional crit damage is better than a multiplicative 10% damage debuff, “c” will be a constant. Let’s consider 50% crit chance for the sake of simplicity, since it is what people will in the long term aim for and what the best scales Opening Shot. Each part of the inequation expresses 50% chance to crit and another 50% chance to do normal damage.
c * 0.5 * (1 + y + 0.3) + c * 0.5 > [c * 0.5 * (1 + y) + c * 0.5] * 1.1
c * 0.5 * (2.3 + y) > c * 0.5 * (2 + y) * 1.1
2.3 + y > 2.2 + 1.1 * y (we can divide by 0.5 * c without changing the inequation since c is positive)
0.1 + y > 1.1 * y
0.1 > 0.1 * y
y < 1 (which translates into crit power being inferior to 100%)
In order for Opening Shot to be better than Exposed, one has to have 50% crit chance and less than 100% crit power, which means 5 legendary 20 fierce glyphs, but worse than 2 mythic 20 devastating glyphs, which in practice probably won’t ever happen since getting at least 2x mythic 20 devastating glyphs isn’t the biggest problem if one manages to max out 5 fierce glyphs. This is also not counting Havoc or Laceration at all, Laceration actually procing at the beginning of the fight and up mostly at the same time Opening Shot is used.
Point me out if i’ve made any mistake in my inequation.
Depends on the weapon to an extent but “crit rating is the most important stat in the whole game for DPS” wouldn’t be stretching it too far
Also, they made it very easy to bring expose. Two in the group is mandatory if you ask me - unless you massively outgear content which is irrelevant anyway.
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