Guild Wars 2

The thread tittle meant to say:
“Boon Effectiveness” Secondary Attribute! (Math included)
Thanks to the 45 character limit in topic tittle, I had to butcher it!

Current Problem:
There are no good support builds out there, and players who invest in supporting builds end up being kind of useless. Currently the only true support attributes are Healing power and boon duration that barely does anything. If you like to buff your party, all your build options are choosing skills that add boons and wasting points on “boon duration”

Disclaimer 1
Ether have “Boon Effectiveness” replace “Healing Power” and take it’s role of improving Healing and Regeneration among the rest of the boons…
…or have it only boost the effectiveness of other boons except Regeneration and keep “Healing Power” as a stat just for the heals.

Disclaimer 2
This change obviously implies that boons will mostly have the stat of their caster, and not of the receiver.

As a Number:
Just like the rest of Secondary attributes, “Boon Effectiveness” (Lets call it BE for short!) will not increase with your level. It can only increased with traits, gear, consumables and runes. My bellow math are based on the assumption that the max BE a character can acquire is a bit less than 2250 similar to “Condition damage”, but I could be mistaken.

The changes in boons:

• Might:
  The damage output formula now is 0.325*(Lvl of reciever)+0.0045*(BE of the sender) +5 per stack.
  This reduces the current Power and Condition Damage of each stack to 31 (from 35) but with a full BE build it can increase to 45.

• Vigor:
  Now multiplies the endurance regeneration by 1,5+0.00065*BE and also temporary increases the max endurance by +(0.023 * BE)%.
  This reduces the current endurance regeneration to x1.5 (from x2) but with a full BE build it increases to x2.9 and you can make a third dodge.

• Swiftness
  It mostly remains unaffected.
  When in combat it can increase the character’s forward speed by +0.04*BE units per second, allowing him/her to run almost as fast as if he was out of combat with Swiftness if buffed with a full BE build.

• Stability
  It remains unaffected.

• Retaliation
  I don’t know how the formula scales with character level (Looking at GW2wiki) so I can’t give a formula my self. Assume that it gets similar treatment as the above.

• Protection
  Now it reduces (28+0.01*BE)% of the received damage.
  That is 28% with no BE (from 33%) and 50% with full BE.

• Fury
  Now it increases critical chance by 15+0.009*BE.
  That is 15% with no BE (from 20%) and 30% with full BE.

• Aegis
  Remains unaffected.

Result of this change

• Players can now assume a support role in parties, as support builds will no longer suck!
• With improved boons, people might even start tossing points to the “boon duration” attribute.
• Supporters can be even insanely useful in PVP.
• One more attribute means lots more stat combinations!

I like this.
I really, really like this.

I’d love to run Healing Power (if unchanged and combined with BE)/ Boon Effective/Toughness as my Elementalist.

I think that you have found, that stat system in Guild wars 2 is crap and does not support most of stat combinations.
Healing power is useless by default
Precision, Power and Critical damage scales very well with each other, but ridiculously bad with other stats, for example condition damage.
Vitality and Toughness scale very badly, especially in PvE.

Your idea of Boon effectiveness is good btw, i have stumbled on it when i thought about the problem myself.
However your suggestion in your current state is not so good, partially because it makes the game inconsistent, conditions are now very different mechanically from boons. To be logically consistent you have to create also a stat called condition effectiveness etc. etc.

Goorman.7916:

To be logically consistent you have to create also a stat called condition effectiveness etc. etc.

That already exist… It’s called “condition damage”, but of course I wouldn’t mind it changing to “condition effectiveness” to account for Weakness, Vulnerability and Chilled as well among others…

I’m responding to this suggestion while only keeping WvW pvp and WvW builds in mind.

Kite.2510:

Current Problem:
There are no good support builds out there, and players who invest in supporting builds end up being kind of useless.

This is the most ignorant thing I’ve heard in a loooong time. Hello, staff eles? Healaway guardians? Yeah, you tell an organized group that they’re useless and you’ll be laughed at so hard.

Kite.2510:

Currently the only true support attributes are Healing power and boon duration that barely does anything.

What?!

Kite.2510:

If you like to buff your party, all your build options are choosing skills that add boons and wasting points on “boon duration”

If you like to dps for your party all your build options are choosing skills that do damage or wasting points in “power”

You’re not wasting points if that’s what you want to do. The guardian boon duration line is rarely traited into for any support build and yet they are still highly effective. Instead, they utilize runes and food, and can get up to 80% increase. Eles have good traits in their boon duration line so it’s not a bad idea to trait into it.

Kite.2510:

• Protection
  Now it reduces (28+0.01*BE)% of the received damage.
  That is 28% with no BE (from 33%) and 50% with full BE.

No. Guardians can get a pretty high uptime for protection. Even if the boon is stripped, they can reapply it with ease. 50% damage reduction is too much.

Kite.2510:

Result of this change

• Players can now assume a support role in parties, as support builds will no longer suck!
• With improved boons, people might even start tossing points to the “boon duration” attribute.
• Supporters can be even insanely useful in PVP.
• One more attribute means lots more stat combinations!

• Support build have never sucked!
• Nope, because the trait line sucks.
• Supporters are already insanely useful in pvp
• Because there aren’t enough already!

tldr: You are really misinformed about support builds, unless you’re only talking about spvp.

Easier suggestion: Make it so healing and boon duration can crit when applied and it scales with your precision just like attack power/condi power. This would tempt people to mix up builds and gear with precision and allow more variations of builds/traits.

I like the ideas, but here comes the predicted post from a full clerics guardian spec’d for boon duration.

I am not useless. Every fight I’m a part of sees 3 things that any of my other characters never witness.
-the fight is much faster overall
-everyone’s health bars are green
-no one hardly ever has conditions

With my particular trait set up, the more enemies there are, the more effective this is.

The only way I’d be please with a change like this is if it were incorporated into the already existing boon duration, replacing it entirely, and leaving healing power totally separate. The support boon would be nice, and allow for more powerful boons, but given my experience I forsee a problem as well:

It would make an already easy fight a yawn-fest. No danger would ever be felt again, and every dungeon group would require someone to be a boon effectiveness build. Speed clear meta’s would just tack this on with 3 zerker wars and 1 reflection cannon mesmer and be done with every fight in the game. As it stands now there is still some amount of challenge to me.

Excellent ideas tho, and I hope to see some fine tuning like this in the game in the future.

This jumps into a cluster of other changes that are on my mind, but I think both conditions and boons should all stack in both duration and intensity. It would require some retooling of the game, but as it is now, when a given boon goes down, save for a few select ones, it doesn’t change how you play. You just power through everything. Same is fairly true for conditions as well.

@GuardianOMS
So you’re saying that you can actually play full support as a Guardian huh?
Well good for you! That’s why Nerf exist!

The idea behind my Attribute suggestion doesn’t aim to boost the boons, (even though some would benefit from some boosting) but instead to allow you to focus entirely on them!

Disclaimer 3
Once you have a third boon-improving attribute, that means that you can have the entirety of your build be based on support, without a single point have been spend on attacking/defending attribute. Yet the fact that players CAN do that, doesn’t mean that they will!
The player’s who will manage to make their boons as strong as I mention in the OP means that they’ll have sacrificed ALL THE REST OF THEIR ATTRIBUTES, so that means that their boons have to be strong enough to make up for their COMPLETE lack of DPS and Defense!
I don’t expect the average non-support build to have more than 300 points on BE.

Disclaimer 4
All numbers I posted are subject to change!..
…And so do professions to abide to the changes!
Of-course there will be Balancing!!!

Disclaimer 5
The point of this suggestion is not to make boons stronger but to turn “boon-adding” into a build of it self!

I kind of understand your frustration though.
Guardians are one of the most supportive professions, and fart support here and there by simply playing.