Guild Wars 2

I was recently testing out some a dire trailblazer mix and after I got hit by a 7k trueshot crit noticed something unusual about thief in 3k armor. Why does my thief in 3k armor feel far less tanky than my ranger or engineer in 3k armor? Am I tripping?

Well, you know, thief has the lowest base health pool of all adventurer classes.

Additionally (not sure since I don’t really play them) do rangers and engies have more/better defensive traits. Almost all trait thief has that uses are either offensive or enhance active skillplay.

Lower innate defenses, lower health pool, no protection/toughness/damage reduction effects which many classes can maintain permanently or have passively built in.

Basically, we’re performing at the same level of balance the rest of the game did at release. Everything’s just so power-creeped that incoming damage feels high (because it is when looking at coefficients) that it seems out of whack. Sad news is unless they do lots of nerfs to damage outputs and damage reduction effects to counter-balance everything, it’ll still be broken, and a few buffs to passives are typically easier when there’s so much accumulated power creep, which is the route ANet usually takes.

It’s the lack of protection and other defensive traits. The damage formula is:

(weapon damage)X(skill multipler)X(other multipliers)/(armor)

Protection basically adds a X(2/3) to the end of that. If we move that to the denominator, it is multiplying the armor value by (3/2), or effectively producing a 50% boost to their armor, meaning 3k turns into 4.5k for them.

No acess to boons (protection) and blocks/invuls + lower HP pool duhh

You can coat manure in powdered sugar it don’t make it a jelly doughnut.

Same way you can’t put heavy armor on a thief and call it a tank.

I’d love to see a venom share/evade tank spec where every time you dodge you gain armor/block. Utilizing lots of weakness/vulnerability. Anything, really.