After some peculiarly low numbers with these mods, I decided to run a battery of tests on both powers and weapons attacks with and without Core Strength and Penetrating Strikes mods. I went into both healer and dps stance and found that Core Strength and Penetrating have no effect in healer stance, it's as if the armor weren't modded at all. I also relogged a few times and then tried different targets, in case something was amiss and I wasn't detecting it. What I found only confirmed my earlier test, that these mods have zero effect in healer stance. Maybe someone else can confirm, that would be great.
I don't have any numbers, but it sure seemed to increase my damage. I guess I should test it tonight to be sure .
So I tested this out again last night. Once again, just equipping the core strength or penetrating strikes mod in healer stance does nothing. However, if you equip it and change stances to DPS and then back again to healer it seems to work. This is obviously a slightly different result from my first round of tests, so I really don't know what's going on with this but it needs to be looked at. It also uncovered another bug, which is mod stacking. So run these different tests, I've had to mod over the core strength or penetrating strikes since I cannot simply remove/delete the mod. What I found is that as long as you stay in the same stance and same zone, you can mod over the core strength/penetrating strikes and keep the effects with that and then get benefits of the other mods too. If you change stance or go through a load screen of some sort, then the mods reset, at least they were last night. So this would be beneficial for any content that you queue into. Just equipment the CS/PS mod, change stances and back again to make sure it takes effect and then mod over it. Fairly certain there was an issue like this with trinkets a while back, where you could use a trinket and then equipment another trinket, use it, and get the benefits of both trinkets at the same time. Hoping that someone else will confirm these findings. Thanks.
