What amount of HP is PvE designed around?
The more HP you have, the harder agony will hurt you, so its not always a good thing to have 27k+ hp.
Agony of course is % based so it evades the issue. <—- fixed that 4 you (learn how % work)
You cant compare classes like that, this game has different mehanics than other games.
-each class has different mechanics,resources,abilities,mitigations
-nobody forced you to spec glasscannon
On a personal note it sems you dont understand your class well (i asume that you re a thief).
“Point being, PvE is impossible to balance when you have such huge discrepancies in player HP. Agony proves this point since you were forced to scale it off %. " that proves that you dont understand % matematics (its not meant in an insulting way), what this means is that actualy it doesnt mater how much hp you have 10HP or 10kHP, if you have , lets say a dot wich reduce your health my 25 % , both the 10 hp & 10kHP will drop to 1hp in the same amount of time … all in all agony its the most neutral dmg, it is unafected by gear, spec, class. It is only affected by the player skill.
Agony is only neutral if it one-hits you. Otherwise it punishes high health classes/builds and favors classes who have more tools to avoid it, less health and better healing.
Agony of course is % based so it evades the issue. <—- fixed that 4 you (learn how % work)
You cant compare classes like that, this game has different mehanics than other games.
-each class has different mechanics,resources,abilities,mitigations
-nobody forced you to spec glasscannon
On a personal note it sems you dont understand your class well (i asume that you re a thief).“Point being, PvE is impossible to balance when you have such huge discrepancies in player HP. Agony proves this point since you were forced to scale it off %. " that proves that you dont understand % matematics (its not meant in an insulting way), what this means is that actualy it doesnt mater how much hp you have 10HP or 10kHP, if you have , lets say a dot wich reduce your health my 25 % , both the 10 hp & 10kHP will drop to 1hp in the same amount of time … all in all agony its the most neutral dmg, it is unafected by gear, spec, class. It is only affected by the player skill.
I have no idea what lead you to believe I didn’t know how Agony worked. But it’s hardly the only source of damage in this game.
Agony just proves my point that you can’t have abilities that are equally threatening to a Warrior and a Thief when one has twice the durability of the other (factoring in armor as well). That’s why they resorted to a non-mitigatable, %-of HP scaling mechanic rather than a fixed damage value.
I think it would serve the game well if we didn’t have such a drastic difference in base-line survivability. It would make things easier to balance and less frustrating on the glass-cannon end and less boring on the tanky end.
Yes, give my Warrior Protection and stealth, also area projectile reflection would be good.
It’s down to survival mechanisms of toons, but also of specific builds.
Examples – most eles are built around dynamic active survival mechanism, with low hp/armor pools but ways to quickly manage their own hp; ele bunkers in w3 are known for going from 10% to 90% in seconds. They have lots of survival skills, both on weapons and utilities, which are pretty much always there (even d/d, the ‘offensive’ weapon setup, has defensive/mobility skills).
On the other hand, warriors have less tricks in their arsenal – but higher hp/armor pools. They can dish out and take more hits before they need to do something, but if they let their hp to drop down too low, they’ve screwed – possibly not enough ways to manage it and bring it back up.
It’s based on professions, but also on builds, of course – some professions, though, have different inherent and suggested survival ways than others, like thieves making use of stealth to withdraw from fights when they need it rather than overhealing like eles.
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Yeah yeah I know all that but there still comes a point where a designer of a dungeon encounter has to decide how much damage a specific attack should deal.
“Please enter the amount of damage Fireburst should deal” might be the prompt.
The designer knows he wants to make the ability dangerous without one-shotting anything but glass-cannons.
What number does he enter?
10000? Then Warriors and Necros will just yawn.
15000? Then you’ll be one-shotting 80% of Thieves and Elementalists
18000? Then Warriors and Necros will be scared but everyone including Rangers and Mesmers is getting one-hit.
Especially when you factor in different mitigation values (Eles for example can achieve quite a lot of mitigation while Thieves cannot) it seems like an impossible balance to pull off.
And this is showing in PvE.
I think people are getting muddied up in the Agony issue when the OP is trying to make a different point.
There isn’t really any elegant way to do it without resorting to making more attacks % based. What it comes down to is basically ANet saying “some professions are easier to play” since some professions are absolutely intended to dodge out of attacks (active defensive mechanism) while others are intended to just take the hits (passive defensive mechanism). Obviously there are telegraphed mechanics everyone is supposed to avoid, but the presence of extra mobility and defensive tools in lighter-armored professions means they have to exert more effort to stay up. The “no holy trinity” philosophy, of course, precludes lighter armored professions from having innately superior damage capabilities, so it just leaves them as a bit more difficult to play.
@Dee jay Point being, PvE is impossible to balance when you have such huge discrepancies in player HP <— i phrase that wrong, pve its inposible to balance with same HP due to classes being so deferent in skills & mechanic; the way agony works its to punish all classes the same without disparity but other dmg is dealt differently by each class. So you re a glass canon thief, who doesnt understand his class very well. Instead of tunneling in your target learn to manage your initiative , learn the boss/encounter mechanic & save/manage initiative so that you have enough to use whatever skill you have to avoid dmg at a correct time. If you re not doing that you re a bad player who only apan skills without any understanding of the game & classes machanics.
You don’t balance for a glass thief and a soldier warrior standing next to each other and eating the same boss attack.
You (try to) balance for a glass thief to get killed if they fail once-badly or twice-barely. That means the thief has the option of gearing for vit/tough and then surviving even a bad fail. It also means that the soldier warrior is in no immediate danger of dying to anything, not contributing enough dps, and probably bored out of their mind. And finally it means that a glass warrior can’t go afk during bossfights anymore, but won’t get oneshotted either, and hopefully can stay engaged in melee for extended periods of time, even if they’re not dodging perfectly.
Of course, that’s the theory.
(Also, agony punishes high health, since you need more healing to get back up. Assuming you don’t get killed by it outright, ofc.)
You (try to) balance for a glass thief to get killed if they fail once-badly or twice-barely. That means the thief has the option of gearing for vit/tough and then surviving even a bad fail. It also means that the soldier warrior is in no immediate danger of dying to anything, not contributing enough dps, and probably bored out of their mind. And finally it means that a glass warrior can’t go afk during bossfights anymore, but won’t get oneshotted either, and hopefully can stay engaged in melee for extended periods of time, even if they’re not dodging perfectly.
Of course, that’s the theory.
Which is all well and good, but it means the glass warrior and glass thief are doing roughly the same thing but the thief has to dodge stuff and the warrior doesn’t. Professions have different innate defenses, but are all on an even playing field offensively.