Guild Wars 2

I’m curious why the developers did not consider adding armor penetration as a means to control/reduce ‘zerking’ in the game.

Currently there are glass canon builds that need their extreme damage output and burst in order to take down a tank. This has the unfortunate side-effect of making that same build incredibly overpowered against non-tank builds.

However, if you introduce armor penetration with an upper limit such that it did not reduce anyone’s armor below, say, light armor, then you’d introduce some interesting dynamics.

You would create ‘bunker buster’ builds that could take down a bunker, but would not necessarily insta-gib other classes. At the same time you would also have insta-gib builds that would break against the defense of a bunker.

Armor penetration brought about one of the biggest imbalances in WoW history, introducing it here with TTK being incredibly low already will be a catastrophy

So basically a stat that reduces the targets Toughness?

It would be an indirect nerf to Warriors and Guardians, which, depending on your PoV, may or may not be justified.

Personally I’d like to see more “bunker busting” capabilities as Bunkers are currently hurting sPvP.

My concern would be though that it’s hard to find a sweet-spot for such a stat. It’s either going to the “the best DPS stat” or a junk stat. It will be hard to make it exclusively attractive for bunker busting.

But maybe this concept should be explored.

Honestly I’m puzzled as to why Arenanet insisted on something with the potential for so much abuse as Increased Critical Damage% in the first place when Armour Penetration was obviously the least likely to lead to stupidly crazy high damage and accelerate Time to Kill to the point where non-specialised builds could do nothing against proper Bunkers due to the DPS vs Mitigation arms race.

It’s partially RNG as well, which worsens the problem, because you can, say, try for a Backstab, crit and take off a full third to half a health bar in one attack; or not crit at all and hit like a wet noodle. If the Condition Meta ever dies down, you can bet that this problem will come back to bite Arenanet in the kitten in the future.

%Increased Critical Damage with its multiplicative scaling has also led to Power Builds almost exclusively favouring Berzerker’s Amulet, because anything else doesn’t have anywhere near a comparable TTK. (Except perhaps for pre-nerf D/D Elementalist with Valkyrie’s Amulet, but that was more due to Arcane Fury and Sigil of Battle).

The same problem is also happening now with Condition damage – The Boon-ignoring, Armour Piercing DPS of Conditions is now also leading to a zero-sum Arms Race between Condition application and Condition cleansing and Immunity.

I’d say that closer to launch back then was when Arenanet should have seriously reconsidered their alteration of %Increased Critical Damage to Armour Penetration. Crit damage has done nothing but harm to the game:

• PvE and Dungeons is Zerker or Bust due to the ridiculous Vitality of bosses requiring multiplicative scaling damage to DPS down in a timely manner
• PvP has Wet Noodle Fights (Guardian vs Guardian at Mid); interspersed with moments where some player gets zeroed out in seconds. (Can anyone honestly say that they enjoyed the Burst Meta where whichever Mesmer got their Timewarp down first won the fight?) There’s no in-between of punch and counter-punch – TTK is ridiculously polarised in range from minutes to kill to seconds
• As a side effect, Crit Damage has also made it nigh impossible to build hybrid Condi-Power due to multiplicative scaling requiring more stat points than are realistically available in a PVP amulet. Has anyone seen a viable build using Celestial? Or Knights? Or Rampager?

The game is now over a year into its launch. The window may well have passed; and knowing Arenanet with their slow “we want to see the meta settle” balancing iteration cycles and incorporating Balance and Bug fixes into Feature patches (WTF?) – turning the ship around to re-align with Armour Penetration may well be far too late.

It’s because they have condition damage for the purpose of bypassing toughness and want to keep things simplistic relative to say GW1 which had armor pen, armor reduction and armor ignoring damage, as well as elemental damages.

ensoriki.5789:

It’s because they have condition damage for the purpose of bypassing toughness and want to keep things simplistic relative to say GW1 which had armor pen, armor reduction and armor ignoring damage, as well as elemental damages.

This is nonsensical as it basically prevents any non-condition class from taking out tank-type classes and pushes the game further into a condition Meta. In every MMO I’ve played heavy defense classes were susceptible to (1) magic damage (i.e. conditions in this game) or (2) specialists (mostly light armour classes with big unsustainable burst and high armour penetration and a high level of risk/reward).

I’m personally all for this as the game is becoming more and more heavy-armour centric for a reason.

MonMalthias.4763:

• PvP has Wet Noodle Fights (Guardian vs Guardian at Mid); interspersed with moments where some player gets zeroed out in seconds. (Can anyone honestly say that they enjoyed the Burst Meta where whichever Mesmer got their Timewarp down first won the fight?) There’s no in-between of punch and counter-punch – TTK is ridiculously polarised in range from minutes to kill to seconds

I’m pretty sure most pvp-ers would say they actually enjoyed burst meta over this cheese that surrounds us.

Main problem with WoW ArP in pvp was not bunker-busting (bunkers will be pretty fine), but ability to explode low-armor targets. Low-armor target + ArP = crazy burst. It will promote bunkering even more.

Arlette.9684:

Armor penetration brought about one of the biggest imbalances in WoW history, introducing it here with TTK being incredibly low already will be a catastrophy

Wow didn’t implement it correctly.

Dee Jay.2460:

So basically a stat that reduces the targets Toughness?

It would be an indirect nerf to Warriors and Guardians, which, depending on your PoV, may or may not be justified.

Personally I’d like to see more “bunker busting” capabilities as Bunkers are currently hurting sPvP.

My concern would be though that it’s hard to find a sweet-spot for such a stat. It’s either going to the “the best DPS stat” or a junk stat. It will be hard to make it exclusively attractive for bunker busting.

But maybe this concept should be explored.

It’s a means of normalizing the damage/survivability.

1. You reduce the amount of burst damage in the game by some combination of profession nerfs and reduction of critical strike damage. Perhaps the next effect is reducing burst damage by ~20%.

1. You add a new stat set that is similar to Berserker’s, but instead focuses on armor penetration at the expense of survivability.

This would result in effectively 2 flavors of glass canon builds: one that is especially good at dropping squishy players, but cannot take down bunkers, and one that can take down bunkers but is not especially good and dropping squishy players.

Sounds like you’re just describing conditions to be honest.

Condition builds are great vs bunkers because you bypass armour and often a lot of blocks as well, but often struggle vs berserker builds who have high condition removal since they are out DPS’ed and the opponent is able to deal with your conditions and their weakness to physical attacks they cant capitalise on.

The think in Anets mind: bunker > DPS > condition build > bunker, it just doesnt work out because DPS players invariably dont have enough condition removal (either by choice or simply not being able to get enough).

Cufufalating.8479:

The think in Anets mind: bunker > DPS > condition build > bunker, it just doesnt work out because DPS players invariably dont have enough condition removal (either by choice or simply not being able to get enough).

It’s hard for this to work when some condi specs are bunkers too :P

Vargamonth.2047:

Cufufalating.8479:

The think in Anets mind: bunker > DPS > condition build > bunker, it just doesnt work out because DPS players invariably dont have enough condition removal (either by choice or simply not being able to get enough).

It’s hard for this to work when some condi specs are bunkers too :P

Which is exactly why condition builds are so popular and strong in small scale PvP activities, not because they are nessesaily overpowered in terms of numbers but because their weakness is often other condition builds, so its just natural that they become increasingly popular as people try to fight fire with fire.

Rednik.3809:

Main problem with WoW ArP in pvp was not bunker-busting (bunkers will be pretty fine), but ability to explode low-armor targets. Low-armor target + ArP = crazy burst. It will promote bunkering even more.

To be honest the whole Crit Damage thing (and now the Condition Damage thing) has lead to a complete breakdown of the Damage, Support and Control “Trinity” that GW2’s original designers intended. Most meta builds nowadays are (a lot) of Damage, with just enough Support and Control mixed in. Meanwhile, Bunkers have emerged due to the Conquest gametype that are mostly selfish Support and Control.

With the proper implementation (Which WoW failed to do); armour penetration can be done right, which (in theory) should lead to the following ecosystem:

• Builds running High Armour penetration (Damage) fare well against Bunkers, but do not gain additional effectiveness against squishy targets. Ideally these builds lack strong Support and do not have strong Control outside of a few expensive (i.e. long CD or hard to land) “setup” skills. Ideally Damage setups themselves do not have much Toughness mitigation which leaves them vulnerable to other targets like Control setups

• Control/Support setups have builds that can support the Bunker with pressure against the enemy team, but do not run enough ArPen to easily down an enemy Bunker. They have greater Support than Damage setups and contribute more to fights with Control. Their CC makes them an even matchup against Damage and most Control builds should pose a significant threat to Damage builds as Damage builds should sacrifice more defense to achieve Bunker Busting ArPen.

• Bunkers (mostly Support with selfish Control) have high amounts of mitigation (CC, direct damage, conditions) but cannot contribute much to a fight outside of Down state control and holding a point. They are mostly selfish with Control with much of it directed towards self-survival. Their low damage pressure makes them vulnerable to High ArPen Damage setups; but they bring enough Support to contribute to Teamfights and help allies stay in the fight.

In terms of Down State Control:

• Bunkers should provide a little more Down State Control than Control/Support setups to let them have a role of keeping allies up in teamfights. Their Damage and CC mitigation also make them ideal for securing Stomps

• Control/Support setups have some Down State Control, but cannot easily secure a Stomp or stop an ally being focused from being Downed.

• Damage setups should have little-poor Down State Control, as their role is to bunker-bust or gank (with a Control Setup) and provide enough damage to Down people, yet have few methods of safely securing a Stomp

Vargamonth.2047:

It’s hard for this to work when some condi specs are bunkers too :P

This. Absolutely this.