Guild Wars 2

…or, more accurately, why high base HP is possibly overrated.

The topic caught your attention, didn’t it? I want to toss out an idea I’ve been thinking about, although credit where credit’s due: I’m not by any means the first person to think about it, and this is something I’ve been dwelling on after listening to other players talk about toughness, effective health and survivability.

I want to advance this idea that the Warriors’ high health pool is overrated, and that the Guardian’s low health pool is actually a good thing. But in order to convince you of this idea, consider the following:

1. HP is Ablative Mitigation

Think of a high health pool as a form of ablative defense. It’s a buffer. Having a huge health pool can help you absorb front-loaded damage, but you’re not likely to get back all your HP over the course of a fight. A warrior with 25k HP can survive frontloaded, burst damage, but will likely spend the rest of the fight bouncing between 4k and 10k HP. Being healed back to full just doesn’t happen often in this game.

2. Armor/Toughness is Proportional Mitigation; Healing is Linear Mitigation

The damage you take is inversely proportional to your armor/toughness. The higher your armor, the smaller a percentage of damage you take from any given attack. Likewise, the value of your healing received is inversely proportional to your vitality. So a warrior with 25k HP gains a much smaller proportion of her health back from a 5k heal than a Guardian with 15k HP. Keep this in mind.

3. Avoidance Is The Best Mitigation

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In GW2’s case, an ounce of avoidance is worth a potentially infinite amount of mitigation. Dodge roll, missed attacks, block mechanics and invulnerability completely mitigate any incoming attack, to say nothing of absorption and reflective walls. Remember that the Guardian has a lot of these.

4. In PVE, Incoming Attacks Are Predictable

Solo a Guardian long enough and you’ll catch on to an enemy’s hidden “rhythm” of attacks. Enemies attack you at relatively fixed intervals. Their biggest attacks are almost always telegraphed, and red circles tell you exactly where you don’t want to be. The conclusion is that it’s easy to avoid attacks you can see coming, provided you have the tools to do so.

CONCLUSIONS

• ….Warriors don’t necessarily have it better than us. Their health pools are much higher, true, but high health usually just serves as a buffer, absorbing the first few big attacks but never really getting back to 100%.

• ….Lower health pools means greater vulnerability to conditions. Luckily, a Guardian can hardly sneeze without removing conditions, but it bears mentioning that our low health pools do come tacked on with this basic weakness. Conditions are potentially our undoing provided we’re not smart about removal, or lack removal options (certainly possible).

• …Guardian self-heals come in steady streams of small values rather than big bursts, making it ideal for builds with decent health/vitality but very high armor and toughness. Our readily available Protection boons multiply this effect. Guardians are therefore capable of much higher sustained survivability with lower health pools.

• …You don’t have to sacrifice damage for defense. Guardians do need Vitality, but not as much as you may think, and survivable builds probably don’t have to build purely on Power/Toughness/Vitality. If you have enough vitality to survive big attacks, you’re good to go. You have more than enough raw mitigation (Protection boons) and Avoidance (Blind, Vigor, Block, Invul) to handle telegraphed attacks.

• …There is a sweet spot for Guardian health, and I don’t know what it is, but it seems to be about 15k to 16k health. This is usually enough ablative defense against frontloaded damage, but also relatively easy to heal back to 100%

Sorta TL;DR Version: High health pools are basically ablative defense. They let you survive big, frontloaded damage, but you’re almost never going to be healed to 100% in an aggressive fight. The lower your health pool, the more mileage you get out of each individual HP healed. The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to condition damage. The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to spike damage. The higher your proportional mitigation (armor, toughness) and the more options you have for total avoidance (dodge roll, invul, block, miss), the less vulnerable you are to predictable damage. Most spike damage in PVE is predictable. Therefore Guardians actually don’t need that much health to perform well.

Thoughts?

I agree fully with this, and have thought mostly along these lines since I first heard people complaining about health pools.

I haven’t bothered with doing that math, nor do I really care to, but I think Anet has gone with a very percentage based system for things going on in GW2. You attacks always deal a percentage of total health, augmented by percentage enhancements to your attack and your damage. They’re hidden partially by the flat numbers, but are otherwise calculated based on percentages unlike, say, a pnp board game like DnD, where most things are flat numbers and/or ranges of flat numbers.

In this way, healing will benefit lower hp classes more than higher hp ones, particularly those invested in concepts like toughness, which is just another way of effectively increasing health. Our many forms of avoidance allow us to completely avoid damage that would otherwise eat away at health pools, while our toughness (which I would say we ought to have quite a bit) helps make the percentage of damage taken more equal to the percentage of those with higher health.

Now, if A Guardian and Warrior are both taking the same or similar percentage of health in damage in a given amount of time, any healing will benefit Guardians more as their current health will be raised by a higher percentage while still losing a constant, similar percentage.

Of course, Warriors could build strictly for Toughness and Vit, but their damage output would significantly suffer, and they aren’t quite built for support in the same way we are. We have so much available for healing and protection, it actually signifies a relation to having more toughness and more healing power to combat a lower pool.

All in all, it just seems to make sense for things to be in this way. The way I see it, you put armor on something that is naturally squishy per se inside, while that which is naturally strong would opt for less. I know Guardian and Warrior are both heavy armor classes, but the concept is still there. Going back to DnD (3.5e), think of Clerics vs. Barbarians. Clerics: Heavy armor, 1-8hp gained per level, healing, defensive (and many offensive) spells (purely relating to melee combat mind you). Barbarians: Medium armor, 1-12hp gained per level, heavy melee, rage to increase melee abilities while sacrificing defense, (even some natural mitigation to make up for their lower defense), etc.

(though I’d rather not,) tl;dr OP has it, and with more healing, it benefits our lower pools much more. Our avoidance and mitigation makes up for lack of hard numbers.

As a Cleric Guardian I agree with this. I’d much prefer to better heal a lower health pool than have a larger health pool that once depleted, won’t fill back up.

Saying that, I wish healing gear scaled just a tiiiiiiny bit more :]

Not everyone playing lives in the USA.

The ping from my country is not very good… 200ms… its not that easy to dodge things. Also if the creature is very large, again its hard to read. So while all this sounds great in your post, which is very condescending btw, there is a nice chunk of the player base that is going to get hit the odd time by things they should have dodged.

Furthermore, most player abilities hit you unless you are dodging. With a handful of people attacking you at any one time and only 2 dodges. You get pumped. This is where health plays a big part. A warrior can hang out like a total noob and take 3 or 4 easily avoidable shots. A Guardian can’t.

First things first, thx for a great post which is both informative and well written.

This is a subject i been considering writing about for a long time and i hesitated due to the complexity and my lack of skill in the english language.

Personally i get a bit disturbed when i see that people advice others to build huge healthpools and at the same time suggests that this is defensive when it in fact just is poor “economics” and an excuse for really poor conditionremovals.

Sure the hp can be used as that, conditionbuffer, but as you say large healthpools are just a buffert and the higher hp/toughness ratio the longer you need to stay out of the fight to recuperate.

One other thing is that toughness as an investment also is one of the few stats that dont have diminishing “relative” return on investment.

With that i mean that when you reached a certain degree each point invested has greater impact (not in absolute numbers) then the previous one. This is mathematical correct if you look at toughness as a solitaire but it also evident if you add in mitigationbuffs like protection and ofc what you describe in OP, how heals change in value based on the size of the healthpool.

example:
Lets say you have 20% mitigation thru toughness.
This would mean that if a hit has a basevalue of 1k and 800 would then not be mitigated.
Assume we add 10% by altering gear, ending up with 30%.
The same hit would then hit for 700.
The extra 10% reduced the incoming damage with 100/800=12.5% damagereduction.

Now lets say we add in 10%, in absolute numbers this would mean an other 100 in reduced incoming damage. 100/700=14,3%.

The more you invest the more the next investment is worth. Brilliant.

When calculating mitigation people tend to look either at the mitigationvalue or the absolute reduction in incoming damage when its infact the relative reduction thats interesting. Infact, the more you invest, the more you gain.

If you do the same math with other stats like precision, healthpool (as stated in OP) or power you will find that its the opposite and the more you invest the less (relatively) you get back.

Ofc if you add in protection and why not signet of judgement this turns really interesting.

People should stop looking at small healthpools and think more about how to stack toughness and maximize conditionremovers.

The above is why an altruistic shoutbased crithammer guardian in knightsgear is such a tough cookie. You dont have to dress down in healersgear and do no damage at all just because you want to be tanky.

14k health is enough outside of spvp as long as you have conditionremovers, protection and lots of toughness.

Very cool that there is something called knights armor and runes/food that makes it possible to stack might, have long duration on protection, which makes you hit like a truck in combination with high crit chance and also being close to invulnerable.

Once gain, thx OP for putting the time into this, great post as usual.

Relentliss.2170:

Not everyone playing lives in the USA.

The ping from my country is not very good… 200ms… its not that easy to dodge things. Also if the creature is very large, again its hard to read. So while all this sounds great in your post, which is very condescending btw, there is a nice chunk of the player base that is going to get hit the odd time by things they should have dodged.

Furthermore, most player abilities hit you unless you are dodging. With a handful of people attacking you at any one time and only 2 dodges. You get pumped. This is where health plays a big part. A warrior can hang out like a total noob and take 3 or 4 easily avoidable shots. A Guardian can’t.

Even though i understand your point of view its actually the other way around. Toughness will always be supreme versus bursty classes and bursty opponents.

There is a reason why a crithammerbuild in knightsgear can facetank almost everything out there.

I advice you, if you have issues dodging due to lag stack toughness, and frankly a guardian has other means to avoiding damage then dodging also, blocks, blinds and protection, just to mention a few.

PS i cant see where he is condescending, in fact i find the post very informative and also correct in both facts and opinions.

If you dont like the content is one thing, but stating that he is condescending is imo an attempt to diminish the value of the post and has no place in a constructive discussion. DS

I agree, more or less. I’ve seen this idea tossed around quite a few times and it seems to hold true, though my experience is somewhat limited.

A reasoned post by an adult who doesn’t think the sky is falling. Refreshing.

Good to see people like this in the community.

This was pretty much my thought as soon as it was revealed that warriors have high health and guardians have low health. Warriors take a lot of killing, yes, but they get worn down over time. Guardians can’t take as much punishment at once, but have a much larger range of ways to prevent and/or recover from damage.

I am concerned because healing is never by percentage of total health but is a number derived from other factors – so a guardian with 10k health and 12k max health is technically the same as a guardian with 10k health and 23k max health, that being the only factor considered. You don’t need to heal up to max health if 10k is enough, but with a 12k max guardian, you only have the ability to take 2k worth of damage before then.

However, Zeal and Honor guardians have 5 trait skills that depend on crossing the 50% health threshold, and wavering in that midline can have the benefit of laying down symbol spam and also putting on aegis, which lends itself to all kinds of options.

This goes both ways since while low vitality bars are easy to heal up past 50%, high vitality bars mean you have greater total HP: you’re safer there.

Also, there is one skill only guardians have that is only dependent on max HP: Tome of Courage 5. That is definitely more powerful to a high vitality guardian with high vitality friends. In addition, Virtue of Resolve passive and Regen don’t work that well on low vitality guardians that can easy reach their HP max.

I believe that high toughness is fine for sPvP and straight PvE, where ToC 5 is impossible and impractical, respectively. In WvW and Dungeons, though, you get condition spiked and sustain armor bypass damage way too much for toughness to be a focus stat. If you’re going to go for toughness, make a backup build for those scenarios.

It’s a quality “blog” post, don’t forget to make a backup, Eveningstar. In general the approach to the values is “numerical equality” (+10 or +1% per trait point) which in the end means that it’s difficult to look beyond just the numerical values and see how they interact. Some of them are statistically extremely inferior, some extremely powerful, and the “casual player” will have problems distinguishing between the two. It’s quite a rookie mistake to design a game around “numerical equality” almost regardless the balance so it’s up to posts like the OP wrote to explain some of the core mechanics.

Kudos!

Eveningstar.6940

Sorta TL;DR Version: High health pools are basically ablative defense. They let you survive big, frontloaded damage, but you’re almost never going to be healed to 100% in an aggressive fight. The lower your health pool, the more mileage you get out of each individual HP healed. The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to condition damage. The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to spike damage. The higher your proportional mitigation (armor, toughness) and the more options you have for total avoidance (dodge roll, invul, block, miss), the less vulnerable you are to predictable damage. Most spike damage in PVE is predictable. Therefore Guardians actually don’t need that much health to perform well.
Thoughts?

This sounds like the “Millionaires have nothing to aspire to, so it’s better to be poor.” argument. Nonsense.

Otherwise, I think you’re right. While we have very low hit points, we are at a disadvantage in PvP/WvW and by splitting our powers (just “Save Yourselves!” so far, but now there’s a precedent) between PvE and WvW/PvP, Arenanet appear to intend to have Guardians in PvE only.

What’s your PvP/WvW alt going to be?

Good post.
I never really noticed the issue of having low health (note that I don’t do dungeons). It’s just never an issue for me.
And it’s good that you point out our weakness to condition damage that comes with having a low health pool. It’s probably our greatest weakness, but we need weaknesses.

I have consider the low healt pool as a bad thing, only in the first week of play, but the regeneration, condition removal, aegis, defensive skill etc etc… make me reconsider this thing

There is value in this analysis, however there are a couple of important points that I feel were omitted:

- A low healt cap is also a cap on the ability to actual receive healing: while during the heat of battle a Warrior will hardly hit his healt cap after using an healing skill/being healed by a party member a Guardian does actually suffer from an hard cap to HPs if he bring a lot of healing skills and do not rise his base vitality a lot. Sometimes he will go in overheal wasting healing power or he will not use healing skills as soon as they are avaible, wasting cooldown timers.

- High healing is irrelevant if an enemy can deplete your healt faster than you can heal.
This is especially evident against dungeon bosses: when a guardian makes a mistake there is an evident bigger chance of being bursted to death than a Warrior with comparable equip/traits.

A character usually do not exist in a vacuum and there is an old saying in RPGs that no matter how much healing you can use having a bigger HP pool is always a good thing, so…

Can a guardian tank enemies and take hits even with his lower healt poll? Yes, it is obviously true.
Can a lone Guardian with lots of healing skills tank better than your averange lone warrior? Yes, I think this is also true.
However, while playing together in a party, will a guardian with lots of healing skills tank better than said averange warrior? No, this is false: most of those healing skills will be party heals affecting also the Warrior that due to the bigger healt pool will benefit more from all that healing power.

all true. one thing is to remember is that you still have to carefully choose your traits.

While a warrior will not get back up to 100% HP the guardian can. Infact he can get up to 110%, 120% , 130% and so on. I am absolutley sure that on some single veteran mob i can reach 200% of my normal hp. yet it does nothing because i constantly “overheal” at 100%.

so even with crit hammer build you have to carefully choose how many heals you trait for depneding on you situation (grouped or solo, how much you like to pull).
its nice to kill three veterans at once. question is only if you are looking for the most efficient build.

as stated condition removal is important and most importantly get rid of poisen. everything else is just slows you down. poison can kill’ya! but even a high high defensive build can live through that without any condition removal.

the fun thing about guardian is that with a a base build like x/x/30/20/x you can adjust so much in your playstyle and skills and you do not have to stick to two weapon sets.

can we tank better than warriors. hell yes!

Asmodal and Dark Kain both bring up good points, which is why I want to reiterate that there’s probably a Guardian “sweet spot” with Vitality/Toughness balance. Remember that we’re limited in what stats we can equip. If we go full on Vitality and Toughness, our other stats are almost certainly going to suffer. Vit/Toughness/Power is a nice combination, but in order to make the most out of our most efficient self-healing build (Altruistic Healing), we need a lot of Precision too, and we won’t get much of it from Radiance.

RE: Losing a ton of health

Yep, this is pretty much true. No combination of Toughness/Vitality will let you eat more than a couple of powerful attacks from bosses. That’s why I mentioned Avoidance mechanics being by far the best form of mitigation.

RE: Overhealing

This is an interesting concept, and I think it varies from situation to situation. Remember that Overhealing is going to be an issue regardless of your health pool. Because, at least with Crithammer, you’re constantly taking in a stream of health, even if you’re at 80%-90% health, you’re going to overheal.

The question is, does overhealing become an issue at 20k health? At 25k health? What’s the “sweet spot” of Guardian HP where Overhealing is not a big issue, but your healing is also keeping up with your health levels? In other words, what’s the point at which your Health is just excessive and acts as ablative armor?

The issue with Overhealing is that it’s going to happen. Always. Regardless of your health level. Overhealing is a problem in other games because, in other MMOs, healing usually costs mana of some sort, so overhealing is inefficient. In this game, at least for Guardians (and defense-traited Warriors), overhealing is a reality. Heals are a constant stream of passive, linear mitigation that costs you nothing in terms of resources and has no recharge associated with it.

So the question is not “Am I overhealing” but rather “What’s the sweet spot of Toughness/Vit/Other Stats at which point I actually do overheal?” You want to constantly reach as close to 100% as possible. If you go over 100%, it doesn’t cost you anything.

So the problem occurs when you either:

1) Have a disproportionately high Vitality at the cost of toughness that you can’t possibly heal yourself to full regularly, in which case the extra health is just ablative, or…

2) Have an excessively low Vitality despite very high toughness, in which case your heals become super efficient, but you’re so vulnerable to conditions and high spike that you’re just depending on your “6” ability anyway, or…

3) Have a high vitality and a high toughness, but your other stats are low, in which case you aren’t dealing damage and therefore actually taking more aggregate damage because your opponent is alive longer.

Summary: I don’t think that overhealing is itself a problem. Overhealing is inevitable, given how crithammer, regeneration and passive healing works. In fact, you want to overheal. Going over 100% health is preferable to never reaching 100% health. However, if you’re constantly overhealing, then chances are your vitality is pretty low, and you can safely afford to add more of it.

Addendum: It’s really all about finding that sweet spot between vitality, toughness and your other stats. Coming from other MMOs, where tough heavy-armor tanky classes always needed more health, remember that in these games you almost always had a healer class at your back, constantly filling and refilling your HP. That’s not the case here, so you definitely need to strike a balance between Health and Toughness to make the most out of your own healing.

This sounds like the “Millionaires have nothing to aspire to, so it’s better to be poor.” argument. Nonsense.
Otherwise, I think you’re right. While we have very low hit points, we are at a disadvantage in PvP/WvW and by splitting our powers (just “Save Yourselves!” so far, but now there’s a precedent) between PvE and WvW/PvP, Arenanet appear to intend to have Guardians in PvE only.
What’s your PvP/WvW alt going to be?

So, this is a pretty important point to make. Because in this case I think the theory still applies in PVP, PVE and WvWvW.

First of all, the millionaire line doesn’t make sense. Warrior/Guardian mitigation is not analogous to rich and poor. Warriors come with a much higher health pool, and it exists to make up for their limited healing and mitigation options. It’s true that Warriors can spec for good HP/S, but it’s never going to match what Guardians can do almost universally, regardless of our own spec. If Guardians are jealous of Warrior HP, Warriors are jealous of Guardian utilities. There’s a reason for that.

Guardians don’t need Warrior level health, because our health level isn’t a problem. Health is just a measure of how much front-loaded damage you can take before you bite the dust. Therefore, there is such a thing as having too much health. You’re just never going to be able to get back to 100% in a real fight. If Guardians did have Warrior level health, we’d be overpowered. Like, grossly overpowered.

Why? Because then Vitality would be a totally useless stat to Guardians. Every Guardian would just go Knights and Berserker and ignore Vitality altogether, and we’d still be just as survivable as we are now, except much more dangerous. A very high health pool for Guardians would actually not contribute significantly to our effective survivability; it would just turn Vitality into a dump stat and make us super-efficient with our stats in a way no other profession is.

RE: PVP

PVP is really a very difficult topic to talk balance on a forum, because the climate of PVP varies dramatically. Success in PVP doesn’t depend that much on stats. I’m just going to be blunt about that. In other MMOs, the gear you hauled with you into, say, Warsong Gulch more or less decided your efficiency in the absence of good teamwork.

In WvWvW, success depends on numbers, terrain and macro-coordination. Not stats. If you’re outnumbered 2:1, you’re going to die, and I don’t care how much vitality you have. Your contributions in WvWvW depend less on your stats and more on being at the right place with the right people, and staying coordinated with the group you’re roaming with.

As for sPVP, we’re a great class. I can’t get into the details of what makes us strong and where our weaknesses lie, because that’s a very long discussion for another topic. It’s true that the current sPVP metagame favors conditions (although this is steadily changing), but the answer to conditions isn’t vitality. It’s condition removal. And we have a lot of that.

Long story short, warrior level health isn’t going to help you in any form of PVP nearly as much as good coordination and tactics will. There is absolutely no level of vitality which is going to nullify the need for good tactics. What high vitality will do is act as ablative defense, a kind of ‘buffer’ that lets you take more punishment and make more mistakes and stand up to higher odds a little longer, but it won’t give you an advantage you can’t duplicate with good tactics.

As for my alts, it’s a bit off topic, but I’d really like to have an 80 of every profession at some point in the future. It’ll probably take forever, but I’m not in a hurry and there’s no gear grind to keep up with. When I’m not on my Guardian, I play Mesmer and occasionally Warrior, and I think Engineer and Elementalist are next. I WvWvW and PVP with all of them.

I’ve played a Necromancer with 24k health plus 24k Life Force. I’ve also played a Guardian with 14k health total. I don’t think you need me to tell you which one is ultimately more survivable.

It was a massive change trying to adapt to a Guardian’s health pool when I was used to looking at my Necromancer’s. Ultimately I’ve found that the low health of the Guardian is not a detriment. Comparing when I take a big hit from a boss on my Necromancer or my Guardian, my Guardian still takes less total damage as well as less percent damage, and can more reliably mitigate and recover afterwards.

I’m currently looking at my last 3 pieces of armor and runes and I’m trying to decide whether or not I even care if I ultimately break 15k health. I don’t think I do, provided I make up for it with some extra toughness. Conditions aren’t going to kill me; I have a substantial number of ways to remove them. For direct damage, stacking toughness, having ways of refilling deficits in my health, and keep up Protection are all more important than having a large maximum health pool.

Based on my experience, My guardian only has 15,045k Hp. 1211 armor defense, 1701 toughness and 424 healing power. I don’t have to study the math behind the damage I absorb and the amount that I heal.

In Arah dungeon, If Lupicus’ poisonous globs hit 2 times, ill have atleast 3k hp left. I’ll pop my Smite Condition to heal atleast 2k++ health bringing me to 5k something HP. Normally, My Signet of Resolve will atleast heal 8.6k bringing me back at 14k hp. Ofcourse the passive effect of Virtue of Resolve will regen me back at 15k hp. That will make me go back at him at full DPS.

Skill wise, “Hold the Line!” and “Save Yourselves!” will heal total of 4k something. plus it will grant me additional defense making it a good healing utility skills. If I’m feeling adventurous, I can pop Renewed Focus and ignore 3 secs of damage while popping my virtues for additional effects.

With the cooldowns, smite condition is at 16 sec, SoF 32 secs, SY at 60secs and HtL at 35secs.

The whole point of my post is to show everyone that a guardian can be tanky and self healing sufficient meat shield while having an aggressive DPS. I also have 600 heals from my rolls (that’s x2) and additional heals from my staff and focus. You can make this build better and more powerful as long as know how to apply your skills and when and where. This game is not about your gear or class or your race, It’s about how good you can play it.

i disagree with almost every point here. infact im not sure if youre just trolling. warriors and guardians have the same armor in the same gear. warriors have more health in the same gear. to say that warriors arent naturally more tanky is only viable if you ignore mathematics.

@Mindvibe
warriors have a larger healthpool, and guardians have a larger effective healthpool, i think OP infact shows a very impressive knowledge in mathematics.

So i disagree with your entire post unless you actually do some math and prove him wrong. As far as i can see his reasoning is very sound, and yes i do understand mathematics.

I can see a big difference in Spvp and WvW. In Spvp I can handle thieves really well. In WvW they burst me down too fast. This says all I need to know about the importance of health.

base level 80 guardian hp: 10805
base level 80 warrior hp: 18372

both are soldier classes and have access to the same armor, meaning any armor value you assign to one class, you can assign to the other.

effective hp is the amount of damage your character can soak up after damage reduction before death.

given that both classes are able to reduce incoming damage by the same amount, how is it mathematically possible to say a guardian has higher effective health while having less hp?

say both reduce incoming damage by 50% to make it easy. that would make effective health for each class:
guardian: 21610
warrior: 36744

assign any numbers you want, its obvious a warrior has higher effective health. not only that but higher health helps vs condition damage, which ignores armor.

why do i disagree with each argument? it doesnt address the fact that WARRIORS GET EVERY SINGLE THING HE MENTIONED ALSO. healing for a higher proportion of health? that means its more likely you will overheal, wasting a partial heal, and it also means since you have lower EHP youre less likely to receive a heal in the time youre alive from an outside source, as well as any heal over time effects. every single paper statistic points to warrior for being more tanky.

his post should have nothing to do with comparing to warriors, and everything to do with why having low base hp is COMPLETELY MANAGABLE with the guardian class.

i play guardian, and prefer it over warrior. i feel they are the superior class, and still extremely overpowered. but the reason has absolutely nothing to do with what he listed.

What this means is that you should roll a warrior and find a bunch of guardian buddies who will perma prot regen on you

say both reduce incoming damage by 50% to make it easy. that would make effective health for each class:
guardian: 21610
warrior: 36744

Effective healing is not Health + Armor. It’s Health + Armor + Healing + Avoidance Mechanics. You have to take into consideration the healing you receive when you talk about effective healing. This is because, unlike more conventional MMOs, most healing in this game is frequent, resource-independent and comes in a steady stream of small doses—with the exception of your #6 ability.

So when you say that Warriors have everything Guardians have and therefore are much more survivable, you’re only thinking of it in terms of armor and health, and you’re ignoring Virtue of Resolve, Altruistic Healing, frequently available Regeneration boons and frequently available Protection.

This is why, to use your own words, Guardians get by just fine with low HP, which is the entire thesis of my argument. This is also why, in my opinion, overhealing is more likely a good thing than a bad thing. Because healing costs you nearly nothing (again, with the exception of your #6 ability and maybe Monk’s Focus), you are always getting a steady rate of healing. So there’s no real issue of ‘wasting’ healing because you don’t waste any mana (or in this case, a cooldown) on a heal. You don’t lose any resources by healing ‘too much.’

Naturally, if you have far too small a health pool, then you run the risk of being crushed once conditions start stacking or you take one or two strong attacks while CC’d, low on Endurance, whatever. But this is a pretty extreme case where a player deliberately chooses to stick to, say, Berserker’s gear at the cost of low vitality. It’s a glass cannon choice (although, frankly, low health + high mitigation + good healing is usually more of a “fiberglass cannon” build, but that’s another topic…)

The issue we’re not talking about, and the issue you glossed over, is that at high levels of health, you encounter fewer and fewer scenarios where you’re actually healed back to full, or close to full. There’s a “tipping point” at which you’re just not likely to get back to 100% health, because your health pool is so high, and your heals are small. After that “tipping point” all your vitality is basically ablative defense, which means once it’s burned away after absorbing a big hit, it’s not going to come back to absorb another one.

You can think of it as a kind of diminishing returns on high health pools. And on a clean sheet of paper where Guardians and Warriors have an equal amount of armor and base HP and an infinite supply of heals, of course Warriors are going to be more “tanky.” My argument is that, in reality, and in practice, this is rarely the case. There is simply a point at which you have more health than you need, and in fact, Guardians get by just fine with, say, 15k HP. (I’m pulling out a random number, but that actually seems pretty decent.)

his post should have nothing to do with comparing to warriors, and everything to do with why having low base hp is COMPLETELY MANAGABLE with the guardian class.

I get a bit sad when I write these excessively long posts, and people seem to gloss over them entirely. :P Because that was my entire point. That’s the crux of my TLDR section, too: Having a low base HP is completely manageable with the Guardian profession. It’s even in the title of the topic.

The reason I brought up warriors is because the “Warriors have more HP than us! What gives?!” topic comes up over and over again—and with good reason, because it does seem counterintuitive, at first glance, that a defensive profession should have low HP. But given the way healing works in GW2, this actually works out fine for us.

If I brought up Warriors, it was because they’re a readily available and familiar example of a profession with high HP, and I use them to illustrate a greater point. That point is this: Low HP is not a bad thing, and once you understand that there’s a tipping point past which your Vitality is just ablative defense, you start to understand why Guardians have the HP that we do.

Afterthought: Ablative Defense is not a bad thing in and of itself. Svarty made an interesting point about its utility in WvW, and this is something other players have talked about too. Being able to withstand huge amounts of incoming “alpha strike” damage is certainly an advantage! Just so long as you realize that ablative defense doesn’t come back, and you’re not likely to heal back to 100% unless you disengage entirely. Similarly, “glass cannon” builds are not as fragile as they may seem provided you have high mitigation through armor and Protection—glass cannons just have a far smaller margin of error.

I hope this cleared up any discrepancies. If you still disagree with me on every point, I’d love to hear the rebuttal. I’m tossing this idea out there specifically to foment discussion.

the Guardian’s low health pool is actually a good thing. rofl

1. HP is Ablative Mitigation

…. A warrior with 25k HP can survive frontloaded, burst damage, but will likely spend the rest of the fight bouncing between 4k and 10k HP. Being healed back to full just doesn’t happen often in this game.
the damage that brought a warrior to 4k made the guardian a corpse. if youre talking about wvw or pve, resetting hp is very easy and common.

2. Armor/Toughness is Proportional Mitigation; Healing is Linear Mitigation
your post is about effective health, which increases linearly with armor. youre also more likely to be healed (buff ticks, healers, self ticks) with more effective health. honestly no idea what youre even trying to convince people of in this entire bullet.
…

3. Avoidance Is The Best Mitigation
every class has this. warriors have as much of this as guardians. quality of said cooldowns is open to debate, since its mostly situational and a matter of opinion anyways. how does this in any way prove more HP for free less valuable? like every other bullet, it doesnt.
…

4. In PVE, Incoming Attacks Are Predictable

…

CONCLUSIONS

• ….Warriors don’t necessarily have it better than us. Their health pools are much higher, true, but high health usually just serves as a buffer, absorbing the first few big attacks but never really getting back to 100%.
  its not a matter of having a tradeoff for getting the extra hp. they literally get it for free. of course its better. again resetting hp is not very difficult in most situations.
• ….Lower health pools means greater vulnerability to conditions. Luckily, a Guardian can hardly sneeze without removing conditions, but it bears mentioning that our low health pools do come tacked on with this basic weakness. Conditions are potentially our undoing provided we’re not smart about removal, or lack removal options (certainly possible).
  to mention nothing of buff stripping. if you dont depend on buffs and are naturally more tanky, youll survive better vs dispellers also.
• …Guardian self-heals come in steady streams of small values rather than big bursts, making it ideal for builds with decent health/vitality but very high armor and toughness. Our readily available Protection boons multiply this effect. Guardians are therefore capable of much higher sustained survivability with lower health pools.
  situational. i dont feel its fair to compare aoe spammed buffs like protection and regen when the warrior is designed to give offensive buffs. every class can get buffed by guardians, and warriors alike, thats just how it is.
• …You don’t have to sacrifice damage for defense. Guardians do need Vitality, but not as much as you may think, and survivable builds probably don’t have to build purely on Power/Toughness/Vitality. If you have enough vitality to survive big attacks, you’re good to go. You have more than enough raw mitigation (Protection boons) and Avoidance (Blind, Vigor, Block, Invul) to handle telegraphed attacks.
  replace guardian with whatever class you play, and you just described gw2.

• …There is a sweet spot for Guardian health, and I don’t know what it is, but it seems to be about 15k to 16k health. This is usually enough ablative defense against frontloaded damage, but also relatively easy to heal back to 100%

Sorta TL;DR Version: High health pools are basically ablative defense. They let you survive big, frontloaded damage, but you’re almost never going to be healed to 100% in an aggressive fight. The lower your health pool, the more mileage you get out of each individual HP healed (false). The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to condition damage. The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to spike damage. The higher your proportional mitigation (armor, toughness) and the more options you have for total avoidance (dodge roll, invul, block, miss), the less vulnerable you are to predictable damage. Most spike damage in PVE is predictable. Therefore Guardians actually don’t need that much health to perform well.

Thoughts?
——
there arent very many absolutes in this game. but its always good to get free stats of any kind. i mean do you understand how much difference just the hp buff alone from 3 orbs in wvw makes? its broken, and warriors get multiple times over this amount over guardians for free.

Idk, I find that full exo knight warrior with regen build survive anything in WvW. Plus, the lag issue really kills all the dodge, block etc etc.

I’m curious about your stats/build, Buzz. Do you go pure Knight’s on your warrior, meaning no vitality? When you say “regen build,” which one are you referring to?

Mindvibe: You have to look at the profession as a whole. A guardian going into melee from a fresh state will have the first hit negated by Aegis. With 5 points in Radiance (if you don’t have at least that and you’re at least around the mid levels, why?) activating Justice will blind foes in your vicinity, protecting you from another wave of hits, and activating Courage will stop another hit (and possibly heal you if you’ve taken that trait). Depending on the nature of the enemy and the player’s timing, this has the potential to stop the damage that the warrior has extra health in order to be able to take. Meanwhile, Resolve is ticking away to undo whatever damage slips through.

And that’s without going into skills. A guardian with a bladed weapon is going to have at least one other area blind on a shortish cooldown besides Justice, and the sword provides a shield against projectiles as well. Blunt weapons will give you the opportunity to plant a defensive symbol on a regular basis – a symbol that can be traited for additional heals. If you really want to go defensive, mace/focus will give you a heal on a chain, a healing symbol, a block, a multitarget blind with healing to boot, and a shield that can be activated while stunned. And then you can add utility skills on top of that, such as Wall of Reflection’s “okay, I can now ignore any projectile user attacking me from over there” behaviour.

Warriors just don’t have this kind of damage mitigation. Yes, they have decent heals, and they have defensive skills on some of their weapons, but even a mace/shield warrior has less ability to prevent damage than a guardian (it might match the guardian mace/focus in terms of what’s on the skillbar, but the guardian gets to add virtues as well). What does the warrior get to compensate for this? The extra health to survive the hits that a guardian could have blocked, blinded, or otherwise prevented. This is how the two professions are balanced against one another – the guardian is based on active defenses provided through skills and the profession mechanic, while warriors are just plain tougher.

draxynnic.3719:

Mindvibe: You have to look at the profession as a whole. A guardian going into melee from a fresh state will have the first hit negated by Aegis. With 5 points in Radiance (if you don’t have at least that and you’re at least around the mid levels, why?) activating Justice will blind foes in your vicinity, protecting you from another wave of hits, and activating Courage will stop another hit (and possibly heal you if you’ve taken that trait). Depending on the nature of the enemy and the player’s timing, this has the potential to stop the damage that the warrior has extra health in order to be able to take. Meanwhile, Resolve is ticking away to undo whatever damage slips through.

And that’s without going into skills. A guardian with a bladed weapon is going to have at least one other area blind on a shortish cooldown besides Justice, and the sword provides a shield against projectiles as well. Blunt weapons will give you the opportunity to plant a defensive symbol on a regular basis – a symbol that can be traited for additional heals. If you really want to go defensive, mace/focus will give you a heal on a chain, a healing symbol, a block, a multitarget blind with healing to boot, and a shield that can be activated while stunned. And then you can add utility skills on top of that, such as Wall of Reflection’s “okay, I can now ignore any projectile user attacking me from over there” behaviour.

Warriors just don’t have this kind of damage mitigation. Yes, they have decent heals, and they have defensive skills on some of their weapons, but even a mace/shield warrior has less ability to prevent damage than a guardian (it might match the guardian mace/focus in terms of what’s on the skillbar, but the guardian gets to add virtues as well). What does the warrior get to compensate for this? The extra health to survive the hits that a guardian could have blocked, blinded, or otherwise prevented. This is how the two professions are balanced against one another – the guardian is based on active defenses provided through skills and the profession mechanic, while warriors are just plain tougher.

why are you trying to convince me of everything ive already said?

also i dont have 5 points in radiance. its not mandatory for any build, including melee only.

It’s not mandatory, but you’d need a pretty good reason not to take it.
I have the same thing with 5 points in Virtues.

Ynna.8769:

It’s not mandatory, but you’d need a pretty good reason not to take it.
I have the same thing with 5 points in Virtues.

i feel fiery wrath is a more mandatory spend than a blind on justice for guardian, and the two dont harmonize well at all in most situations. you cant rightly save the cooldown for both defense and offense. dueling with melee would be the possible exception. i wouldnt trade any of my traits for it, which is why i dont have it.

10/0/10/30/20 is what i use. my interest lies in wvw for the time being, and i find very few flaws with this build.

In my personal opinion, while i find Inspired Virtue an amazing trait and a must have, blind justice just isn’t as good.
It boost only one virtue and while area blind is ok against waves of mobs, blind is still the weakest form of damage mitigation: it can be removed, some targets are immune (dredges and turrets comes to mind) and every boss you would really want to use it against will have Unshakable thus making blind pointless.

In my opinion Blind justice becomes good only if you have traited 15 points of radiance, then it is awesome; otherwise is pretty much lackluster compared to several other options.

This thread makes a good case for the low HP if you look at the guardian in a vacuum and don’t compare it to anything else out there. I don’t really think we need more HP but it’s an undeniable fact that warriors and necros both easily have more effective HP, warriors also have comparable healing and avoidance.

I’ll believe it when I see a guardian wearing 6 WvW invaders all the way back to the keep

Cause I’ve already seen that fashion show on the warrior countless times

Note: I’m basing this off of PvE since that was what was mentioned in the original post.

I am enjoying this thread, but I get confused when I am constantly seeing “Warriors won’t get back to 100% HP”.

Regardless of the dungeon, on my Warrior, I have zero problems getting back to 100% HP (which in my case is 24k). I do play my warrior slightly more survivability, in the lazy mans way (Passive Signet Heal, Adrenaline Passive Healing, and I’ll throw in some food to add a third passive healing, it adds up you know). Add in if I want to lower my dps just SLIGHTLY I could add in Shout Heals too. Warriors are in a great place to Regen health.

Don’t get me wrong, my Guardian has great healing as well (Altruistic Healing is probably my favorite trait in the hole game). And I love the class just as much as my Warrior.

But otherwise, this is a silly argument to throw out in an otherwise well thought out thread.

Guardians are stacked with toughness on most gear. Claiming that a low health pool is somehow is an advantage relevant to mitigation abilities compared to the warrior is a misnomer and obtuse considering that warriors can have similar toughness.

The warrior is subject to receiving most of the mitigation abilities via the guardian. Focus block for the guardian is an obvious exception.

Condition damage is probably the great equalizer, and in that regard if your running around in pvp with < 15K health, good luck.

IMO, your better off sacrificing some toughness for vitality. It makes no sense, to stack toughness over 2K knowing that there is a plenty of condition damage sources.

Max toughness mitigation is about 35% damage reduced relative to no bonus toughness at all. Let’s just say 33% for simplicity. Max health gained from vitality is about 12k health. In effect this basically means that the first 12k damage you take each fight is negated.

This means that on a toughness build you need to take 24k (36k “raw”) damage to have mitigated an amount of damage equal to the health gained from vitality. Damage reduction from toughness is on a curve but the curve isn’t actually that steep. Even at lower levels of toughness vs. vitality you still need to hit around 25k or so to break even.

In PvP you won’t ever take 25k worth of damage. Your base health pool with no vitality is only about 10k so you have to take almost 2.5x that. That said, in PvE, against powerful enemies (regular mobs are so weak it doesn’t even matter either way) you will probably will take quite a bit of damage while pounding on some of those healthsink dungeon bosses. In that case, yes, toughness is better than vitality.

Mindvibe.4630:

why are you trying to convince me of everything ive already said?

also i dont have 5 points in radiance. its not mandatory for any build, including melee only.

I think that’s what the point of the trait system. If you don’t want to trait to take advantage of a low HP pool, then simply spec for high vitality instead.

Whatever works for you to be honest. ( how you play and what you play )

Personally I run just shy of 15k, and trait accordingly ( also runes/sigil to maximise energy recovery and equiped for blind and teleporting ), sometimes I feel godlike, and occasionally I get burnt down pretty fast if I’m not paying attention.

High vitality/low heal can be equally as effective given the right builds, but it’s not the way I roll/dodge.

The debate between vitality and toughness can only exist where one is echanged for another. If all other things being equal, one class having lower HP than another class is never advantageous. Period.

The first thing I’d like to ask is if we have ever confirmed that armor doesn’t suffer from diminishing returns as it goes up.

The gigantic elephant in the room that is being ignored is how important sustained defense is compared to front-loaded defense. I have only used a guardian in sPVP, and from several weeks of sPVP I would argue that ablative defense is more important than sustained defense because of the short life of any battle that players get in. It is rare for me to ever use a healing skill more than once in a fight, since by then one of us has defeated the other. After the battle is over, players are healed back to full health and are ready to engage the next group with a full HP bar. Because of this, healing potential in sPVP and in many cases of WvWvW is overrated, not only because healing is a linear benefit but also because it only gets used once and “over-healing” shouldn’t be an issue because of this.

Of course, the most important factor is the sweet spot, which is the point in which both HP and armor are both ablative and sustaining up until that point. Too little HP and you’ll get burst down, or burned by conditions. Too little armor and enemies will rip right through that HP bar like it was tissue paper, hitting for massive damage very easily. Generally you’ll want to build in what you are lacking, and it is only after you have a good balance that you should consider going for sustained or ablative defenses.

The general point is that all else isn’t equal. I don’t think anyone is seriously arguing that giving guardians another 12K base health would be a nerf. However, guardians have lower health as part of their design philosophy – the typical guardian has access to a lot more active defence than the typical warrior, and even in a short battle that can make up the difference (and mean that having lots of health on top of that is overpowered – there are already people complaining that competant guardians are too powerful as bunkers). And for those who can do a good job of making use of those active defences, they can mean greater survivability overall than just having more health.

I have played a tank for 12 years in MMOs and this has always been true.

Avoidance/Mitigation builds with lower health pools are always better for tanking than the ‘big ’ol bag of morale’ build with little mitigation for all the reasons the OP has stated.

Never mind the Warrior, take two Guardians and build one with max Vitality across the board in order to maximize his health pool. Use DPS skills and traits and forget any defensive skills. Take the second Guardian and build for Toughness and trait for blocks etc and defense. Put them in the same dungeon taking the same hits, the mitigation build will survive much longer. But you say, vs a Warrior there would be an ever greater delta in the health pool and that would make up for it.

If you’re getting whacked and every hit takes a big chunk out of your health, you’re going to run out at some point. If you can stand there with 500 health and take a beating and survive, because you have a chance to avoid or mitigate every hit, your survival rate will be much higher.

Toughness and Armor do not mitigate Conditions, more often than not the thing that does the most damage to me is bleeding. When a DOT can be applied every second and Removers are on longish CD… well you get my point. A health pool is often > toughenss.

There is no reason for a Guardian to ever be without a condition removal for more than a few seconds, Relentliss. We have an incredible array of traits and abilities that remove a whole slew of conditions at a time that, quite frankly, should make an encounter with a bleed-centered warrior quite simple. And this doesn’t even consider Rune of the Soldier, or a sigil that removes conditions on crit (name escapes me atm…).

Point is, a Guardian can negate conditions easily. If someone’s build doesn’t take advantage of this, then they’re missing a big part of being a Guardian.

Eveningstar.6940:

I’m curious about your stats/build, Buzz. Do you go pure Knight’s on your warrior, meaning no vitality? When you say “regen build,” which one are you referring to?

Sorry for late reply, was on a holiday.

Banner regen build, + dolyak + the regen signet and the regen trait. Since warrior have way more hp than others, you can just neglect vit, go full knight and still have 20k+ hp. The only banner I use is Defense, pop it and hold it and move with a team. Sure you can’t solo much, but since knight add power+precision, having a gs/rifle will give you the dps needed. This is pretty viable imo, but it only work for warrior since they do have a high health pool.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNBkODbk0p5t4RAiJOggUYFVxRBUEgpHhBbsGA

Whatever you do, axe and warhorn(traited) is a must. Just swap rifle to gs if you want, but I’ll keep rifle for wvw. Those convert condi to boons and the speed buff+SoR=perma swiftness are priceless.

I have both a level 80 Warrior and a level 80 Guardian. Both are great classes, have great survivability and bring a lot to the table for groups. A lot of my guildies asked me why I leveled two of the “same thing” as my first 80’s, and I can whole-heartedly say they both play extremely different, despite looking very similiar on the surface.

Eveningstar’s first post was dead on as it relates to Guardians. There is a ton of survivalability built into that class, despite having the lowest base health tier.

But there’s no point in arguing which is better or more survivable, Warrior vs Guardian, because they’re both great classes. I’ve surpirsed people with both classes in terms of situations I’ve survived and damage I’ve done. It’s a great feeling to hear someone in a group say, “Whoops, guess we wiped, huh?” and to reply back, “Nope, still fighting, get back here!” And I’ve had the same experience on both Warrior and Guardain.

tl;dr – Guardian – Fantastic class. Warrior – Fantastic class. Each plays differently, but you can’t go wrong with either.

Bit of an unneeded post. I play a shout healing warrior, and there was a discussion on Warrior forums about Guardian > Warrior in tanky ness in all areas. To which i disagreed with, saying Warriors are best short term, with burst damage and burst healing and ability to control enemies very often with blunt weapons (defiance reduces this) but guardians are more long term with their steady income of healing which counters their low health. Im not sure what the HPS is for guardians, but if you had 300 HP/S, and fought for 10 seconds, thats 3000 effective health.

That said, i am a healer basicly, a bad kitten boss stomping healer, but a healer no less. And my guild leader is a guardian, and it feels so satisfying to see my 4.5K heal fill up so much of his bar. Even if the overall gain is exactly the same as a Warrior getting a 1.5K heal, the percentage of life gained feels like a nice safety net though.

I think the classes, if you can manage to trade aggro effectively, really compliment eachother in terms of survivability in PvE. Warrior can rip through defiance stacks and stun the enemy for 2 seconds at a time, while providing burst healing when needed, and able to take the huge hits when Guardian is getting hurt, and Guardian can provide steady healing to harmonize with the burst healing, can take the boss primarily while the Warrior recovers his 30K HP, defend allies from projectiles and grant protection boons.

I usually look at them as attack and defense. Warrior knocks down enemy for 2 seconds which is like, a burst period of 0 damage taken by that enemy, while Guardian defends his allies. One stops the attack from happening, the other stops the attack from landing.

In SPVP, i have actually drawn comments from my guildies (2 were guardians) who could not believe how long i could last against multiple enemies as a full on tank warrior(i couldnt hit hard, but i relished my role as support meat shield) and both me and my guardian friend dueled for basicly an entire match, and it was pretty equal, trading stuns for blocks, knock backs for teleports. The match started around 50 points, and ended while we were whittled down to about 45% health each.

tl;dr Warrior and Guardian compliment eachother when it comes to survivability, rather then say Guardian > Warrior, more focus should be placed on their roles and how they cover eachothers weaknesses. Warrior brings an amazing performance for a short amount of time (defiance stacks stopping stuns, high health but no stable healing), while Guardian delivers a great performance consistantly(blocking attacks, protection boon, regen). And by combining Warrior’s burst defense with Guardians consistant defense, you basicly have your OT and MT positions if we are in a holy trinity world.

However, you show me a target without defiance, and i’ll show you a target that can’t use a single move. =P

A constant stream of regeneration is a form of health, but against Guardian’s it can be easily countered by knocking them off their symbols. The low health is really just a way of making it so once you break through the Guardian’s defenses and lock them from healing that they aren’t totally invincible.

In my WvW build I rarely ever die even though I’m a commander and I’m always standing in the front lines. I would say I have like a 50:1 K:D ratio. Guardian’s are incredibly powerful in WvW right now in pure support builds. Wall of Reflection is practically overpowered.

There is quite a bit of misinformation floating around regarding EHP and survivability. I’ve created a spreadsheet to help out with this, and it includes some default values for base stats and accounting for 1x or 2x heals per fight.

Preview sample.

You can download the spreadsheet from Strike Force Public Forums.

Which is why I don’t care too much for health. Not saying it’s not important, because it is. But having relatively low health isn’t that bad really. Low health with high defence makes your heals much more effective, I like that.