Guild Wars 2

Ok before you throw rocks at me, please let me explain.

Before this game, I played Rift and WoW. ducks rocks HEY…..

cough erhm Due to that fact, I am having a time wrapping my head around attributes in GW2. I am used to “Hunter, you only need agility…no mana!” or “Healer that has tank stats on it!!”

Etc, etc. So I have come to the fact that there is no trinity. But I still am having a time wrapping my head around attributes. (currently working on a warrior, so seeing healing just confuses my head until it explodes.)

So my question to you all is there certain attributes that say a warrior or necro should be investing in, not that it is possible to spec, but what helps out the character the most?

Ok, commence rock throwing…. =)

(edit, wow I was comma happy there for a sec. Plus this has drove me to the point of overanalyzing I have created a spreadsheet to break down attributes, food etc O_O)

I don’t know of any actual caps on attributes, but it’s hard to get any single primary stat to 2500+ simply because of how gear is designed and how many attribute points exotic and ascended gear give you. I feel like I’m building in the right direction if I can get the two primary attributes I care about most to 1700-2000 at level 80 in exotic gear.

Healing power is probably one of the hardest attributes to understand because it doesn’t affect all healing skills, and it doesn’t even scale across healing skills in a predictable manner when it does affect a healing skill.

This may overwhelm you with information, but this wiki page is very helpful at figuring what attribute combinations you can reliably find on gear and how much of an attribute you can expect.

While the “holy trinity” is gone, the terms DPS/support/tank are still used to describe builds. It’s just harder to make a pure-DPS, pure-support, or pure-tank viable for solo exploration in PvE. For example, my elementalist is support/DPS, my warrior is tank/support, and my thief is on Ori gathering duty until I figure out what I want to do with her.

The wiki has good descriptions of all the attributes (link).

I can’t tell you positively about a necro’s best attributes because I just started one myself. From what I hear, stack enough toughness to keep yourself alive and put the rest in power and condition damage.

While leveling a warrior, unless you want to go crazy theorycrafting, you probably just want to stack power, toughness (armor), and vitality (health pool). If you want something more offensive stack power, precision (crit %), and crit damage. For something balanced, go with power, precision, and toughness. Only after level 60 do you want to even want to think about healing power, and that’s only if you’re going for a support/tank-type build.

Feel free to PM me or catch me in-game if you’d like to chat more about getting your first character or two off the ground.

Thanks DEKeys, It’s actually one of my 8 characters, but I just got to really thinking today about WHAT I am investing points in and why. That’s when I really started overanalyzing it and wondering if I was putting things in the right spot.

(again we all know about that one character that stacked that one attribute when they should have been stacking another, in other games)

I may just catch you in game once I get the gist of how points work and why. I do mainly PvE (www does not play nicely on my laptop, and the couch is much more inviting to play on than my desktop) with a sprinkle of spvp on the side.

But I feel I am gimping myself by not understanding truly how points/attributes and secondary attributes work.

(Although I do miss being a dedicated healer, something about saving the day gave me the grins)

One other thing, with attributes, is there a such thing as a hard/soft cap?