Guild Wars 2

For those of you who haven’t hit lvl 10 fractals yet. Agony hits you like a ton of bricks. And some Agony is unavoidable. Note: Agony ticks for a percentage of your life, at lvl 10 it is 16% of your max hp and 8% with 5 Aresist.

I’ve been thinking about the best way to handle high lvl fractals and the increase in agony duration and possibly damage. Thinking back to GW1 and 55 monk and necro builds. The idea is that you want as low hp as possible with high healing. This will reduce the amount of damage agony does and you can thus heal through it easier using less resources.

Thus I believe the best stat combination for going deep into fractals would be:
Primary: Toughness, Healing
Secondary: Power, Precision, Condition damage, Crit Damage
Avoid: Vitality

Stacking primarily toughness, healing and secondary stat should give you the best agony survival. Note: that you can switch to this for boss fights and have a normal set for clearing trash.

Unfortunately we have nothing like protective spirit to abuse.

Necros still have DS which is really helpful against Agony. But you really should avoid being in Lich or Plague Form when Agony hits you.

I’m currently at lvl 16 and I still don’t wear my ascended ring, the stats would be better for my Mesmer so I wait until I really need it and hope that something useful will drop in the meantime. Agony hits hard but since it usually comes on attacks you should dodge either way you don’t really need Agony Resi yet.

Can someone describe how Agony actually works? Where is it, how got, when triggered, how deadly (that got covered), etc. TIA!

Agony is a condition that ticks once per second and deals a certain percentage (16%) each time, you can’t remove it or reduce its damage unless you have an Agony Resistence Infusion. Starting with level 10 most fractal bosses apply Agony with at least one of their basic attacks. Some bosses apply agony for 3 seconds, others for 5 or more.

drkn.3429,

As far as i have seen in 10-19. Only the final bosses of each path will have 1 agony attack. All of the regular paths are avoidable if you know what does agony. However, Jade Maw is not avoidable and does it every tenticale transition. Something like 10 seconds of 1 stack agony. You can probably look up what triggers agony on the path bosses.

Eventually, I would believe at much higher levels each attack will put on multiple stacks, more attacks will put agony on, and/or longer duration. And they might not be avoidable. If you go high enough, agony resistance will cap out and you are just left with your ability to heal and absorb agony damage. At this point I believe a minimalist hp approach will be necessary along with designated heal rotations. (waterfields/detonation, Guardian books, ect)

Does the minimalist HP approach mean that support eles (who spec heavily into VIT to achieve maximum healing in dungeons) will no longer be viable?

zombyturtle.5980:

Does the minimalist HP approach mean that support eles (who spec heavily into VIT to achieve maximum healing in dungeons) will no longer be viable?

Exactly. If you don’t get way better Infusions then we have now by the time mobs start to stack Agony you should probably not use any gear with Vit on it.

Frankly, the more I think about it, the more I believe Guardian will be the prime ‘Tank’ and ‘Support’ candidates for high level Fractals, while Thieves will be your best ‘Damage’ bet for the same Fractals. Both have low base HP and have next to no reason to stack Vitality, and both have numerous ways to completely nullify damage without actually ‘mitigating’ it.

nachtnebel.9168:

Necros still have DS which is really helpful against Agony. But you really should avoid being in Lich or Plague Form when Agony hits you.

As far as I’m aware, Death Shroud can take 4 (Unmitigated) hits of Agony at 100% Lifeforce before being depleted. It’s taking double damage from it, just as it takes double damage from additional sources of Condition damage. Ie, it’s absolute trash for mitigating Agony damage. No idea if it’s working as intended or not because of Arenanet’s ridiculous policy on being completely silent on whether or not something is a bug or working as intended.

I’m confused to why people overhype agony still. I’m sitting at level 12, and haven’t had issues with agony yet. Granted I have passive heals, 2 heals I can pop on demand, and then tome of courage to turn me into pretty much a walking tank, but even the three ele’s I ran level 11 with didn’t have issues with it.

This is an interesting subject from the standpoint of the Engineer. Especially with weapons starting to appear (soon) as our kits receive no benefit from an equipped weapon. And Kits are our most viable dps option in fractals since aoe is so good in the dungeons.

Then again this ties back to the whole legendary issues and the other “after thought” style upgrade stuff the game is providing the Engineers with.

I did up to lvl 20 with no agony resistance at all. Except for maybe Jade maw, all agony is avoidable. Now I got a pre-infused ring, but 10 agony resistance is not doing much in 20+, still most agony hits like a truck. So better learn to time those dodges.