Guild Wars 2

Hello

I’ve recently reached 80 with my guardian and have aquired a P/T/V set from AC.I’ve checked various builds on the forums that call for different stat combinations (some people go for Knight’s,other swear by Berserkers).

So I went in the mists and tried a combination of builds with a combination of amulets and the differences between,for example,full berserker’s and full soldier’s dont feel very significant.

Granted this was a hasty test in order to get a general feel but I found that,for example a medium dummy went down in 7 autoattacks with berserker vs 9 with soldier’s.

Trying to facetank npcs in order to see differences with/without vit/toughness I saw that it was a matter of withstanding 2/3 hits more.

Am I missing something obvious here or are stats supposed to be small adjustments that add flavor?Should I bother grinding/spending gold on different armor sets if I want to try out different builds or is it a waste of time?

I’m saying this because I’d love to have 2-3 very different builds for my guardian.Switching playstyles within a class is one of my favourite things in mmos but ultimately I feel that all these +5% differences from stats or traits are only minor nudges in a general direction.

What are your experiences with stats?Any examples that might help me understand them better?

Personally, I find the Mists terrible for testing stat combinations. There is very little control over the actual stats, and often the PvP stats don’t line up with their PvE equivalents. The PvP Berzerker amulet adds vitality, for example, and doesn’t give near the crit damage that PvE Berzerker armor and trinkets would give. The Valkyrie PvP amulet gives toughness where the PvE Valkyrie armor and trinkets give vitality. So on and so forth. The PvP equipment seems to be more “balanced” than running straight-line equipment in PvE.

I notice a drastic difference in damage and survivability between armor sets in PvE. My damage while using full Cleric’s gear is half (or less) of the damage I do while wearing full Berzerker’s. It’s kitten near impossible to go down wearing full Cleric’s, but you can easily go down in full Berzerker’s if you miss dodges or get unexpectedly surrounded.

Ah thanks so much for the heads up.It did seem to me that the stats didn’t align with what I’d read on the forums but I put it down to faulty memory.

Is the stock P/V/T gear good for something in particular in dungeons?I use it with some healing trinkets (around 450 healing power).I use Staff/mace with an altruistic healing build.Would a full cleric’s set help my team more?

I use P/V/T armor from HotW (looks great for a Guardian) with an AH build. I like the balance between damage and survivability. The issue with clerics is that you deal next to nothing in damage. Yeah you gain a lot in the survivability department. However you may find yourself in situations of only prolonging the inevitable. Before the Jan 28th update Cleric Guardians could hang on in the fight preventing the boss from resetting. This would allow the team (if needed) to waypoint reze back into the fight. Now you can only waypoint if no one is in combat. Your team ends up just watching you deal no damage until you die or leave the fight.

I really believe you can’t just support like in other mmos. You need to help the team kill the target by dealing damage.

Always remember, the best damage mitigation in the world is a dead foe.

I understand what you mean, I also thought the same thing when I started mixing with sets and attributes.

It seems indeed that attributes in GW2 works differently than other MMOs, where your gear attributes define your whole character, in GW2 it’s just a small boost compared to your base stats, but they’re important enough to define your role.

For example, in some games if you get an entire set without any Power in it, you’d hit for barely nothing at all, but you traded the damage for something else of your choice.
In GW2, without any gear, you’d do 100 damage already. With a full power gear, you’ll do 125 damage, so even if you choose not to take any power at all, you’re still in a reasonable range of damage, not to the point of thinking your damage is useless.
This is probably why GW2 can live without having defined roles (the holy trinity).

Now, to your question, I don’t think it’s a waste of time.
Even if the attributes doesn’t define your character as a whole, they’re still bonuses that helps and you should invest in what you think you’d like best.

Regarding Mist’s stats, they’re useful for a bit of testing but they are limited because you can’t mix different sets like you do in PvE, and the crit damage is lower probably to reduce PvP bursts.

The amount of points, though, is equivalent and can give you an idea of what’d change in your PvE character.
You can pick a main attribute with a maximum of 800ish and 125 for gems (925), where in PvE you’d have about 1000ish of this attribute. For the secondary attributes in PvP you can get up to 635, in PvE it’s 683. Crit Damage is the only thing really lower, in PvP it’s 20% and in PvE it’s 61%.
These are all values without Runes, which are the same.

So in your example of Soldier x Berserker it wasn’t a good match, because the damage in PvE would be much more higher because of the 40% extra crit damage.
But you can calculate these yourself (just imagine your crits dealing an extra 1/4 damage) so it’s not a big deal, and the important part is that you can see how much your base damage (non crits) does and how much damage you take.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply.I’ll try getting some knight’s armor and see how that works out.