Guild Wars 2

Rifter.6591:

Also if you agro more than three mobs at a time thats on you and a player skill issue not a gear issue, its not like mobs are super tightly grouped in this game its very easy to control agro if you look where you are going and dont run blindly then stop out in the open while you have 30 mobs chasing you.

Not exactly, fire off an attack at any mob in open world and watch one or more of the same kind get red crossed swords over their head. The game loves to throw multiple mobs at us just because it can.

digiowl.9620:

Rifter.6591:

Also if you agro more than three mobs at a time thats on you and a player skill issue not a gear issue, its not like mobs are super tightly grouped in this game its very easy to control agro if you look where you are going and dont run blindly then stop out in the open while you have 30 mobs chasing you.

Not exactly, fire off an attack at any mob in open world and watch one or more of the same kind get red crossed swords over their head. The game loves to throw multiple mobs at us just because it can.

Digi is correct. Just to add to this – go to wayfarer hills, to the Maw event area, and attack a single moa standing in a group – attacking one, aggro’s all within a specific radius of attacked mob.

It’s not about skill there at all.

Robbyx.1284:

Now im not saying for one second that everyone should have the cookie cutter builds, or that everyone should be min/maxing builds….BUT if you are a warrior with max tough/vit firing a longbow as standard, then you simply do suck and should avoid gimping groups with your woeful presence….or find a guild that is willing to carry you as baggage through quests/dungeons etc.

I did read, thus my response. Read yourself above (I capped “but” for emphasis.)

“If you don’t play the way I (or math, “the right way”, the proven, more efficient way, etc.) wish you to play, you suck and are baggage to a group."

In short you are saying “learn to read”, but I did read everything, and nothing could be more arrogant than the following: “your woeful presence”, just because a player decided to do whatever, rather than what you (or your math) think players should do.

It’s very much like saying “not to be racist, but this ethnicity always does this or that wrong.” The “but” invalidates any non-racist claims.

As for the “carried” part, any player that is reasonably inexperienced or hasn’t mastered his/her Profession will be “carried” a little REGARDLESS gear (MF, Knight’s, or Beserker’s, it won’t matter.) Having Berserker’s gear (for instance) wouldn’t necessarily make him/her great at what he/she does (and of course it is OK for everyone to be a beginner or work in progress.)

I think a formula of a players HP-Pool and the enemies DPS is not the proper approach to calculate a players “survival time” as soon as we talk about bosses or champions. The aforementioned formula assumes, you are exposed to continuos boss damage during a fight, a situation that – regardless of the DPS you can put out, and regardless of your life pool or toughness – you will never win. So, even “adjusted enemy DPS” which takes into account your healing, vitality and toughness, will definitely kill you.

Most of us who are observant of their HP-pool, can probably confirm that the total amount of HP damage they suffered during a boss battle, overweights their maximum HP many times. A boss DPS is either so high, that he can kill us in a few seconds, or his HP pool is so huge, that regardless of our DPS, we will never kill him faster than he can kill us.

The “enemy survival time” formula, on the other hand, does more justice to the boss fights as we know them. Bosses are rather exposed to the players summarized DPS the whole battle time, they don’t roll out, they dont use healing skills comparable to ours, and, they don’t kite us. They just have a huge HP pool.

So, how do we win boss battles ? We kite, we dodge, we use our skills, we burst and we disengage, we REZZ the downed, we eat hits, but survive them, we heal, we regenerate in combo fields and so on…

How do we lose boss battles ? We lose men. Not only our DPS, but our aggregated “skill pool” and “endurance pool” decreases. From five to four to three players…We run out of options, up to a point, where we HAVE to eat the boss full DPS, which WILL kill us in seconds like I pointed out above.

My conclusion is, the pure “my HP-pool vs your HP-pool, my DPS vs your DPS” equation doesn’t win boss battles. The formulae in this thread partially oversimplify to a moot point.

The one I can agree on is: “Enemy survival time”. The duration of a boss battle depends on our DPS and the boss HP pool. The difference between a high DPS group and a low DPS group decides, whether the fight will take a minute, or three, provided everyone survives.

But our own survival and therefore success of the team is decided by the situations, when we individually have to deal with boss damage. Those situations may take only fractions of the whole battle time, but to master them is crucial for the team’s success. For these situations, team DPS doesn’t count. To win the battle, you have to survive those special situations, and not shorten the overall battle time. (“Stay there, we kill him before he can kill you !!” is only viable, when the beast is technically slain :-))

Our survival depends on: Can we pull another trick of our hat, which is not on cooldown ? Can we eat the damage, and heal it later with a skill ? Can we use a damage prevention skill right on time, or roll, teleport, blink..etc out of harms way ?

And here comes the advantage of high DPS groups as I see it: If they can shorten the boss battle by a significant amount, most of their skills will be needed only once during a battle. That means, they will have less skills in cooldown when they need them.

digiowl.9620:

That, and any healing that the group may give him/her.

Something ANet specifically designed the game against, thanks to no targeted healing spells.

No single target player skills maybe, but I can tell you from experience that the Elementalist’s healing skills (both PbAoE and ground target) are still very effective. And there’s also regeneration, which is often applied to nearby players as well.

The OP forgot one fundamental question: If you’re a bad player, does toughness/vit suck less?

digiowl.9620:

lynspottery.6529:

BTW, I recently learned how to kite. Woot …what a great mechanic. I am using it in everything I do now and am not dying so much.

Maybe i am an old grouch, but my default reaction to kiting is that it is an abuse of game mechanics.

That’s ok, you can be an old grouch if you like. :=)

But for poor players like myself who are trying to learn new things, I need something to help me along as I learn. Eventually, I hope to be a better player and not need to depend on kiting a lot. But for now, it is extremely helpful when I solo.

Recently tweaked my warrior a bit.

Used to have full berserk gear and full dps spec. Had tons of dodge due to signet and trait (50% endurance back on bursts). I felt survivability was just too low. Too many mobs in Orr and it got sweaty. So I shuffled some traits around aswell as picking up 3 pieces of knight gear (helm, chest, legs), replaced some runes and started to use healing signet.

With the new spec (15/0/15/10/30) I barely take any damage whatsoever. I still maintain high dps, regen 960 health (not counting healing bonuses) over 3 seconds (3 heal signet ticks+adrenal healing). It’s a balanced spec/build and it works great in PvE, WvW and for farming. Bonus is, I can still dodge like a maniac and make some very nice combos with it both with axe+shield and longbow.

I was about to just ditch my warrior, since the survivability was just that low.

digiowl.9620:

ThiBash.5634:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

But, in a given theoretical group of players, when an enemy has singled out a player and has started attacking him, that players survivability is dependent on the total DPS of that group.

That, and any healing that the group may give him/her.

Something ANet specifically designed the game against, thanks to no targeted healing spells.

Obviously you never played Ele or Engi support huh, they both have targeted healing spells..

ThiBash.5634:

So what is the math on the all-stats items like Rune of Divinity and Triforge Pendant? Seeing as how the elementalist in many ways uses a mix of all playstyles (conditions, burst, dps over time, healing, etc.) you’d assume that going for a mix of all stats would limit the effects of inherent diminishing returns. Also, since the total amount of stats granted by those items is higher, that would be a double gain. Or not?

The all-stat items, although giving more raw attribute points to everything, are not always ideal for every class or build. The main problem with the all-stats are that they give attributes to where a player will likely not need them. There are two big offenders here, with two minor offenders as well:

#1: Healing Power. This attribute is only useful if you use plenty of regen or weapon/utility heals. Otherwise it does very little and isn’t worth investing.

#2: Condition Damage. Simply put, not everyone uses condition damage.

Those two make up 1/3rd of an all-stat’s attributes.

Minor #1: Crit Damage. In order for crit damage to be valuable, high power and high precision are necessary. Without high precision, it never factors into the equation. Without high power, it does a paltry increase since it multiplies based on power. All-stat items themselves don’t give that high power or precision, so they really should only be used to supplement builds that are starting to hit diminishing returns.

Minor #2: Precision. That 50 point increase from the Tri-Forge pendant gives a whopping 2% increase in critical chance. Again, only valuable if you have so much power/vitality/toughness already that you’re better off with other stats.

So all in all, I would recommend that you use omni stats on classes that almost always end up using conditions and/or regen + supplementary heals. Things like the elementalist, the necromancer, and the engineer. Otherwise, the extra points just go into places that don’t get use.

As for how they interact with each other, in short they sort of multiply each other regarding survivability. In length, however…

(Enemy DPS x damage decrease factor of toughness) / (player DPS ratio increase)

So if there was a 20% damage decrease from toughness, and a 50% increase in damage, then it would look like

Enemy DPS x 0.8 / 1.5 = Enemy DPS x 0.53

This is a generic version, though. To get the real numbers, you’d have to factor in the effectiveness of each attribute depending on the class. For example, lets use a thief. This will get us:

Power
Toughness x 916 / 1980
Vitality x 916 / 1080.5
Precision (Power x (100 – (4 + (precision – 916)/21) + crit damage (4 + (precision – 916)/21)

And so on. Another interesting bit I can see here is that the omni-increasing items seem to benefit lightly armored classes more than heavily armored classes.

Man… I really should come up with a “theory of everything” here. Might make things more comprehensive than just scattered mathematical relationships.

I’m a bit surprised this has become an issue, but I will address it: fighting multiple enemies.

Frankly, I do not see the big deal about having to fight multiple enemies on a glass cannon build. I only have experience fighting masses of enemies in glass cannon equipment with two classes at the moment (and the necromancer is only half way through leveling), but so far it has not been a problem. Currently I am running a rampager set alongside of the knight set for my engineer. I alternate on the weapons I use, but pistol/pistol is definitely the “zerg melter”. I call it this, because with the coated bullets trait (which is readily accessible without having to re-trait my current build), for every enemy it pierces it explodes, causing small AoE burst of damage each time it hits an enemy. Multiply that by 5 or so enemies, and the auto attack hits the whole group 5 times, quintupling the damage output of the auto attack. Unless enemies are scattered about and attacking from all sides at the same time, their numbers count for nothing against my pistols. Worst case scenarios I put down the glue puddle to stop a besieging group of melee fighters or I toss elixir U to make a barrier against certain ranged enemies.

My necromancer currently has similar luck. Set up a few marks, Use Scepter 2 + Dagger 5 on an enemy group, follow up with epidemic, drop well of suffering then swap to death shroud for life transfer. Enemy groups of seemingly any number just melt away. Now, the engineer may be an exception because they have exceptional AoE damage as a class, but pretty much every class has many attacks that hit in a cone or pierce or bounce or in an AoE. There are weapons and utilities that only hit enemies one at a time, but this brings up a question: Why would anyone use a single target weapon in a place where there are hordes of enemies? It would make so much more sense to use multi hitting weapons against multiple enemies.

The same rule of “enemies that die quicker do less damage” applies to groups just as well as single enemies. Toughness and Vitality gear lets you survive longer, but the enemies live longer, too, so they end up doing more damage. The case for durability can only be made in circumstances where you are ambushed very quickly (and thus the start of the fight behaves much like burst damage), or if the enemies happen to stack disabling abilities far beyond with the stun breaker or condition cure normally manages. This isn’t much more different than burst damage or control effects from a large single boss enemy.

penatbater.4710:

The OP forgot one fundamental question: If you’re a bad player, does toughness/vit suck less?

Not forgotten. Just implied. The answer is yes, it does suck less. To a certain degree, anyway. If someone is so bad at the game that they’re indistinguishable from some impotent manimal clobbering his frustrations out on the keyboard, then no stats will help. If they’re half decent, then toughness and vitality really help as a safety net, allowing you to make more mistakes (which, if you are new, you will) and learn the game better. But once you’ve broken the game down to a science, then you’ll want to go more for DPS since you’re good enough to take those risks now.

And breaking the game down to a science is something I do for fun.

@SneakyErvin

I guess you do bring up a point that I haven’t covered yet. Most of what I’m doing here deals with equipment stats and not traits or utilities. This is mostly because of the minimal impact that trait points give for the most part A maximum of 300 isn’t that much no matter where you go. Since the attributes from equipment breech 1000 points in their primary, that is the main focus of “investing”.

As for my advice on making builds, I always say that you should build for the trait abilities, and not really the trait points themselves. I.E. on my engineer, when I’m running the rifle I switch to the firearms trait that gives 10% more rifle damage. It is a master trait, so it requires 20 points in firearms to get (200 precision and cond damage). While the build normally has 2000 power or so, that single trait gives me 200 extra power (roughly). So, by investing 20 points into precision, I ended up getting 20 points worth into power as well. If I just put those into power, I would get the power but then I’d lose out on the precision and condition damage.

It is all of those little tricks and techniques that make traits worth far more than their attribute points, so analyzing them mathematically based on efficiency just isn’t correct. It isn’t like equipment, which is only the sum of its stats.

@Timberwolf: I have to respectfully disagree about the HP pool comparison. The ability to out-sustain champion damage is a frequent occurrence, and surpassing the threshold where a champion can never kill you is an even more frequent occurrence.

Since I do not have any numbers regarding the DPS of any champion with any given player population around them, I will have to give anecdotes:

There is a group event in Malchor’s leap called “Defeat the Mark II YF-Gold golem that’s destroying the area” that occurs just north-west of the waste hollows in the eastern side of the map. This is a single champion golem that I love to solo. Mostly because there is no one else around… but on occasion someone else will run up and fight it with me. The results of their efforts can be anything from hilarious to intriguing.

There are two cases that stand out in my memory, particularly because they contrast so well. In both of them, a guardian came out of nowhere and helped me to fight this golem. The first guardian that ran up was… ineffective. He would down frequently and would spend most of the time running futilely around obstacles to avoid getting killed. It didn’t do much good, what with the golem’s long reach and ranged attacks. I spent half the fight trying to chase and immobilize this golem just so I could line up my rifle skills, for the golem had inexplicably decided that this guardian was his sworn lifelong archenemy that killed its parents, and would chase only the guardian around. The fight was far easier without this other player’s “help”.

Come the second fight, and months later I am again soloing that golem. This time, when a guardian came out of nowhere, he entered into a straight up no-holds barred close quarters MMA brawl with the golem. I swear I only saw this guardian dodge twice for the whole thing. He didn’t loop around the enemy or use immobilizes to kite or anything of the sort, and I know from an unfortunate pistol-related event that blinds were ineffective as a defense. He just straight up fought the golem while not moving, and didn’t down once. I stood back with my pistol at the “sweet spot”, just shooting it over and over again, watching this guardian in awe as he took his whippings like a big boy. It was like he wasn’t even trying. I have the distinct feeling that, were I not there, the guardian could’ve sustained the fight with this golem indefinitely. The fight didn’t end any quicker than when I solo the thing, but it was interesting to watch this guy put his bunker build to the test and pass.

I, personally, have never solo’d the golem in my rampager gear. This may be under technicality, since I’ve only tried twice without being aided and both times with the pistol/pistol (which is far inferior to the rifle for the fight, to which I can attest), and I can theoretically do it given my ability to avoid nearly all of its attacks. However, once I put on the knight gear and the rifle, I can fight the thing endlessly. I make plenty of mistakes, since I am very shaky and am using an inferior mouse pad to play the game, but that boatload of toughness gives me enough survivability to heal away my damage, letting me fight the golem for very long amounts of time. More than enough to kill it and walk away with at least half health overall.

I’ve had that experience in other places, too. A big one is the Statue of Dwayna. Before I discovered that a perma-vigor build would let me dodge every attack, the first time I tanked it with a small group, I would just eat the AoE blind attack while I dodged the damage wave and the rain of fire. At first this didn’t go so well, but after dying and coming back in knight gear I could just heal away the damage and stare down that statute forever. It isn’t particularly useful, since I can do the same in rampager gear now with some quick mods to my traits, but nonetheless it beautifully demonstrates the principle of a survivability threshold against bosses.

As for finite survivability, finding any specific example of that is difficult. Mostly because I either have a boat load of toughness, or no toughness at all (not so big on vitality investment). Just think of any time where a player tried soloing a boss, and only barely won the fight. Or, since it is relevant now, any instance where a player barely survived being attacked by a group of enemies. Of course if the fight went on for longer they would’ve died, but since they killed the enemy first they didn’t die. I can’t really look at anyone and say that a thief or elementalist or guardian having nearly twice their HP wouldn’t help them beat enemies they couldn’t before.

penatbater.4710:

The OP forgot one fundamental question: If you’re a bad player, does toughness/vit suck less?

Sadly no.

Dante.1508:

digiowl.9620:

ThiBash.5634:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

But, in a given theoretical group of players, when an enemy has singled out a player and has started attacking him, that players survivability is dependent on the total DPS of that group.

That, and any healing that the group may give him/her.

Something ANet specifically designed the game against, thanks to no targeted healing spells.

Obviously you never played Ele or Engi support huh, they both have targeted healing spells..

GROUND targeted, not directly targeted at individuals. Meaning you have to catch the person in the AOE, and likely if it is ground targeted then it is a HOT not a instant heal. That, or get up close with him using things like the elementalist dagger #5 or traited warrior shouts.

That btw makes shout warriors perhaps some of the best team healers, as a couple of them standing shoulder to shoulder (or on top of each other, thanks to the game engine) can catch both themselves and their party members in the shout AOE. It may just be 1000 a shout, but with 3 shouts a person it can crazily enough add up.

But to get there you have to reach at least level 60 so that you can dump 30 points into a trait line.

And that illustrates how the game is balanced for SPVP where everyone is level 80 with exotic gear. Under those conditions it is easy to drop 30 in a line and get access to incidental healing traits. Warriors have them on shout, guardians on boons, engineers on explosives and so on. But to get there in PVE you have to stop thru 59 levels where DPS is honestly the only build that really works…

lynspottery.6529:

digiowl.9620:

lynspottery.6529:

BTW, I recently learned how to kite. Woot …what a great mechanic. I am using it in everything I do now and am not dying so much.

Maybe i am an old grouch, but my default reaction to kiting is that it is an abuse of game mechanics.

That’s ok, you can be an old grouch if you like. :=)

But for poor players like myself who are trying to learn new things, I need something to help me along as I learn. Eventually, I hope to be a better player and not need to depend on kiting a lot. But for now, it is extremely helpful when I solo.

Thing is, this game turns into a game mechanic abuse into a necessity. It is built around PVP as the balance focus, and in PVP nobody stands still for long. End result is that as the OP illustrates, passive defenses basically suck. This to reduce the impact of so called bunkers that sit on a SPVP point to deny the enemy a capture.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’ve had that experience in other places, too. A big one is the Statue of Dwayna. Before I discovered that a perma-vigor build would let me dodge every attack, the first time I tanked it with a small group, I would just eat the AoE blind attack while I dodged the damage wave and the rain of fire. At first this didn’t go so well, but after dying and coming back in knight gear I could just heal away the damage and stare down that statute forever. It isn’t particularly useful, since I can do the same in rampager gear now with some quick mods to my traits, but nonetheless it beautifully demonstrates the principle of a survivability threshold against bosses.

Great example. It shows exactly what you are going for against a boss – the minimum defense to (reliably) last indefinitely, with the rest in offense. It is also an example of how better play means go can forgo most of your defense and still succeed. The amount of toughness you need depends on the situation and your skill. In many cases, it might be lower than your default toughness.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

There are weapons and utilities that only hit enemies one at a time, but this brings up a question: Why would anyone use a single target weapon in a place where there are hordes of enemies? It would make so much more sense to use multi hitting weapons against multiple enemies.

Luxury of choice? Or the other way round, that one was committed to the fight before one knew one was going up against a group. Never mind that sometimes AOE on auto draws in more trouble than you want. bouncing projectiles have a bad habit of aggroing yellows when out and about for instance.