Guild Wars 2

Active damage mitigation in gw2 makes it possible to avoid 100% of the damage without investing in any kind of toughness or armor defense whatsoever.

My proposal

Adaptive Active Damage Mitigation

it’s simple really,
make dodge tie into the character’s toughness and armor rating.
Dodging would have a base damage mitigation of say 35-50%
For any higher damage mitigation you’d need to invest in toughness, armor and vitality.
up to say 75-80% damage mitigation via dodging.

What this change would do:

- it would make zerk only parties a lot harder, dare I say impossible since even dodging would not mitigate 100% of the damage and since zerkers do not invest in any kind of defense they would rapidly melt down.
- it would make defensive based play both desired and interesting to play.

My 2 cents.

Discuss.

EDIT

the numbers and formula’s are nothing but an example, I do believe wholeheartedly that the idea is a sound one.
It’s up to the professionals to figure out the correct ratios and so on as to not give high armor classes an advantage over light armor classes.

EDIT2

This is funny, anytime anyone (in this case me) brings up the obvious issues with current game mechanics, people immediately assume (oh he plays clerics or pvt and wants to feel welcome in this zerker meta)

I play zerker warrior, guardian, elementalist and mesmer.
I love them all but…..
That doesn’t mean I do not recognize the issues present in the game when one stat combo dominates all.

This would overly favor classes with high toughness and vitality. Investment in more toughness vitality and armor makes no sense when certain professions already have a significant advantage in the same.

Sorry but no. If I dodge something I should not get any damage at all. If I get any damage, then it’s not dodging.

Latinkuro.9420:

Active damage mitigation in gw2 makes it possible to avoid 100% of the damage without investing in any kind of toughness or armor defense whatsoever.

My proposal

Adaptive Active Damage Mitigation

it’s simple really,
make dodge tie into the character’s toughness and armor rating.
Dodging would have a base damage mitigation of say 35-50%
For any higher damage mitigation you’d need to invest in toughness, armor and vitality.
up to say 75-80% damage mitigation via dodging.

What this change would do:

- it would make zerk only parties a lot harder, dare I say impossible since even dodging would not mitigate 100% of the damage and since zerkers do not invest in any kind of defense they would rapidly melt down.
- it would make defensive based play both desired and interesting to play.

My 2 cents.

Discuss.

i think it would be bad on dodge, but might be good if some skills like endure pain/aegis sheild blocks were more effected by toughness or vitality.

The meta would go from Full Berserk gear to Full PTV gear. The actual play style would not change in the slightest, except that the fights would take longer since there would be no crit damage. Even with maxed out toughness and vitality, with the longer fights, groups would wipe if you only had 85% damage mitigation. They would be worn down over time.

the numbers and formula’s are nothing but an example, I do believe wholeheartedly that the idea is a sound one.

It’s up to the professionals to figure out the correct ratios and so on as to not give high armor classes an advantage over light armor classes.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Sorry but no. If I dodge something I should not get any damage at all. If I get any damage, then it’s not dodging.

when you dodge you don’t always make it outside the effective area of damage.
from that perspective, even if you do aka dodge you would and should take damage.
you wanna mitigate 100% of the damage ? make it to the outside of the affected area

think of glancing blows and the likes if it helps.

It would make cc and condition dmg way too strong in that no one could avoid them.

The dodge was implemented to get away from the holy trinity. Every class has the ability to deal damage, mitigate damage (dodge) and heal themselves. That is the core design of the game and changing it would move us back toward the trinity.

I don’t know why everyone wants to try and “kill the zerker”. Zerker builds are used because it’s what works best with the way the game was designed. Trying to get rid of it would be changing the entire game. Which leads me to ask why does everyone want to play an entirely different game?

Vigor is already something you can invest into. Not through armor, but through skill selection. Dodging tends to be a very powerful method of damage mitigation as well, so I do not see the developers increasing its’ effectiveness anytime soon (especially considering they just nerfed vigor across the board for most classes).

Latinkuro.9420:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Sorry but no. If I dodge something I should not get any damage at all. If I get any damage, then it’s not dodging.

when you dodge you don’t always make it outside the effective area of damage.
from that perspective, even if you do aka dodge you would and should take damage.
you wanna mitigate 100% of the damage ? make it to the outside of the affected area

think of glancing blows and the likes if it helps.

Exactly; dodging implies not getting hit. If a mage tosses a fireball into a room and you roll out of the way you might reduce some of the damage, but you’re still getting hit by the fireball unless you get yourself fully out of the area of effect.

Or a more real example; if I shoot a gun and I miss, you don’t take damage. If I throw a grenade and you roll into the grenade, you still take damage.

cranked.3812:

Zerker builds are used because it’s what works best with the way the game was designed.

This is the problem with the zerker crowd; they’ve deluded themselves into believing that the entire game was designed around a single stat set.

Latinkuro.9420:

Active damage mitigation…

I’m not wading into this argument, but are you a marketing person IRL?

Latinkuro.9420:

Active damage mitigation in gw2 makes it possible to avoid 100% of the damage

No it doesn’t, nobody has that many dodges. Yep, not even S/d or S/p thieves!

Player’s have to soak up small amounts of damage. Berserker/Assassins are an available stat because of a player skill curve, as players learn the game they become less reliant on crutches that are toughness and vitality – because they use their dodges appropriately to dodge the powerful attacks which are often highly telegraphed.

Don’t try and force people to use these stats just because you are not good enough to learn the mechanics yet.

DusK.3849:

cranked.3812:

Zerker builds are used because it’s what works best with the way the game was designed.

This is the problem with the zerker crowd; they’ve deluded themselves into believing that the entire game was designed around a single stat set.

Yah, but cranked has a point. Look at the ratio of Zerker drops from monsters compared to other pre/suffixes… it would appear Arenanet’s loot tables agree.

Disclaimer: I have not a single zerker build in character stable… not supporting the build, just calling out anecdotal data.

I still don’t see why people want to get punched in the face

Player’s have to soak up small amounts of damage. Berserker/Assassins are an available stat because of a player skill curve, as players learn the game they become less reliant on crutches that are toughness and vitality – because they use their dodges appropriately to dodge the powerful attacks which are often highly telegraphed.

That’s exactly the problem.
The two primary defence stats; Toughness + Vitality currently serve no real purpose. They give the illusions that the player should have more of said stat of they want to survive better, when the actual trick to surviving better is instead active avoidance.

The solution is either force players to take more small sustained hits (In addition to the current big moves, obviously) and make the said stats relevant.
Or replace entirely with new stats that affect active avoidance.

This would suck for an Elementalist. Haha.

Toughness and vitality serve their purpose in 2/3 game modes. Berserker has 1. I understand people wanting their soldier cleric guard welcome in groups, but trying to argue it by saying it isn’t wanted in a single, very small part of the game and therefore it’s a problem is just simply selfish.

Toughness and vitality serve their purpose in 2/3 game modes. Berserker has 1. I understand people wanting their soldier cleric guard welcome in groups, but trying to argue it by saying it isn’t wanted in a single, very small part of the game and therefore it’s a problem is just simply selfish.

Didn’t mean to say that we should remove Tough+Vit, just because it is problematic in PVE (although it is a possible solution, albeit lousy one)

I just stated for a fact that something should be done to make the touted defence stats actually worth survivability in a PVE situation.
Obviously the best solution would be one that doesn’t destroy the other modes as they currently are. For example we could have more boss adds with non-telegraphed attacks kitten to give passive mitigation from stats more useful.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Sorry but no. If I dodge something I should not get any damage at all. If I get any damage, then it’s not dodging.

Then actually dodge away rather than sploiting evade frames.

ApplePearOrange.9281:

Toughness and vitality serve their purpose in 2/3 game modes. Berserker has 1. I understand people wanting their soldier cleric guard welcome in groups, but trying to argue it by saying it isn’t wanted in a single, very small part of the game and therefore it’s a problem is just simply selfish.

Didn’t mean to say that we should remove Tough+Vit, just because it is problematic in PVE (although it is a possible solution, albeit lousy one)

I just stated for a fact that something should be done to make the touted defence stats actually worth survivability in a PVE situation.
Obviously the best solution would be one that doesn’t destroy the other modes as they currently are. For example we could have more boss adds with non-telegraphed attacks kitten to give passive mitigation from stats more useful.

My post wasn’t directed at you, I don’t think. I didn’t think anyone wanted to get rid of toughness and vitality, my point is, with all of these people crying that berserker is a problem, they really should look at the fact that it is the gear set people go to for a small bit of a single game mode (hardcore dungeon pve). You can run any gear you want for not hardcore dungeon pve. It’s really silly to me.

Latinkuro.9420:

Active damage mitigation in gw2 makes it possible to avoid 100% of the damage without investing in any kind of toughness or armor defense whatsoever.

My proposal

Adaptive Active Damage Mitigation

it’s simple really,
make dodge tie into the character’s toughness and armor rating.
Dodging would have a base damage mitigation of say 35-50%
For any higher damage mitigation you’d need to invest in toughness, armor and vitality.
up to say 75-80% damage mitigation via dodging.

What this change would do:

- it would make zerk only parties a lot harder, dare I say impossible since even dodging would not mitigate 100% of the damage and since zerkers do not invest in any kind of defense they would rapidly melt down.
- it would make defensive based play both desired and interesting to play.

My 2 cents.

Discuss.

EDIT

the numbers and formula’s are nothing but an example, I do believe wholeheartedly that the idea is a sound one.
It’s up to the professionals to figure out the correct ratios and so on as to not give high armor classes an advantage over light armor classes.

Promoting a more passive defense(stacking vitality/toughness) is not interesting at all.

Everyone is complaining about berserkers because there’s no diversity. But there actually is diversity, nobody is pointing a gun at you to run berserkers.

You play how you want and you are rewarded how you play.

Play a glass cannon? You have to not miss a single dodge or you get downed. You play it successfully and you clear content faster.

Wanna “tank”?(there actually isn’t such a thing as tanking in this game because you cant taunt mobs to aggro you alone)

You can ignore dodging and laugh at all the downed zerk dodge exploiters in your party but then you cost the party 5-30 more minutes to clear the content because the boss would’ve been already been dead several minutes ago if only you were actually doing significant damage to it.

digiowl.9620:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Sorry but no. If I dodge something I should not get any damage at all. If I get any damage, then it’s not dodging.

Then actually dodge away rather than sploiting evade frames.

No need because dodging already works fine.

No thank you, dodging works perfectly fine in this game. Why fix something that isn’t broken?

Latinkuro.9420:

Active damage mitigation in gw2 makes it possible to avoid 100% of the damage without investing in any kind of toughness or armor defense whatsoever.

My proposal

Adaptive Active Damage Mitigation

it’s simple really,
make dodge tie into the character’s toughness and armor rating.
Dodging would have a base damage mitigation of say 35-50%
For any higher damage mitigation you’d need to invest in toughness, armor and vitality.
up to say 75-80% damage mitigation via dodging.

What this change would do:

- it would make zerk only parties a lot harder, dare I say impossible since even dodging would not mitigate 100% of the damage and since zerkers do not invest in any kind of defense they would rapidly melt down.
- it would make defensive based play both desired and interesting to play.

My 2 cents.

Discuss.

EDIT

the numbers and formula’s are nothing but an example, I do believe wholeheartedly that the idea is a sound one.
It’s up to the professionals to figure out the correct ratios and so on as to not give high armor classes an advantage over light armor classes.

That is a horrible, horrible idea. Mainly because of the current reward and encounter system. For one thing, since most bosses are just HP sponges, you’d do very little damage and it’d take much, much longer to go through a dungeon for very little reward. All that time spent dodging is you not hitting the boss. Then you just die without having contributed anything.

Latinkuro.9420:

Discuss.

This is a horrible idea on many levels and would kill the game. Most casuals can barely dodge as it is, forcing them into PVT to get more out of a dodge would just lead them getting worn down and dying.

If you are trying to advocate for full cleric runs just say so and stop beating around the bush.

I do not think latinkuro has a horrible idea. I don’t think it would work well in gw2 but it’s not a bad idea overall. I mean the idea makes sense to some degree, just would kind of break the game so definitely not something that should be implemented

DusK.3849:

cranked.3812:

Zerker builds are used because it’s what works best with the way the game was designed.

This is the problem with the zerker crowd; they’ve deluded themselves into believing that the entire game was designed around a single stat set.

No one is fooled into anything and I didn’t mean that zerk gear is the best for the game entirely. It doesn’t work great in wvw and doesn’t really work at all in pvp.

BUT, in pve, it really is the best and not by a little, but by a lot. I’m not going to break it down for the 1000th time on the forums as others already have, but we have all been over this many times. The game, in pve, is filled with enemies that have 1-2 shot mechanics regardless of what stats you are running and anet’s idea of harder content is adding more HP. Both of which are best defeated by zerker gear hands down. Hence the reason I said it works best for the way the game is designed.

To be clear, I don’t care what gear you run or how you play, but arguing that zerk gear isn’t the best for pve (dungeons for sure anyway) is foolish and has already been proven wrong.

If dodging is too 100% perfect and over powered, then, have a slight chance (1-5%) that 10-20% damage is not mitigated. If having a two dodge reserve is not sufficient enough. Simple enough, right, if dodging seems too magical and perfect to a fault in the most part. But does this really mitigate zerker parties that much? Being less perfect can be a double edged blade sometimes though. Just saying.

Sorry it’s a bad idea which is simply not needed.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Latinkuro.9420:

Discuss.

This is a horrible idea on many levels and would kill the game. Most casuals can barely dodge as it is, forcing them into PVT to get more out of a dodge would just lead them getting worn down and dying.

If you are trying to advocate for full cleric runs just say so and stop beating around the bush.

Do you know “most casuals”, or is it just another ill-placed, elitist assumption? I would be equally wrong in saying that “all min/maxers are jerks”, even if there were a considerable number of the type who are.

I think such a change would take some getting used to, but I think it could be done in such a way so as not to be game breaking.

The point was brought up that conditions and CC would be too strong. So, make it so that the % based dodge only reduces direct damage but still completely avoids CC and condition application.

And I also feel like it should also scale off of healing power as well.

As for the actual scaling, I feel like it would work well if it started at a base of 50% reduction when you have zero bonus vitality, toughness, and healing power. And then from there, it should scale up very quickly at first with bonus t/v/h, but have diminishing returns such that you’d need infinity bonus t/v/h to achieve 100% reduction.

Maybe a scale that looked close to this:
(Tough + vit + heal) -> reduction %
0 -> 50% (no defensive stats on gear)
100 -> 60%
500 -> 75%
1000 -> 85%
1500 -> 90%
2000 -> 95%
2645 -> 98% (character in full ascended P/V/T with 30 points in 2/3 of the toughness, healing power, and vitality trait lines, omnomberry bread, dolyak runes, full defensive infusions)

Players with full P/V/T would take virtually no damage from dodged attacks while players in full glass would be taking half damage, and with something close to that scaling, it would highly incentivize throwing in at least a little bit of T/V/H as just getting up to a total of 500 bonus defensive stats will cut the damage you take from a dodged attack in half.

I also feel like if we moved to a system like this, the number of base dodges would need to go up by one, i.e. endurance cap changed to 150 so that anyone can hit 3 dodges in a row.

Also, any attacks that trigger something special when they successfully land (such as cloak and dagger) should still not trigger their effect when dodged. So, if you dodge a 5k CnD wearing zero defensive stats, you take 2.5k damage, but the thief does not stealth.

Overall, I think this is a rather creative idea that has a lot of potential. The primary drawback is that there may be further balancing issues I have no considered with certain PvE fights. Further, it may be a bit difficult for new players to get a grip on how it works, but I don’t think any more difficult than working out how a player’s armor total reduces damage.

Also, I think this change might unfairly buff direct damage in relation to condition damage. Perhaps dodged damaging conditions should still apply but at a reduced duration at the same % as the direct damage reduction. So, bleed, torment, burning, poison, and confusion still apply at a reduced duration when dodged, but weakness, chill, cripple, blindness, fear, and immobilize do not apply for any duration.
And the reduced duration should be applied to the modified duration, not the base. So, say a player dodges a bleed attack that has a base duration of 5 sec, the attacking player has +100% condition duration, and the dodging player has 1500 total bonus defensive stats, then the resulting applied bleed would be for only 1 sec.

Flissy.4093:

Latinkuro.9420:

Active damage mitigation in gw2 makes it possible to avoid 100% of the damage

No it doesn’t, nobody has that many dodges. Yep, not even S/d or S/p thieves!

Player’s have to soak up small amounts of damage. Berserker/Assassins are an available stat because of a player skill curve, as players learn the game they become less reliant on crutches that are toughness and vitality – because they use their dodges appropriately to dodge the powerful attacks which are often highly telegraphed.

Don’t try and force people to use these stats just because you are not good enough to learn the mechanics yet.

Don’t try and force people to use these stats just because you are not good enough to learn the mechanics yet.[/quote]

Wrong assumption

if you’d care to see my posting history you’d know I play zerker and do know my mechanics and the likes, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with the way one stat combination dominates everything in the game at this point.

no.

dodge is working well as intended.

do not fix what is not broken.

No. The more experienced the player, the less reliant they are on toughness and vitality in PvE. I don’t want a perfectly functional mechanic spoiled because OP is too lazy to learn the mechanics of the game.

Saint.5647:

No. The more experienced the player, the less reliant they are on toughness and vitality in PvE. I don’t want a perfectly functional mechanic spoiled because OP is too lazy to learn the mechanics of the game.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Latinkuro.9420:

Discuss.

This is a horrible idea on many levels and would kill the game. Most casuals can barely dodge as it is, forcing them into PVT to get more out of a dodge would just lead them getting worn down and dying.

If you are trying to advocate for full cleric runs just say so and stop beating around the bush.

again why do you people assume I’m not a zerker player look at my post history before sprouting all this kitten

I’m not keen on this idea. Why?

• Bunkers have had to be nerfed much more than glass due to PvP complaints; ergo, the real problem with PvE is not the superiority of one type of gear, it is more an issue of mobs dealing damage differently than players
• There is a massive dichotomy in GW2 PvE. While some complain that the game is too easy, any time content that is supposed to be “harder” is introduced, there are complaints that it is too hard. Ergo, the “game is too easy” demographic is not the whole story.
• Nerfing dodge across the board would mean that the mass of players who already struggle with the game would struggle more. I’m all for presenting more challenging content as an option for those who want it, but don’t think making the game harder across the board is the way to do it.
• It’s folly to try to make the efficient players accept a variety of builds. There will always be a best choice, no matter what the developers do, and whatever the “new” best option is will become the new mandatory.
• The OP’s suggestion would only offer an incentive to use gear/build choices featuring toughness. Soldier or Knight gear might become more popular. However, GW2 has 20 different types of gear. 20. Making 1-2 more gear choices seem desirable does nothing for the other types.
• The OP’s suggestion would grant another benefit to heavy armor professions (make dodge tie into the character’s toughness and armor rating). The game does not need another reason for people to think Guards and Warriors are the best choices.

I’m not sure there is a fix to make other gear types desirable in PvE. ANet says that the Ferocity change is the first step in their plan to do so. I’m curious to see what else they come up with, even though I’m not sure anything will work.