Guild Wars 2

Power creep, not only from players but mobs has basically totally overcome armor. Armor needs to matter again. All of this one or two hitting a heavy armor crap needs to stop. If skills and abilities are going to scale with percentage then protection provided by armor should too.

Armor works well, just not against condi.

Heavy Armor user with base 1000 Toughness aren’t exactly a ‘Tank’, they’re glass-build and everyone that use ‘Berserker’ or ‘Viper’ gear should understand this. No one really 1-2 hit KO a Soldier, or a Dire really

Xegrilt you are totally wrong with this assumption!!

I play, unlike many others an unusual Thief Build, that is using as Main Gear complete Soldier Gear with a mixture of Celestial Trinkets and have at WvW with buffs like over 20 to 22k HP…

And I oftenly meet there 1v1 where my enemies, like for example Chronomancers or Reapers are sometimes easily able to just 1 hit kill me, where I just say to myself – WTF just happened there and how broken this games balance is.

Armor, and defense NEVER has worked really in this game. Vitality is WAY to weak and there needs to exist a way how a player should be able to reduce the percentage of how much Condition Damage should maximum ignore your defense – but this doesnt exist and its a strong reason why Condi builds are so obscenely overpowered right now since 23rd june of 2015!!

Said Chronomancers just need only to shatter all their clones at the perfect moment in your face and you are most likely dead – and that with a high defensive build with over 20k Hp is absolutely ridiculous!!
Zhat woudl be understandable, if it hits a berserker build with low health,. or any build, that isn’t a combination of toughness and vitality…

The problem with this game is, that it lets by design work and counjt only offensive builds, it practicalyl favors them all the time over defensive builds, due to their attributs providing very strogn synergies, while the defensive attributes have no syerngies AT ALL which counter the offensive playstyles!

There are no defensive attribute effects that raise your wendurance regen
All is dependant on a stupid boon – vigor

There are no defensive attributes, which decrease the chance of receiving critical hits to counter fury and high critical builds (bersis)

There are no defensive attributes, which directly reduce condition damage, or the duration of conditions. Again we are dependant here on buff food and a stupid obsolete boon – Resistance, which you have no access to as a Thief >.>

This game needs since 2015 a long overdue overhaul of the complete boon and condition system together with a rework of the attribute system (dual attributes) to help getting rid of obsolete boons

Reapers also just need to do their weapon skill rotation practically and if they luckily crit with them most of the time, xyou lie with a defensive build also downed on the ground …

Why is this the case? Because the base health system is completely outdated. The game still uses its old system of 2012, which was designed around massively WEAKER classes, which was designed with no Revenants and not Elite Specs in general in mind, which was designed around conditions like Torment and a constantly damaging Confusion not in mind, which was designed with no such massive CC spam in mind, like we have it now years later.
The 3 type base health system needs to get reworked into an individual class based base health system, where each class’ base health values get individually balanced and not anymore shoehorned into 3 class types. This will allow ANet to massively balance each individual class better and each class should receive more Base Health, so that actually fights will last longer and to reduce the chance, that palyers can too easily 1hit killed/bursted into down state due to all classes potentially dealing right now way too much damage, than the game was designed for to begin with originally, due to ANet using still too many outdated 2012er gameplay elements in their combat system of GW2 which they missed to keep updated for the last 5 years together with all the powercreep Anet added over the last 3 years.

2014 were alot more things still ok, than they are right now!!

adapt or get killed. also thief is still very viable for most if not all parts of the game, be it power or condition dd, wvw roamer or as +1 in spvp
also why would you eat a whole power reaper rotation into your face? if you do so you deserve to die. there are near to no as strong telegraphed attacks as in reapershroud

Fact is you can have as much toughness as you want ( armor ), but if you don’t have sustain, vitality, invul, protection, condition cleanse, and so on, you are nothing.

You have 3k armor?
If an elementalist has 2400 and protection on you are way below him.
That’s it.

The fact that Toughness needs protection and other requirements ( as listed before ), is not the real problem.

Protection gives -33% dmg ( tempest -40% i guess ).

If Armor would work better and maybe protection provides less damage reduction ( but as a Total, the same amount given by Armor + Protection ), you’ll have removing boons nearly useless.

You could Tank with only Toughness ( imagine a warrior or a necro ).

The real issue here, to me, is that since gw2 release, promises were made.

Like

“every class will be able to do everything and cover every “role”, but also there won’t be “roles”.

or issues

“Many classes don’t have access to all boons/removal/conditions”.

You want to get tanky with thief?
You Can’t.
You just have dodges and teleport, but no sustain, no protection, no healings, no invul, etc…

I’d say that currently we have to accept that things work this way, and that the game is mostly boons/conditions wars, and every class has probably its own role in pve and pvp.

Raithwall.8201:

adapt or get killed. also thief is still very viable for most if not all parts of the game, be it power or condition dd, wvw roamer or as +1 in spvp
also why would you eat a whole power reaper rotation into your face? if you do so you deserve to die. there are near to no as strong telegraphed attacks as in reapershroud

Because it just can naturally sometimes happen in the course of a battle maybe?
We play agaisnt other players you know and not against some braindead predictable NPC A.I. you can already foreseee what they do ages ago, before they actualyl do somethign, due to NPCs attacking also like 1/3rd as fast as a real player does constantly.
Would my Thieves Guild only attack players half as fiercely and fast, like I do, then would everyone and their mum scream immediately here in the forums, how overpowered this skill is, but no, they have a massive delay in time in their auto attacks and by far use not so actively their initiative skills, like a real player could do and thats in the end, what balances this skill out – on the other side of the coin it is against massive condi/cc spam underpowered an they are no great help for you as they deal too less DPS to put a halfway decent chronomancer/reaper under any pressure, unless they are in a real low health state and you can successfully surprise youe foe with them being summon in an inconvinient moment for them.

Reaper can just way too long protect permanently their health through their shrouds.
Seen already lots of them, which were practically able to sustain their shrouds like felt 90% of the whole time, having always enough shroud time there to be protected from any of my burst attacks. This needs to be balanced through lettign them lose the shroud faster and building it up should become slower, so that the shroud gets more used in special situations and can’t be kept up basically mostly permanently in melee combat. They shoudl also like Warrior lose adrenaline lose the shroud out of combat, so that they start at 0 like Warriors do at a start of combat.
—-

You know, real players can react to what I do and can act also accordingly to force me eating their full rotation? A real shocker right? I surely don’t do this with any intention, or because I do like to eat their rotations, because it makes so much fun to lie dead on the ground…

Adaption would mean going into ranged combat, but with ranged combat (Shortbow) you deal significantly lesser damage, than with D/D or S/P
The problem is all this CC and Condition Spam against which you stand no chance when it comes together both at the same time.

However, the true point here was, which I wanted to point on is, how unbalanced this game is, when it comes down to defensive play styles, because the whole game practically doesn’t support defensive playstyles, its all practically play offensive or GTFO and thats somethign that disturbs me personally, not the fact that I did lose to some Chronomancer/Reaper players just because they were by game design able to easily outplay me at these moments and that Anet hasn’t changed anything on this bad situation in the game for over 2 years now!!

Orpheal.8263:

Raithwall.8201:

adapt or get killed. also thief is still very viable for most if not all parts of the game, be it power or condition dd, wvw roamer or as +1 in spvp
also why would you eat a whole power reaper rotation into your face? if you do so you deserve to die. there are near to no as strong telegraphed attacks as in reapershroud

Because it just can naturally sometimes happen in the course of a battle maybe?
We play agaisnt other players you know and not against some braindead predictable NPC A.I. you can already foreseee what they do ages ago, before they actualyl do somethign, due to NPCs attacking also like 1/3rd as fast as a real player does constantly.
Would my Thieves Guild only attack players half as fiercely and fast, like I do, then would everyone and their mum scream immediately here in the forums, how overpowered this skill is, but no, they have a massive delay in time in their auto attacks and by far use not so actively their initiative skills, like a real player could do and thats in the end, what balances this skill out – on the other side of the coin it is against massive condi/cc spam underpowered an they are no great help for you as they deal too less DPS to put a halfway decent chronomancer/reaper under any pressure, unless they are in a real low health state and you can successfully surprise youe foe with them being summon in an inconvinient moment for them.

Reaper can just way too long protect permanently their health through their shrouds.
Seen already lots of them, which were practically able to sustain their shrouds like felt 90% of the whole time, having always enough shroud time there to be protected from any of my burst attacks. This needs to be balanced through lettign them lose the shroud faster and building it up should become slower, so that the shroud gets more used in special situations and can’t be kept up basically mostly permanently in melee combat. They shoudl also like Warrior lose adrenaline lose the shroud out of combat, so that they start at 0 like Warriors do at a start of combat.
—-

You know, real players can react to what I do and can act also accordingly to force me eating their full rotation? A real shocker right? I surely don’t do this with any intention, or because I do like to eat their rotations, because it makes so much fun to lie dead on the ground…

Adaption would mean going into ranged combat, but with ranged combat (Shortbow) you deal significantly lesser damage, than with D/D or S/P
The problem is all this CC and Condition Spam against which you stand no chance when it comes together both at the same time.

However, the true point here was, which I wanted to point on is, how unbalanced this game is, when it comes down to defensive play styles, because the whole game practically doesn’t support defensive playstyles, its all practically play offensive or GTFO and thats somethign that disturbs me personally, not the fact that I did lose to some Chronomancer/Reaper players just because they were by game design able to easily outplay me at these moments and that Anet hasn’t changed anything on this bad situation in the game for over 2 years now!!

you are playing a thief and complain about being forced to eat dmg skills? ever tried a class that cant chain 7 or more dodges + a stunbreak block on 12s cd + has a stunbreak teleportcondiclear. if you get hit by a necromancers shroudskills as a thief its only your own fault

Shirlias.8104:

You want to get tanky with thief?
You Can’t.
You just have dodges and teleport, but no sustain, no protection, no healings, no invul, etc…

Your definition of “tanking” is a bit narrow. A thief’s job is never to take blows to the face, but insofar as distracting an enemy indefinitely, a thief is really good at that. Just ration dodges and skill evades and you can survive for a long time.

All that said, I’m not sure this is really an issue in the game. Soldier’s and Dire gear are still some of the most efficient sets, point for point, because of how toughness and vitality scale geometrically. With a toughness minor you’re taking 67% of the damage you would have normally, which buys you 50% longer survival time in a fight. Just because enemies do more damage doesn’t make this advantage go away.

That would make sense if the game was Tank and Spank…..but the mere existence of active dodging changes the entire balance dynamic. Armor/Toughness isn’t there to supplant damage avoidance; its there to compliment it. Both Defense (armor + tough) and HP in general are distinctly tuned to blunt sustain damage, while dodge rolls exist to counter burst damage.

Sustain damage is there to force players to expend skills to recover from the damage. This is known as “pressure” in our Meta. Burst damage is there to overwhelm a target’s defenses, and either force them into a defensive stance, or finish them off. Mitigating buffs (like Protection) are limited duration, not meant to have too much uptime, and is there to blunt burst damage to survivable levels. Since uptime is an issue outside of large groups, protection has to be carefully deployed as a way to conserve your recovery skills.

As an easy example, Medi Guards can use smite condition to clear conditions; but the Healing and Fury from Monk’s focus turns it into a powerful sustain tool. It can fire frequently, adds back health, improves burst damage potential, can deal respectable damage, and is able to counter act condi burst and condi pressure at key moments. Add the trait that casts Smite Condition on Heal, and they effectively have soft immunity to light and medium condi pressure, and can easily reset burst condi on classes that can’t rapid reapply. There was a very clear reason Medi guards were long time contenders on Metabattle.

So again….. the game is heavily focused on “active” combat. That means rewarding well timed and well executed actions/strategies, and punishing passive players for not getting out of the way of big damage when they see it coming.
What the OP is suggesting the players behave like AI in core Tyria….. just stand there like a lump, using skills as they come of cool down, and not move when AOE circles come up. Thank about that carefully for a second!

Thought it was clear what i meant.

A thief can’t join a zerg and pretend to remain alive as could maybe do a guardian, warrior or elementalist.

He can stay ranged and and survive using dodges and teleports instead.
And can also join for an instant, to finish an almost dead target, then came out.

Also i wasn’t talking about “jobs”, because these “jobs” shouldn’t have existed at first, as they declared.

We simply have classes as any other mmo.
With specify roles.

Raithwall.8201:

you are playing a thief and complain about being forced to eat dmg skills? ever tried a class that cant chain 7 or more dodges + a stunbreak block on 12s cd + has a stunbreak teleportcondiclear. if you get hit by a necromancers shroudskills as a thief its only your own fault

They have other ways of damage mitigation like invulnerability skills where you dont need to dodge, you can just eat all the damage and lose no health at all, other forms of stun breaks and way more condi cleans than a daredevil (and i even use the one that cleans on dodge and signet of agility, the condi spam is still too much for this alone)

I don’t complain here having lost these battles – i know that I have just been outplayed at these moments.
I#m complaining about how defensive play styles factly play in this game absolutel no role and are by design of this game so underwhelming, that you stand most of the time no chance with tjhem in combat, because the offensive playstyles just ignore everythign you throw at them completely, without that you have any way in the game to get some counterweight to this.

Like mentioned, as defensive play style you have no way through an attribute to increase your endurance regen, you are permanently reliant on vigor for this – a practically obsolete boon, if there just would exiost more gameplay relevant alternatives

There exist no way to decrease condition damage or durations, unless you use buff food for this or you get somehow resistance, which is somethign thievres have no access to, same as much as liek Stability or Protection, which are important to be able to play halfway decently in a defensive way to sustain all this cc and condition spam better.. because only because thieves have more dodges as daredevils, than other classes, also doesn’t mean that it casn happen that you get hit sooner or later also with some hard bursts…
Even the best thief player wil lget hit in this game… so please don’t try to do so, as if the thief class woudl be some kind of overwhelming dodgy super class, which will NEVER GET HIT, because we all know, that this is simply said just not true, regardless o how often you can dodge in a combat. Dodging often makes you not undefeatable – especially if you get spammed for with AoE skills that either put you full with conditions or try to cc you – or worser, both at the same time and that as DoT, because then help you alot of dodges not very much.

If GW2 would make finally defensive playstyles more equal to offensive playstyles, then this game woudl become automatically better balanced, regardless of which class I or you or whoever else plays now.

The problem always has been and remains that offensive stats give you way more bang for your buck than defensive stats do – pretty much always, though the impact is less substantial in PvP than it is in PvE.

This is in large part because of the active combat. Because your ability to avoid damage is limited, the best defense in the game is ending fights quickly. The longer a fight goes the more of a liability it is for you, so defensive stats actually undermine your defense in more situations than not. It’s actually pretty horribly broken, and it’s surprising Anet hasn’t done more to address it.

I actually agree with the OP that defensive stats need to be made more effective than they are. Three major changes I would make:

- vitality should increase your endurance regeneration in addition to your health

- armor/toughness should reduce incoming damage in a subtractive way rather than a divisive way, so weaker hits become highly ineffective against heavily armored characters while heavier hits still need to be dodged. Additionally, it should reduce damage from condition ticks by a percentage, OR

- agony resistance should be retooled in such a way that it impacts all condition damage. I’d leave the specifics up to Anet.

Orpheal.8263:

There are no defensive attributes, which decrease the chance of receiving critical hits to counter fury and high critical builds (bersis)

Actually, we have https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Weakness

Orpheal.8263:

Said Chronomancers just need only to shatter all their clones at the perfect moment in your face and you are most likely dead – and that with a high defensive build with over 20k Hp is absolutely ridiculous!!

But, but… Anet likes this kind of gameplay, since they think it will draw all the twitch-kiddies to the game. Fast paced arcade action oneshotting gameplay ftw!

I completely agree with you Einlanzer there .

It would really help alot, if Toughness and Armor would provide together some kind of Damage Threshold, which needs to get surpassed first, before you can actually receive even Damage first.
So if you get attacked and the damage of the attack lies under your Damage Threshold, then you see as opponet only the Damage Number 0
Example:

You have 1000 Touhness and 3000 Armor, tnhat woudl make a value of 4000.
So you#d have a Damage Threshould of 4000, meaning an Enemy would have to deal over 4000 Damage to me first with direct attacks, to deal damage to me.
Everythign under 4000 Damage would automaticalyl mitigated to 0 Damage.
Dont take the numbers now too serious, they just are an example to describe the mechanic.

Kind of like a similar “Barrier Mechanic”, which would mean automatically, so higher your Armor and Toughness are, so more Damage must your opponet deal to be even able to scratch you.
This way would become Toughness alot more important.
If Vitality would receve instead of a significant boost to much Health or instead of the merge with healing Power instead the secondary effect of increasing Endurance Regen, then would become also Vitality more important and helpful and would have like you say more “bang for its buck”

But personalyl Id say, it would be more useful for the overall balance of the whole game, if Healing Power gets merged into Vitality so that if you have high health, then you should be also able to heal you better accordingly to your higher health pool.
That way if you have a defensive build as thief, you can sustain longer fights also alot better then with the help of traits like assassins reward, or that one which heals you for critical hits together with skills like Signet of Malice…

The increase for more endurance regen can come then through a new attirbute, that replaces Heal Power with Agility. The dual attribute I propose has a reason why I do it, especialyl to make defensive playstyles this ay more equal with offensive ones and to get rid of obsolete combat effects like Vigor/Fury as rthese boons could get easily integrated completely into the attributes, if precision just becomes more effective in raising critical hit,s if there is on the couterside also finalyl an defensive attribute, which can reduce the chance to receive critical hits from enemies (Courage), because thats also somethign very important that this game is missing now for 5 years…

SappFire.5793:

Orpheal.8263:

There are no defensive attributes, which decrease the chance of receiving critical hits to counter fury and high critical builds (bersis)

Actually, we have https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Weakness

Thats no defensive attribute, thats a condition.
I’m talking in this case about defensive attributes like Toughness.

Somethign like Agility, that could work for increased Endurance Regen and incrased Chance to not critically get hit.

Or somethign like Courage, which increases the Efficiency of Boons (why should only Conditions be increaseable?) and reduces the percentage of how much Conditions can ignore your Armor.

Or Wisdom (dont like the silly term Condition Damage, thats no attribute term that resembles a persons values) as a dual stat which could increase not only cour Condition Damage, but also how much Condition Damage you can take maximum by reducing the Durations of Conditions for you you have to suffer.

Thats the kind of equal defensive gameplay mechancis that are missing all to give like Einlanzers says – them more bang for buck. With thse kidn of effects would receive defensive attributes also more synergies between each other, same as much as like offensive attributes profitate from each other through synergies to maximise your DPS.
There needs to be also synergies to maximise your damage mitigation to counter this permanent spiral of damage damage damage.. as if there exists nothing else of importancy anymore in this game /rolleyes.

If someone is blowing up like that, it’s a misplay on their part really. GW2 isn’t a game like FFXIV where a tank just sits there and facetanks while a healer stands back and heals them. There have been several situations where I have been fighting people in WvW where I have been unable to kill them even though I do tons of damage myself, and it’s mostly due to them understanding positioning, knowing when to CC, and knowing when to time their blocks/invuls. GW2’s combat in PvP gamemodes is about knowing your enemy’s capabilities and being able to predict/react quickly to what they will do. Just having tons of toughness won’t cut it in a system where so many hits/sources of damage come out so fast. Just the other day, I and five others chased an Elementalist for two minutes straight in an attempt to kill them, and only managed to do so after I broke combat and equipped Scorpion Wire for an extra CC pull. It started as a 1v1 and they were gaining the upper hand on me with their self-sustain compared to my damage. To put it simply, they knew their class better than I knew mine. If there’s one thing I know about mesmers, they need a certain situation to be able to land their full burst combo, and that’s if you’re standing in place CC’ed, immobilized, or just not moving. If you’re kiting efficiently and utilizing the environment to your advantage with line-of-sight rules, however, they have trouble landing it all. I know this is the case for power mesmers, but I am unsure for condi mesmers (which is why I die to them 99% of the time, I haven’t learned their playstyle yet.) Watch some WvW roaming videos on YouTube. Most of the time, those videos show players who know their class to a T, and because of that they are able to 1v1 /very/ efficiently.

starlinvf.1358:

That would make sense if the game was Tank and Spank…..but the mere existence of active dodging changes the entire balance dynamic. Armor/Toughness isn’t there to supplant damage avoidance; its there to compliment it. Both Defense (armor + tough) and HP in general are distinctly tuned to blunt sustain damage, while dodge rolls exist to counter burst damage.

snip

So again….. the game is heavily focused on “active” combat. That means rewarding well timed and well executed actions/strategies, and punishing passive players for not getting out of the way of big damage when they see it coming.
What the OP is suggesting the players behave like AI in core Tyria….. just stand there like a lump, using skills as they come of cool down, and not move when AOE circles come up. Thank about that carefully for a second!

Yes, the game is focused on active combat and damage avoidance, which is why offensive stats are too powerful relative to defensive stats. As I said above, when the game revolves around active dodging of big hits and then severely limits your capacity to dodge, offense becomes way more important than defense, because you need to end fights quickly to avoid death.

It is a problem, and is why we have a berserker-dominated meta, no matter how much people try to argue to the contrary. It sounds counter-intuitive, but offensive and defensive stats would actually be better balanced if we had unlimited dodges, because it would become less important to eliminate opponents as fast as possible and you could effectively strategize around which hits to take and which to evade. Of course, unlimited dodging would make condition damage way too strong, which is why I favor something like what I proposed above. B

I see a significant improvement in my ability to survive a fight using higher armor and toughness simply because said armor can better absorb “in between” damage when one is not using other measures to avoid the same.

Just as with cleanses versus conditions , one should not expect armor and toughness to mitigate anything thrown your way. You still have to and SHOULD be playing the game actively. If armor or toughness mitigated yet more damage a person would be much better able to regain full health once all of those defensive measures come off cooldown. This would make it much harder to kill high armor users in power meaning Condition builds become more used to deal with the same.

Einlanzer.1627:

- vitality should increase your endurance regeneration in addition to your health

Excuse me have you actually fallen off your rocker? If vitality could increase your endurance regeneration engies would be unkillable, tempest would be unkillable, thief would always be flying. You would actually break the game. Stop, this is why you guys are not game designers, because you clearly have such a clear bias to defensive stats that it actually makes me sick to my stomach.

And this is coming from a support main. Armor does indeed work as it is intended, but it is more of the fact that you need to be /active/. GW2 clearly has a learning curve of having well-timed dodges and knowing what hits to take or not take. This isn’t WoW where you can sit there and occasionally press keys, this is an /active/ combat system. I cannot believe people have not realized it yet. Just because you are defensive you cannot just sit there and take hits all day.

And if you are melting from something like a power reaper you are mostly allowing their vulnerability to stack on you, which cuts all of those defensive stats by a percentile. You are literally getting hit with a condi that says it’s cutting your armor and making you more vulnerable to enemy attacks.

Xegrilt.9426:

Armor works well, just not against condi.

Heavy Armor user with base 1000 Toughness aren’t exactly a ‘Tank’, they’re glass-build and everyone that use ‘Berserker’ or ‘Viper’ gear should understand this. No one really 1-2 hit KO a Soldier, or a Dire really

Problem is soldier or dire don’t have enough damage to counterpressure, so a berserker build with more proactive mitigation like blocks/evasion/immunity is more effective at outlasting you.

Toughness should reduce crit damage taken by a % as well as its current bonus, and vitality should reduce condi duration and increase healing power by a % as well.

In fact, vitality should be merged with healing power as a stat.