Guild Wars 2

With the latest patch changing the game game balance upside down it became even much more clearer now, that the whole game is in a dire need to get completely rebalanced around its defensive gameplay elemwents, which currently – how do I say it appropiately – do SUCK HARD, to keep the whole damage creep of this game which you created over the last 3 years of patching in check, because you consistantly ignored to rebalance the defensive gameplay.
Most elements of it are still working like on game release, while you consitantly increased the damage creep of this game to a point, where all the defensive mechanics of this game are way too weak to compete with this permanent damage creep.
I have wrritten this down already in the thief section, but I want to talk about it here in a more general suggestive way, cause I beleive here it has also greater chances to be seen by the responsible devs..but thats just a hope of mine …

To know what actually needs to be done against all this damage creep is to know first, what actually causes all this damage creep and what hasn’t been done against it until today after 3 years of the game beign already released, to know what has been ignored for all the time to rebalance.

1)One big part of the damage creep comes from the Stat Synergy of Power, precision and Ferocity, as when used together, this Stat Triangle significantly boosts your maximum damage you can deal into high heights to the point, that you can currently burst hit even a high defensive player build to death in a matter of freaking seconds, that you start to believe, that its totally senseless to play a defensive build at all, cause even without all the vitality and toughness you die same as fast currently, if not even much faster due to having much lesser health..but even the current max health under the defensive builds are of 0 help at all agaisnt this damage creep

2) Another factor of this damage creep comes from the easy stacking of 25 staples of Might, together used with Fury to significantly boost up even much more your max damage (DPS), without that there exists actually an appropiate counter to that in the defensive gameplay as protection alone is too ineffective and not all classes have effective ways to get that boon at all.

3) Defensive Stats have no synergies with each other, while offensive Stats have synergies with each other by boosting up together effectively your DPS even better through critical damage. Condition gameplay doesn’t even require any synergies at all to deal high damage, there you need only 1 single stat and upgrades/buff items that ioncrease significantly your condition durations which is for a gameplay, that completely ingores all player defense just too effective for that simple damage maxing by requiring only 1 stat, profiting from every point in power also too as nice extra bonus for the base damahe that you deal with your weapon as a condi build and precision to make certain conditions that happen under critical hits appear more consistantly, which is why Sinister condi builds are now so effective

How to fix this in the next posting:

To fix this permanent damage creep and to bring it back to a normal state, where you can battle even under a high defensive build, without getting shreddered into thousand pieces in a matter of seconds, these changes should be done:

1) Add as new Boon to counter Might the boon Sturdiness, which should have also max 25 Stacks and increases instead of Might and Condition damage instead Toughness and Healing Power. 35 Points per Stack, same as like Might adds 35 Points to Power/Condition Damage per Stack, so that you can have up to 875 points more Toughness and Healing Power when being under 25 Stacks of Sturdiness, making it alot tougher to deal damage to you, addign a way to counter all the damafe creep that comes from 25 stacks of Might, which can be reached especially in WvW easily.

2) Add Apathy as new Condition to counter Fury, as it would reduce Critical Hit Rates by 20%. This is absolutely needed to balance out finally all this high crit chance damage burst meta, especialyl for WvW, that comes from all the buff food and passive trait boosts when playing together in a group

3) Increase the Maximum Health high defensive players can have immensively by increasign the Health per Vitality Point from lousy 10 to appropiate 25 HP.
This way would have for example my defensive Thief Build with PVT Gear instead of around 25000 HP in WvW then around 40000 HP and would be substantially alot better then to survive all the condition spam longer, while survivign also better bursts givign you a better chance to react, before you already lie dead on the ground eating dust… it would finally reward high defensive builds with having significantly more health over playing offensively.

4) Add to Toughness the defensive synergy, that it should protect you percentually against being critically hit, so higher your Vitality is and that it should protect you also percentually against Condition Durations, so more Healing Power you have.

With these 4 changes made and reconsidered for the next balance patch, whenever it might come, I think Anet could bring back all the damage creep in GW2 back to a normal level, while also rewarding more build diversity for taking rather a high defensive build over playing a high offensive build, that you actually alos really feel a sigificant difference in both play styles and that defensive builds should be alot tougher to bring down, also too for offensive builds, otherwise it completely feels totally senseless to play with PVT gear for example or any other defensive gear set that provides vitality or toughness, when those stats are so underwhelming compared to the offensive gear sets.

Playing with a high defensive gear set like PVT, that is 2/3rd defensive should feel for an enemy that is a critical burster alot more like fighting agaisnt a high defensive mordrem, agaisnt which they should deal effectively only damage with the help of damaging conditions and vulnerability

I do not agree the powercreep is solely responsible.

Healing and vitality are not balanced to support eachother, toughness was somewhat usefull vs DPS in the past and is now completely passed by by the conditions.

Some focus should shift to repairing and rebalancing healing . Also the general consensus of DPS is everything will be broken when people start dying from condition dmg every 2 minutes due to them not wanting to take a condition clear.

I do not yet see any use in Healers and Tanks I do see use for greatly improved (AOE) heals , AOE clears and other support buffs, which were all negatively affected by the 23 june patch

The huge and overwhelming amount of people swtching to (hybrid-) condition builds, the unlimited stacking of poison and fire have already caused some (wel in our low tier WVW server dozens die in incredulous short time) victims. But Condition removal would be very usefull…
The huge amount of DPS increwase due to builds now focussing on maximized traits instead of stats points has created a minor power spike, rendering toughness less valuable and more hit points

Healing was NERFED in most cases, when considering celestial of power/ and minor healing combo’s healing lost 20-33% effectiveness while poeple neeede more HP to counter the huge spikes. Only FULLY (read: major stat healers, healing runes, sigil of life, dedicated food) dedicated healers gained a small amount of healing… a couple of dozen to be exact..

The fact DPS and Conditions hae both been boosted and Toughness cannot counter 1 of those 2 and is less effective each time power creeps up do not help balance.
Vitality has been boosted as well, and every player gained 750 added health points, but healing cannot fill it’s role. Only 100% full healers have had a margnally boosted effect from healing. Marginally….

I do not think making (y)our character a health bag fixes the problem. I might see uses in healing (and/or vitality) to reduce condition duration yes or maybe just better scaling of healing (related skills with vitality and healing. (regen and so on)

Things that could help solving the problem:

-Nerf burning base dmg
-Make precision have diminish returns like toughness. Instead of linear can make it logarithmic.
-Reduce base healing and increase the scaling with healing power. Similar to what they did to warrior shouts. That way you don’t have people that run no healing power and still heal crazy amounts.
-Reduce base endurance regen. Shortage of dodges make you think more strategically when to use them and moves some builds away from the state of imune/dodge spam.

xDudisx.5914:

Things that could help solving the problem:

1. -Nerf burning base dmg
2. -Make precision have diminish returns like toughness. Instead of linear can make it logarithmic.
3. -Reduce base healing and increase the scaling with healing power. Similar to what they did to warrior shouts. That way you don’t have people that run no healing power and still heal crazy amounts.
4. -Reduce base endurance regen. Shortage of dodges make you think more strategically when to use them and moves some builds away from the state of imune/dodge spam.

1. Might happen personally I find the burning atm moment rather weak In the past my fuly buffed mesmer could do 1 burn but burn 1150 /tick, now burning is 450/ tick only more stacks, I’d advise not to stay in the fields… but if they do they should repair some of the DPS loss from bleeds and poison. They are horridly underwhelming..
2. precision is fine. It wasn’t scaled in fact @ 23 june, it remains the same.in scaling (so points needed have been raised 30%.
3. Yes, please?
4. -NO- you want to be alive longer make sure you can dodge instead of having dodges removed. full tanky builds still suffer a lot of dmg, mostly because ppl do not dodge,

as much as I would agree for those to work, your kitten will feel the wraith of meta players soon :P. They are to say the least a plague to this game and ruining it for players.
I would also like to see a new stat where boon and healing power are the same and have it scale a lot better, giving reason to be support, and over all lowering the base healing power for everyone, giving more diversity on parties. So it is not mindless numbing listening to kittens say STACK MIGHT, FIRE FIELD BLAST BLAST BLAST. and then get mad for missing a second of might. but then again Meta players so they will get kitten and not learn to adapt,even though every support player has had to do since nerfs and patches began.

@ have partially to disagree with you pax too …

Epsecially at your opinion that people “want” not to take condition clears into their builds.
Its often not the point of not wanting to have condition clears, its way more often the case, that the possible builds don’t provide good enough condition clears at all, or lock you into specific builds, if you want to get better condition clears which might not fit to everyones personal liked play style. The thief is such a case, a class with super lousy condition clears, unless you play a high stealthy build where stealth removes conditions.
If you don’t want to play that way, then say immediately good bye to your single most effective way that the whole class has to clear conditions, because anything else is underwhelmingly weak and helps you no bit against condition spammers.

There needs to be made about the general defense gameplay based on Stats, they need an internal synergy that helps reducing Condition Durations with the help of a Synergy between Toughness and Healing Power.
That way would make the new added suggested Boon Sturdiness you also alot more effective agaisnt Condition Spammers, as the stacks of Sturdiness would significantly improve for you then also through that synergy your defense agaisnt conditions letting them end alot sooner on you, cause Sturdiness would increase your max toughness and healing power, making it tougher to defeat you, while helping you also significatly to heal you up if you are on low health as long the boon is on. its a long overdue counter boon to Might thats essentially needed to make defensive builds again competeable agaisnt all this powercreep that anets adds from patch to patch while completely ignoring since 3 years the most basic defensive gameplay systems of this game, like increasing the effectively of Vitality to make our Max Health, thats currently balanced around the games state of 2012 appropiately balanced around the current 2015 powercreep state where everyone and their mom hits now hard like a truck…

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

xDudisx.5914:

Things that could help solving the problem:

1. -Nerf burning base dmg
2. -Make precision have diminish returns like toughness. Instead of linear can make it logarithmic.
3. -Reduce base healing and increase the scaling with healing power. Similar to what they did to warrior shouts. That way you don’t have people that run no healing power and still heal crazy amounts.
4. -Reduce base endurance regen. Shortage of dodges make you think more strategically when to use them and moves some builds away from the state of imune/dodge spam.

1. Might happen personally I find the burning atm moment rather weak In the past my fuly buffed mesmer could do 1 burn but burn 1150 /tick, now burning is 450/ tick only more stacks, I’d advise not to stay in the fields… but if they do they should repair some of the DPS loss from bleeds and poison. They are horridly underwhelming..
2. precision is fine. It wasn’t scaled in fact @ 23 june, it remains the same.in scaling (so points needed have been raised 30%.
3. Yes, please?
4. -NO- you want to be alive longer make sure you can dodge instead of having dodges removed. full tanky builds still suffer a lot of dmg, mostly because ppl do not dodge,

1- They reduced the base dmg but increased the scaling with condi dmg. If you are using a main stat condi dmg gear you should be doing more dmg now.

4- There are builds that can spam so much imune/evades to the point where running zerker their survivability is at the same lvl as other builds running pvt. Like some thief and mesmer builds. Anet did a great job nerfing Vigor uptime and the effect of Vigor itself. But more nerfs are needed. Evade spam is one of the most important things that destroy the game balance. You don’t see people spamming immunes on competitive mobas or fps.

Orpheal.8263:

@ have partially to disagree with you pax too …

Epsecially at your opinion that people “want” not to take condition clears into their builds.
Its often not the point of not wanting to have condition clears, its way more often the case, that the possible builds don’t provide good enough condition clears at all, or lock you into specific builds, if you want to get better condition clears which might not fit to everyones personal liked play style. The thief is such a case, a class with super lousy condition clears, unless you play a high stealthy build where stealth removes conditions.
If you don’t want to play that way, then say immediately good bye to your single most effective way that the whole class has to clear conditions, because anything else is underwhelmingly weak and helps you no bit against condition spammers.

There needs to be made about the general defense gameplay based on Stats, they need an internal synergy that helps reducing Condition Durations with the help of a Synergy between Toughness and Healing Power.
That way would make the new added suggested Boon Sturdiness you also alot more effective agaisnt Condition Spammers, as the stacks of Sturdiness would significantly improve for you then also through that synergy your defense agaisnt conditions letting them end alot sooner on you, cause Sturdiness would increase your max toughness and healing power, making it tougher to defeat you, while helping you also significatly to heal you up if you are on low health as long the boon is on. its a long overdue counter boon to Might thats essentially needed to make defensive builds again competeable agaisnt all this powercreep that anets adds from patch to patch while completely ignoring since 3 years the most basic defensive gameplay systems of this game, like increasing the effectively of Vitality to make our Max Health, thats currently balanced around the games state of 2012 appropiately balanced around the current 2015 powercreep state where everyone and their mom hits now hard like a truck…

Yes I do see a problem here tho how do you supose the defensive players would stack the sturdiness buff?
Like adrenaline for a warrior you gain more then longer the fight go on and lose it while shrugging of conditions and make blows that connect into glancing blows instead?

Sturdiness could be applied for you in many different ways, same as like there are tons of different ways how you gain Might currently:

Gain Sturdiness through using your Healing Skill
Gain Sturdiness through makign a successful Dodge Roll
Gain Sturdiness through using a Class Specific Skill, like Steal, Virtues, ect.
Gain Sturdiness through blockign attacks
Gain Strudiness through using a specific Utility Skill Type
Gain Sturdiness when receiving Conditions/Critcal Hits

And so on, Anet has lots of ways through Skill/Trait Design, how they could add the boon to the game
the whole new trait System is in my humble opinion way too limiting anyways..
intead of this 3×3 + 3 System, the Trait System should be designe after a 4×5 system with the fix minor traits being implemented as chooseable options instead of being fix given things , as that would provide more build diversity and enough options to add in Sturdiness/ Apathy with new traits here n there also too.

I may be well out of line here, but is not balance (a state of equilibrium) the ability to defend against pure DPS with pure defense?

If so then a player running toughness/vitality/healing should offset a player running power/precison/crit damage (condi damage being a wildcard that could use it’s own counter IMO). If in a 1 on 1 arena where a pure damage dealer is able to down and kill (quickly I might add) a pure defensive player, we have no balance.

As for solutions I’m all for some of your suggestions, although giving players more health doesn’t seem to work out to well for the necros but IMO it is up to ANet to be the final arbitrator on the matter. The facts are clear though, as the game sits we have no balance per say, hence the meta is always to carry the biggest gun to the knife fight.

the whole toughness and armor system do not work good in this game

if i have above 3,5k armor and above 2.3k toughness you will say i can tank allot but the truth is its not working very good

some players rip true your tick wall like it was nothing and you stile die in a few hits -.-
Anet really need to fix that problem

its the same in PVE some normal mops just rip true your defence like hell
like the mord mops is in my few a bit to strong in atacks

Thrasher when he spins around and put a poison trail and your in it you get allot off damage even if your tank build like me

i even see many pll die from it and its not even a elite or vet type

so in my few the whole defense system off this game sucks atm

I’ll be frank -light fields- are very underused for condition removal as well.. (guard/necro/mesmer/engineer)

Light field and finishers:
Projectile Remove Condition Conditions Removed: 1
Whirl Cleansing Bolts Conditions Removed: 1

And yes fire mighty have goten better on the high end, it’s why all guardians now run sinister condition builds >.> right, as thier condition builds will outdo their actual damage as a zerk by a factor 3 (judge’s intervention and purging flames with whirl from GS (15 stacks burning with runes of balthazar (+40% burning duration) and the burns from virtue of justice…)… , at least the burst does.,.. some bring a sword/torch as well.. and swap out of staff to GS. (pre might…) dunno haven’t tried. I do not even have a condition build on Guard.

Best way would be to lower the stacks drastically or nerf the whirl… the actual DOT from burning is ok.

I cannot get my head around the fact the op proposes all these changes to make his thief more tanky.

The main theme of the thief is not mitigating damage, but completely avoiding it. If you don’t want to play your thief like it’s meant to be played, better look for another profession.

@ Tommy & Gen

You two exactly described very well the problem of the current situation, why the games defense gameplay currently is so broken, because defense basically never has existed in this game – it was always from game release dat on a pure ILLUSION sadly, cause when offense playing can kill defensive playing in a matter of secons, then there is absolutely no balance at all.

High defense should make it significantly harder for offensive play styles to deal damage against you, so that at least direct damage should be significantly lesser effective agaisnt you, which means, a much better balanced defensive build should give you alot more max health, than an offensive player, and it should it should reduce the chances, that you might receive critical hits, so that it feels for a direct damage dealer alot harder to bring you down without the usage of damage dealing conditions that ignore that strong physical defense and crit rate reduction.
Thats why I said, playing agaisnt a highe defensive player should feel for your enemy like fighting against a Mordrem HUSK, these big slow modrem with super high defense powers which you can effectively kill only with damaging conditions/vulnerability, while direct damaging attacks and criticals are ineffective against them.

But as long its simply possible for the offensive playstyle to overwhelm you in a matter of seconds with 25 stacks of might, fury and the general stat synergy between the offensive stats, while the defense side has nothing of that!!!, there will be never any balance, nor a sense behind it to play a defensive build at all, cause you die anyways in like 3 seconds if you are unlocky getting critically bursted to death with like several 7-11k hits plus a bit of auto attacking in between 2-3k crit hits -.- and that with full defense with PVT gear!!!

There need to be made appropiate counter mechanis, its about time, if this game ever wants to reach a state that feels at least being balanced for both sides on the gameplay weighting scale… but currently the game is since 3 years a “Go all out for full DPS, cause nothing else matters” and thats what feels absolutely not being right here.

If Anet thinks, that this feels being right, then they could instantly remove completely vitality and toughness from the game and nothing would change at all, cause the game would be exactly the same, just only with some lower max health numbers and just only much quicker dieing players which can then be one hit killed I guess instead of having at least 3 lousy seconds to live, hwich aren#t anyways at all enough to have a chance to react to let a battle come to action, before it is already finished …

Theres absolutely no fun in such super fast kills.
In GW1 it was never possible to kill an enmey so incredible fast, because there was the whole defensive gamepaly alot better balanced and no player was able to deal so much damage in just 1 hit…
Yes, we hat in GW1 only around liek 500 HP, but there existed no single build inm the game, to make a comparison, that made it possible for you to deal with like 1 single hot over 250 damage or more, even not with a spike build that was made for single targets as an Air Elementalist or Longbow Ranger ..

When you deal with a single critical hit in GW1 like 100-125 damage, that was already very good!! But essentially it was just only maximum 25% of your max health and not like far over 50% to nearly dead with one single attack !!
This way you had time to REACT, especially because dealing spike damage in GW1 required also certain preparations to be able to spike, giving the enemy also time to prepare for the next spike ..here in GW2..you can burst spike pretty well without any long preparations, giving your opponent no tiem at all to react fast enough..

Thats why GW2’s powercreep needs to get an end with adding fittign defensive gameplay elements, that allow the player to significantly reduce incoming damage or the chance to be criticalyl hit and reduce the durations of conditions (not just only through buff food), to give you enough time to react on a burst that will be quickly followed by another one that will be already then definetely a killing strike, because already the first one dealt way too much damage for this game’s general balance in where Max DPS is king and anything else doesn’t matter sadly and this since game release >.<

There is already a condition that reduces crit chance. It’s called Weakness.

@ Aenesthesia.
who the hell are you to tell me, how I should play my character please?!
if you have nothing constructive to say on topic, other than to criticize my playstyle, then please, for the sake of what is good..

GET OUT

PS. the suggestions aren’t based on just me and my thief playstyle, they are based on the general consensus, that defense in this game is just a mechanic, that is currently since game release absolutely not effective and too weak.
Regardless of which class you play as high defense build, it can be killed in a matter of seconds, due to vitality being too ineffective, toughness not reducing good enough received damage and most especially, because defensive stats provide no synergy, while offensive stats have one and the powercreep gets even more supported with boons like Might and Fury, while the defense has just only Protection, which alone is not good enough.
There needs to be something like Sturdiness as a direct counter to Might, which can be given out a bit more widely spreaded to classes, than Protection and Apathy as a counter directly to Fury to make it harder for high crit builds to burst you down so quickly

@ stof: Weakness reduces not the chance to deal crits, it just changes half of all incoming hits into glancing strikes, that deal half damage, regarless if it was a critical hit or not
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Weakness

Weakness is a condition that decreases the rate of endurance regeneration and turns half of all hits into glancing blows (that deal 50% less damage). Stacks of weakness increase the duration of the condition. Only stacks up to 5 times.

Nothing in the description here says something about like:
Reduces the Critical Hit Rate of your enemy by 20%, like Fury works exactly the other way around, that it increases the rate by 20%

A lot of your complaints with defense against conditions are warranted, and that’s why resistance is a thing. I think resistance should be more widespread, though if it is it should be toned down. Maybe same as prot, 33 percent less damage from conditions while active, something like that. But yeah as it is now it’s too limited.

Eh, the defensive elements are fine (with the possible exception of healing power, which is weak). People use active defense all the time and defense abilities (like blind, blocks, etc) to good effect. In other words, defense is so good most of us don’t even realize how much we use it.

A bigger problem in my opinion is that the AI isn’t clever enough to deal with these things. Foes move into AoE (not out of it), they conveniently turn corners to fight us (forming clumps that are easily cleaved), and follow predictable scripts that can be easily countered.

thats what i want to see here like any other mmorpg i play as full tanker

so 10 players hit you and you just laugh ad them and they cant kill you that is what a tanker( build ) must be

on the down side i cant kill them but its very good for a commander he don’t need to fight he just give orders

Genlog.4983:

thats what i want to see here like any other mmorpg i play as full tanker

so 10 players hit you and you just laugh ad them and they cant kill you that is what a tanker( build ) must be

on the down side i cant kill them but its very good for a commander he don’t need to fight he just give orders

No, that would be stupid.

Genlog.4983:

thats what i want to see here like any other mmorpg i play as full tanker

so 10 players hit you and you just laugh ad them and they cant kill you that is what a tanker( build ) must be

on the down side i cant kill them but its very good for a commander he don’t need to fight he just give orders

Actually this is not balance. When you can take on 10 players as a single player that would tilt the pendulum far to far in the other direction. It is only natural in this game to be slaughtered when outnumbered, as there is no true trinity, so being a tank should only allot you a few extra seconds here.

Genlog.4983:

thats what i want to see here like any other mmorpg i play as full tanker

so 10 players hit you and you just laugh ad them and they cant kill you that is what a tanker( build ) must be

on the down side i cant kill them but its very good for a commander he don’t need to fight he just give orders

and they would the just walk around you kill the squishies they can kill then kill the npcs and knock you around on your bum to take keeps and towers instead…. all while you laugh unkillable

Cut endurance regen by half and make vit or thoughness give extra endurance regen. In a way that a player running a vit/thoughness main would have the same endurance regen as now and a player running 0 vit/thoughenss would have 50% of the current endurance regen.

Orpheal.8263:

@ Aenesthesia.
who the hell are you to tell me, how I should play my character please?!
if you have nothing constructive to say on topic, other than to criticize my playstyle, then please, for the sake of what is good..

me? I am nobody. Anet is the one who designed the thief with one playstyle in mind.

If you don’ t like how they designed the thief, then…. In your own words:

GET OUT

PS. the suggestions aren’t based on just me and my thief playstyle, they are based on the general consensus, that defense in this game is just a mechanic, that is currently since game release absolutely not effective and weak

General consensus? So the general consensus is that dodge (which negates 100% of te damage) is weak? What about stealth? Is it a weak defense mechanism? And blocks, invulnerability, illusions, minions, necro ds, ele regen and condi clean, warrior condi clean, etc etc are all poor defense mechanisms?

You talk about stats here and stats here, and it’s prety obvious to me you want to turn players into health bags and encourage passive defense, while his game is obviously balanced for active defense.

Do you know how much i suffer from the new burning pvp op guardians? Zero, because i specced to transfer their condis back instead of crying for more health.

Defensive play has, in addition to stats such as vitality, toughness, and healing, player controlled 100% damage mitigation in the form of mobility, positioning, block, blind, and dodging. Then there is less absolute player controlled damage mitigation in the form of protection and weakness. Even immobilization and cripple an be used to mitigate a foes damage.

None of these directly increase one’s damage output (of course staying alive is an indirect increase in potential damage output).

Ashen.2907:

Defensive play has, in addition to stats such as vitality, toughness, and healing, player controlled 100% damage mitigation in the form of mobility, positioning, block, blind, and dodging. Then there is less absolute player controlled damage mitigation in the form of protection and weakness. Even immobilization and cripple an be used to mitigate a foes damage.

None of these directly increase one’s damage output (of course staying alive is an indirect increase in potential damage output).

Also projectile reflect / absorb and of course stealth can be used in defensive play to completely negate damage.

Defensive gameplay in this game is just fine. In fact it’s really awesome and one of the best parts of the game, avoiding attacks instead of absorbing them.

Also, it’s important to note that players heavily investing in defensive stats can already faceroll content in the game. No dodge Arah runs? Bearbow-only Fractal runs? You name it. The current choice is between slow and easy or fast and harder.

maddoctor.2738:

Also, it’s important to note that players heavily investing in defensive stats can already faceroll content in the game. No dodge Arah runs? Bearbow-only Fractal runs? You name it. The current choice is between slow and easy or fast and harder.

Yeah, lik this one : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chkMBzXKxAs

Notice how much he optimised his DPS by not having to dodge at all which would stop him attacking.

stof.9341:

maddoctor.2738:

Also, it’s important to note that players heavily investing in defensive stats can already faceroll content in the game. No dodge Arah runs? Bearbow-only Fractal runs? You name it. The current choice is between slow and easy or fast and harder.

Yeah, lik this one : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chkMBzXKxAs

Notice how much he optimised his DPS by not having to dodge at all which would stop him attacking.

And yet we have posts like the OP who want defensive stats to be even more powerful as if that’s the problem with defense in the game…

Halan.7931:

Why not just add a 50% (debatable number) reduction to all damage done against other players. Since this game doesn’t have dedicated healers, there won’t be much problems with “unkillable” characters, maybe only some regen-builds.. but it’s easy to balance.

Maybe also -20% crit chance against players.

How hard would it be to kill Bunker characters with those modifications ?

Ashen.2907:

Halan.7931:

Why not just add a 50% (debatable number) reduction to all damage done against other players. Since this game doesn’t have dedicated healers, there won’t be much problems with “unkillable” characters, maybe only some regen-builds.. but it’s easy to balance.

Maybe also -20% crit chance against players.

How hard would it be to kill Bunker characters with those modifications ?

well about 50% harder so what 20sec instead of 10?

20s is getting close enough to reuse a few heal skills, tick a few more regen ticks. So that 20s will instead turn into 30s. Which gives a few more ticks of regen again etc…

So 50% less damage turns into 120-150% more effort to kill them and not 100%.

yea and you totaly cant use poison sigil to negate the regen or interupt said heals at all

Halan.7931:

Why not just add a 50% (debatable number) reduction to all damage done against other players. Since this game doesn’t have dedicated healers, there won’t be much problems with “unkillable” characters, maybe only some regen-builds.. but it’s easy to balance.

Maybe also -20% crit chance against players.

Why? I’ve done loads of battles in PvP and survivability is mostly fine. Why reduce the damage?

Linken.6345:

yea and you totaly cant use poison sigil to negate the regen or interupt said heals at all

You are shifting the goalposts here. When someone said it takes 10s to kill a bunker currently, I kind of assumed you were already using the tools like poison and interrupts at your disposal.

stof.9341:

Linken.6345:

yea and you totaly cant use poison sigil to negate the regen or interupt said heals at all

You are shifting the goalposts here. When someone said it takes 10s to kill a bunker currently, I kind of assumed you were already using the tools like poison and interrupts at your disposal.

It was me who said it and interupt what heal there is no heal in the entier game that have less then a 16 sec cd so what heal will you interupt twice if it was uped from 10 to 20sec?

Healing Turret actually has a 15s cooldown for example. If you pick it up which isn’t a bad idea in the first place.

Also, every extra second might be an extra tick of regen.

1. Lot of things could be solved by making Toughness/Vitality/Healing Power runes more appealing with more impactful effects. There’s a good reason why Hoelbrak runes are popular, because they are containing elements that should have been domain of Toughness runes.

2 Toughness effectiveness should have better scaling. Instead we are getting diminishing returns as it goes higher.

3. Healing Power should be a counter to Condition damage, just as Toughness is counter to physical damage. This would be a massive incentive for people to utilize that stat.

4. There are more Power runes than Vitality and Healing power runes combined! You can argue that not all Power runes are equally effective and desirable, but that goes double for Vitality, Toughness and Healing power runes, which makes situation even more dire.

Bottom line you don’t need to nerf condi and power numbers if you provide soft counters to it, like the one above suggested. If you’re banging on a unprotected target you should deal massive damage, but that damage should be countered harder if you decide to go for protection.

Thoughness effectiveness doesn’t have diminishing returns. EHP scales linearly with thoughness (+ a few bonus jumps in EHP when it saves you time for a new heal/regen tick)

stof.9341:

Thoughness effectiveness doesn’t have diminishing returns. EHP scales linearly with thoughness (+ a few bonus jumps in EHP when it saves you time for a new heal/regen tick)

Yes it has dimish returns. No it is not linear. Look at the dmg formula. Thoughness counts twards armor, and armor is dividing on the formula.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

For every 21 precision point you get 1% critical chance. You can’t make the same relation for thoughness. It works the same way as magic find, it is easy to obtain the first % dmg mitigation, but the armor/thoughness needed to get the nextra % of dmg reduction is higher and higher.

EHP is a linear function of player toughness, all other stats staying the same. This isn’t a diminishing returns relation, it’s linear. EHP = HP * (equipment armor + toughness). This is the definition of a linear relation.

Every point of toughness increases your EHP by your HP value. No matter if you have 0 or 10000 toughness.

stof.9341:

EHP is a linear function of player toughness, all other stats staying the same. This isn’t a diminishing returns relation, it’s linear. EHP = HP * (equipment armor + toughness). This is the definition of a linear relation.

Every point of toughness increases your EHP by your HP value. No matter if you have 0 or 10000 toughness.

The dmg formula is not linear with armor. Your made up function has no value lol.

damage = Weapon strength * Power * Skill coefficient / Armor

Armor is in the denominator. That is not linear. There is a huge difference between going from 2000 to 2100 and going from 3000 to 3100.

Effective HP is linear on the player toughness. If you don’t understand what Effective HP is, you shouldn’t be doing any kind of theorycrafting.

AI in this game is sad and that is what players are experiencing. This has so little to do with balance, etc… so any suggestion to rebalance all these formulas and stats is frankly a huge waste of time.

If anything, I think the game should be true to it’s nature; if active defense/boons/conditions is the order of the day for PVE, then stats buffing the passive aspects of character parameters should perhaps be completely removed. Let the performance of any character be dependent completely on the skill of the player to apply the correct attack or dodge/block/heal at the right time.

Save the stats juggle for PVP/WvW

stof.9341:

Effective HP is linear on the player toughness. If you don’t understand what Effective HP is, you shouldn’t be doing any kind of theorycrafting.

Your made up equation does not translate real effect of thoughness over dmg mitigation. You can’t just add up thoughness because it is not linear. If you don’t understand basic math that is not my problem.

Damage done = (Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

For example:
weapon strength as 1000
power as 2000
skill coef as 1

when armor 2000 -> dmg taken 1000
when armor 2100 -> dmg taken 952.38
when armor 3000 -> dmg taken 666.66
when armor 3100 -> dmg taken 645

When you have 2000 and add 100 armor, those 100 armor reduced the dmg by an additional 48.

When you have 3000 and add 100 armor, those 100 extra armor reduced the dmg by only an additional 22.

It is not linear.

Considering skill dmg coefficient, power and weapon strenght fixed the dmg formular is:

dmg(armor) = constant /armor
That is a f(x)= constant/x function

The derivative is = -constant/(x^2)

The derivative value is the impact that each 1 extra point of armor will affect the dmg mitigation. If you still did not understand, I suggest you go watch some pre calculus video on youtube.