Guild Wars 2

I’d like to bring to attention this aspect of GW2, which in my opinion, is weird, completely out of place and extremely counter-intuitive. It is the functionality of sharpening stones and other utility buffs.

From https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Sharpening_Stone:
Nourishment(30 m):
Gain power equal to 6% of your toughness
Gain power equal to 4% of your vitality
+10% Experience from kills

Most other utility buffs function in a similar way, only perhaps giving you different stat or converting smaller percentage based on level.

I find it weird that an item, which is supposed to boost your offense by increasing your power/precision/condition damage incentivizes you to invest stats into defense, by having a percentage of your toughness/vitality being added to the offensive stat.
Of course, nobody would ever do that, because the amount of stats gained by investing into defense is way lower than the amount of stats you would have to give up, so the purpose of these items becomes completely self-defeating. The best way to utilize these items is to just take advantage of your base toughness and vitality, gaining 100 extra power/prec/condi dmg, or – better yet – use the toxic variant of these items, which gives you straight up 100 stats (without the toughness/vitality nonsense) as well as an extra 10% condition duration.

I think these items should be changed completely, to better allow you to achieve the goals of your build. If you’re trying to increase your power/precision/condition damage, it is absolutely clear you don’t want to invest stats into defense and you shouldn’t be forced to by the nature of the item.

Therefore, I’d suggest that these items either give you straight up an amount of stats (just like the toxic variants), or, if Arenanet wants to stick to the idea of gaining stats based on the amount of a different stat, make it somewhat sensible. For example – it would make sense to increase ferocity based on precision, because precision increases your critical hit chance and feroticy increases the damage from critical hits, so it benefits from that stat directly. Alternatively, you can boost power based on the amount of power – in other words – increase your outgoing damage by a certain percentage.

What do you think? Do you think it’s okay that an offensive item incentivizes a self-defeating stat investment? Can you think of some other solution?

My guess is that the original intention behind that item was for it to be useful for hybrid/tank builds to compensate slightly for what they lacked (power). Consequently, the offensive builds were supposed to take the defensive utilities (again, to compensate for what they lacked).

Of course, defensive stats not being worth much, it didn’t work that way. Since then, the whole utility/food effects should have been looked on and fixed according to the new paradigm, but that likely got overlooked.

It should still likely be done, but i doubt it’s going to happen. Much more likely is that Anet will at some time introduce a new utility item that’s going to replace sharpening stones. Though you may say that they have already done that with the Toxic version.

Perhaps it is an unpopular opinion, but I both use and value gear with defensive stats in PvE (Celestial gear to be precise, the one that provides a bonus to all stats). Even for me though the nourisment buffs you complain about OP are not my preferred choice for the following reasons:

1) If you are using conditions but your defensive gear does not give expertise then you get a bigger damage bonus from the toxic nourishments that give +10% condition duration.

2) If instead you focus on direct damage then you’ll get as good an increase to an offensive stat (or better, if focusing on just one defensive stat) by running the appropriate furious nourishment – these also give a +100 bonus to your defensive stat of choice.

3) If I am in PvE content where nourishment actually matters I’ll likely be using an appropriate potion instead, e.g. Powerful Potion of Slaying Scarlet’s armies in the T4 nightmare fractal. +10% damage and -10% incoming damage is an order of magnitude better than what the other nourishments can provide.

4) And finally if I’m not in content where nourishment really matters I’ll just use one of the halloween items. As the tankiest guy in the group I tend to do the most resurrections and it is fun to dye allies pretty colours whilst also boosting their stats.

I think @Astralporing nailed this one. These utility items likely weren’t intended to be used by fully offensive builds, which is why they seem wonky.

" As the tankiest guy in the group"

I’m pretty sure my minstrel chrono is tankier. Celestial stats aren’t good for a variety of reasons. It’s not simply because they provide defensive stats, its because they serve no purity of purpose. It’s meh at everything.

Also powerful potion don’t work in all content. in fact there is a lot of content where they don’t (like all of the HoT maps).

FrostDraco.8306:

…its because they serve no purity of purpose. It’s meh at everything.

^ exactly this.

The original intention behind the item very well could be, as Astralporing said, to “compensate” these weird mishmash hybrid builds for being naturally inferior, or simply result from Anet’s lack of understanding how PvE works. I’d really like the utility buffs to receive some treatment to better support builds which have a clear direction.

If you wanna play an extremely tanky build (I will not get into whether or not this is a good idea in PvE), you will surely benefit more from an item, which increases your vitality based on toughness (or the other way around), but you surely have no interest in power or other offensive stats, because they won’t do anything for you.
Similarly, if you wanna deal as much dmg as possible, you don’t want to be cornered into using defensive stats by some weird, poorly implemented item.

Remember how traits some time ago received a similar update? There were many useful traits, but they were tied to completely useless stats, because each traitline had its own set duo of stats. Eventually, Arenanet completely separated those, because it doesn’t make sense to punish players for choosing beneficial traits, by giving them useless stats.

Let’s have a look at options for support classes (like minstrel chrono/ele):
They can either choose to run a bountiful version of any utility buff, which will give them 10% extra boon duration as well as 100 of a stat that is completely useless to them. Or they can run furious tuning crystal, which gives them 100 extra healing power, but it comes with (again, completely useless) bonus ferocity. How much cooler would it be, if you could have best of both worlds, and have your utility buff give you both boon duration and healing power?

There are many possible builds for PvE. But the fact is, the vast majority of these, regardless of whether they are “meta” or not, are suffering from the poor implementation of utility buffs. By reworking these items and giving them clear purpose, many builds could work much better, whether they are damage dealers, support or tanks.