Claire Voyant, which Curse does more Damage?
Etjama
Member Posts: 7,981 ★★★★★
Now let's say you're using Claire against an opponent with no immunities. What I have always wondered is, does the Curse of Hellfire do more damage? Or does the Curse of Plague do more damage? I assume that in shorter fights, the Curse of Hellfire will take down the opponent faster while the Curse of Plague may be better in longer fights since you can throw far more specials. If this is the case, how long of a fight would it have to be in order for the Curse of Plague to be better? Or am I wrong and one curse does more damage no matter how long the fight? I'm sure someone can do the math on this. I'ma just tag @DNA3000 and @DrZola here. 😂
Post edited by Kabam Porthos on
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Dr. Zola
Need to regen, stay in blood, need decent power control plague. If you need damage then it’s hellfire.
But as I said it’s her utility. I usually use a combo of 2/3. Against certain immunities I switch to it to gain power faster than switch to the phase that I need most. Beast champ.
But as previous post explained, the sp2 is generally best utilised on whether you want to heal, steal power or do lots of damage.
I have a 6* rank 2 that I use a lot. I run full suicides so I switch to curse of plague as soon as possible.
At that point, assuming AI is being cooperative and throwing specials when baited, I switch it to curse of hellfire and, depending on health pools, I get in a couple of sp2’s.
I try to finish with a sp2 in curse of blood to get the recoil damage back.
She’s a lot of fun.
I think Curse of Hellfire will always do more damage.
Here's why:
Curse of Plague steals 5% of the opponent's max power. So if you wanted maximum gain from her SP2, your opponent would need to be at an SP3. But remember, you're only draining 5%, which means you're effectively keeping your opponent at an SP2 or near an SP3 for most of the fight. Which really isn't a convenient way to play (unless you're playing against Darkhawk lol).
Now, I can digress.
As most of the users mentioned above, Curse of Plague is meant to focus on utility only (and it behaves this way too). You only want to use her SP2 in emergency situations, when your opponent is near to or at SP3, after which you can bait out their SP2.
Now speaking from personal experience, I only use Curse of Plague when the opponent is Poison Immune, and I spam heavy to gain those Clairvoyance charges.
But yeah. Hellfire always over Plague.
NOTE: I am not a professional. Any values provided are from personal experiences and everything below is my opinion.
I think Curse of Bleed and Curse of Plague do almost similar amounts of damage since they do not have damage output attributes like DOT or Burst.
SP2 with Curse of Bleed heals 35% of damage dealt so assuming most hits aren't crits it's only useful if you are certain you can throw SP2s without losing any health. If you can maintain your health then it's ideal for long fights.
SP2 with Curse of Plague steals only 5% of the opponent's power. I think storing power till SP2 then throwing it just to steal 5% is useless.
SP2 with Curse of Hellfire deals about 4000 direct energy damage. Wouldn't recommend in very long fights (ROL) because you'd have to not lose any health and drop 15+ SP2s. It gets even harder when the defender takes reduced energy damage.
Inference:
Curse of Bleed can keep you at max health but increases fight duration due to low damage.
Curse of Plague isn't effective at all.
Curse of Hellfire deals huge bursts of damage and drops in potency only when the defender takes reduced energy damage.
Conclusion:
Curse of Hellfire deals more damage.
First off, I'm ignoring immunities as a premise of the question. There are still two other interactions to consider: poison reduces healing, while incinerate reduces block proficiency. So Plague will do more "effective damage" by virtue of reducing healing, while Hellfire will amplify block damage during the fight. These are both difficult to quantify, but they're there.
Setting those aside, it comes down to the fact that Hellfire adds significant damage to SP2 while Plague adds a power steal to SP2. Theoretically speaking, power steal can amplify damage *rate* because it can reduce the need to spend time baiting specials. But I think the power steal amount is small enough that it doesn't reduce opponent power by enough to counterbalance the damage Hellfire does in SP2. For comparison purposes, the damage bonus for Hellfire SP2 is about 6.7 times the total damage of the combo debuffs (counting all three stacks combined). It does take several combo sequences to build enough power to reach SP2 usually (mystic dispersion can accelerate this) but that's still a significant amount of damage.
I notice you didn't mention Blood. Blood doesn't have extra damage or power control, but it is the only one of the three whose damage can be increased through masteries. Max deep wounds adds 2.5 seconds to bleed effects. For Claire's 8 second bleeds that means the total damage would increase to 10.5/8 ~= 1.31x or about 31% more damage from the debuffs.
If you use SP2 with any regularity at all, that extra deep wounds damage is probably not enough to overcome the damage bonus of hellfire. You'd need to do about 22 combo sequences for every one SP2 launched for Deep Wounds to make Bleed deal more damage than Hellfire.
but there is a wildcard in this, in that Deep Wounds also does strike down damage once the target's health drops to lower than yours. It is a sort of assassins-like effect, and since Claire does three bleeds instead of one big one, each one of those bleeds should get that strike down damage. But that's a tricky thing to quantify, because it relies on having more health than the target rather than just triggering on the health percentage of the target. Which, intriguingly, Curse of Blood would help with, as it has regeneration effects.
I've never played Claire with max DW to see how strong this effect is in practice, but on paper it could be significant. I might try to test this out when I get a chance.
It takes about four heavy attacks to generate a bar of power. So hjypothetically speaking this is a valid attack chain: Heavy, Heavy, Heavy, Heavy, SP1. It procs the most debuffs while cycling SP1. Similarly, Heavy x 8 + SP2 procs the most debuffs while cycling SP2.
The bleed debuff deals the same base damage as the incinerate debuff, but the bleed debuff can theoretically be increased with Deep Wounds to deal 2.5 seconds more bleed, which means the bleed debuff would deal 10.5/8 ~= 1.31, or 31% more damage. So in the extreme case of Heavy x 4 + SP1 + Heavy x 4 + SP1 you would have 30 bleed debuffs which land for 30 *1.31 = 39.3 times the base damage of the debuffs.
The presumptive Heavy x 8 + SP2 sequence lands 24 incinerates plus bonus damage equal to about 6.7 more debuffs. So that's 30.7 times the damage of the debuff. If we assume these two attack chains take about the same amount of time, the bleed debuffs would be outdamaging the incinerate debuffs plus the bonus Hellfire damage, before accounting for the bonus deep wounds strike down damage.
This is probably an extreme corner case and it requires the deep wounds mastery and I don't know (I haven't calculated yet) if two SP1 attacks have similar damage to one SP2. But it is at least mathematically possible for Claire's Bleed to outdamage Incinerate.
Broken OP
Poison - every hit steals 5% of current power. So it would steal not more than 0.05*8 = 0.4 of full power and not less then 0.34. But you most likely won't manage to use sp2 only on full power. Best case scenario - 4 sp2s instead of 3, i.e. 33% damage increase.
With hell fire active sp2 deals extra 2.3k per hit, 25k per sp2. Without it about 8-9k per sp2. With power gain active would be about 14k.
Generally speaking, hell fire is more damage. But power steal on sp2 allows you to be more aggressive, so even with lower dph you may get higher dps.
I think after maxing coagulate, I'd rather run despair, no?