Guild Wars 2

Lately we’ve had quite a lot of discussion about the Berserker meta. One of the main arguments against reducing the effectiveness of Berserker stats are that other stats are simply not useful: builds do not lose out on active defenses by speccing for damage and defensive stats tend to promote bad play because there is more reliance on passive stats and less need to learn encounters and play skillfully.

An interesting thought would be to tie the effectiveness of weapon skills and utilities to stats more heavily. Non-boon support/utility skills (like blocks, walls and knockdowns) don’t scale in duration/effectiveness (except for specific trait/rune modifiers). What if the duration of skills scaled based on your toughness? Say Shield Stance was not fixed in duration but instead scaled 2..6 seconds based on the toughness stat. Obviously this would not be a solution implemented by itself but I think it could be a useful complement to other changes. It would provide an incentive (along with a redesigned defiance) to use defensive stats in combination with damage pieces to meet breakpoints and reach specific stat levels (instead of running all equipment from one set of stats). It would also promote using defensive stats to improve play instead of relying on them as a passive stat crutch to make up for bad play.

yes, this is imo, the only way to actually make stat combos useful. And actually makes playstyles more diverse and varied.

The also need to change AI behavior as well, but that needs to happen no matter what.

With the current set up, the stat distribution on gear is almost completely about just deciding how skilled you are. The more skilled/organized you are, the less vit, toughness and healing power you need.

gw1 actually had it right, by having the stats you can change effect different skills. I know they want to keep it simple, but if its simple, gear will be only about maximising dps.

anyone else have any thought? Got some pretty decent discussion going on reddit. Lot’s of support for the idea but concern about the effect on PvP/WvW and how difficult it would be to overhall so many skills.

This is exactly how Guild Wars 1 was. Your skills were tied to how many attribute points you had invested in the trait lines. While its a good idea, I just do not see them rebuilding gw2 to work that way.

If they want to make stats like toughness and vitality useful, it is the only way.
Offensive stats already have an effect on every skill related to them, after all, as well as healing power (even if i think it isn’t still relevant enough) and boon duration.
Doing so, people specialized in offensive stats wouldn’t have the same active mitigation as people specialized in defensive stats. Unlike now, where said mitigation skills ends blocking up better amounts of damage on offensive-gear people than on the defensive one (as the damage otherwise inflicted would be major compared to more tanky-geared people).

But how will you scale dodge/blocks/blinds/reflects etc.? These are all or nothing mitigation skills that have different levels of accessibility throughout the different classes.

If you nerf them to not mitigate that 1 hit KO then you’re just adding a hard requirement of x toughness & x vitality.

If you buff them according to vit/toughness how will it be? 5 seconds of invulnerability frames for every dodge? 24 seconds of Wall of Relection duration? Most encounters are trivialized already if you know how to use your damage mitigation skills properly.

People stack vitality/toughness because they’re not good enough to properly use these mitigation skills hence needing more room for error. That it in self is the incentive of tougness/vitality.

The encounters/mechanics themselves need to change and not nerfing/buffing damage mitigation skills.

From a dev point of view, I’d rather rehaul PvE mechanics and encounters than going through the nightmare of balancing all utilities/weapon skills scaling with stats.