Guild Wars 2

I’d like to share a story:

Until very recently, I’ve always used Toughness/Vitality builds on my characters. Occasionally, I would sacrifice some Vitality for Condition Damage, but T/V was King. I play solo and reasoned that survivability, above all other things, is critical for my success. Believing so, I’ve leveled seven characters to 80 through PVE battle and questing (This is only a very modest achievement. I mention it only to give you an idea of my time invested in and commitment to TVC builds.) Anyway, my world has been rocked.

A little over a week ago, I was in Southsun Cove on my Charr Warrior slaughtering mobs – Mosquitoes goin’ down, baby! – in hopes of a crate drop. I approached Kiel’s outpost and saw a horde of Karka running around and opening a whole case of whoopkitten on it. As I got closer, I saw a thief fighting a Vet Karka by the gate. He went down before I could close the gap and the Karka went for the kill.

Nuu-uhh, not on my watch.

I ran in and started going to work. The Karka, however, did not switch aggro and
did finish off the thief who, now dead, says:

“Too much toughness ftl”

Normally, I shrug those kind of comments off because – you know – I’m gonna play how I wanna play, but it struck me that he knew so quickly what kind of build I was running and also knew I could have saved him had I been using a Power build. Anyway, I rezzed him and we finished the event and parted. I went back to killing stuff for a while but his comment had struck a chord and I kept thinking, “Maybe he’s right”.

Maybe. But I needed to know.

Off I went to Lion’s Arch and retraited to full Power/Crit. Sold all my gear and purchased full-on glass cannon with supporting rune. Picked up a greatsword and felt the chill wind of Change play its tune along my spine. Threw a Bloodlust sigil on it, went back to Southsun and…

Great Caesar’s Ghost!

I was playing an entirely different game. Huge damage numbers inside of red flares were flying around over my head. I was hitting things so hard, I was afraid the mobs would report me and get me banned!

And it was fun!

It was awesome how my Charr grunted and snarled as he did his #2 (that’s 100 Blades, people). Add stacks of might and Fury to that and it was a dream come true! Toughness and Condition Damage? What the kitten was I thinking?! If I want to win, I’ve gotta go PP! Power and Precision paves the path to victory!

I’ve since done the same for my Ranger and now *terrorize* Karka and Sharks. They are dropping so fast that I can’t tell if I’m killing them or they are committing suicide!

Rest in peace T/V/C builds. You’ve done me great service, but your time has come.

tl;dr; – I have to go PP and do a #2.

-Vawn

darkace.8925:

“Too much toughness ftl”

So he blamed his death on you having too much Toughness? Not himself having too little? But you having too much?

/scratches head

nah you don’t understand. THe point is ironically it is safer to kill faster with no defense gear.

That’s same as dungeon. Most of the time it is better to go all out berserker because if you don’t kill fast enough it doesn’t matter if you are in full soldier gear, you’ll still die.

A few of the dungeon event, for example burrow in AC, or mag bomb event, it is much safer to go all out berserker. Infact most of my dungeon failure is because people don’t have enough dps.

I think the best idea is just have 2 differnet set for pve. One offensive set and one deffensive set. I still use defensive set for some situation. But most of the time I go berserker.

laokoko.7403:

darkace.8925:

“Too much toughness ftl”

So he blamed his death on you having too much Toughness? Not himself having too little? But you having too much?

/scratches head

nah you don’t understand. THe point is ironically it is safer to kill faster with no defense gear.

That’s same as dungeon. Most of the time it is better to go all out berserker because if you don’t kill fast enough it doesn’t matter if you are in full soldier gear, you’ll still die.

A few of the dungeon event, for example burrow in AC, or mag bomb event, it is much safer to go all out berserker. Infact most of my dungeon failure is because people don’t have enough dps.

I think the best idea is just have 2 differnet set for pve. One offensive set and one deffensive set. I still use defensive set for some situation. But most of the time I go berserker.

I was certain I deleted that post before anyone replied to it, lol. Yeah, I misread what OP was saying.

this is a very good point. about 3 weeks ago I also made the transition to full zerker and the difference is night and day. toughness does nothing for you in dungeons. defense in this game is all about dodging at the right time and using certain abilities/evades. people say zerker players are dumb and not viable but once you learn how to effectively play one its extremely rewarding.

Those of us who specced condition damage from day one have been complaining about this in PVE forever now. Nothing’s been done. They still say we are OP and it’s sad they could have had a well balanced game if they had a PTR to see how OP the zerker thing is. What’s even worse now is that that’s all that’s needed for anything so why bother with anything else.

laokoko.7403:

nah you don’t understand. THe point is ironically it is safer to kill faster with no defense gear.

That’s same as dungeon. Most of the time it is better to go all out berserker because if you don’t kill fast enough it doesn’t matter if you are in full soldier gear, you’ll still die.

A few of the dungeon event, for example burrow in AC, or mag bomb event, it is much safer to go all out berserker. Infact most of my dungeon failure is because people don’t have enough dps.

I think the best idea is just have 2 differnet set for pve. One offensive set and one deffensive set. I still use defensive set for some situation. But most of the time I go berserker.

I do agree with you here. Not everywhere not having toughness and vitality is a good idea, but you don’t need it everywhere as well. I, having lots of alts, just have different characters outgeared differently for different situations lol.

You only just noticed? You didnt notice that berserker gear on the TP costs roughly 4 times what any other set costs?

Never mind the massive irony is that piling on toughness in dungeons is likely to make you the mob magnet, negating any survivability said toughness is supposed to provide.

As i sit here reading i start to wonder if why the mobs are such damage sponges are because ANet knows that zerker is that massive but can’t find a way to tone it down.

Likely because they need the dual stats on each trait line for aesthetic reasons more than game mechanics, in some silly attempt at making us make tradeoffs in our builds.

The only option out that i see is for ANet to multiply all internal healing power skill modifiers have by 5 or 10 in PVE, so that heals actually have the potential to pull you back from the brink rather than just postponing the inevitable.

If that results in people foregoing dodging for facetanking mobs, so be it. Right now the defensive side is so tilted towards dodge as the be all end all that it is gone beyond tragedy and become a farce.

digiowl.9620:

Never mind the massive irony is that piling on toughness in dungeons is likely to make you the mob magnet, negating any survivability said toughness is supposed to provide.

As i sit here reading i start to wonder if why the mobs are such damage sponges are because ANet knows that zerker is that massive but can’t find a way to tone it down.

I wanted to quote these two lines right here, because they go together so well.

Tell me, if a group of people was beating on you, and you had to decide who to take down first, who would you go for? The guy that’s doing the least damage, but will be the hardest to take out of the fight? No, you’d go for the guy kicking your face in, and sporting a glass jaw.

Mobs should target high power first, not high toughness. No, this doesn’t fix much of anything in a group where everyone’s full ‘zerker, but it’s how I’d think things should work in general. Right?

Oh, and yes… I’m trying a second warrior right now (I alt a lot and take my time). First one’s all Vit/Tough, this one’s all Power/Prec. Even at level 20, I can see a real difference. And that’s without the greatsword. I’ll be trying a second elementalist next, I think.

Palador.2170:

I wanted to quote these two lines right here, because they go together so well.

Tell me, if a group of people was beating on you, and you had to decide who to take down first, who would you go for? The guy that’s doing the least damage, but will be the hardest to take out of the fight? No, you’d go for the guy kicking your face in, and sporting a glass jaw.

Mobs should target high power first, not high toughness. No, this doesn’t fix much of anything in a group where everyone’s full ‘zerker, but it’s how I’d think things should work in general. Right?

I agree with you in principle, but without thread/aggro system wherein tanks can keep the mobs off the most vulnerable party members, your proposal wouldn’t do much. The guy who invested in Toughness/Vitality gear wouldn’t get to use it because he’d never be targeted and the masses who invested in Power/Precision gear wouldn’t get to use theirs because they’d be dead. It’s a lose/lose situation.

Yeah, i am not quite sure what ANet’s thinking was there.

Could be they wanted to give a coordinated group some semblance of tanks by having one or two stack toughness and healing power and so become the mob focus of the group.

But for PUGs it just becomes a mess as there is no way to independently document who has the most toughness in a group, and so will carry the brunt of mob attention.

You definitely have to know how to dodge though (that is, play the game). I know CoFp1 has been talked to death, but I find it relevant here. I love it when (badly played) warriors sporting the full berserker set join my PuG group of random classes. They’re so used to killing things before they take any damage. However, when they’re in a PuG group, they don’t know how to play, so they just die and die and die.

I’m happy that monsters go after players with toughness. I like my build with condi/precision/toughness, so I can hold aggro for the glass cannons who don’t know how to dodge

offense is the best defense.

Is there the chance you misunderstood the thief?

Meaning, he had high toughness as well, and could not drop aggro due to this?

I agree with the rest though, in principle. I do tend to still have some defensive stats on my builds, but I almost always have a couple zerker pieces, and almost always run with ruby stuff on my jewelry.

Tuluum.9638:

Is there the chance you misunderstood the thief?

Meaning, he had high toughness as well, and could not drop aggro due to this?

I agree with the rest though, in principle. I do tend to still have some defensive stats on my builds, but I almost always have a couple zerker pieces, and almost always run with ruby stuff on my jewelry.

That’s a point. It’s a shame that not only do we have n expectation of the way mmos are suppose to be played but we also expect other players to bad mouth us.

Either way, it led Vawn to look into new possibilities with a pretty positive outcome on his part.

This is correct for PVE BUT and I only say this because its in the general forums; not the best idea for WvW.

The interesting note here is that the person who was faceplanted, was calling out the one who did not…

Kichwas.7152:

The interesting note here is that the person who was faceplanted, was calling out the one who did not…

It’s also interesting that they’re in open world pve, and not in the same group whatsoever.

This is how I felt pretty much when I dropped Carrion gear for Zerker and my shortbow for example went from like 350-450 auto attacks to 1500-2000 =/ it was like whats the point of condition in pve, even stacking zerker with t/v feels better.

A balance between them with Rampager and Zerker or Rabid can be fun for warrior and necro~ though.

Think a simple balance might be mobs with such high toughness the only way to kill them effectively is with conditions

Razeor.6271:

Kichwas.7152:

The interesting note here is that the person who was faceplanted, was calling out the one who did not…

It’s also interesting that they’re in open world pve, and not in the same group whatsoever.

As Tuluum pointed out in this insightful comment:

Tuluum.9638:

Is there the chance you misunderstood the thief?

Meaning, he had high toughness as well, and could not drop aggro due to this?

And Zenleto excellently added:

zenleto.6179:

It’s a shame that not only do we have n expectation of the way mmos are suppose to be played but we also expect other players to bad mouth us.

It’s possible he was talking about himself and I’d misunderstood. Either way, I am thankful (Aren’t you thankful?!!) it happened. It is so very satisfying to run up on a young karka like a mean tossed salad out of nowhere (my Ranger is Sylvari) and wreck him hard like a red-shelled step-lobster.

I only regret I didn’t take note of the thief’s name. I would have mailed him a Karka Shell.

-Vawn

I’m just coming off of the opposite, actually. During one of my recent leveling armor upgrades, I switched my thief’s usual carrion setup for zerker, P/D for D/P, re-traited for offense, and gave it a go. The backstab crits were nice as well as the direct damage, but I missed dodging all over, blazing away merrily out of stealth, and not faceplanting when my initiative ran out. It felt like I was going higher reward for a much higher risk.

The leveling upgrade after that I went back to carrion, P/D, and re-traited again for defense. The improvement was noticeable. I may not be ganking mobs in backstabs but I had a much thicker cushion of error thanks to the improved vitality and defensive traits and the mobs were still dropping pretty fast regardless. He’s back to being what I consider fun.

Nothing against OP’s decision, its fun for him so run with it. In PvE, its all in what you want out of your character.

IronPlushy.4256:

Think a simple balance might be mobs with such high toughness the only way to kill them effectively is with conditions

I think that may require an armor value in excess of 5 000.

Edit: Allow me to correct myself, as further pondering and playing with numbers suggest that armor in excess of 50 000, maybe even 500 000, would be required.

Ugh…

So if i have done the numbers right a full 100b channel can rip some 10000+ off a target if the whole thing crits. And that is if the target has exotic armor with major toughness and a full toughness trait line.

So yea, the more i think about it the more i think ANet has made mobs damage sponges. Because they can’t find any other way to balance the numbers for both PVP and PVE…

I think the Thief meant himself. As Toughness holds aggro more (or so many believe) he was likely ruing having so much Toughness that the karka couldn’t be peeled off him.

I agree with the original poster.

I play a warrior and I am also traiting and gearing her defensively with tons of support because defense and support fits my playstyle, but I’m just not having fun playing that way in this game. I feel I could be much more useful to my groups going berserker, but I hate being fragile and it’s just not my style to go all-offense. As a very defense-oriented player I’m just not finding group play very fun because of that, so after level 80 I am only playing this game casually when the living story looks interesting.

I understand that the devs went out of their way to kill the “tank role”, but now all the fun things to do as a defense-specialist have been stripped out of the game. As a high-defense character, when I see someone getting killed I want to be able to protect him/her. But nope, no way to get a mob to attack you unless you actually go glass cannon and risk getting yourself killed too. And I’m sure that people who play glass cannons DON’T want to get attacked and have to kite non-stop. It feels so backwards! The other day I was playing with my friend who is a glass cannon and we took a champion: he spent the entire encounter kiting the boss because he had aggro, and while I (tanky) was trying to kill it with my pitiful damage. It really wasn’t fun.

It would be very nice to have a utility similar to the warrior’s Intevene in World of Warcraft, where the warrior redirects all the damage taken by a nearby party member to her/himself. You could use that on a player that is downed or about to be downed, then Shield Stance or Defy Pain while other players revive the player safely. That could be fun, and this is already programmed in the game. (The ranger’s “Protect Me!”) That’s the kind of thing that would give a huge point to having a low damage defensive character without putting the trinity back into the game.

Another thing that’s fun as a high-defense character is to be able to withstand stuff that other players have to avoid. For example I find it fun when a boss uses a huge attack and everyone is running away, but instead I just stand there, pop Shield Stance and BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK! Feels good. However, in dungeons it feels like the majority of the dangerous stuff is unblockable and you have to dodge and go Greatsword because, well, your shield is useless. The troll in AC story is probably the most ridiculous example of this: even his auto-attacks are unblockble, and he’s just a story mode mob. I don’t mind an unblockable attack here and there to keep things from being monotonous, but I think there are too many at the moment. If block was reliable in this game, I think it would be MORE fun to play defense in this game than in one of those MMOs with the trinity, because here when you block/dodge attacks you reduce damage by 100%, which feels much more rewarding for players that are good at it. This contrasts with trinity MMOs, where tank abilities typically reduce damage only by a percentage to make sure that healers have something to heal. A big cooldown can be 40% damage, while in GW2 just a simple skill like Counterblow is 100% and have short cooldowns.

I think the only place where defense is really important is in wvw, for zerg rushing. There’s no point of being glass if you can’t even do a skill for dying in a second (in a zerg of course. Skirmishes and small matches are a different matter).

Maybe it’s a class thing. As a ranger, I found that for single mob fights (eg karka), I could drop mobs much faster with cond/prec/tough gear + corruption sigil + traits, than full zerker gear + bloodlust sigil + traits. For events, zerker wins every time of course.

Aggro system needs to be based on damage and conditions inflicted and not toughness of your gear.
This would be a first step in fixing the ridiculous and outrageous advantage of zerker gear in PvE.

Vawn.3041:

I’d like to share a story:

tl;dr; – I have to PP and do a #2.

-Vawn

Baaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!
I spotted myself on this one

Same here. My ranger was 100% defensive. Mobs were taking so long to kill and I thought well when I run dungeons I’m not contributing much. Today I switched to Beserker and a very different game opened up. Mobs fall down quite fast now, I blow right through them. It’s very nice for farming too.

Uruz Six.6594:

I’m just coming off of the opposite, actually. During one of my recent leveling armor upgrades, I switched my thief’s usual carrion setup for zerker, P/D for D/P, re-traited for offense, and gave it a go. The backstab crits were nice as well as the direct damage, but I missed dodging all over, blazing away merrily out of stealth, and not faceplanting when my initiative ran out. It felt like I was going higher reward for a much higher risk.

The leveling upgrade after that I went back to carrion, P/D, and re-traited again for defense. The improvement was noticeable. I may not be ganking mobs in backstabs but I had a much thicker cushion of error thanks to the improved vitality and defensive traits and the mobs were still dropping pretty fast regardless. He’s back to being what I consider fun.

Nothing against OP’s decision, its fun for him so run with it. In PvE, its all in what you want out of your character.

Same.

Granted, I have fun on my characters build primarily for offense, I have more fun being reliable. In the OP’s example, why not just stop and rez the Thief instead of trying to kill the mob? That’s sort of the advantage of defensive support in that you can help people more reliably.

While 2 of my characters have primarily berserker stuff, all my characters have at least 2 sets of armor that is more defensive and usually a hybrid of offense and defense. For the longest, I played a berserker mesmer and had fun killing stuff really fast but it just got annoying going down in a blink before I could react (which is likely the main way you go down as a berserker mesmer) so I tried a making a power/healing phantasm mesmer and it’s a big change…probably the first build set-up I ‘theory-crafted’ myself and had lots of success…it doesn’t kill very fast but I can literally face tank champions and some dungeon mobs if I wanted to, heal up the damage my phantasms take and fight an attrition battle. It’s a different kind of playstyle and I can do other things in combat while still dealing damage.

iczek.9628:

Same here. My ranger was 100% defensive. Mobs were taking so long to kill and I thought well when I run dungeons I’m not contributing much. Today I switched to Beserker and a very different game opened up. Mobs fall down quite fast now, I blow right through them. It’s very nice for farming too.

You shouldn’t expect to kill fast with a 100% defensive build. If you yourself are geared defensively, then you probably should take an offensive pet, traits to support the pet’s damage and weapons/utilities to help them hit harder. Running a Beastmaster build in PvE isn’t quite effective but it doesn’t really kill that slow while still giving you a huge margin of error that lets you do other crazy things…also, your pet can be made so strong, it just solos Vet Karkas for you while you make a sandwich.

People underestimate defensive strategies, IMO. It’s not so much about how much slower you kill or how much punishment overall you are capable of taking but what you can do with that margin of error you open up.

Leo G.4501:

also, your pet can be made so strong, it just solos Vet Karkas for you while you make a sandwich.

…. Man, I really have to get around to getting a hunter past single digits.

People underestimate defensive strategies, IMO. It’s not so much about how much slower you kill or how much punishment overall you are capable of taking but what you can do with that margin of error you open up.

Totally concurred.

Leo G.4501:

Uruz Six.6594:

I’m just coming off of the opposite, actually. During one of my recent leveling armor upgrades, I switched my thief’s usual carrion setup for zerker, P/D for D/P, re-traited for offense, and gave it a go. The backstab crits were nice as well as the direct damage, but I missed dodging all over, blazing away merrily out of stealth, and not faceplanting when my initiative ran out. It felt like I was going higher reward for a much higher risk.

The leveling upgrade after that I went back to carrion, P/D, and re-traited again for defense. The improvement was noticeable. I may not be ganking mobs in backstabs but I had a much thicker cushion of error thanks to the improved vitality and defensive traits and the mobs were still dropping pretty fast regardless. He’s back to being what I consider fun.

Nothing against OP’s decision, its fun for him so run with it. In PvE, its all in what you want out of your character.

Same.

Granted, I have fun on my characters build primarily for offense, I have more fun being reliable. In the OP’s example, why not just stop and rez the Thief instead of trying to kill the mob? That’s sort of the advantage of defensive support in that you can help people more reliably.

Because it is counter intuitive as hell. First of it locks you in place and stops you from doing anything but rez-ing. Second, the rate of rez is fixed and is slower when you are marked as in combat. End result is that it is unlikely that he would be able to keep pace with the damage output of the mob.

digiowl.9620:

Leo G.4501:

Uruz Six.6594:

I’m just coming off of the opposite, actually. During one of my recent leveling armor upgrades, I switched my thief’s usual carrion setup for zerker, P/D for D/P, re-traited for offense, and gave it a go. The backstab crits were nice as well as the direct damage, but I missed dodging all over, blazing away merrily out of stealth, and not faceplanting when my initiative ran out. It felt like I was going higher reward for a much higher risk.

The leveling upgrade after that I went back to carrion, P/D, and re-traited again for defense. The improvement was noticeable. I may not be ganking mobs in backstabs but I had a much thicker cushion of error thanks to the improved vitality and defensive traits and the mobs were still dropping pretty fast regardless. He’s back to being what I consider fun.

Nothing against OP’s decision, its fun for him so run with it. In PvE, its all in what you want out of your character.

Same.

Granted, I have fun on my characters build primarily for offense, I have more fun being reliable. In the OP’s example, why not just stop and rez the Thief instead of trying to kill the mob? That’s sort of the advantage of defensive support in that you can help people more reliably.

Because it is counter intuitive as hell. First of it locks you in place and stops you from doing anything but rez-ing. Second, the rate of rez is fixed and is slower when you are marked as in combat. End result is that it is unlikely that he would be able to keep pace with the damage output of the mob.

The rate of healing on a downed player is quite high. If you’ve got the toughness to take a pounding, it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to pull up someone from downed state.

same exact thing happened to me after 3 months i think good story a very common one.. it happends to all of us sooner or later.. all became zerker.. atleast in 1 character to farm

Direct damage scales way better than any other stuff in the game and sadly most PvE is about dealing damage.

Now toughness is important at some point at managing aggro so it matters in dungeons.

Palador.2170:

digiowl.9620:

Never mind the massive irony is that piling on toughness in dungeons is likely to make you the mob magnet, negating any survivability said toughness is supposed to provide.

As i sit here reading i start to wonder if why the mobs are such damage sponges are because ANet knows that zerker is that massive but can’t find a way to tone it down.

I wanted to quote these two lines right here, because they go together so well.

Tell me, if a group of people was beating on you, and you had to decide who to take down first, who would you go for? The guy that’s doing the least damage, but will be the hardest to take out of the fight? No, you’d go for the guy kicking your face in, and sporting a glass jaw.

Mobs should target high power first, not high toughness. No, this doesn’t fix much of anything in a group where everyone’s full ‘zerker, but it’s how I’d think things should work in general. Right?

That’s why people is still asking for a return of the holy trinity… Because ANet yelled all over the world about “we took trinity off the game”… But they replaced it with a broken and stupid mechanic.

Leo G.4501:

digiowl.9620:

Leo G.4501:

Uruz Six.6594:

I’m just coming off of the opposite, actually. During one of my recent leveling armor upgrades, I switched my thief’s usual carrion setup for zerker, P/D for D/P, re-traited for offense, and gave it a go. The backstab crits were nice as well as the direct damage, but I missed dodging all over, blazing away merrily out of stealth, and not faceplanting when my initiative ran out. It felt like I was going higher reward for a much higher risk.

The leveling upgrade after that I went back to carrion, P/D, and re-traited again for defense. The improvement was noticeable. I may not be ganking mobs in backstabs but I had a much thicker cushion of error thanks to the improved vitality and defensive traits and the mobs were still dropping pretty fast regardless. He’s back to being what I consider fun.

Nothing against OP’s decision, its fun for him so run with it. In PvE, its all in what you want out of your character.

Same.

Granted, I have fun on my characters build primarily for offense, I have more fun being reliable. In the OP’s example, why not just stop and rez the Thief instead of trying to kill the mob? That’s sort of the advantage of defensive support in that you can help people more reliably.

Because it is counter intuitive as hell. First of it locks you in place and stops you from doing anything but rez-ing. Second, the rate of rez is fixed and is slower when you are marked as in combat. End result is that it is unlikely that he would be able to keep pace with the damage output of the mob.

The rate of healing on a downed player is quite high. If you’ve got the toughness to take a pounding, it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to pull up someone from downed state.

If i could dodge right out of it, i would. But dodge is locked unless i hit a direction key first, something that happens nowhere else in the game. And a couple of seconds is more than fast enough for any of the larger kinds of mobs to crank out their dodge-or-die moves.

My first major experience of this was with the taumanova reactor event, and people piling up on the bridge. Trying to help them invariably resulted in me or others going down ourselves. Because either a ember put a DOT under us or the elementals flame projectile came through, and we failed to dodge it in time because of the nonsensical lock on dodge i mentioned.

digiowl.9620:

Leo G.4501:

digiowl.9620:

Leo G.4501:

Uruz Six.6594:

I’m just coming off of the opposite, actually. During one of my recent leveling armor upgrades, I switched my thief’s usual carrion setup for zerker, P/D for D/P, re-traited for offense, and gave it a go. The backstab crits were nice as well as the direct damage, but I missed dodging all over, blazing away merrily out of stealth, and not faceplanting when my initiative ran out. It felt like I was going higher reward for a much higher risk.

The leveling upgrade after that I went back to carrion, P/D, and re-traited again for defense. The improvement was noticeable. I may not be ganking mobs in backstabs but I had a much thicker cushion of error thanks to the improved vitality and defensive traits and the mobs were still dropping pretty fast regardless. He’s back to being what I consider fun.

Nothing against OP’s decision, its fun for him so run with it. In PvE, its all in what you want out of your character.

Same.

Granted, I have fun on my characters build primarily for offense, I have more fun being reliable. In the OP’s example, why not just stop and rez the Thief instead of trying to kill the mob? That’s sort of the advantage of defensive support in that you can help people more reliably.

Because it is counter intuitive as hell. First of it locks you in place and stops you from doing anything but rez-ing. Second, the rate of rez is fixed and is slower when you are marked as in combat. End result is that it is unlikely that he would be able to keep pace with the damage output of the mob.

The rate of healing on a downed player is quite high. If you’ve got the toughness to take a pounding, it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to pull up someone from downed state.

If i could dodge right out of it, i would. But dodge is locked unless i hit a direction key first, something that happens nowhere else in the game. And a couple of seconds is more than fast enough for any of the larger kinds of mobs to crank out their dodge-or-die moves.

My first major experience of this was with the taumanova reactor event, and people piling up on the bridge. Trying to help them invariably resulted in me or others going down ourselves. Because either a ember put a DOT under us or the elementals flame projectile came through, and we failed to dodge it in time because of the nonsensical lock on dodge i mentioned.

And in that situation, would being Berserker help you?

Killing the Flame Elemental is more a group effort than a ‘it went down because I’m wearing zerker gear!’ effort.

Ok, poor example. But what i was trying to put a example to is that there are all kinds of issues with trying to help someone in this way in the middle of a fight if the mob(s) are not otherwise occupied.

Leo G.4501:

iczek.9628:

Same here. My ranger was 100% defensive. Mobs were taking so long to kill and I thought well when I run dungeons I’m not contributing much. Today I switched to Beserker and a very different game opened up. Mobs fall down quite fast now, I blow right through them. It’s very nice for farming too.

You shouldn’t expect to kill fast with a 100% defensive build. If you yourself are geared defensively, then you probably should take an offensive pet, traits to support the pet’s damage and weapons/utilities to help them hit harder. Running a Beastmaster build in PvE isn’t quite effective but it doesn’t really kill that slow while still giving you a huge margin of error that lets you do other crazy things…also, your pet can be made so strong, it just solos Vet Karkas for you while you make a sandwich.

People underestimate defensive strategies, IMO. It’s not so much about how much slower you kill or how much punishment overall you are capable of taking but what you can do with that margin of error you open up.

And I didn’t expect to kill them fast being 100% defensive. With 30 points in BM and 25 stacks of Master’s Bond my jaguar was holding aggro and tanking mobs including Champions. I just pew pew my way to victory. The big difference I noticed was when I switched from Apothecary gear to Knight’s gear. In Apothecary gear I could not solo the Vet undead or what ever he is in Cursed Shore. He tosses out the grubs which in return shoot poison everywhere. However in my knight’s and zerker gear I can. Also, when boss’ in some dungeons one shot pets it is real unfortunate cause there goes half of my dps. So investing more in my character (offensively) than my pet is worth it.

Either the damage stats need to do less, or the defensive stats need to do more.

I’ll weigh in. I did this a good couple of months ago. Retired my Soldier armor and Rampager trinkets and went all Berserker. The only noticible drop in defense is where even Soldier would have a hard time keeping up. But the increase in damage…way up!

IndigoSundown.5419:

Either the damage stats need to do less, or the defensive stats need to do more.

The latter, unless ANet feels like reworking every last mob in the game.

Thing is tho that the defensive side is fine for SPVP because the professions are more closely aligned, it is in PVE that it breaks down because the mobs are such damage sponges.

Uh oh, you complained on a forum, now the berserker warrior is gonna get hit with the nerf hammer instead of an actual improvement on other builds. That’s what happened to the Elementalists and the Rangers. Good luck.

I learned the same lesson…

When I was a newb doing COF P1 the first few times, my guardian fully outfitted in Knight’s gear used to die from time to time in the portion where you have to stay in the brazier circle. It was embarrassing….no one else was dying there.

I tried the same path with my zerker warrior, and the light dawned…I could cut right through the mobs.

I learned two things:

1. My defensively speced guardian was drawing far more of the mob to my kitten than the other players were dealing with.

2. The rate of damage dealt out by the zerker warrior was FAR better at keeping me alive than any amount of toughness I could build into the guardian (I even tried Cleric’s gear…I am embarrassed to admit).

Now I run full zerker in all four my classes…warrior, guardian, thief, and engineer…and have never regretted it.

As others have mentioned, I think if you play the game long enough everyone will eventually come to this conclusion…this game rewards offense FAR more than defense.

digiowl.9620:

Ok, poor example. But what i was trying to put a example to is that there are all kinds of issues with trying to help someone in this way in the middle of a fight if the mob(s) are not otherwise occupied.

Alright, that’s a fair point.

Utilities help bridge some of the gaps though. I always view my PvE experience in a way that I try to help people first and do damage second. Just doing damage, while it’s effective, seems selfish to me. While building to survive can technically be selfish too, you can try to do something with that survival to help seeing as you have the ability to rez people be it manually or with utility skills or tactics.

iczek.9628:

And I didn’t expect to kill them fast being 100% defensive. With 30 points in BM and 25 stacks of Master’s Bond my jaguar was holding aggro and tanking mobs including Champions. I just pew pew my way to victory. The big difference I noticed was when I switched from Apothecary gear to Knight’s gear. In Apothecary gear I could not solo the Vet undead or what ever he is in Cursed Shore. He tosses out the grubs which in return shoot poison everywhere. However in my knight’s and zerker gear I can. Also, when boss’ in some dungeons one shot pets it is real unfortunate cause there goes half of my dps. So investing more in my character (offensively) than my pet is worth it.

Right, we’re on the same page then

I too run a BM build and while I do support my pet as my main source of damage, I wear Knights armor and Soldier trinkets so that I can crit somewhat often. With the Vet Risen giant, feels like a bad example since that’s one boss who’s damage seems to escalate if you don’t kill him fast. Even on my Phantasm mesmer, it’s hard to keep illusions alive and doing damage because its stomp will knock away Warden so can’t sit in it for protection, so have to rely on mainly damage.

My balanced Elementalist can manage to kill those giants despite not killing them super quick…Swirling Winds destroys the grubs before they land.

It seems to me that what does not work is the middle ground. Full offence and full defence seem to work but I cannot get a mix that works – instead of dealing reasonable damage and having some survivability it deals too little damage and does not have enough survivability.