Guild Wars 2

Especially in regards to lower level armor and so?

Ok, lets make an example:

I’m level 50 and am in a level 50 zone. My armor and weapons however is level 40 still.

Now I go into a level 45 zone and get downleveled.

Does the game recognize that my armor would still be valid in that area and doesn’t touch it stats, only reducing my natural stats I got from leveling and traits etc?
Or doesn’t it care and just reduces everything by 10% or so?

Your gear doesn’t change, just your attributes. Here’s some info from GW2 wiki on downleveling:

Dynamic level adjustment (down-leveled) reduces a character’s attributes and level when the character’s level exceeds the area he or she is in. For example, a character with an actual level of 50, in a level 10 area, will have his attributes reduced to an “effective level” equal to a level 11 character (max level for the area +1). Effective level is shown as a green number in parentheses next to the actual level on the experience bar and is stated under the actual level on the hero panel. Changes to attributes are also seen on the hero panel in green next to the actual attribute values.

In PvE, a character’s effective level and attributes are automatically reduced based on the enemy levels immediately around the player, and there can be numerous level scalings per area/zone. Skills and equipment are retained, so the area is easier because of this, but should still be challenging to play.

StarsLife.7320:

Dynamic level adjustment (down-leveled) reduces a character’s attributes and level when the character’s level exceeds the area he or she is in. For example, a character with an actual level of 50, in a level 10 area, will have his attributes reduced to an “effective level” equal to a level 11 character (max level for the area +1). Effective level is shown as a green number in parentheses next to the actual level on the experience bar and is stated under the actual level on the hero panel. Changes to attributes are also seen on the hero panel in green next to the actual attribute values.

- That doesn’t explain how downleveling works. How do you define what stats level 11 character is supposed to have? As you can see when you bring your different characters that are above level 11 into level 11 zone, they all have slightly different stats. Level 80 character with maximum stat gear is going to be more powerful than level 11 character in level 11 zone.

Again, the question is how does it work? What’s the formula we’re looking for?
I’ll give you a short example:
Level 11 character with no items equipped has 68 points in Power, Precision, Toughness and Vitality. If you put two points into your trait line that gives your character +10 power for each point, then that downscaled character will have 85 power. That is only 17 points increase.

Gear does play a part: a lvl 50 in a lvl 40 zone with lvl 50 gear will have higher stats than with lvl 40 gear (try it).

No matter how it works, it still makes for OP chars (for me since lvl 5, now lvl 65—20 levels too high) and the game too easy, forcing the missus and I to find areas where people aren’t in order to find some semblance of a good fight, which is contrary to what this mechanic is supposed to do.

Rolo.9248:

Gear does play a part: a lvl 50 in a lvl 40 zone with lvl 50 gear will have higher stats than with lvl 40 gear (try it).

No matter how it works, it still makes for OP chars (for me since lvl 5, now lvl 65—20 levels too high) and the game too easy, forcing the missus and I to find areas where people aren’t in order to find some semblance of a good fight, which is contrary to what this mechanic is supposed to do.

Try fighting in the nude.

I have not looked at the numbers since BWE2, but this is how it worked* then:

At any given level, your stats have a certain base value. Each stat will have the same value and no factors aside from your level matter. The function to compute this will be called B, and, for those that are curious, it is an approximation of a n-squared curve that is made from a series of linear segments. The wiki had an article that was mostly accurate on this.

If you take your computed (Base + gear + other effects) stats and divide each by B(actual_level) you will get your normalized stats. Multiply by B(effective_level) and you have your effective stats.

This was confirmed to include food, traits, and other effects. (They are scaled down with you). I did not test scaling up for WvW.

*I had one test case where there was a single off-by-one score, which I attributed to rounding error. Even allowing that error, I had over a thousand matching samples and the accuracy was over 99.9999%

Fildydarie, it sounds like you know what you’re talking about. I took some data from my character at different scaled levels. Is this helpful for determining the formula?

items and traits give 77 power, 100 armor and 176 attack without scaling

Level 13 character, adjustment to level 5 (no items):
40(80) power, 40(80) precision, 40(80) toughness, 40(80) vitality
40(80) attack, 4%(4%) critical chance, 40(80) armor, 490(1034) health

Level 13 character, adjustment to level 7 (no items):
48(80) power, 48(80) precision, 48(80) toughness, 48(80) vitality
48(80) attack, 4%(4%) critical chance, 48(80) armor, 606(1034) health

Level 13 character, adjustment to level 8 (no items):
52(80) power, 52(80) precision, 52(80) toughness, 52(80) vitality
52(80) attack, 4%(4%) critical chance, 52(80) armor, 664(1034) health

Level 13 character, adjustment to level 11 (no items): +17 power from traits
68(80) power, 68(80) precision, 68(80) toughness, 68(80) vitality
68(80) attack, 4%(4%) critical chance, 68(80) armor, 878(1034) health

Level 13 character, adjustment to level 5 (with items):
79(157) power, 40(80) precision, 40(80) toughness, 40(80) vitality
226(333) attack, 4%(4%) critical chance, 117(180) armor, 490(1034) health (+39 power, +77 armor, +147 attack)

Level 13 character, adjustment to level 7 (with items):
94(157) power, 48(80) precision, 48(80) toughness, 48(80) vitality
245(333) attack, 4%(4%) critical chance, 128(80) armor, 606(1034) health (+46 power, +80 armor, +151 attack)

Level 13 character, adjustment to level 8 (with items):
102(157) power, 52(80) precision, 52(80) toughness, 52(80) vitality
255(333) attack, 4%(4%) critical chance, 136(180) armor, 664(1034) health (+50 power, +84 armor, +153 attack)

Level 13 character, adjustment to level 11 (with items):
133(157) power, 68(80) precision, 68(80) toughness, 68(80) vitality
297(333) attack, 4%(4%) critical chance, 160(180) armor, 878(1034) health (+65 power, +92 armor, +164 attack)

@Zenith: I have written full-fledged combat simulators for testing different builds/mechanics before. When time permits, I love dissecting (or constructing) mechanics like this.

Unless someone beats me to it, I’ll try to confirm that this is still accurate later tonight. I’m at work now and have a desire to not be fired, so I can only spare a minute here and there. :-)

Thanks for the data, I’ll add it to what I take from my own characters when I validate.

Health and armor values of my data are incorrect, I realized too late that there are server-wide bonuses given by World vs. World that affect them.

Better late than never… I haven’t had a chance to run a statistically rigorous test at home, but I’ve managed to hit a few test cases and so far everything (Including Zenith’s numbers) is matching my BWE2 findings.

On another note, you get floor(level/10 + 2) * 2 stat points each level, and 20 extra points at level 1. This seems to be holding true so far for all the test cases I’ve investigated but, again, I haven’t brute-forced every level to verify. The best-fit second-order polynomial for this is 0.1x^2 + 3.1981x + 20.856 (for those of you that prefer continuous functions).

This is pretty interesting. If I’m understanding this correctly, there is at least one really weird quirk to the system:

If you are playing in area where you are currently the max level for the area and you level up, the dynamic level adjustment function will actually make you weaker until you upgrade your gear. Your stats go from:

B(level) + gear stats

to

[B(level + 1) / B(level + 1) * B(level)] + [gear stats / B(level + 1) * B(level)
= B(level) + gear stats * [B(level) / B(level + 1)]

Since B(level + 1) is necessarily greater than B(level), your gear stats always end up with a multiplier less than one, so your total stats will end up lower.

How do stat bonuses from Traits factor in? Are they counted among the “other” stats that you mentioned?

@Fredlicious: To the best of my knowledge, all bonuses are scaled. Traits, food buffs, gear… everything.

You are correct that your effective stats drop the moment you level. I’m currently digging into this more, but I have a feeling that over a span of 5 levels, there will be minimal variation, and since crafted armor upgrades can be fairly reliably produced every 5 levels, the gear gap should close about as fast as it opens.

On traits, as I recall they don’t show in the hero panel, but common sense says they scale as well. I plan to gather evidence to support this, but until I do, consider the following:

A level 1 has 96 base stats and 0 trait stats.
A level 80 has 3664 base stats and 1400 trait stats.

If it didn’t scale, the 80 would still have 1400 points at 1 when scaled. At ~1500% of the natural strength of a 1, this would be massively overpowered.
With scaling, this is ~36 extra points, which is a far more modest ~37.5% boost, which is significant but not breaking.

Why are there no traits at levels 1-10? The stat boost is likely too large to be offset by scaling at those levels, so instead the helm, shoulder, and jewelrey slots are filled instead. The smaller increases which, on the average, should be spread over the levels compensate for the absence of traits.

I haven’t compared tiers of armor to each other, but I expect to find that fine armor, scaled, is equivalent to fine armor. Masterwork will remain equivalent to masterwork, and so on. This means that when you get to 80 and exotic is the norm, your scaled gear will have an advantage over unscaled gear, since exotic armor is not available at significantly lower levels.

You also have to consider the effects of slotted traits, rune sets, and so on. Undeniably, your character gets stronger as you level, but only so much comes from stats.

Unfortunately, I won’t have time to do research this weekend as my parents are coming to visit.

Fildydarie.1496:

I haven’t compared tiers of armor to each other, but I expect to find that fine armor, scaled, is equivalent to fine armor. Masterwork will remain equivalent to masterwork, and so on. This means that when you get to 80 and exotic is the norm, your scaled gear will have an advantage over unscaled gear, since exotic armor is not available at significantly lower levels.

This is the other thing I’m interested to understand better. Even if the scaling for stats on gear is analogous to base stat scaling, since the number of individual stats on each piece of gear increases as you level, a higher level player is definitely going to have a larger total stat pool than a lower level one, assuming they are both wearing character-level-appropriate gear.

Certainly there is not an issue with down-leveled characters feeling too weak; in fact, my impression is that the consensus is the opposite. The only real takeaway from understanding the quirk I mentioned is that your gear’s level needs to be managed and kept up to date based on your character’s level, not based on the level of the area you are questing in. Furthermore, since not all drops in level-adjusted areas are scaled to your level, it means there is a notable disadvantage to not leveling in level-appropriate zones.