Guild Wars 2

Let’s look at stats and the GW2 character.

You get 5496 total stat points, while naked, just for being lvl 80. That’s 916 Power, 916 Precision, etc. Incidentally, you’re already born with 50% bonus crit damage, too, but I’m going to leave that out, because it’s built into the damage formulas already.

You get 70 trait points, each of which translates to the equivalent of 20 stat points (for example my guardian can spent 1 trait point and get 10 precision and 10 condition damage), for a total of 1400 equivalent stat points. Here I’m using equivalent stat points because of how the item budgets work. For example, you could have a helm with 45, 32, and 32 stat points, or you could have one with 45, 32, and 2% crit. Or with Traits, you can get 10 condition damage or 1% crit for a trait point.

Damage dealt is based off weapon strength, which for my guardian is 950ish or 1050ish, so let’s just call it 1000 which directly adds with power in damage calculations.

So… a character without any stats from gear already has 7900 equivalent stat points.

A whole exotic armor set has the equivalent of 763 stat points on it, i.e. less than 10% of your naked stats. An exotic 1h weapon has 218 stats. A ring 163. Earring 96. Amulet 218. Grand total is about 2150 from your gear (not attempting to count runes vs seals vs orbs – just leave them out, cuz they’re not on ascended anyway).

Your total character stats with equipment equate to 10050 (minus upgrades), of which 7900ish aren’t even from your gear, approx 79% of your stats. With gear making up about 21% of all your stats combined, making even what looks like a decent size increase on a single piece doesn’t affect your character’s overall capabilities.

Another way of looking at the effects of statistics improvements via gear is to look directly at the damage formula.

Here I’ll take the simplified damage formula for direct damage skills.

Damage is (weapon damage + power) times some scalars, then divided by the target’s (armor + toughness).

Weapon damage depends on 1h vs 2h and all, and there’s a range with random variation, so let’s just take 1000 as an average for that. A typical lvl 80 exotic character may have 916 power while naked, say 200 power from traits, 236 from armor (that’s the max power karma set), 426 power from accessories, and 180 from weapons (going full zerker). In the damage formula, the variables that come from your character add up to 2960. Now imagine you get all 3 of the new ascended items, again going full berserkers. Each adds 11 power, for a total of 33. This is an increase of just over 1% to your actual damage output.
The relative improvement is a bit more if you have very conservative/tankish/defensive gear, potentially getting as high as 2% increase in damage, or so.

I’ll admit, I was as infuriated as anyone when I saw they were adding a new tier. And then I did the math. At this rate, all it’s doing is giving us something to work on. The actual effects on character performance will be so small as not to adversely affect the tuning of previous content. You also won’t actually see any relevant performance differences in wvw or how many skills it takes to kill a mob.

The mechanical advantage of the increase in stats from ascended will be fairly small once aggregated with naked stats, traits, and slots for which ascended doesn’t exist (yet?).

The problem is that it’s going to have a big influence on the mindset of the in-game community. For a lot of people, gameplay is going to focus on acquiring that higher tier gear, even though the benefit is small. Likewise, it’s going to add a sense of elitism in grouping…if they’re even running other content at all. What this ends up doing is dividing the community.

It isn’t the mechanics of the change so much as it is the meta-game aspects that bother me. If I could find a server that had a community that largely eschewed ascended gear and maintained the attitude of running fractals “just for kicks,” I think the addition of the gear would become transparent.

This is same way Federal Goverment has taken so much power and our money away from us. It starts by just a little and over time adding just a little more is not that bad right?

mulch.2586:

Another way of looking at the effects of statistics improvements via gear is to look directly at the damage formula.

Here I’ll take the simplified damage formula for direct damage skills.

Damage is (weapon damage + power) times some scalars, then divided by the target’s (armor + toughness).

Weapon damage depends on 1h vs 2h and all, and there’s a range with random variation, so let’s just take 1000 as an average for that. A typical lvl 80 exotic character may have 916 power while naked, say 200 power from traits, 236 from armor (that’s the max power karma set), 426 power from accessories, and 180 from weapons (going full zerker). In the damage formula, the variables that come from your character add up to 2960. Now imagine you get all 3 of the new ascended items, again going full berserkers. Each adds 11 power, for a total of 33. This is an increase of just over 1% to your actual damage output.
The relative improvement is a bit more if you have very conservative/tankish/defensive gear, potentially getting as high as 2% increase in damage, or so.

I’ll admit, I was as infuriated as anyone when I saw they were adding a new tier. And then I did the math. At this rate, all it’s doing is giving us something to work on. The actual effects on character performance will be so small as not to adversely affect the tuning of previous content. You also won’t actually see any relevant performance differences in wvw or how many skills it takes to kill a mob.

So what happens in months from now after they have added just a little increase 10 times over. IT is principle of how they changed the game from what they sold us.

Moddo.7105:

mulch.2586:

Another way of looking at the effects of statistics improvements via gear is to look directly at the damage formula.

Here I’ll take the simplified damage formula for direct damage skills.

Damage is (weapon damage + power) times some scalars, then divided by the target’s (armor + toughness).

Weapon damage depends on 1h vs 2h and all, and there’s a range with random variation, so let’s just take 1000 as an average for that. A typical lvl 80 exotic character may have 916 power while naked, say 200 power from traits, 236 from armor (that’s the max power karma set), 426 power from accessories, and 180 from weapons (going full zerker). In the damage formula, the variables that come from your character add up to 2960. Now imagine you get all 3 of the new ascended items, again going full berserkers. Each adds 11 power, for a total of 33. This is an increase of just over 1% to your actual damage output.
The relative improvement is a bit more if you have very conservative/tankish/defensive gear, potentially getting as high as 2% increase in damage, or so.

I’ll admit, I was as infuriated as anyone when I saw they were adding a new tier. And then I did the math. At this rate, all it’s doing is giving us something to work on. The actual effects on character performance will be so small as not to adversely affect the tuning of previous content. You also won’t actually see any relevant performance differences in wvw or how many skills it takes to kill a mob.

So what happens in months from now after they have added just a little increase 10 times over. IT is principle of how they changed the game from what they sold us.

Well, they’ve added maybe 2% to a defensive player’s dps by affecting a quarter of the item slots. If they do yet another complete about-face, even if they add ascended gear with stats that are double exotics, that’s still about +21% to total stats.

This illustrates how very flat and non-gear dependent the GW2 system is. Other games make stats really matter. GW2 makes them just eye-candy.

Moddo.7105:

This is same way Federal Goverment has taken so much power and our money away from us. It starts by just a little and over time adding just a little more is not that bad right?

. . . and yet, there’s a side to that which people keep forgetting. The (United States) Federal Government is not one big amorphous blob. They’re responsible for many . . . many things which we would sorely miss if they stopped handling them.

Sure, you can have them back out of your daily life. But your mail is going to be handled by private companies now who have their own methods and might not get you your mail in the same amount of time. Your utilities might cost more if there’s nobody even potentially overseeing the myriad providers. Then there might not be money for road repair, pipeline repair, bridge repair . . . well maybe there will be if you want to pay an increased local tax since now there’s no funding to be had from a Federal Government.

. . . and then there’s the Internet . . . you probably are gonna have more problems with local providers blocking access to certain networks if there’s no Federal Government to tell them “don’t do that”.

Please, for the love of kittens and puppies, stop bringing real world politics into these whole things.

Edit: Typo

Merthax.5172:

The mechanical advantage of the increase in stats from ascended will be fairly small once aggregated with naked stats, traits, and slots for which ascended doesn’t exist (yet?).

The problem is that it’s going to have a big influence on the mindset of the in-game community. For a lot of people, gameplay is going to focus on acquiring that higher tier gear, even though the benefit is small. Likewise, it’s going to add a sense of elitism in grouping…if they’re even running other content at all. What this ends up doing is dividing the community.

It isn’t the mechanics of the change so much as it is the meta-game aspects that bother me. If I could find a server that had a community that largely eschewed ascended gear and maintained the attitude of running fractals “just for kicks,” I think the addition of the gear would become transparent.

Mindset is a big deal. Especially with a playerbase that really doesn’t understand how the stats figure in, and a game that lacks a DPS parser.

So some people react because they really just wanted something to work on, and this, no matter how trivial, is something to work on.

Other people react into panic mode about a gear treadmill without taking note of how very flat this treadmill is.

My hope in putting this thread up was to give a way that doesn’t rely on players doing algebra, and give some concrete information about how little the gear matters — in hopes of getting a more relaxed atmosphere about it in the community.

mulch.2586:

Merthax.5172:

The mechanical advantage of the increase in stats from ascended will be fairly small once aggregated with naked stats, traits, and slots for which ascended doesn’t exist (yet?).

The problem is that it’s going to have a big influence on the mindset of the in-game community. For a lot of people, gameplay is going to focus on acquiring that higher tier gear, even though the benefit is small. Likewise, it’s going to add a sense of elitism in grouping…if they’re even running other content at all. What this ends up doing is dividing the community.

It isn’t the mechanics of the change so much as it is the meta-game aspects that bother me. If I could find a server that had a community that largely eschewed ascended gear and maintained the attitude of running fractals “just for kicks,” I think the addition of the gear would become transparent.

Mindset is a big deal. Especially with a playerbase that really doesn’t understand how the stats figure in, and a game that lacks a DPS parser.

So some people react because they really just wanted something to work on, and this, no matter how trivial, is something to work on.

Other people react into panic mode about a gear treadmill without taking note of how very flat this treadmill is.

My hope in putting this thread up was to give a way that doesn’t rely on players doing algebra, and give some concrete information about how little the gear matters — in hopes of getting a more relaxed atmosphere about it in the community.

That won’t quiet the people who are saying “no increase at all or you broke your promise” while waving links of the manifesto.

And before someone chimes in – they might have a point, but you can go about it better than loading a question so any answer is going to be bad. “Why have you betrayed your manifesto?” Loads the question. “Why did you introduce this, if your manifesto says…” is less presumptive.

A much better (compound) question(s) at this point? “Would you introduce this again given the negative reaction which arose? If so, would you make any change to the method in which it was introduced?”

mulch.2586:

Merthax.5172:

The mechanical advantage of the increase in stats from ascended will be fairly small once aggregated with naked stats, traits, and slots for which ascended doesn’t exist (yet?).

The problem is that it’s going to have a big influence on the mindset of the in-game community. For a lot of people, gameplay is going to focus on acquiring that higher tier gear, even though the benefit is small. Likewise, it’s going to add a sense of elitism in grouping…if they’re even running other content at all. What this ends up doing is dividing the community.

It isn’t the mechanics of the change so much as it is the meta-game aspects that bother me. If I could find a server that had a community that largely eschewed ascended gear and maintained the attitude of running fractals “just for kicks,” I think the addition of the gear would become transparent.

Mindset is a big deal. Especially with a playerbase that really doesn’t understand how the stats figure in, and a game that lacks a DPS parser.

So some people react because they really just wanted something to work on, and this, no matter how trivial, is something to work on.

Other people react into panic mode about a gear treadmill without taking note of how very flat this treadmill is.

My hope in putting this thread up was to give a way that doesn’t rely on players doing algebra, and give some concrete information about how little the gear matters — in hopes of getting a more relaxed atmosphere about it in the community.

Um, in general treadmills are flat. Its not the treadmill itself, but the Gear part of the treadmill. If we look at it in the sense of +stats; the question we should ask is, why can’t people be satisfied with a visual treadmill? Esp. when +stats offer no true progression.

I wrote a thread about this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Vertical-vs-Horizontal-a-compromise/first#post839846

My response to this type of post is here…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Haggling-Over-the-Price/first#post842250

Enzomiles.6197:

My response to this type of post is here…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Haggling-Over-the-Price/first#post842250

I saw that, funny! glad the moderators weren’t knee-jerk about it

On the other hand, so many of the 10k posts on ascension have been panics about having to keep up to compete in wvw, or feeling forced to get the gear — for those concerns, the miniscule influence is relevant.

mulch.2586:

Enzomiles.6197:

My response to this type of post is here…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Haggling-Over-the-Price/first#post842250

I saw that, funny! glad the moderators weren’t knee-jerk about it

On the other hand, so many of the 10k posts on ascension have been panics about having to keep up to compete in wvw, or feeling forced to get the gear — for those concerns, the miniscule influence is relevant.

Its not the amount, its the principle.

Leonard.2867:

mulch.2586:

Enzomiles.6197:

My response to this type of post is here…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Haggling-Over-the-Price/first#post842250

I saw that, funny! glad the moderators weren’t knee-jerk about it

On the other hand, so many of the 10k posts on ascension have been panics about having to keep up to compete in wvw, or feeling forced to get the gear — for those concerns, the miniscule influence is relevant.

Its not the amount, its the principle.

Actually it’s the interest that’s killer.

(And yes, that’s relevant, if we look at the “treadmill” as a compounding interest curve we are in so much trouble . . . )

Leonard.2867:

mulch.2586:

Merthax.5172:

The mechanical advantage of the increase in stats from ascended will be fairly small once aggregated with naked stats, traits, and slots for which ascended doesn’t exist (yet?).

The problem is that it’s going to have a big influence on the mindset of the in-game community. For a lot of people, gameplay is going to focus on acquiring that higher tier gear, even though the benefit is small. Likewise, it’s going to add a sense of elitism in grouping…if they’re even running other content at all. What this ends up doing is dividing the community.

It isn’t the mechanics of the change so much as it is the meta-game aspects that bother me. If I could find a server that had a community that largely eschewed ascended gear and maintained the attitude of running fractals “just for kicks,” I think the addition of the gear would become transparent.

Mindset is a big deal. Especially with a playerbase that really doesn’t understand how the stats figure in, and a game that lacks a DPS parser.

So some people react because they really just wanted something to work on, and this, no matter how trivial, is something to work on.

Other people react into panic mode about a gear treadmill without taking note of how very flat this treadmill is.

My hope in putting this thread up was to give a way that doesn’t rely on players doing algebra, and give some concrete information about how little the gear matters — in hopes of getting a more relaxed atmosphere about it in the community.

Um, in general treadmills are flat. Its not the treadmill itself, but the Gear part of the treadmill. If we look at it in the sense of +stats; the question we should ask is, why can’t people be satisfied with a visual treadmill? Esp. when +stats offer no true progression.

I wrote a thread about this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Vertical-vs-Horizontal-a-compromise/first#post839846

I think except for trivial amounts of stats, what the ascended is shaping up to be is a gating mechanism for some of the content – the Agony mechanic.

The stats are such a small influence that it’s basically horizontal. A 1% slope is 99% horizontal.

As to why can’t people be satisfied with graphics-only progression, I think if you visit gamespot, mmorpg.com, and sites like that, there was a lot of negative information about how easy you get to 80 and max gear.

My son said Pokket (who had an exclusive interview with Colin J of Arenanet) wrote of the experience of too easily, too quickly reaching max and then feeling lost and unmotivated. When I try to find what he read, I can’t find it because there’s so many hits to “guild wars 2 has no endgame.” To win back those who’ve left, and to win new customers, Arenanet needs to counter that perception.

Adding ascended gear and an infinitely progressing set of FotM dungeons gives an answer to those who need something to work on. People are dumb enough about stats that they’ll see it’s a higher color and just assume it’s meaningfully better, despite the actual math.

I think Arenanet intended it to be the compromise — throw a bone for those complaining about no endgame and nothing to do, whilst keeping a very horizontal progression.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Leonard.2867:

mulch.2586:

Enzomiles.6197:

My response to this type of post is here…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Haggling-Over-the-Price/first#post842250

I saw that, funny! glad the moderators weren’t knee-jerk about it

On the other hand, so many of the 10k posts on ascension have been panics about having to keep up to compete in wvw, or feeling forced to get the gear — for those concerns, the miniscule influence is relevant.

Its not the amount, its the principle.

Actually it’s the interest that’s killer.

(And yes, that’s relevant, if we look at the “treadmill” as a compounding interest curve we are in so much trouble . . . )

How? This compounding interest is like what my bank pays for checking accounts. I always keep a few thousand $$ there, but at tax time there’s almost nothing to claim.

Compounding fractions of a percent is non-zero, but infinitesimal.

mulch.2586:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Leonard.2867:

mulch.2586:

Enzomiles.6197:

My response to this type of post is here…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Haggling-Over-the-Price/first#post842250

I saw that, funny! glad the moderators weren’t knee-jerk about it

On the other hand, so many of the 10k posts on ascension have been panics about having to keep up to compete in wvw, or feeling forced to get the gear — for those concerns, the miniscule influence is relevant.

Its not the amount, its the principle.

Actually it’s the interest that’s killer.

(And yes, that’s relevant, if we look at the “treadmill” as a compounding interest curve we are in so much trouble . . . )

How? This compounding interest is like what my bank pays for checking accounts. I always keep a few thousand $$ there, but at tax time there’s almost nothing to claim.

Compounding fractions of a percent is non-zero, but infinitesimal.

In this analogy, let me point out compounding interest can be very bad if you’re managing not to pay down all the value of the interest.

For this, let’s use “interest” to represent the effort to get Ascended. Now, if later tiers get added with higher stats and more effort, and you still didn’t get Ascended (i.e. didn’t pay down the interest) . . .

Then you’re looking at more effort, continuously, until you can put down enough money to make the principal go down so the interest doesn’t compound so badly.

. . . this is how loans make money off you.

It also depends on the period of how often it’s compounded. Yearly? Not a big deal. Monthly? You might be able to work with that. Daily?

“Uh oh.”

So my hope is if this turns out to be compounding, it’s more like “yearly” rather than “daily”.

I’d rather it not be any kind of form of this at all, and I truly hope it isn’t. But everyone is thinking of a linear progression when a curve could be as likely with the data we have right now.