Guild Wars 2

After playing without a stun breaker for a few weeks and seeing just how good Protection has been at keeping my Engineer alive, I personally feel that this is our best defensive boons. I’m looking for help brainstorming the best ways gain it, and maximize the duration.

We can gain protection through utilities, traits and Runes:
*Elixir H (random, 5 seconds)
*Toss Elixir H (random, 5 seconds)
*Protective Shield (I Invetions): Gain protection for 3 seconds when you are hit with a critical attack 20 second cooldown.
*Protection Injection (VI Alchemy): Gain protection for 3 seconds whenever you are disabled. (stun, daze, knockdown, knockback, launch, float, sink, fear). This effect can trigger once every 5 seconds.
*4 Runes of Earth: 25% chance to gain Protection for 4s when hit. (Cooldown: 30s)
*6 Runes of the Forge: At 50% health you gain protection for 10s and burn all nearby foes. (Cooldown: 60s)
*4 Runes of the Grove: 25% chance to gain Protection for 4s when hit. (Cooldown: 30s)

We can increase the duration by investing points into Alchemy, and Runes.
*2 Superior Runes of Earth: +20% Protection duration
*4 Superior Runes of the Forge: +20% Protection Duration
*2 Superior Runes of the Grove: +15% Protection Duration
*2 Superior Runes of Water: +15% Boon Duration
*2 Superior Runes of the Monk: +15% Boon Duration
*4 Major Runes of Altruism: +15% Boon Duration
*2 Major Runes of Sanctuary: +10% Boon Duration

Currently I’m favoring an Elixir Build (30 points) with 2 Superior Runes of Earth, 2 Superior Runes of the Grove, and 2 Superior Runes of the Monk. That’s a 65% increase in Protection Duration, or 85% if you select the Potent Elixirs trait. I also feel like a good argument could be made for going with 6 Runes of the Forge since the protection duration you get is so high at 10 seconds and guaranteed to proc when you reach 50% health. My only problem with it is the 60 second cooldown.

This turns every 3 second Protection buff into 4-5 seconds, and every 5 second Protection buff into 8 or 9 seconds. As far as I know Protective Shield and Protection Injection do not share a cooldown, so it is possible to have Protection up at all times when being focused—with some lucky Elixir H procs. I would even consider Elixir C on the off chance that you can turn a condition into Protection.

So what’s all this good for? I feel that this is a great foundation for a bunker build. I’m not sure what the rest of the build looks like, but I want to start some discussion about it. Let me know if I’ve omitted any options for gaining protection or increasing the duration. Keep in mind my focus is on tPvP so maybe you WvW vets have some other ideas on this.

Maybe something like this:

(cut and paste link)

http://tinyurl.com/cl746tx

The first idea that came to me is using chill in conjunction with Protection. Sigil of Hyrdomancy + 40% frozen duration* = 4 seconds of AOE chill every 9 seconds. This will severely hamper your enemies ability to damage you on top of your already high Protection up-time. Bombs and Mines make the point very difficult to fight on, and with Elixir infused bombs you further mitigate the damage you are taking.

*sigil of chilling + 2 runes of grenth + 10 points into explosives

A good way to think about protection is the sum of all of the uptimes divided by their respective recharges. This is a very haphazard way of handling boons, but nonetheless provides a decent measure of how effective the boon is.

For instance, Elixir H in that setup would have a 20 second recharge, with a 1/3 chance of granting protection. With +20% duration from the trait ability, 30% from trait points, and another 30% from runes (that calculator is outdated: both grove and earth give 15% duration), that comes to an 80% increase or a 9 second duration. So, factoring that all in:

1/3 × 9 / 20 seconds = 0.15/second

or roughly a 15% upkeep. Do the same thing with Toss Elixir H, and you’ll get 0.1/second, which comes to a 25% upkeep when added to the previous. Now, lets compare this to, say, using 4 runes of earth.

Now, 4 runes of the earth are going to give a 45% increase to protection from the runes themselves, while also giving a 25% chance to get protection for 3 seconds when hit on a 30 second cooldown. The 25% chance to work gets complicated, though, since we have to average out how many attacks it’ll take to work and then combine that with how long it takes to execute those attacks. Those numbers change for each class, so I’ll just hammer out a few assumptions. Feel free to disagree with these assumptions and substitute any value of your choice, for they are merely guesswork. However, I must insist that if anyone disagrees, that they substitute their own numbers and make an argument for using their numbers or formula:

Attack rate is about one hit per 0.75 seconds.
The trait is meaningful only when it has a chance of proccing equal or greater than 90% during any set interval.

Using a very basic method of taking 1-0.75^x > 0.9, we’ll find that it’ll take roughly 8 attacks to have a high chance of activating, which comes to 6 additional seconds, having a total recharge of 36 seconds for the runes to activate. So, going by these numbers again:

Elixir H = 5 × 1.65 × 1/3 / 20 = 0.138
Toss Elixir H = 0.092
Runes of Earth = 4 × 1.45 / 36 = 0.161

Total: 0.391, or 39.1% up time. So, as you can see, using 4 runes of Earth is far superior to using 2 then 2 runes of grove. Note: it is possible for the runes to activate sooner than 8 attacks, but at 8 attacks it has a roughly 90% chance of having activated then or before then. I’d argue to use 6 runes of Earth, since the magnetic aura at 20% health is incredibly useful, for it WILL seal the deal against many classes in 1 vs. 1 fights. It gives more stat points in toughness, too. However I digress:

The really important trait is protection injection. That trait gives protection when you need it, every time you need, and against a particularly control heavy enemy it will nearly always be up.

As for the build itself, for a pure bunker I would personally go with reinforced shield as the major trait instead of cloaking device, and then I would either replace land mine for Elixir C or I would replace potent elixirs with Cleaning Formula 409. As it stands, that bunker build is incredibly weak to conditions, and it is necessary for there to be a way to clean those conditions.

Another strange option would be to replace either land mine or Elixir S with Elixir R. When near death, tossing Elixir R allows you to get right back up again, severely trolling enemies. It’s also a stun breaker that adds 2 more dodges (1.5 seconds worth of evasion time), so it is worth experimenting with.

protection injection + 4pc Forge rune + 30% boon duration (Alchemy) = 4.5sec of Prot every (potentially) 5 seconds.

PI has been a staple in every one of my FT builds, often criticized for their lack of CC removal.

Does Protective Shield reduce the damage of the first critical hit that activates it, or will you eat the full damage of the first critical hit?

godmoney.6025:

Does Protective Shield reduce the damage of the first critical hit that activates it, or will you eat the full damage of the first critical hit?

Not sure. I’ve always assumed it was after the hit, but I haven’t bothered to take notice. This trait will be much more powerful than I thought if it actually does trigger for the triggering crit.

godmoney.6025:

Does Protective Shield reduce the damage of the first critical hit that activates it, or will you eat the full damage of the first critical hit?

I’m 90% sure you eat the full damage of the crit first. Although, this is just the programmer in me talking. If you gave me the decision to have a trait check if you’ve taken a critical hit and apply protection or to check if a hit would be a crit, apply the protection first, and then deal the damage, I’d take the straight-forward, less exploitable, simpler to implement route.