Guild Wars 2

Something I’ve thought about more and more lately – I wish Anet would retune some of the calculations behind the power/crit/precision to make it scale in a more linear fashion like other stats. The comparatively hyperbolic power growth from focusing on that combination at the expense of others sort of breaks the game.

On the one hand, you have the well-known dominance of berserker stats on end game gear. While a lot of people would prefer offensive stats over defensive ones regardless, the fact that you simply get way more bang for your buck just makes the Zerker trio a no-brainer over anything else.

The other issue I’ve noticed is that skills that that are balanced around crits (such as Air on Ele Scepter) have to be weak at the baseline in order to not be OP with berserker scaling. This results on those sets and skills being noticeably weaker and hard to use effectively relative to other sets while leveling or with builds that aren’t highly optimized. Personally, I see this as an issue.

Not going to happen, as the balance team as SPVP myopia. And there the defensive builds win, simply because they can outlast the enemy in a straight up fight. This as an artifact of how both sides start on equal grounds in SPVP, but not in PVE.

One example of this is a simple one right now. Attack a toxic dramoss out in kessex using only autoattacks, and count how many autoattacks you need to do to take it down. Then do the same inside inside the tower. The difference is staggering. The mob scaling in this game is bunk, making all at level fights attrition fights.

And this is compounded by how you rarely fight a mob 1v1 unless you take special precautions. More likely you are alone vs 3+ mobs. This makes their spike attacks (the ones put in there to make us use those interrupts and make the fight more “active”) difficult to notice and favors base AOE spam to clear out the area as fast as possible.

At the moment critical damage goes up exponentially.

The more precision you have, the more effective the power and critical damage. The same goes the other way around. (The more power, the more effective your critical chance & damage)

In PvP we can only increase the critical damage to a certain amount. In PvE we can go quite a bit further.

If there was a way to slow the curve at the top end and make it more linear, it would perhaps make the difference between mixed-average builds and full berserker builds less striking.

In PvP we wouldn’t see the difference unless we went full berserker + sigils + runes + offensive traits. And even then it shouldn’t be that clear a difference.

Digiowl raises a good point with the difference in combat between PvE and PvP. Attrition isn’t really the word I’d use for PvE fights though. (I might have misinterpreted your post here)

In an attrition fight I assume one side manages its resources better than the other in order to win over time. The losing side did not have the resource management to come out victorious.

In solo PvE the player has limited resources (skill cooldowns and endurance mostly) that can be managed, but the monster has no such thing. Most monsters have no resource management at all. No healing, no damage prevention (while being able to deal damage), no condition removal, nothing.

In team PvE the player side sort of has limitless resources as well. They can blast all their cooldowns, but even then, they can just keep ressurecting one another. Very few of my PvE party wipes seem to be caused by losing an attrition fight, most seem to be lost by poor positioning and missing our dodges on damage spikes. (Not so much the lack of endurance, much more the lack of timing.)

(This does not go for all fights! But for most.)

So building for an attrition fight by picking up more resource management (in the way of healing power and toughness) seems to be a poor option in PvE.

This would probably be different if there was no downed state, and if PvE mobs could use more pressure to kill, instead of spikes.

If PvP had a meta in which players could 1 or 2 shot players regardless of their defense, we wouldn’t see attrition fights there either.

That said, the difference in damage between full critical damage and a mixed build is huge at the moment in PvE. Managing this difference could make it easier for the design of new content to be challenging for berserker groups, while not creating tiresome mountains to chip away at for groups that focus less on critical damage.

Some food for thought: What if Tequatls healthpool was designed to sustain critical damage?

What if we couldn’t crit on mobs? So this would make it easier for noobs like myself with soldier gear . I do really hate berserker players , they are so pro and it annoys me . I bought 1 berserker piece and got downed several times, So I switched back to soldier. I think we shouldn’t be able to crit , so bads like myself will not be forced to use this berserker gear. Which is for pros only.

I think that the scaling on Berserker gear is fine. Most classes DO at least have to give up quite a bit to wear it, especially the really squishy ones. I think the problem lies more in the fact that the scaling of Vitality, Toughness, and Healing Power are just aweful. Condition Damage isn’t so bad, but then you hit the condition stack limit.

The defensive/helpful stats really need to scale up on a non-linear curve, so that having just say 500 Toughness/Vitality/Healing Power would be a significant boost to defenses, but going all out and getting 1300+ wouldn’t give much of an advantage. This still satisfies the “we don’t want tanks and healers” motto of the developers.

A person in a full set of defensive armor, with a full defensive build, takes only half the damage of someone in full Berserker gear. The person in full Berserker gear, with a full offensive build, deals nearly three times as much damage. But as I have said, the synergy between the Berserker and Assassin stats is a good thing, and I think we should leave it alone, we just need to adjust the scalings on the other stats so that they become worth speccing into, and possibly synergize them.

Edit :Note I only talk about these sets because nothing else offers full Prec+Crit Dmg.

Hannelore.8153:

The defensive/helpful stats really need to scale up on a non-linear curve, so that having just say 500 Toughness/Vitality/Healing Power would be a significant boost to defenses, but going all out and getting 1300+ wouldn’t give much of an advantage. This still satisfies the “we don’t want tanks and healers” motto of the developers.

Like an inverse of the berserker curve? Where extra pieces become less powerful instead of more powerful?

You might be on to something, but I think berserker should follow the same rules.

We have to keep in mind that currently pretty much all of PvE is easy enough for strong players to beat without any defensive gear. So even if bringing some defensive gear is becoming more useful, it would still be an unnecessarily large loss of DPS. Especially since those last parts of berserker (that we would be replacing) are more powerful than the first parts of the set.

The Lost Witch.7601:

Digiowl raises a good point with the difference in combat between PvE and PvP. Attrition isn’t really the word I’d use for PvE fights though. (I might have misinterpreted your post here)

In an attrition fight I assume one side manages its resources better than the other in order to win over time. The losing side did not have the resource management to come out victorious.

In solo PvE the player has limited resources (skill cooldowns and endurance mostly) that can be managed, but the monster has no such thing. Most monsters have no resource management at all. No healing, no damage prevention (while being able to deal damage), no condition removal, nothing.

In team PvE the player side sort of has limitless resources as well. They can blast all their cooldowns, but even then, they can just keep ressurecting one another. Very few of my PvE party wipes seem to be caused by losing an attrition fight, most seem to be lost by poor positioning and missing our dodges on damage spikes. (Not so much the lack of endurance, much more the lack of timing.)

(This does not go for all fights! But for most.)

So building for an attrition fight by picking up more resource management (in the way of healing power and toughness) seems to be a poor option in PvE.

This would probably be different if there was no downed state, and if PvE mobs could use more pressure to kill, instead of spikes.

If PvP had a meta in which players could 1 or 2 shot players regardless of their defense, we wouldn’t see attrition fights there either.

I call it attrition in that the only way to win against a mob is to remove its massive health while trading blows. This because control skills are tuned for SPVP, where a single application, or countering of same, can make or break a fight. In PVE however, it is more often than not wasted effort. I have seen mobs last through 2-3 recharges of such skills, meaning that the fight lasted multiple minutes.

And when one side has to manage resources (healing cooldowns and similar) while another does not (just a single massive health pool), the side with the management better not ever slip up or or it will be a slow inevitable march to the death.

DPS short circuit this by significantly reducing the duration of the fight vs defensive.