Guild Wars 2

Here’s a helpful hint when it comes to attribute allocation:

Your primary attributes start at 916 each (at level 80). These are power, toughness, vitality and precision. There are also secondary attributes, that start at 0, that aren’t as important —the primary really govern the fundamentals of hitting things, and getting hit by things.

Both primary and secondary attributes are used to compute so-called derived attributes, but they’re irrelevant to this discussion. In terms of item budget, we allocate primary or secondary attributes on our gear.

Now, when you pick your triple-attribute exotic gear you are allocating 1003 points towards an attribute and 698 towards two others. Celestial gets 454 to five.

Ignoring some of the PvP-centric tweaks (e.g. PvP Berserker spreads its budget on 4 attributes), then a Berserker enemy has allocated a total of around 2400 attribute points towards blowing you up quickly on gear alone. With a Celestial amulet, you have 454 points towards mitigating that damage, and 454 points towards soaking that damage.

This is the starting point (e.g. traits also give attributes) as to why you take so much damage. I would suggest you familiarise yourself with the game by using an attribute spread that is much more defensive. Make sure not to invest too much on Healing Power, as it is a somewhat advanced attribute that requires some knowledge of the game to take advantage of.

Argon.1563:

Or you could just dodge/evade/run/block/blind/interrupt/knockback/knockdown/etc/etc

I would like to point out that Lich Form comes with stability.

zapv.8051:

Far and away the worst is the Grandmaster Spite minor Siphoned Power. One stack of might for dropping below 25% health. Literally 1 stack of might, that’s 35 power for falling below 25% health. To me it is quite possibly the worst trait in the game because it has such a minimal impact and you invest 25 points for it.

The description of Siphoned Power reads (emphasis mine):

Gain might when struck while your health is below the threshold.

As far as I can tell, that description is accurate. If you get hit five times and you are under 25% health, you get five stacks of might (each lasting 5s). If there is an internal cooldown, it is a short-ish one.

One can certainly say many things about this minor (e.g. not every build or playstyle can or will benefit from might when you have little health left), but probably not that ‘it is quite possibly the worst trait in the game’.

When I first tried out different professions I used to think that the lack of cleave on Dagger was hurting us. Now that I’ve delved deeper into them I really appreciate the weapon though. That the melee dagger (for both Thief and Necromancer) deals the most damage without cleave is good design. That melee cleave is oh-so-important in high-level PvE but not everyone has access to it may not be, but I don’t think putting cleave everywhere is a nice solution.

If there is something to be said about Axe range it’s that at the least 600 or so range weapons are unusual in general, and may be underdesigned. A brief recap:

- Melee attacks are typically set at 130 (some oddballs at 150) with the highest damage (that comes with the shortest range)
- Ranged attacks start at 900, extending to 1200 (some oddballs in between), and trade some punch for safety — some traits may extend the range

It’s hard to figure out the purpose of the weapons that are in between, and there are in fact very few of them. Namely:

- Necromancer Axe at 600
- Guardian Staff at 600
- Elementalist Dagger at 400 (Fire), 600 (Water), 300 (Air) and 300 (Earth)

Of that list, the Axe and Staff have some similarity damage-wise in that they both have a lackluster spam skill that’s somewhat compensated by a spammy-ish second skill (unless you detonate the orb, in the case of the staff). As the staff hits in a very wide cone though, all three setups are arguably very unique.

(I can’t really comment on the Elementalist’s dagger when it comes to the damage–range/risk–reward trade-off as I lack experience with it. In any case it’s a popular weapon not just for the utility but also the damage, as I understand it.)

So that’s what I mean by ‘underdesigned’. The non-spammable skills may be easy to figure out (e.g. Staff has great support), but the weird damage-to-range point of the spammable attack makes it a little bit unobvious to the player how to play to the weapon’s strengths, if any; or conversely how to integrate the weapon to their playstyle.

There is currently a lot of hand-wringing and anxiety regarding the new appearance system. I am here to dispel a very important misconception and clarify that you don’t need to spend transmutation charges every time you want to change appearance for the sake of PvP. Admittedly it is easy to fall victim to this misconception due to a couple of arguable oversights for the update, but I’ll elaborate on that later.

Before:

- You had PvP-only items with definite appearances that you stored in your locker and inventory. They took inventory space.

After:

- You have a database of skins (now in your bank, obsoleting the locker), also partially browsable from your appearance tab — this is an unlock system, a lot like achievements and crucially this takes no inventory space.
- There still are skin consumables to imbue an actual item with a particular appearance. As a side-effect, using/looting the consumable unlocks the skin, but you can ignore that for the time being.
- You have items with definite appearances in your inventory, that you can store in your bank as well.

Notice the similarities: before, you could choose to swap your Country helm for your Devout helm. Now, you still can. Before, you would receive or craft a PvP item with a definite appearance in your inventory. Now, you receive a consumable to imbue a definite appearance to an item in your inventory — say, to one of the common item you can buy cheaply at one of the PvP vendors. (I actually need confirmation that you do receive consumables from the reward tracks and do not merely unlock skins – without that premise everything I have said falls apart.)

In other words the transmutation charges everyone received serve the purpose of transitioning (as the items you used to have have vanished). They are not central to the day-to-day sPvP experience however.

Why you were possibly misled

Unfortunately there seem to be a few oversights that make the new system not up-to-par to the old one:

- Lockers were obsoleted, but there is no bank access to store or transfer your items so you need to leave the Heart of the Mists. Worse, you lost storage room (e.g. what if you were using your bank for non-PvP purposes?)
- Pieces like shoulder armors require the character to be level 11 — note that you sometimes receive tomes to level up via the reward tracks though.
- You buy common equipment at the PvP vendors with coin. You do receive coin as part of your rewards, but there also are additional uses for coin now — it remains to be seen if this is not an overall inconvenience. Worse, you may be tempted to use a skin consumable on one of the masterwork or better items you sometimes receive in order to same a bit of money, but masterwork or better items bind to the character, not the account unlike skinned common items. (I need confirmation for this as well, although I know WvW skins leave common items account bound.)

The OP’s math is not as shoddy as people are jumping in to point out. You always have to keep track what a percentage is relative to.

Assuming a 100-point pool that depletes in 25s, it is correct to label that as a 4% degeneration. That’s 4% of the 100 points, per second.
Assuming a 130-point pool that still depletes in 25s, it is correct to label that as a 5.2% degeneration, where the percentage is relative to those 130 points, per second.

It is also correct to say that you lose 4% of your lifeforce per second no matter how much lifeforce pool bonus you have. That percentage is relative to the 100% of your lifeforce. The relation between the 130-point pool and “100% of your lifeforce” is that of course when traited for +30% lifeforce pool then 100% of your lifeforce pool is 130% of your untraited lifeforce pool. Another way to frame that is to say that you always lose 4% of your lifeforce pool, but that percentage can represent up to 5.2 points (not percentage) of your untraited lifeforce pool.

Let’s stop bickering about percentages and focus on the core of the OP’s point, which is:

vicious.5683:

The logic says, if you have more LF, it should take more time to deplete.