Guild Wars 2

Just curious.

You have glass cannon (berserkers)
You have bunker (soldiers)
You have pow/pre/vit for damage with survival vs condition users.

But you don’t have pow/pre/tuf for damage with survival vs direct damage.

So you can go burst, bunker, or balanced but the latter gets obliterated by burst builds.

There is an entire build style left out of the equation here, one that is popular in WvW. I just don’t see much of a reason to leave this stat configuration out.

This is the only thing that stops me from playing sPvP.

You should try Valkyries amulet. It works better than the amulet you described for most classes and builds. Precision is honestly a pretty lack luster stat in this game. Only a minimum amount is required for most classes.

Phantaram.1265:

Precision is honestly a pretty lack luster stat in this game. Only a minimum amount is required for most classes.

Really only the case in spvp where crit damage is hard to come by and has a bad tradeoff(compared to ascended gear).

He’s talking about amulets though, not WvW.

I think it would completel kill berserkers and knights amulets.

Everybody would take it cz it would give dmg and protection against zerkers. Yes low hp would make u more vulnarable to conditions but they are (even now in a heavy condi meta) being cleansed a lot.

Think about it, we already have bunkers who deal moderate dmg and every build needs its pros and cons.

Phantaram.1265:

You should try Valkyries amulet. It works better than the amulet you described for most classes and builds. Precision is honestly a pretty lack luster stat in this game. Only a minimum amount is required for most classes.

284 precision instead of 15% crit damage would actually be a net average DPS increase of ~4%/7% with/without fury. Mostly because of how miserable the stat efficiency for crit damage is on amulets (nearly 19 stat points per 1% crit damage). Compare that to the 10:1 for traits or 5:1 for divinity runes.

well with the prevalence of condition damage in PvP right now it’s better to take vitality anyway

You will have to mix and match with a jewel, for what little boost they provide, they still provide something. Knights amulet with Shaman or Soldiers jewel. You will have to think about what stats you’re picking up in your trait lines. This is a silly reason not to play pvp.

I don’t think you are really going to get an official answer here unfortunately.

sPvP is designed in such away that you can only optimize your build around a limited number of amulet choices. I believe the root cause is that the balance team doesn’t want to have too much work to do as they apparently are too short-handed to keep up already. Changing the amulet system would increase the amount of work they’d have to do by a large multiple per amulet or perhaps even exponentially, so it is going to stay as it is for awhile most likely, an perhaps forever.

Copenhagen.7015:

You will have to mix and match with a jewel, for what little boost they provide, they still provide something. Knights amulet with Shaman or Soldiers jewel. You will have to think about what stats you’re picking up in your trait lines. This is a silly reason not to play pvp.

Playing an offensive guardian that isn’t glass cannon is impossible without Pow/Pre/Tuf, basically.

Your survival comes from high toughness with healing, your damage comes from power and precision from gear and the 30% critical damage from the Valor line.

If you go low toughness, you basically trade the innate survival Guardians have because your healing is greatly exceeded by the damage you’re taking in. If you go low power and precision with high toughness and vitality, you become just another bunker. I don’t want to play glass cannon or bunker. Pretty obvious reason not to play if I can’t play the way I want to.

Same thing with how I play my Engineer. High toughness, low health, with has constant regen and various sources of healing. He has high power for damage with bombs and precision for traits with a rifle.

Can’t use either in sPvP without going bunker or glass cannon. Precision players a major role in both, but they’re not entirely based on precision. You need power. But without the Toughness they’re just another glass cannon with a survival gimmick that doesn’t work in real battles.

Flumek.9043:

I think it would completel kill berserkers and knights amulets.

Everybody would take it cz it would give dmg and protection against zerkers. Yes low hp would make u more vulnarable to conditions but they are (even now in a heavy condi meta) being cleansed a lot.

Think about it, we already have bunkers who deal moderate dmg and every build needs its pros and cons.

In WvW people still play condition/bunker/berserkers. It’s not as if pow/pre/tuf blows everything out of the water.

And if that’s the case, then should the current most popular amulet get removed? If berserkers is the most common, then why shouldn’t it also not be an option?

lmaonade.9207:

well with the prevalence of condition damage in PvP right now it’s better to take vitality anyway

Direct damage is also prevalent. Only difference is that you can go pow/pre/vit to counter conditions, but not pow/pre/tuf to counter direct damage.

Besides, it’s just another choice. If you only had options to counter what was most common, then it would be boring for everyone involved.

Myrmidian Eudoros.4671:

I don’t think you are really going to get an official answer here unfortunately.

sPvP is designed in such away that you can only optimize your build around a limited number of amulet choices. I believe the root cause is that the balance team doesn’t want to have too much work to do as they apparently are too short-handed to keep up already. Changing the amulet system would increase the amount of work they’d have to do by a large multiple per amulet or perhaps even exponentially, so it is going to stay as it is for awhile most likely, an perhaps forever.

That’s just going to throw balance between pvp/pve/wvw off. If they just balance for PvP, then a set of builds will become imbalanced in WvW/PvE because they don’t SEE these builds in PvP. The opposite is also true. Just makes their job harder and the game annoying, IMO.

I think the OP is wondering why they changed the knight’s amulet from the regular game to spvp mode. Why didn’t they just leave it the same?

In the regular game it’s power, precision, toughness.

In spvp it’s power, precision, vitality.

Wreckdum.8367:

I think the OP is wondering why they changed the knight’s amulet from the regular game to spvp mode. Why didn’t they just leave it the same?

In the regular game it’s power, precision, toughness.

In spvp it’s power, precision, vitality.

I don’t really care what it’s called, just curious why they don’t have that specific combination of stats on any of the gear.

It’s strange that they don’t, they never gave a reason, and nobody ever asks.

shimmerless.4560:

Phantaram.1265:

You should try Valkyries amulet. It works better than the amulet you described for most classes and builds. Precision is honestly a pretty lack luster stat in this game. Only a minimum amount is required for most classes.

If you are playing an aura Ele or something like a Thief with guaranteed crits then yes, you could say something like this, otherwise you could not be further from the truth.

Actually, it looks like Phant was responding to a guy that plays a Guardian Main.

Valkyrie Guard is workable. RH strength FTW. Most classes are actually optimized in terms of effectiveness for PvP without going really deep in precision. This doesn’t mean precision is worthless, but rather that for most professions there isn’t a good reason to go all in for precision.

Many classes and power builds work with Valkyrie’s, especially those that either have a large base HP pool or superior sustain through healing or invulnerabilities.

Thief, for instance won’t work at all with Valkyries, because their HP pool is too small and their healing is mediocre (talking TPvP builds here).

In terms of efficiency in my opinion Valkyrie’s is however below the Soldier’s for most if not all classes. Valkyrie’s gives increased healing and crit damage, while Soldier’s gives HPs. However, if we look at what the extra 284 healing and the 15% crit damage translate to, it’s hard to justify taking Valkyrie’s over Soldier’s, unless you have a class/build that takes excessive advantage of these otherwise unimpressive stats.

The only one that comes to my mind is the Elementalist hybrid build with 2 arcanes. The extra healing and guaranteed crit from arcanes put it pretty much on par with Soldier’s.

To clarify, many heals have a stat contribution of 1 or lower (this rougly depends on cool down, cast time and additional boni the heal itself grants), so that whatever your #6 heals for, you’re mostly getting up to 284 extra healing from it.

Furthermore, while 15% crit damage seems to be a lot, one has to be aware of the fact that crit damage, like most other stats, suffers from relative diminishing returns, so that the Elementalist’s meta build (0/20/20/30; Phantaram among others uses this), will sit at a crit damage base modifier of 70% prior to runes and amulet/gem (a 1k non-crit will result in a 1.7k crit). Now it’s pretty common for Elementalists to either use Divinity or Scholar runes in that build, which will add 12 and 8% additional crit damage respectively for a total of 82/78% crit damage modifier prior to amulet/gem.

If we take Phantaram’s build as an example (Divinity runes), he will then add a Valkyrie’s amulet and a Berserker gem to it for a total of 102% crit damage modifier (1k regular hit translates to a 2020 crit). If we now were to replace the Valyrie’s with the Soldier’s your crit damage modifier would drop from 102% to 87% turning a 1k regular hit into a 1870 crit. Applying simple math we can see that the 15% crit damage modifier translates to an 8% damage increase on a crit (and only on crit, as regular hits will do the same with both amulets).

Phantaram’s base crit chance with Divinity runes is 20%, which will top off at 40% on attunement switch thanks to fury. So Phantaram is dealing an extra 8% more damage 40% of the time at best and dropping 5.7k HPs for it (13855 instead of 19545) due to his amulet choice.

A trade that would be nowhere close to worth it given the fact that condition damage can not be mitigated and that many classes will deal extra damage or trigger devastating effects on you when you drop below a certain % of HPs (on top of being generally more susceptible to burst), if it wasn’t for the very strong access to healing this build has and the auto-crit on your instant burst.

Alarox.4590:

I don’t really care what it’s called, just curious why they don’t have that specific combination of stats on any of the gear.

It’s strange that they don’t, they never gave a reason, and nobody ever asks.

A suggestion for you is to either run Power/toughness/vitality amulet with a power/precision jewel with power/precision runes. You can still achieve a good amount of crit % and have great survivability. (you can use the runes which provide fury when hit to have a high fury uptime provided you have some innate boon duration)

Another alternative is to go Power/prec/vitality amulet with a toughness/power jewel and toughness runes with protection uptime (runes of earth if I remember correctly). I have found both options to work well with my warrior/ele.