Guild Wars 2

This is a revamped repost from pre-patch. And in classic Warrior style, I’ll leap right into the fray here!

Damage = Weapon * Power * Skill Coefficient / Targets Armor

Exo Greatsword has a Weapon value of 1047. In sPvP a soldiers ammy will put you at 2200 power and 3067 armor. Warrior Greatsword AutoAttack has a coeff of 0.7, and we’ll skip crits, traits, might, etc to keep it simple, because they dont really change the outcome, they just speed up reaching it.

Thick Skin
Without Thick Skin = (1047 * 2200 * 0.7) / 3067 = 528 damage
120 Toughness Thick Skin = (1047 * 2200 * 0.7) / 3187 = 506 damage

Soldiers ammy also grants a big juicy 28,212 hp pool. The 90% threshold is from 25,391 and up, meaning a 2821 hp window where Thick Skin applies its damage reduction.

So in 6 hits (506 × 6 = 3036) we’ll have lost thick skin by dropping below 90% hp. And it will have saved the Warrior a grand total of… 132 health! (22×6)

That’s right, this trait adds 132 health worth of survival to someone with a 28,212 health pool. Or in other words, 0.0046% increase. But wait, it gets better.

Thick skin is presently bugged, and only grants 20 toughness
20 Toughness Thick Skin = (1047 * 2200 * 0.7) / 3087 = 522 damage

Yeah, that’s right. At present, thick skin prevents roughly 36 damage total, or increases your effective health by 0.00127% (28248/28212).

Determined Revival
Without Determined Revival = (1047 * 2200 * 0.7) / 3067 = 528 damage
400 Tgh Determined Revival = (1047 * 2200 * 0.7) / 3467 = 465 damage

Again, it only reduces damage by roughly 63 per hit. Lets assuming you spend a lot of time reviving fallen allies. About 10% of the match time spent reviving seems high to me, but lets use it anyway. Averaged out… ((528*9)+465)/10 = 522 damage.

That equates to 6 damage reduction per swing across your lifespan, with 55 strikes to bring health below 0 (55*522=28710), meaning it would save you roughly 330 health on average, out of a 28212 health pool. Or a 0.0116% increase (28542/28212).

Dolyak Signet
Without Dolyak = (1047 * 2200 * 0.7) / 3067 = 528 damage
With Dolyak = (1047 * 2200 * 0.7) / 3247 = 497 damage

Again, 31 damage reduction per hit. At 57 AA hits to down the War (497*57=28329), thats still only 1767 (31*57) or a 0.06% increase in survival.

TL;DR: Toughness Stacking traits and skills are just terrible. Please, PLEASE, revamp these to provide meaningful sources of Damage Reduction!

It’s like Anet are afraid to give us damage reduction. No access to protection, and as you so clearly showed, the passive DR traits suck and have sucked for a long time. It’s like we’re supposed to work around block if we want to take less damage, BUT they keep spreading unblockable skill all over the place everytime so have fun blocking. (And Shiro’s going to be even more ridiculous with the unblockable stuff, might as well give him passive unblockable; that’s easier to program.)

I hope that the elite specialization gives us proper damage reduction stuff, maybe access to protection as well. But given the name “berserker” it’s probably just going to boost our DPS and do nothing to our defenses and support.

Agreed – this is something that’s been an issue for too long.

I really appreciate the numbers here. Hopefully someone with some influence on class design will see this and give us some proper damage reduction.

We have:

-The highest Armor available
-The highest healthpool available
-2x Endure Pain (once as a utility, once as a trait)
-Several blocks on weaponsets (Mace, Shield, Sword)

Do we really need more Damage Reduction?

we need better active defense not passive damage reduction…

FlashGamer.4017:

We have:

-The highest Armor available
-The highest healthpool available
-2x Endure Pain (once as a utility, once as a trait)
-Several blocks on weaponsets (Mace, Shield, Sword)

Do we really need more Damage Reduction?

The health pool helps a lot, but the game has changed a fair bit to the point that each class’ mitigation options should be looked at.

For example, the math above more or less shows armor difference between heavies and other classes isn’t worth much.

All but one block ends with a single melee attack, and as noted there’s been some proliferation of unblockable skills. The stances have long CD, are short lived, and apply to one damage type.

I don’t think warrior is “in trouble” per se, but its staying power in a fight has been lessened due to the diminished value of its mitigation options.

Blinds, evades, stun breaking teleports, aegis, protection, and particularly stealth are the much more valuable damage mitigators, after dodge.

Choppy.4183:

FlashGamer.4017:

We have:

-The highest Armor available
-The highest healthpool available
-2x Endure Pain (once as a utility, once as a trait)
-Several blocks on weaponsets (Mace, Shield, Sword)

Do we really need more Damage Reduction?

The health pool helps a lot, but the game has changed a fair bit to the point that each class’ mitigation options should be looked at.

For example, the math above more or less shows armor difference between heavies and other classes isn’t worth much.

All but one block ends with a single melee attack, and as noted there’s been some proliferation of unblockable skills. The stances have long CD, are short lived, and apply to one damage type.

I don’t think warrior is “in trouble” per se, but its staying power in a fight has been lessened due to the diminished value of its mitigation options.

Blinds, evades, stun breaking teleports, aegis, protection, and particularly stealth are the much more valuable damage mitigators, after dodge.

Don’t forget we also have alot of access to Regeneration as a boon and not as a boon so we actually can have it “twice”. Aegis, protection and stealth would not feel right on a warrior in my eyes. However, blinds and evades, while being more a thief thing would fit the warrior. But well we still have our elite spec to be announced and I’m looking foward to it. Dagger could be evade focused and Pistol or Torch could be associated with blinds. I’m placing my bets on Torch btw

Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I’m not personally looking at other classes with envy, just agreeing with the overall message of the thread that our primary defenses have diminished a bit in this brave new world.

I also think torch or dagger is likely. Setting stuff on fire, blind, and reveal are likely if it’s torch, I think. Dagger I’m not sure… can’t think of any utility it could bring that we don’t already have.

I believe that Armor overall damage reduction is not THAT good in this game.

I mean, when against another power build, having 3000 armor (besides hampering your DPS) doesn’t make you stand for that long against profession that can deal huge amounts of dmh.

On the other hand, professions that have means to go fully zerker and still avoid hits (using evades, stealth, protection) can bring you down fairly fast.

So, at the end of the day, whom he can go fully zerk and still avoid hits wins. Warrior can’t do that. He either go fully zerk and go kill or be killed or he goes tanky and is unable to kill fast (thus ending up dead due to others being able to reset/heal easier).

After reading this post, it reminds me some calculation i made on eviscerate dmg output.
It happened after a ranked match i made, where a noob ele who doesnt know anithing of how warrior work told me i was a noob cuz i was using signet of might instead of signet of doliak. Well, in this meta i can say 180 power is much more better than 180 togness, and 6s unblockable on a 25 cd is waaaay better than 10s stability on 60cd.
The main reason the passive buff of signet of might is better, is that togness is not providing enough damage mitigation to compensate the lose of power. Against a berserker, you will be hit a little harder, but you will hit much more harder: you can go 2 warrior berserker autoattack each other, the one with signet of might will win over the one with doliak signet (considering they have the same trait builds and the same utilities remaining). I did several tryes, warrior with signet of might always win, the only time it gets close (but still might signet wins) is when having an high health pool.

To speak poorly, rousing resilence wich gives 1k togness when break out of a stun, is not even remotely close to the damage reduction protection gives, and not even close to the adept mesmer trait 3% less damage for each illusion you have. To be fair, even if rousing resilence would give 2k togness, protection would still be better^^

@Shala
The main reason is power’s always a good investment, even when it’s not the best investment (and often it is the best). Every damage multiplier connects with power, and there are more multipliers after the patch than there was before.

On the other side, there are few multipliers that interact with toughness and probably none that help defense (e.g. Armored Attack interacts, but results in more power not defense). This makes it so the rate of diminishing returns through greater investment in toughness is higher than it is with power.

You basically need enough health and toughness to survive a surprise burst, and then the rest is mitigation to kill or be killed.

Consequently, denying entire hits from landing, or percentage based defense (like protection) are much better than toughness.

The damage formulas of this game are awfully bad designed. Anyone who has studied even elementary calculus can spot the scaling problems right away. I suppose they don’t make game designers study math, so perhaps they should let their programmers tinker with damage formulas instead.

I’m stubborn enough to play a full tank warrior and while I’m maybe 1.5 or 2x more durable than other warriors, they do maybe 4x more damage than me. The living story bosses were just boring: they were easy but they took 20 minutes.

With the armor formula of Guild Wars 2, how good a +X toughness is depends on how much you have so it’s harder to judge how good a buff is. A buff of a certain amount of toughness can be a 10% damage reduction on what you took if your toughness is low, but only 3% if it’s high. And it works against itself because those are in the defense line, the line that wants you to have high toughness…

For armor, I really liked the inverse exponential formulas of Guild Wars 1. There was one rule to know: for every +20 armor you got, you had a 50% damage reduction. It didn’t matter if you had 60 or 100 armor: if you get an additional 20 armor you take half the damage you used to take, period. (That’s how inverse exponential functions work.) Then you can find other values easily with a calculator, and again those are always the same.

Here’s another interesting tidbit. (I borrowed the damage from my original post for ease)

Soldiers Light Armor 2788, and 1612380 / 2788 = 578 damage taken
Soldiers Medium Armor 2929, and 1612380 / 2929 = 550 damage taken
Soldiers Heavy Armor 3067, and 1612380 / 3067 = 526 damage taken

So, when using Soldiers, Heavy Armor only reduces damage by 4.56% over medium armor, and 9.88% over light armor.

Zerker Light Armor 1888, and 1612380 / 1888 = 854 damage taken
Zerker Medium Armor 2029, and 1612380 / 2029 = 795 damage taken
Zerker Heavy Armor 2167, and 1612380 / 2167 = 744 damage taken

When using Zerkers, Heavy Armor reduces damage by 6.85% over medium armor, and nearly 14.78% over light armor.

This just further demonstrates how the armor formula has diminishing returns. The more armor you get, the less each point is worth.

And yet power and damage scale in a linear fashion.
1047 * 2200 * 0.7 = 1,612,380
1047 * 3300 * 0.7 = 2,418,570

Notice how when you increase power from 2200 to 3300, a 50% increase, your total damage (before defenses obviously) ALSO increases by 50%? Linear scaling. Every point of power increase is worth the same as the point before, and after it.

So the problem as I see it is simple.
The Warrior classes primary defense versus direct damage is armor. This is pretty obvious, as the class has a lot of toughness bolstering traits, and no access to protection, aegis, dodge spam, teleports, etc. And yet, the more one gets of armor/toughness, the worse it is.

All the other classes defend using various means, such as evade frames, stealth, protection, healing, blind, rangekiting, or some combination thereof. NONE of these methods suffer from diminishing returns.

The only defense, and the only character attribute, that suffers from diminishing returns is armor/toughness.

Vitality too. In fact, the same principle applies to all attributes in gw2.

Choppy.4183:

Vitality too. In fact, the same principle applies to all attributes in gw2.

Yes. Vitality is 10 health per point.
Precision is 1% crit for every 21 points, once you get above 916
Ferocity is 1% crit damage for every 15 points

I’m not even outright AGAINST having toughness scale inversely, but when you base damage output on a linear scale, ONE classes defensive capability around an inversely scaling mechanism, and base every OTHER classes defense around liner scaling mechanisms…

Definitely. And you were absolutely right to point out that some classes are more affected by the increased damage than others due to the extent in which their mitigation is dependent on toughness.

Warriors should remember this the next time someone from another class says warriors are OP because of their heavy armor and large health pool. It’ll happen…

Thick Skin looks better when you have some form of regen like HS, so if you take a little damage and regen back to 100% you keep your Thick Skin bonus and it helps you shrug off incidental AoE and stuff like that.

Also if you take a large hit, the whole hit will be mitigated, not just the portion of it equal to 10% of your health.

However even if it weren’t bugged the numbers on it are horribly weak even when considering the above.

Shala.8352:

—
To speak poorly, rousing resilence wich gives 1k togness when break out of a stun, is not even remotely close to the damage reduction protection gives, and not even close to the adept mesmer trait 3% less damage for each illusion you have. To be fair, even if rousing resilence would give 2k togness, protection would still be better^^

With 2k armor, 1k toughness gives 33% damage reduction.

Bearhugger.4326:

The damage formulas of this game are awfully bad designed. Anyone who has studied even elementary calculus can spot the scaling problems right away. I suppose they don’t make game designers study math, so perhaps they should let their programmers tinker with damage formulas instead.

—

The only reason toughness scales bad is because your starting armor is much more than your starting power. If they were equal, it wouldn’t matter which attribute you stacked. A player with 2000 power deals same damage to a 2000 armor target than a player with 1000 power to a 1000 armor target. However, a player with 1500 power and 1500 armor would be optimal and win in both cases.

1500 / 2000 = 0.75 > 1000/1500 = 0.67

1500 / 1000 = 1.5 > 2000/1500 = 1.33

The formula works fine which should be pretty obvious, for some reason it isn’t.

What matters is how many hits you can take. For example with 10k health, you can take 10 hits of 1k damage.

Add 10% more health and you can take 11 hits.

Add 10% more armor and that 1k hit becomes 1k/1.1 = 909 damage. 10k/909 = 10k/(1k/1.1) = 11 hits.

An example with power. 1k hit against 10k target needs 10 hits.

To kill that target in 9 hits, you would need 10/9 -1 = 11% more power.

To kill that target in 8 hits, you would need 10/8 – 1 = 25% more power.

To kill that target in 7 hits, you would need 10/7 – 1 = 43% more power.

Doesn’t that look like diminishing returns? To actually kill the target faster, you need more and more power.

If you want them balanced, I suggest suggesting halving all skill coefficients and remove defense from gear.