Guild Wars 2

I had a question about base stats per profession. I’m in no way trying to suggest anything is wrong or broken…I just have a simple question.

Professions start with differing amounts of base health. Regardless of armor type (which can further widen or shorten this gap in health difference), is there a philosophical balance that gw2 has officially stated that is the reason for such health differences?

I guess what I’m getting at is I am confused why all professions start with the same amount of power, precision, etc, but that base health differs? Again I’m asking from a technical standpoint…. Not trying to get into whether it’s right or wrong. Like have they ever given an official statement on how it plays into their idea of class balance?

Yeah there is a reason, but people tend to ignore that when complaining about classes being having things that theirs do not.

For example, eles have the lowest base defense in the game. They are both in the lowest health pool and can only wear light armor. Thus they were given more mobility (when dagger) and more range/control (when staff) to balance it out. Basically while a warrior may be able to face tank something, an elementalist has to use mobility to compensate.

Power doesn’t need to be different based on profession because each skill has its own power coefficient. If all thief skills have a power coefficient of 1.2 or higher, thieves already effectively have more power than a profession that averages .8 or something. The same basic idea can apply to critical damage. Profession x already deals higher direct damage, so base crit damage goes further for it.

The argument can be made that ease of applying fury can be a substitute for anet wanting certain professions to have higher base precision. I like to think that is why eles have such great and easy access to fury with zephyr’s boon and/or arcane fury.

Base condition damage doesn’t need to be higher for professions that can already stack more conditions faster and for longer durations by default.

Some professions have more heals and/or better heals with higher coefficients than others by default. They are already better at healing, so no need to give them higher base healing power.

Higher base stats would just mean that they would have to adjust skills and traits based on that anyway. Plus, making professions better at something without just increasing a stat is more interesting. A higher base crit chance is just a higher base crit chance. However, fury can at least be stripped, interact with traits/runes and requires people to make some kind of choice.

Base hp and armor are basically inversely proportional to the amount of active defense a profession can have. Warriors aren’t very good at removing conditions, healing, applying defensive boons/conditions, blocking, evading, teleporting, using stealth or any of the other things squishier professions use to make up for having less passive defense. High armor and hp are nice things to have, but they can’t be timed right for increased effect.

covenn.7165:

Yeah there is a reason, but people tend to ignore that when complaining about classes being having things that theirs do not.

For example, eles have the lowest base defense in the game. They are both in the lowest health pool and can only wear light armor. Thus they were given more mobility (when dagger) and more range/control (when staff) to balance it out. Basically while a warrior may be able to face tank something, an elementalist has to use mobility to compensate.

… and I’m sure that mobility/CC would come really handy next time my warrior friend is face tanking a boss/trash in an instance while doing tons of damage, I’ll start running in circles reallyyyy fast or start spamming 1 sec CC skills instead of damage ones.

Not everything should be balanced around pvp or pve alone.