Guild Wars 2

Khorthall.1682:

Hmm, so this brings up my next question.

If I were to do a combination of Zerk + Knights.. would it be better with Soldiers? I suppose this would lead to the Toughness vs Vitality.

Then again I hear that conditions are not affected by armor, so Vitality (Soldiers) would be better yes? Hmm.

Yeah .. hard to decide. I was longtime a zerker / knights fan, but since i did that math
i also now try more soldiers stuff, since what kills me the fastest often are really
mobs that spam masses of conditions.

Beldin.5498:

Khorthall.1682:

Hmm, so this brings up my next question.

If I were to do a combination of Zerk + Knights.. would it be better with Soldiers? I suppose this would lead to the Toughness vs Vitality.

Then again I hear that conditions are not affected by armor, so Vitality (Soldiers) would be better yes? Hmm.

Yeah .. hard to decide. I was longtime a zerker / knights fan, but since i did that math
i also now try more soldiers stuff, since what kills me the fastest often are really
mobs that spam masses of conditions.

Valkyrie stat set exists. Power/ferocity/vitality (power primary).

Khorthall.1682:

If I were to do a combination of Zerk + Knights.. would it be better with Soldiers? I suppose this would lead to the Toughness vs Vitality.

What’s killing you? If you’re getting one-shot and don’t have a chance to heal, a soldier’s mix will be superior. If you’re taking a couple hits but eventually dropping, knight’s will likely be superior.

It also depends on your class, since they have different amounts of base health – a warrior is almost always going to want to mix in knights, while a guardian is going to want to mix in some soldier to bulk up a bit.

Izaya.2906:

again, factor in might, fury and banners…

your projection of soldier damage is way off…

Actually your formulas are incorrect and you are underestimating lower crit setups significantly.

Simple proof:

Assume two setups, A and B, where both have the same power and a 2x crit multiplier. A has a 100% crit chance however B has only a 50% crit chance. Using the formula you used Power * crit chance * crit multiplier, we would conclude that

A would do
power * 1 * 2

B would do
power * 0.5 * 2

So B would do half the damage of A, when the obvious correct answer is B does 75% the damage of A. Basically the formula you are using is only comparing the damage done from critical strikes and ignoring non crits. This inflates high crit % and ferocity.

Total damage is (non crit damage) + (extra damage from crits), or
(power) + (power * crit% * critbonus%)

Using that formula with your buffed stat numbers puts Soldiers at ~71.3% the damage of full zerk.

My idea for the toughness/vitality stat: Create Elite mobs

• Elite mobs have high attack speed, and does a lot of damage to players with low toughness. They are anti-zerker, anti-dps mobs.
• The tank(player with high toughness or vitality) takes the elite mob and distract the mob. While the other players fight the other mobs.
• Elite mobs still have devastating attack that may instagib the player with high toughness if he doesn’t dodge.
• If the party defeats the mobs, the elite mob loses its potency. It cannot do high damage against low toughness players anymore.
• Condi mobs are the same except against vitality stat.
• This suggestion wouldn’t work by itself. It needs the fight against the other mob to be challenging and make stacking useless. I made a list of suggestion for that.

BarnabeJonez.6023:

This actually isn’t quite true. Protection reduces incoming damage by 33%. It doesn’t boost toughness. This makes protection a higher value boon for zerkers as they inherently take more incoming damage. That being said, the rest of your post looks good.

• If you have 9000 hitpoints and are receiving 900 DPS, you will die in ten seconds.
• With Protection, you’d be receiving 600 DPS, which would kill you in fifteen seconds. You get 5 more seconds.
• With 50% more armour, you’d be receiving 600 DPS, which would kill you in fifteen seconds. You’ve bought 5 more seconds.
• With both Protection and 50% more armour, you’d ultimately receive 400 DPS, which would kill you in 22.5 seconds. This means you’ve gotten 12.5 more seconds — you’ve also gained 2.5 seconds more out of protection thanks to your high armour.

If you had a buff that granted +50% to your total armour, in GW2, that buff would be mathematically identical to Protection — it’s even possible that that’s how Protection is really implemented in the code.

There are other weird things surrounding protection — for example, Protection is four times more effective than the Guardian signet that reduces incoming damage by 11%, not just three times. And, ignoring the fact that it only negates a limited amount of actual damage, Illusion of Defence is twice as effective as the Protection boon, not just 50% better.

MegumiAzusa.2918:

He’s actually right by the numbers, the problem is as stated in my previous post that the bigger the numbers the effect still diminishes. You just forget to take into account that the effect is quadratic instead of linear.

You’re entirely correct that the more toughness you have, the less “damage reduction” each point of toughness gives you — but you’re actually wrong about what it means.

In Guild Wars 2, if you’re not getting hit by armour-negating damage, and you’re not dodging or otherwise negating hits, then how long you last is directly proportional to your armour.

That means that the benefit from toughness is always the same — when you have 3300 armour, then the time to kill you increases by just as much when you go to 3400 armour as it would if you had 925 armour and went to 1025.

Stacking lots of different percentile damage reduction buffs so that they compound gives better results, but it’s an example of exponentially growing returns — positive feedback. As a result, there’s a limit to how many of these buffs you can get (as there is for the percentile damage increase buffs, for the same reason).

If the percentage damage reduction you got as a result was directly proportional to your armour, you would see an even bigger case of positive feedback. If you start with no damage reduction and gain ten pips of it, that gives you 10% damage reduction and makes you last about 11% longer. If you already have 80% damage reduction and you gain ten more pips? You now take twice as long to kill as you did before.

An interesting curiosity is that +x% damage traits and runes actually have an identical effect to what x% armour pierce runes and traits would do (with slightly different numbers — e.g., a +10% damage buff is roughly the same thing as a 9% armour pierce effect).