Guild Wars 2

Currently, there are two stats which scale immensely well: Power and Precision.

The other stats, say, Healing Power, do not scale well at all. There’s a ton of math involved here that I’m not at all prepared to do: If anyone has done/wants to do it, go for it. But it’s not necessary to prove that this scaling problem exists, because of the “problem” it creates, which looks something like:

“LFM ZERKER ONLY PING GEAR SPEED RUNS WARRIORS ONLY ZERKERZERKERZERKER”

People are stacking Berzerker gear because the other stats simply don’t give enough in the tradeoff. For example, a full set of stamina/defensive gear will let you live slightly longer, but you could just go zerker and beat the content twice as fast anyway. People are stacking Warriors because in PVE they are currently broken…. but that’s another issue.

The reason berzerker gear and warriors are broken is because Power and Precision are the only stats that scale anywhere close to well enough to matter.

Well… That, and the content is “too easy.”

When I say “too easy,” what I mean is that it was not designed around the stats players can achieve. Healing Power exists, but you’re not “supposed” to be able to be a “healer” spec. Stamina exists, but you’re not “supposed” to facetank. This lack of a holy trinity is perfectly fine, except for the fact that holy trinity stats exist without holy trinity roles.

These two issues — stat scaling and “difficulty” of content — are not easy or simple fixes. Many may not even believe they exist. What I’d like to hear, though, is some statement from the devs acknowledging it.

Let me be clear.

These things, if left unchecked, will ruin the future of PVE in this game.

I’m not being dramatic. As it stands, 4 Warrior + 1 Mesmer/Guardian groups are the most efficient PVE dungeon group possible by an unacceptable margin. I love my Thief, and I play him because he’s my main… but there is no reason whatsoever to take a Thief over a Warrior in PVE. Furthermore, there is no reason for me to wear anything but Berzerker’s gear, because everyone scales infinitely off of those stats and nothing else!

While it’s okay to have a “best composition” team, I think, from a developer’s perspective we would want to play this cat-and-mouse game. In League of Legends, there is a constant cycle of fotm champions -> nerf -> new fotm champions. Some see this as negative, but in reality it is the nature of game design. Difference is power. Inasmuch as classes/specs/spells are different, they will be more or less powerful than one-another. This is why we need game developers to constantly buff/nerf. Buffs are for those powers that are useless (Body Shot); nerfs are for those powers that are dominating the scene to the exclusion of others (100 Blades). We need this for the game to be healthy.

Now, the devs know this, I hope. I’d just like to hear a statement from them saying, “We’re looking into it.” That’s it. I’m willing to stick around as long as I’m having fun — that’s what games are for — but eventually, if Warriors and Guardians are dominating PVE to the point where I feel useless as a Thief or Ele, I’m going to quit the game. I hope that’s a long time down the road, and I hope the devs will nip it in the bud so I can play forever and support this amazing game.

What do you guys think?

Armor (Toughness) becomes pretty much worthless after 2750 (33%) and by that point the protection (Also 33%) is like having an extra set of armor.

Honestly, protection needs nerfed to 15% of all damage. Toughness needs increased by double what it is now. Weakness needs to be -50% to Critical Bonus/Condition Damage.

Everyones health needs to be more normalized and everyone needs ways to sustain themselves better. (More healing, this game HAS no healers.)

We also need an absorb mechanic (elementalists / guardians / warriors maybe?) that absorbs damage directly so we don’t have to rely on dodges so much.

The point is, Toughness Sucks, Heavy Armor does not matter much at all!

at the moment it looks like someone’s son in the design team likes to play berseker… everything is designed for it (gauntlet as example…one shot skills + timer to kill fast = zerk job).

a core change is needed before other sets starts being useful.

Daecollo.9578:

Armor (Toughness) becomes pretty much worthless after 2750 (33%) and by that point the protection (Also 33%) is like having an extra set of armor.

Honestly, protection needs nerfed to 15% of all damage. Toughness needs increased by double what it is now. Weakness needs to be -50% to Critical Bonus/Condition Damage.

Everyones health needs to be more normalized and everyone needs ways to sustain themselves better. (More healing, this game HAS no healers.)

We also need an absorb mechanic (elementalists / guardians / warriors maybe?) that absorbs damage directly so we don’t have to rely on dodges so much.

The point is, Toughness Sucks, Heavy Armor does not matter much at all!

he’s talking pve, where even if toughness had quadruple the effect it would still be pointless

Also op, thieves are useful in dungeons and do can as much damage as a warrior. In any dungeon without dredge, blinds are good utility as well.

When they changed the static stat bonus provided while wielding certain weapons they kind of opened up a new can of worms if the number they used are about equal then any item with condition damage would need that value increased.

OP, every class works in dungeons. 4 war 1 mes is the PUG meta, but organised groups can quite easily take a thief, ranger, LH elementalist and more and do just as well, in fact better because they’re maximising their DPS even more.

I think condition damage scales more or less like Power – as in, an increase in X points of condition damage will increase the damage of conditions by Y%, just like an increase in X points of Power would increase direct damage by Y%. In that aspect, I think the issue of condition damage is more a matter of design than just a matter of scalling.

+1
I think Power and Precision are fine as they are right now, other stats just simply need to scale better. Especially Toughness and Healing Power like you stated.

Condition damage scales better than Power. Vitality scales very well, particularly on Guardian/Thief/Elementalist that have small health pools. Power, Vitality, and Condition Damage have the highest marginal returns from zero in the game.

Precision and Critical Damage do not scale particularly well. Precision has ok scaling if you load up on proc effects, but Critical Damage never scales particularly well outside of the low hanging fruit on jewels. Neither gives the brute force advantage of Power/Condition Damage/Vitality.

Berserker gear isn’t the go-to for scripted encounters because it has the best scaling in the game, it’s because those are the 3 stats that scale up your offense across the board. Defense doesn’t matter when you’re memorizing set encounters and when you want to dump everything into offense its your only choice.

Erasculio.2914:

I think condition damage scales more or less like Power – as in, an increase in X points of condition damage will increase the damage of conditions by Y%, just like an increase in X points of Power would increase direct damage by Y%. In that aspect, I think the issue of condition damage is more a matter of design than just a matter of scalling.

I’m actually rather confused behind the logic of the stat design.

For instance, condition damage is only scaled by your condition damage stat. But direct damage is scaled by your power stat and your weapon strength which is all calculated into another stat called Attack. I would assume the reason for that is because Armor only counters direct damage and not condition damage, but don’t you think that advantage is trumped by the presence of +%Damage bonuses and the Vulnerability condition that can increase direct damage only by up to 25%?

How does crit damage not scale well? It’s not like toughness where you get to a certain point that you just get diminshing returns, you can infinitely stack crit damage and you’re getting a ton of extra damage.

The problem is that stat system is simplified to a point, where it hurts gameplay.
Power is a good stat, because every point in power increase your direct damage output by a certain amount based on your weapon.
Toughness is bad stat because every point in toughness does not increase your survival time by a certain amount, tougness is less and less important the more you accumulate.

my guild recently ran cof1… we had 1 mesmer, 2 guardian, 1 necro, 1 warrior. One of us likes to run cof all the time, he said it was one of the fastest runs he’s done. as some examples, the gate was down before the bar showing it’s progress came up, and the final boss was at half health 12 seconds after the fight started.

I partly agree with the OP, but I think the real problem in these games is almost always simplistic mob AI.

The whole concept of “learning” a dungeon really needs to go out the window.

There ought to be enough variation in any dungeon so that a more balanced team is necessary to balance against regular doses of surprise due to clever AI.

But I guess that’s too expensive, resource-wise, for devs to implement. Hence the inevitable decline of most MMOs into a hybrid soup where damage is king, and everyone can do it.

Goorman.7916:

Toughness is bad stat because every point in toughness does not increase your survival time by a certain amount

colesy.8490:

It’s not like toughness where you get to a certain point that you just get diminshing returns

I do not know why people believe this about toughness, but it is wrong. Toughness has linear scaling like every other stat in the game and have an identical effectiveness curve.

Ensign.2189:

Goorman.7916:

Toughness is bad stat because every point in toughness does not increase your survival time by a certain amount

colesy.8490:

It’s not like toughness where you get to a certain point that you just get diminshing returns

I do not know why people believe this about toughness, but it is wrong. Toughness has linear scaling like every other stat in the game and have an identical effectiveness curve.

Actually it gets worse/worse the more you get.

What do you mean by scaling? Power has some of the heaviest diminishing returns in the game, stronger even than toughness (which everyone likes to complain about). The difference is that power has a much higher initial effectiveness AND it increases all your damage, while toughness only decreases direct damage.

Healing power has a huge percent increase of some skills, higher than anything else in the game, but the problem is those skills are so puny to begin with that it’s still negligible. Look at guardian’s heal on dodge roll. With 2000 healing power, you get something like a 1000% increase in healing. Great, right? Well 1000% of 150 is still crap. Then on the heals that heal a decent amount to begin with, healing power scales horribly.

There are two issues with toughness:
1) It only affects one type of incoming damage (while power affects all your outgoing damage)
2) It is added to armor, which means that you start off requiring ~2000 toughness to halve damage vs. only ~1000 power to double damage. Someone stacking power will totally dominate someone stacking toughness.

However, I’d like to reiterate that people who think toughness is bad because of diminishing returns are just ignorant. Power has far more diminishing returns. Oh no stop stacking power!

Daecollo.9578:

Ensign.2189:

Goorman.7916:

Toughness is bad stat because every point in toughness does not increase your survival time by a certain amount

colesy.8490:

It’s not like toughness where you get to a certain point that you just get diminshing returns

I do not know why people believe this about toughness, but it is wrong. Toughness has linear scaling like every other stat in the game and have an identical effectiveness curve.

Actually it gets worse/worse the more you get.

So does power. Even more so actually.

Going from 1000 to 1100 power gives you a 10% damage increase. Going from 2000 to 2100 power gives you only a 5% damage increase. Going from 3000 to 3100 power gives you only a 3% damage increase.

Yet you still stack it. The issue with toughness has nothing to do with diminishing returns (they aren’t that great actually). It’s because the stat sucks to begin with and it starts with a massive disadvantage because it’s added to armor (ie, it starts at an initially higher value).

colesy.8490:

How does crit damage not scale well? It’s not like toughness where you get to a certain point that you just get diminshing returns, you can infinitely stack crit damage and you’re getting a ton of extra damage.

What people like you don’t understand is the difference between INCREASING damage and DECREASING damage.

Outgoing damage is based on your weapon. Power has a multiplicative effect on that. It may seem like it’s adding a constant amount and you get the same value regardless of 1000 power or 3000 power, but that’s misleading. Sure, 100 points more damage is 100 points more damage, but if you start at 100 damage and go up to 200 damage that’s a much more significant change than starting at 100,000 damage and going to 100,100 damage. The scaling of power definitely decreases. You just think it doesn’t because you are looking at it the wrong way.

On the other hand, incoming damage is based on monster attacks. Lets say we made it so that toughness reduced damage the way you would like it to. Every 1000 toughness reduces damage by an additive 50%. So going from 1000 to 2000 toughness gives you 50% damage reduction and going from 1000 to 3000 toughness gives you 100% damage reduction. Well, we have a problem now. Because while it seems like the 2nd 1000 toughness has the same effect as the first 1000 toughness, in fact it is infinitely better. When you have 2000 toughness you’d reduce a 10,000 hit to 5,000. When you have 3000 toughness you’d reduce a 10,000 hit to 0. In fact, you’d reduce a 9999999999999999999999999999 hit to 0. You would literally be invincible.

Now you may say, well why not have toughness reduce damage by a fixed 100 points per 100 toughness or something like that? Well the problem is that no matter what value you choose, each extra point of toughness will have a greater effect on damage reduction until you get to the point where you have enough toughness to reduce the damage to 0 (invincible!). You never want to design a system where it’s even theoretically possible to scale stats such that damage becomes 0. I believe WoW used to make this mistake and it led to big balance issues regarding armor stacking.

Yaki.9563:

However, I’d like to reiterate that people who think toughness is bad because of diminishing returns are just ignorant. Power has far more diminishing returns. Oh no stop stacking power!

I don’t understand what you mean by “diminishing returns”, the game has no diminishing returns, as I understand it everything is linear.

Yaki.9563:

Daecollo.9578:

Ensign.2189:

Goorman.7916:

Toughness is bad stat because every point in toughness does not increase your survival time by a certain amount

colesy.8490:

It’s not like toughness where you get to a certain point that you just get diminshing returns

I do not know why people believe this about toughness, but it is wrong. Toughness has linear scaling like every other stat in the game and have an identical effectiveness curve.

Actually it gets worse/worse the more you get.

So does power. Even more so actually.

Going from 1000 to 1100 power gives you a 10% damage increase. Going from 2000 to 2100 power gives you only a 5% damage increase. Going from 3000 to 3100 power gives you only a 3% damage increase.

Yet you still stack it. The issue with toughness has nothing to do with diminishing returns (they aren’t that great actually). It’s because the stat sucks to begin with and it starts with a massive disadvantage because it’s added to armor (ie, it starts at an initially higher value).

IMO, I believe it’s a fail on the community’s part. They do not quite understand mathematical relationships to describe that things have such diminishing returns. Diminishing returns really only has true meaning with the compared measurement is inherently congruent. Comparing +500 toughness, -100 points of damage taken and -x% reduced damage aren’t inherently congruent because one is a ratio of two numbers while the other are summations of two numbers, one of which varies by other circumstances.

Diminishing Returns, with the context of RPG stats, at least to my perception, only occur with stats that are inherently percentile based. If we had a stat that lowered the chance of an enemy landing a hit by a %, there will be a point where adding more of that stat will lower the chance you are hit by a set % but the % damage mitigated will diminish as your chance to get his is reduced to 0.

Armor, as a function of % damage taken, isn’t in any danger of reaching 0, not when enemies can boost their damage and reduce your armor. So it isn’t to say Toughness’/Armor’s effect doesn’t diminish, but even within the context of Economics, it isn’t diminishing returns unless you keep damage received constant.

idk man, for this issue Anet has been nerfing warrior damage, and balance the damage of all classes.. so idk if you want anet to nerf the power and precision?

Yaki.9563:

What do you mean by scaling?

When I say a stat scales well, I am using it as shorthand for the stat having a big impact on your effectiveness when starting from zero. Power scales very well because the first few (thousand) points of power do more for your damage than either crit chance or crit damage.

As you said, everything has linear scaling (either on damage on effective health), and everything is multiplicative with everything else. So nothing really ‘scales’ better than anything else; you can just pick some low hanging fruit of low starting points on a handful of stats (Power, Condition Damage, Vitality). At high enough stat totals you want a little bit of everything.

I think the biggest change that needs to happen is that arenanet needs to split the functionality of conditions & boons across pvp & pve/wvw because currently the identical implementations are not working at all.

They’ve done it with traits. They’ve done it with skills. It’s time to step it up and do the same with conditions so that condition builds can actually compete with zerker gear in pve and not quite so devestating in pvp.

Once this change is made it will clear the way to further pve changes that would make things like clerics gear worth using.

gurugeorge.9857:

Yaki.9563:

However, I’d like to reiterate that people who think toughness is bad because of diminishing returns are just ignorant. Power has far more diminishing returns. Oh no stop stacking power!

I don’t understand what you mean by “diminishing returns”, the game has no diminishing returns, as I understand it everything is linear.

Toughness and power are percent modifiers for incoming and outgoing damage, respectively. Power scales linearly because each point of power adds a fixed percent to the damage modifier regardless of what your current power is. While this seems like it doesn’t diminish, the relative effect of each point of power is not the same.

Toughness is not linear. It is also a percent modifier but it is in the denominator of the modifier which makes it an inverse function. Inverse functions behave differently than linear functions. This is good because if toughness were linear, there would be massive balancing issues. Each additional point of toughness would be worth more than the prior points. As an extreme example, lets say you reduced damage by 1% every X amount of toughness. Well going from 100% to 99% damage taken is not that big a deal. But going from 1% to 0% damage taken is massive. It allows you to take a 10 billion damage hit and not even have your health budge.

colesy.8490:

How does crit damage not scale well? It’s not like toughness where you get to a certain point that you just get diminshing returns, you can infinitely stack crit damage and you’re getting a ton of extra damage.

Yeah the OP just did not go far enough. The new trinity is Power, Precision and Critical Damage.

Yaki.9563:

gurugeorge.9857:

Yaki.9563:

However, I’d like to reiterate that people who think toughness is bad because of diminishing returns are just ignorant. Power has far more diminishing returns. Oh no stop stacking power!

I don’t understand what you mean by “diminishing returns”, the game has no diminishing returns, as I understand it everything is linear.

Toughness and power are percent modifiers for incoming and outgoing damage, respectively. Power scales linearly because each point of power adds a fixed percent to the damage modifier regardless of what your current power is. While this seems like it doesn’t diminish, the relative effect of each point of power is not the same.

Toughness is not linear. It is also a percent modifier but it is in the denominator of the modifier which makes it an inverse function. Inverse functions behave differently than linear functions. This is good because if toughness were linear, there would be massive balancing issues. Each additional point of toughness would be worth more than the prior points. As an extreme example, lets say you reduced damage by 1% every X amount of toughness. Well going from 100% to 99% damage taken is not that big a deal. But going from 1% to 0% damage taken is massive. It allows you to take a 10 billion damage hit and not even have your health budge.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t diminishing returns as that’s ordinarily understood in theorycrafting. Check this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/A-legitimate-discussion-about-toughness

In berserker gear, it take monster 1-2 second to kill me.

In full toughness gear, it take monster 1.3-2.6 second to kill me.

Now people’ll start complaining well, give toughness more mitigation….

But the game is desgined that you have to move and dodge to avoid damage.

So I’m not sure where everything is heading.

It’s a very simple issue here. A full gear amount of secondary vitality or toughness will increase your survivability by ~33% in most cases. Precision is about as effective, as a full gear’s worth of secondary precision without added power will increase your DPS by just shy of 25%. A full gear amount of secondary power, however, will almost double your damage output.
And also, while there are TWO purely offensive amulets in the game (zerk, rampager), there is no pure tank (vitality, toughness, healing) or sustain (toughness, healing, boon duration) combination.

laokoko.7403:

In berserker gear, it take monster 1-2 second to kill me.

In full toughness gear, it take monster 1.3-2.6 second to kill me.

In berserker gear, it takes me 1-2 seconds to kill monster.
In full toughness gear, it takes me 1.3-2.6 seconds to kill monster.

from the wiki: Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
moving things around: Damage done = (weapon damage) * (skill-specific coefficient) * Power / (target’s Armor)
So power and armor directly compete against each other.
if 2000 power attacks 2000 armor = 1. 3000 power attacks 3000 armor = 1. 2000 power attacks 1000 armor = 2. 3000 power attacks 2000 armor = 1.5.
So, when power>armor, adding 1000 power and 1000 armor results in less overall damage.
In this type of system, the most efficient build would be equal power and armor.

The PvE portion of this game is pretty much dead except for the grind and that’s a kitten shame. I blame bad encounter design. Too much AoE spam and too much one hitting which makes anything but zerking pointless. Forget about playing a ranger or a minion master because the game just doesn’t support it.

Mystic, everything in the top part is above the armor. (This is simple algebra, if you multiple everything together and divide it by one thing, it’s the same as re-writing it as all of it divided by that same thing. As long as you don’t add or subtract.)

The equation is…

([([Weapon Damage * Power] * Skill Co-Efficient) + Skill Base Damage] * Damage Modifier) / ([Toughness + Defense] * Armor Modifier)

This can be shortened to…

Damage Modifier(Derived Attack * Skill Co-Efficient + Skill Base Damage) / Derived Armor

Derived Attack = Power * Weapon Damage
Derived Armor = (Toughness + Defense) * Armor Modifier

As for Healing Power’s effectiveness, most Professions have a scaling of (on average) 1:1. Warriors have a healing skill with an effectiveness of 1:5 (Full Adrenaline Healing Surge).

The maximum amount of Healing Power able to be obtained is 1935 (25 stacks of Sigil of Life + 5 Healing Power Runes + 1 Healing Power Rune + Full Ascended Cleric/Apothecary Trinkets + Magi Backpiece with Magi or Cleric Jewel + Cleric or Magi or Apothecary Armor + Cleric or Apothecary or Magi Weapons + 30 Traits in Healing Power).

Using that, if you have a 1:1 scaling, you will get 1935 health from your skill.

If you have a 1:5 scaling, you will get 2902.5 health from your skill.

Healing Surge has a 30 second cooldown, and most healing skills with a 1:1 ratio have a 20 second cooldown.

I’m going to calculate the health/sec given by going full Healing Power (so we can compare it to rune of the dolyak).

With 1935 health/20 seconds, you get 96.75 health/sec (in addition to the base heal of your skill).

With 2902.5 health/30 seconds, you get 96.75 health/sec (in addition to the base heal of your skill).

Rune of the Dolyak gives 30 health/sec.

So, by speccing ENTIRELY around healing, you just made yourself 3x more effective than a single runeset at self-healing. This doesn’t count regeneration or AoE heals. Also, you will do very minimal damage with a build setup like that.

Let me give you another demonstration of why going full Healing Power is relatively useless:

Restorative Mantras is a Mesmer Trait. When you finish charging a Mantra, you heal in an AoE (~450 radius). The base heal is 2600, it has a scaling of 5:1 (5 healing power → 1 health).

With 1935 healing power, you get a bonus 387 health.
That means that if you spec SPECIFICALLY TO HEAL you will bring your heal from 2600 to 2987. AMAZING~! Or you can go full zerk and just heal in an aoe for 2600 (it’s actually going to heal for 2640 because you need to get some healing power to trait).

The efficiency and effectiveness of Healing Power, in MOST BUILDS, is subpar.

With that said, I’m running a hybrid support build utilizing Restorative Mantras and Boon Duration to apply AoE 25 Might for 20 seconds while topping up my allies. I run Zerker trinkets and Weaponry. Givers armor (old armorset I had from a long time ago) with Boon Duration Runes to hit 46% Boon Duration. + 30% from Traits + 10% from Signet = 86% Boon Duration + AoE Boon Share + AoE Healing + Still deal decent damage.

Think twice before grabbing [too much] healing power.

My toughness guardian sits waiting to be useful(My initial main). Now my Zerker Mesmer is the only character that I use. Why would I bother to use my toughness healing guardian that heals well with his mace/shield when this is a useless stat to have.

Agreed op the game is fundamentally flawed, until stat mechanics get serious overhauls Zerkers will reign supreme.

I really do think it’s a content problem, not a stat problem. Maybe crit damage goes too far, maybe. But really, healing power and toughness (and to a large degree, vitality) are attrition stats – they have value only if you’re in a long fight and taking damage.

Currently the winning strategy for dungeons and the like is to take (almost) no damage at all: an idea I’d laugh at in most contexts, but is done regularly in boss fights and well-planned trash mob encounters.

If dungeons and content had a better way of forcing light to moderate damage on players without feeling unfair or like being cheated, toughness and healing power might gain more value because they’d become essential to some degree. But I’m not even sure that would be possible: ArenaNet has made a big emphasis on player skill and coordination being an adequate defense, for better or worse.

Maybe they should just implement stat caps and be done with it. :P

Zaxares.5419:

Maybe they should just implement stat caps and be done with it. :P

Stat caps wouldn’t make a difference unless the stat caps were at ~1800 for any given stat. It still wouldn’t make Healing Power anymore viable.

The reason why I pulled 1800 out of my kitten is because it then forces players to mix and match their gear with nomenclatures to get the most out of it. You won’t have people running full-zerk because they’d just be wasting power/precision. It would also allow traits to make a difference in itemization instead of getting traits in addition to stacking certain coughzerker*cough*] gear.

That’s what I meant. Cap stats around 1800 – 2000, for the reasons you mentioned. There’d be no point in going full zerk because anything above that low limit is just wasted, and likewise there’s no point in going full tank or full healer either. Everybody runs a “Generalist” stat build and it’s up to their specific choice of skills/utilities that determine how effective a player they are.

I feel like the stat cap should be something that you can achieve (and surpass) with just one armorset.

This would make it viable to start running Carrion AND Rabid together and would improve diversity in builds. The only downside is it would come at a huge damage cost to the entire game.

You could compensate for that by lowering HP thresholds across the board though. Of course, when you get to this point you’re looking at a major re-design, not something that could be easily implemented.

Leo G.4501:

]

IMO, I believe it’s a fail on the community’s part. They do not quite understand mathematical relationships to describe that things have such diminishing returns. Diminishing returns really only has true meaning with the compared measurement is inherently congruent. Comparing +500 toughness, -100 points of damage taken and -x% reduced damage aren’t inherently congruent because one is a ratio of two numbers while the other are summations of two numbers, one of which varies by other circumstances.

Diminishing Returns, with the context of RPG stats, at least to my perception, only occur with stats that are inherently percentile based. If we had a stat that lowered the chance of an enemy landing a hit by a %, there will be a point where adding more of that stat will lower the chance you are hit by a set % but the % damage mitigated will diminish as your chance to get his is reduced to 0.

Armor, as a function of % damage taken, isn’t in any danger of reaching 0, not when enemies can boost their damage and reduce your armor. So it isn’t to say Toughness’/Armor’s effect doesn’t diminish, but even within the context of Economics, it isn’t diminishing returns unless you keep damage received constant.

No, the community is actually correct. Diminishing marginal returns refers to the property of a negative first order derivative with respect to a particular input. In the context of MMOs this usually incorporates the opportunity cost.

View the sum of every marginal piece of gear as an optimization problem, where the utility is the rate at which you are able to complete a dungeon at.

The argument is that, due to the one-shot mechanics of a dungeon, the marginal utility for survivability, even after the nth piece is still low, because at best it grants you enough health to only permit one more mistake (if even that), while, under the assumption of perfect play, the the more DPS you have the more utility it yields, i.e. there is no diminishing marginal utility with respect to berserker gear, because utility is only increased as you add more.

Softspoken.2410:

If dungeons and content had a better way of forcing light to moderate damage on players without feeling unfair or like being cheated, toughness and healing power might gain more value because they’d become essential to some degree. But I’m not even sure that would be possible: ArenaNet has made a big emphasis on player skill and coordination being an adequate defense, for better or worse.

This. I hope to see this so much.

shimmerless.4560:

Ironically conditions are superlatively strong in PvP precisely because you only need one stat to make it effective, meaning you have two left completely free.

This nonsense AGAIN? Will you never give up?

Defensive stats would be valuable in dungeons if bosses attacked more than once every 5 seconds with attacks that dealt less than 15,000 damage. There’s insignificant chip damage to mitigate or heal through; an optimal dungeon build would have just enough defense to avoid getting one-shotted if you do get hit, with any more being wasted.

This isn’t a gear problem or a scaling problem, it’s a dungeon design problem. If the whole game plan is for players to never take damage ever if they execute right, they’ll never want anything other than pure damage gear.

crestpiemangler.7631:

No, the community is actually correct. Diminishing marginal returns refers to the property of a negative first order derivative with respect to a particular input. In the context of MMOs this usually incorporates the opportunity cost.

View the sum of every marginal piece of gear as an optimization problem, where the utility is the rate at which you are able to complete a dungeon at.

The argument is that, due to the one-shot mechanics of a dungeon, the marginal utility for survivability, even after the nth piece is still low, because at best it grants you enough health to only permit one more mistake (if even that), while, under the assumption of perfect play, the the more DPS you have the more utility it yields, i.e. there is no diminishing marginal utility with respect to berserker gear, because utility is only increased as you add more.

You’re right. But I would assume the community should create a specific term for such a scenario since, in the general sense, nearly every stat except healing power and vitality has diminishing returns. Also, Boon/Condition duration don’t have diminishing returns either, they’re simply capped.

If the community wanted to be honest, then like you said, they should refer to the phenomenon by Opportunity Cost. Same amount of syllables, fewer letters, tells the whole story. Gauging the stats by opportunity cost in context of PvE, one simply asks do you want to kill a boss quick or kill it reliably. This excludes skill too.

As far as healing power, it’s not really that healing power is weak, it’s the modifier for the skills that heal are low. If you have multiple skills with healing that has a decent frequency and and a scale that reflects the frequency, you can do some good healing.

So far, the only professions I’ve attempted with this is Ranger and Mesmer although for the Ranger, it’s mainly regen and self/pet. Elementalist, Guardian and Engineer can likely be built for moderate high ‘heal-spam’ so to speak which can trivialize a lot of encounters in openworld PvE but the content variety it’s useful in is still limited (overall Opportunity Costs). If you find it funny to eat Champ attacks with it and its buddies being nearly completely ineffective against you, it’s an interesting diversion but it comes at the cost of widdling the foe down slowly unless help just happens to stop by. Compare this with getting unlucky in your Berserker gear and missing a dodge and the enemy getting 2 stuns on you before you can heal.

Of course you can always just port back and try again while the defensive build would just take awhile, possibly running out of time and failing anyway. This kind of bum content should have a reverse or just plain be more diverse.

I don’t see how Power and Condition Damage have diminishing returns, could you please explain that?

The Boz.2038:

I don’t see how Power and Condition Damage have diminishing returns, could you please explain that?

They don’t. I think it was a suggestion to make them have diminishing returns (which would, inevitably, result in a stat cap for stats).

I don’t think that’s the way to approach it. I think just having a stat cap would be good enough because it would force players to mix and match. You can use Celestial as an example. Assume someone is decked out in full celestial, and that’s a good place to start (it’s not 100% in all stats, it would simply be about 80% all stats or something like that)… if you get what I’m saying…

shimmerless.4560:

You can write all-caps as much as you like until you learn to have an adult discussion I’m not really interested.

Brilliant conversation stopper.
You lose. Good day, sir.

The Boz.2038:

shimmerless.4560:

You can write all-caps as much as you like until you learn to have an adult discussion I’m not really interested.

Brilliant conversation stopper.
You lose. Good day, sir.

Actually, I’m going to have to side with shimmerless because he made a valid point and you simply blew him off saying “YOU AGAIN, PSHHHHH”.

That is not proper conduct in an intellectual discussion. If you were, however, not having an intellectual discussion about the topic at hand, then please, move it to private messages.

Since Condition Duration is not a stat on armor, Condition Builds only need Condition Damage as a primary damage source and can relocate the 2 secondaries to vitality and power, power and precision, or precision and toughness. This is the fuel that drives the Condition meta in sPvP. You can be tanky enough to survive zerkernukes while maintaining full Condition Damage in your stats.

It’s like how, in PvE, Power + Precision + Critical Damage scale so well together that no amount of defense is going to stop someone like that from ripping your panties apart (unless you have other forms of mitigation along with your defense, but that comes at the cost of damage or other utility).

I responded the way I did because for three times in as many days, shimmerless and others have claimed that “power damage requires three stats, condition damage but one”, and on each of these I countered them with proof, mathemathics, and logic. I was flat out ignored twice, and Fenrir called me a liar once, saying that I used walls of text because I have no argument to counter THE TRUTH.
The claim is wrong twice. First off, condition damage has three stats that are VITAL to the damage output of a condition damage build. You can only itemize two of those stats. The gains for condition damage from Condition Damage are more or less equal in comparable builds and situations to the gains for power damage from Power. Precision allows power damage to crit and inflict mroe damage, it also allows a condition damage build to crit and apply more conditions. Critical Damage allows power builds’ damage output on critical hits to increase, Condition Duration allows condition builds’ long-term pressure to rise. Behold, three stats.
Additionally, the nature of condition damage (slow and steady) imposes a requirement for a sustain or survivability stat, be it toughness, vitality, or healing power.
I have yet to have this argument countered, but it has been ignored several times.