Break Weapon Question

I have a quick on the Break Weapon skill tool tip. It states the following:

"-0.4 weapon damage for 10 seconds"

At face value, I read that as it reduces weapon damage by 0.4 points per hit. So instead of doing 10 damage to me, the enemy will do 9.6 damage. If that's the case, doesn't it just round that number up to 10 anyways? Or if it just rounds down to 9, that still doesn't seem to be useful at all.

Another th0ught I had is that may mean it multiples damage by 0.4. Effectively reducing weapon damage by 60% as 10*0.4 = 4. That seems VERY powerful, so I'm probably wrong there as well.

Can anyone explain to me what that actually does?

Thanks

 

Health is a float. For example CurrentHealth: 334.092 is what I have at the moment.

So I would guess that they really do 9.6 damage instead of 10.

 

Pretty sure it works like this. Especially at higher levels where there is a lot of maths being done; especially in percentages. So, the game is processing it as a floating-point number, but for ease of viewing and rough calculations, the damage/healing you see will be shown as an integer. Unsure if it is rounded up or down when converted to an integer though.

 

Any parsing I've ever done with break weapon/break armor, the results have been lost in the noise. It's impossible to tell if it's doing anything at all.
That is, it's not significant enough to warrant using, because just the normal randomness of combat is enough to hide any value it might be offering.

There are many, many skills, supposed debuffs, and non damage glyphs and innates that have this same issue. Any value they may offer can't be seen by analyzing the logfile, so... there's really no point in wasting the casting time when you could just use another straight damage glyph. Same goes for dots vs. direct-damage. If a DoT ticks for 2 per 2 seconds, combat lasts 10 seconds, you might get 8-10 damage out of it. A direct damage ability does 20-30 damage. Why would you ever use that DoT? If you waste time casting the DoT, combat lasts 10 seconds. If you cast the direct damage instead, combat lasts 5 seconds. Pretty easy decision.

Same goes for abilities like Blind. Chris has said directly you can't negatively debuff a target, that is, you can't make dex go below zero, or damage avoidance go below zero. Ok, so even at zero for both, there's no parse-able difference if Blind is on a target or not. It doesn't make you hit them more often. It doesn't make them hit you less often. It doesn't increase the damage you to do them. It doesn't decrease the damage they do to you. It only lasts for 9 seconds (not 10 like the tooltip claims) and you have to burn a GCD every 9 seconds to keep it active. Yet... it doesn't make any difference.

Unfortunately, when you start to examine each tree and all the abilities in detail, some very unfortunate realities start to come to light, the least of which is: In a resource collection game like shroud, the only thing that really matters is DPS. (strictly from a PvE perspective)
And as was predicted, all CC abilities have slowly been nerfed into uselessness, just like Taming, making it again... pointless to use them when compared to straight damage. This "nerf twice, nerf thrice" behavior on the part of Portalarium also encourages players to "hide" overpowered abilities as long as possible, which is the opposite of what you want in a healthy game.

 

Thanks for the replies! Its disappointing that the skill does so little that it can't be noticed in the logs (let alone to a player just playing the game without analyzing logs).