Guild Wars 2

Defy Pain – Activates Endure Pain at 25% health, basically makes you invulnerable for 4 seconds. Supposed to be 5 but I believe it only last 3-4. Internal cooldown is something like 90 seconds?

or

Spiked Armor – Gain 5 seconds of retaliation when struck by a critical hit, 15 second internal cooldown. If the wiki is correct you would be reflecting around 400 damage a hit for the duration at 2k power.

Which do you guys think is better for pvp? Do you actually take the damage reflected or is their attack reduced by the amount that’s reflected?

Spiked Armor x1000.

Considering it’ll be up 33% of a fight, compared to Defy Pain that has a long CD, doesn’t last even as long as retal, and activates only after the majority of the fight has ended.

Shouldn’t even be a decision!

lol I guess I’ve been doing it wrong

Def do you know if you take the damage reflected?

Yes you do take the damage.

I would like to add, that Spiked Armor only gets better the more HP and Toughness you have.

If you have 1500 Toughness and are taking 500 dmg a hit from an enemy, you’ll reflect about 375-400 back to them.

However, if you have 2000 Toughness and are taking lets say 375 dmg a hit from an enemy, you’ll reflect 375-400 back to them.

Defy Pain is only relatively (and I mean relatively) decent for builds that have barely any HP/Toughness and really NEED outside utilities to keep them alive.

And Endure Pain is bugged, as you said, it’s more 3 sec than 5. Compare a mechanism that works with one that works only for half of it’s duration.

If you seem to have issues with reacting quickitteno an enemy player advancing on you, I recommend using the Defy Pain as basically a safety net. If a frenzy warrior jumps on you and blows you up, you would only go to 25% health at max in his combo. This gives you time to react and attempt to pull the fight back in your favor.

But I agree with Defektive, you should make sure you have ample toughness to try and maximize the retaliation effect. If you are into the more of a glass cannon type build (like how I usually build) than you may be more apt to use Endure pain.

It should also be mentioned that I believe (someone else can confirm) that endure and defy pain do not cancel the damage of any conditions that are on you. So while you may be invulnerable to any new attacks, if you have a stack of bleeds they will still be hitting you. It’s the duration of defy pain that turns me off though.

Correct, the Pains do not remove nor stop condition damage.

Backbeard : I’m not sure that’ll really put a safety net.
Let’s say you’re at 40%. If you receive a hit (burst damage e.g.) that’ll put you down to 15%, the Defy pain will activate AFTER the hit. Which means that if someone can put you down from 25% to 0%, that won’t work.
Although, I recognize that few skills can do as much damage in one hit (Evis and Kill shot for warrior). Also, the cooldown of Defy Pain (as Endure Pain) is quite long. And both have only ~3 sec for now.

@ kyokara : That doesn’t match with the tooltip, but you’re probably true. It appears that for now, Endure Pain works like the Shield Stance : 3 sec and blocks only incoming hits (although no block animation for Ep, ofc).