Alright I consider this debate over. On a night with new keybinds and taking me 5 seconds to find the button for Shelter…
http://imgur.com/K5Lkp4P
http://imgur.com/sKP07U2
golf clap
The slowness never bothered me. Other races feel fast. Even my human feels like Usain Bolt. But my main’s a Norn so I guess I’m just used to it.
But, if you run a 25% speed runeset it’s largely mitigated by that.
>wants to encourage build diversity
>won’t tell you what the build is so you can try it
Ok.
Also, I don’t think Purging Flame counts as a “70k damage in a single attack.” It’s 70k damage alright, but distributed across a dozen or more characters, and they all healed it back.
You will change your mind about spirit build when you see this. This build can churn out 70k AOE damage in 1 hit with spirits
What’s the build exactly?
It’s happened before! :P
I can see the patch notes now.
“Fixed a bug with Shield of Absorption that erroneously displayed duration as 4 seconds. Now correctly reads 2.”
We’ve been asking for Shield to be changed for years now. (It feels weird saying that.) It’s never gonna happen.
Two months of problems with my connection at home have finally more or less abated. I’ll be resuming the playtesting I was unable to complete soon.
4 points in Virtues gets you Absolute Resolution and cooldown reduction on Purging Flames, which are both outstanding condition dumps. Absolute Resolution is great because not only does it have a stupidly huge range (it hits 4 allies within 1200) but it also has a healing component and Regeneration built in to help reset the clock on the damage you took. Purging Flames is a mini version of that without the heal. Personally I’ve never noticed the extra condition duration reduction effect on PF, but every little bit helps.
I use Indomitable Courage for PvP. Don’t need blind stomps when you have clutch stability.
That’s exactly right. As soon as you get hit, you lose it. There are two main schools of thought that I’m aware of for Unscathed Contender – One is to use it in tandem with burst skills like Whirling Wrath, i.e. pop Retreat or your virtue immediately before Whirling Wrath for a 20% bonus. So, you might be a Berserker burst PvP guardian who uses Judge’s Intervention, Focus 5 and Whirling Wrath in a very short timeframe and be able to get all of the abilities off at the 20% bonus before you get hit.
The other is to use it without intending to get hit at all, i.e. pop it right before a long chain of blinds, knockbacks, and so forth. Using it from range with a Scepter is also another option.
I have had no internet at my house for the entire month of July, which has made finishing things difficult. It’ll be done when it’s done. :l
I do still have a copy of the old guide, if you want it let me know. I’ll have the new version up this week, for real this time. I had some real-life hangups that were distracting me.
Re: Deathmond, full condition damage builds remain underpowered for Guardians. Radiant Retaliation is also pretty garbage as a trait. There will be in-depth explanations in the updated guide for why this is the case, but Dire is a pretty bad choice of armor for Guardians.
A quick bottom line on condition damage – high condi burning is great when your time on target is low. That is to say, if you are having to chase someone (as in pvp) or the fight is otherwise set up such that you can’t be constantly applying standard melee DPS rotations, having a hybrid with a good chunk of burning damage makes a lot of sense because it’s positioning agnostic for the most part. If your time on target is high, i.e. you’re able to stick to someone like glue without breaks in your rotations, regular melee DPS is much better.
If you’re going to build something other than Berserker, I’d do Soldier rather than Knight’s. The DPS loss isn’t so great as you would expect, because the additional Vit and Toughness will boost your Sharpening Stone buff and give you more power than Knights would, which offsets some of the loss of Precision compared to Knights. It also increases your benefit from the Fury buff. It’ll also make you a lot tougher in WvW. WvW isn’t just about raw armor, you need buffer HP as well to resist bursts.
Barring any major changes to the way PvE works, Berserker is and will likely remain your first priority for armor.
if your in combat, that means you got hit, which means aegis is used up…….
if your staring at how you look then your not killing anything…
There are two kinds of people.
Healing power is one of those things that is more difficult to quantify than it might seem. Healing power becomes dramatically more effective as your enemy’s time on target drops. No one applies 100% of their on-paper DPS 100% of the time.
You can kind of think about it like this – Healing power is more effective when people aren’t hitting you, because your actual HP/s recovery increases as incoming damage decreases. Taking 1000 DPS and healing 500 HP/s is a losing battle. If you can reduce your incoming damage taken to 500 DPS though, either through maneuvering or blinds or whatever, then suddenly you’ve actually reached an equilibrium… and you’re effectively invulnerable.
Put another way, say you’re taking 550 DPS and healing 500 HP/s. You’re gonna die eventually. With a modest buff of only 10% healing, you suddenly become invulnerable again.
Of course, your own ability to kill the target becomes a factor in how long you actually have to survive in the first place. Dead enemies deal no DPS. Also, this applies more to PVP than PVE for various reasons. But healing power isn’t useless, and it’s not helpful to characterize it as such. It’s just very difficult to quantify, and it remains one of those stats that is more of a “I feel” than an “I am.”
Well, one thing that being able to move while casting ZD would allow for is lining up the projectiles such that instead of trying to hit a foe moving side to side with respect to you, you can move so that they are instead moving closer or further from you. That would be kind of interesting because it would add a player skill aspect to the ability that is currently lacking. Of course, it would be kind of pointless except as a short-medium range punish for when they’re just outside of melee; but if they also upped the damage somewhat, so that it competed with Warrior’s Sword 3 (which even on my non-berserker warrior crits in WvW for 6k) then I think Sword would be much more valuable as opposed to a dumb AA weapon.
Sword 2 used to do damage and be targettable, but they changed it in BWE2 or 3. You used to be able to do a really fun combo whenever an enemy was rooted or immobilized or whatever; You’d ground target Sword 2 just behind you so that you were out of melee, and then ZD where they couldn’t reach you.
Those were changes from the bogus patch notes as I recall.
You only lose fractional seconds if you fail to apply more burning to raise it up to a whole second before it runs out. If you apply 1.5 seconds and another 1.5 seconds before it runs out you will get 3 ticks.
Simplex optimization?
I’d be content with them just have it actually block ranged attacks like the description states that it does…
Important distinction – it blocks ranged projectiles, not ranged AoEs/ground targetted abilities. I.e. arrows, Kill Shots, etc.
I use it in WvW to block cheesy Kill Shot warriors all the time.
This is a point that has come up over and over since beta. They haven’t changed ZD significantly since then. I forget what they did exactly in beta, I want to say that’s when they nerfed it from a block to an absorb.
I’m really glad that I can finally point the “armor has diminishing returns” crowd to someone else’s thread so they no longer have to take my word for it, now.
I recommend that you start exploring condition damage ASAP, as you aren’t really breaking new ground until you start to do so.
(edited by foofad.5162)
Mm, not buying it. At 43 seconds he went from 7 stacks to 8 stacks a split second before you stripped, shifting Might to the far right (most recent). The same thing happened at the very next strip, ten seconds later at 53 seconds into the video, where he went from 5 stacks to 6 just a split second before you stripped him again. Those are the only two I’ve scrutinized so far but I suspect it’s the same story for all of them.
That comment was in reference to PvP, where you can’t eat food. I should have specified.
I’m sure there’s a way to put it that’s more cogent than the way that I wrote it out. Here’s a slightly better way of putting it:
The formula for damage is that the HP change = damage (which is skill coefficient * weapon damage * power, aka a big number) / armor. This is the same as saying 1/x, as was pointed out. 1/x is indeed a hyperbola, suggesting that as x increases y decreases at a slower and slower rate.
HP Reduction = Damage / Armor is the same thing as saying that Armor * HP Change = Damage, because algebra. Armor * HP Change is a linear function. It’s the same thing as saying 1 * x, which is a straight line. Armor * HP Change can be thought of instead as Effective HP in this incarnation. What Effective HP is saying is that your weapon damage before armor comes into play must be greater than this to kill you.
So let’s use actual numbers now.
Let’s pretend we’re using a skill that has a 1.0 coefficient, with a weapon that does 950 damage on average, and a character that has 2000 power. That means you’re doing 1*950*2000 damage on a strike, or 1,900,000 damage. (Does the massive damage to critters make more sense now?) For a 2127 armor character (a heavy armor character with 0 toughness) that means the change in HP is = 1,900,000/2127 which is 893.28 damage.
When we think about damage reduction, what we’re really saying is “damage reduction versus a standard light armor character with 0 toughness,” which is 1836. In that case, the damage reduction is thought of as 13.68%, because 2127 is that much greater than 1836. As your toughness increases, and thus your armor increases, your damage reduction appears to slow down again as a result of 1/x (1836/x in this case) being a hyperbola.
Fortunately, that doesn’t matter; Because as we already established, Armor * HP is Effective Health. For a 10,000 HP character with 1836 armor, your EHP is 18,360,000. Our 1,900,000 damage strike would have to hit us 9.66 (in reality, 10) times in order to knock us out. If we bump our armor up to 2127 though, we now have 21,270,000 EHP, and that same strike would need to hit us 11.19 (in reality, 12) times in order to knock us out. That’s a linear increase, and totally not subject to any kind of diminishing returns.
And this makes perfect sense, because from 9.66 to 11.19 is a change of 13%, because we added 13% more armor. If you add 50% more armor, say from 1836 to 2754, you can now take that 1,900,000 hit 14.49 times, or 50% more times than before.
So: Increase in EHP is linear, ergo increase in number of hits required to kill you is linear, thus there is no diminishing returns for investment in armor.
All I can really say is read my post because you still don’t get it. Damage reduction leads to taking more hits before you die, and the number of hits it takes to kill you scales linearly as damage reduction increases even when damage reduction seems to increase at a slower rate per point as you add more toughness.
Until you actually subvert that line of reasoning with some math, you’re not making any headway at all.
The armor soft cap is 2700
Also, having just a bunch of vit is BAD… some classes take advantage of the % missing health and do more dmg to you.
Well the armor soft cap might be 2700 and so armor above 2700 is subject to diminishing returns…
Armor above 0 is subject to diminishing returns, honestly do you people just completely make up the stuff that you post on this forum?
No, it doesn’t. Armor scales linearly regardless of how much you have. There is no diminishing returns.
Study the graph of 1/x carefully, now realize that your entire wall of text is irrelevant in light of how completely false your first three sentences are. The marginal benefit of armor decreases as you increase armor regardless of the armor level, that is the definition of diminishing returns.
I am happy to consider a counterpoint if any when you produce one. There is absolutely nothing about what I posted that is factually incorrect as far as I am aware, and if you would be so kind as to point out where and how I have made an error I will be glad to address it.
If you would actually read my post, you would see that I acknowledge that 1/x appears to produce “diminishing returns” but in point of fact what is diminishing has absolutely no bearing on the actual gameplay effect. You do not actually gain less benefit the further out you are on the x plane. You do gain less damage reduction per point of toughness but that doesn’t matter because the increase in damage reduction still translates to a linear increase in survivability as a function of increased effective HP and total number of hits to kill.
It should always remove 3 conditions off of everyone in the AOE when it is cast, including yourself. If it isn’t, it’s a bug or you’re having conditions reapplied to you very quickly.
The armor soft cap is 2700
Also, having just a bunch of vit is BAD… some classes take advantage of the % missing health and do more dmg to you.
Well the armor soft cap might be 2700 and so armor above 2700 is subject to diminishing returns…
Armor above 0 is subject to diminishing returns, honestly do you people just completely make up the stuff that you post on this forum?
No, it doesn’t. Armor scales linearly regardless of how much you have. There is no diminishing returns.
Edit: Okay, let’s put this one to bed. Damage is divided by armor, meaning doubling your armor doubles your damage reduction. That’s a proportional relationship. As such, you can say that Health * Armor aka Effective Health is an important relationship too, because of the following:
When you say that 1000 damage / 20 armor = 50 damage, you also say that 1000 health * 20 armor = 20,000 effective health. This looks strange on its face, but it isn’t. 20 hits times 1000 damage = 20,000 damage. In other words what is being said is that a person who has 20,000 effective health requires that an enemy whose damage before armor is 1000 must hit you twenty times in order for you to die. 50 damage * 20 hits = 1000 damage as well, so it all works out.
Now double your armor.
1000 damage / 40 armor = 25 damage. 1000 HP * 40 armor = 40,000. Twenty points of armor is “worth” exactly the same amount of effective health regardless of how much you began with. If there were diminishing returns, you would have less than 40,000 EHP. But there isn’t because it’s all proportional.
You can do this all day, even with random numbers that aren’t strict doubling. 1000 / 67 = 14.92. 1000 HP * 67 = 67,000. The difference between 40 and 67 is 27. 67,000 is 27,000 higher than 40,000. An enemy would have to hit you 67 times at 1000 damage in order to kill you, 27 times more than 40.
All of this is to say that every point of armor is worth exactly the same amount of effective HP for any given amount of starting armor and HP. Therefore armor does not decrease in effectiveness the more you have.
The way to think about armor is not in terms of damage reduction. The way to think about armor is in terms of total hits required to kill you. The number of hits required to kill you scales 100% linearly with armor. The damage reduction % does appear to slow down the more you have, but that does not translate to a slowing of the number of hits it takes to kill you. That number is always, always linear, and it’s the only one that truly matters.
(edited by foofad.5162)
The armor soft cap is 2700
Also, having just a bunch of vit is BAD… some classes take advantage of the % missing health and do more dmg to you.
No. There’s no armor soft cap, hard cap, or break points in this game. I can give you the math for why, but I’m hoping you’ll take my word for it instead.
There’s a big difference between untraited Contemplation of Purity which cleanses every 60 seconds on yourself only, and traited Purging Flames which clears conditions on your team and yourself every 28 seconds. There’s a reason very few if anyone runs Meditations in PvE – They just don’t do anything for anyone else. Now you don’t need the Save Yourselves/Contemplation combo to clear conditions on your team – That’s two utilities to do the job that Purging Flames can do alone very well. Also, this is a burn build – and Purging Flame burns. So that’s always a plus.
You also no longer need the Fury from Save Yourselves, as your base crit chance is now above what you would have gotten, and generally speaking almost any PvE group is going to have someone that can cast Fury.
You were also missing Stability, which is also incredibly important.
You’re way overtanked for dungeons and are lacking the condition damage that makes Amplified Wrath useful. This will be gone over in more detail in the revised guide as soon as I fix some of my metrics, but basically the Amplified/Permeating combo works best as a hybrid physical/condition DPS spec when you’re talking about dungeons. It lacks single target DPS of something like the standard meta, but it has very good sustained AOE dps. It’s also forgiving, in the sense that because you’ve got typically very long durations of burning on any given target you’re continuously applying damage even when positioning requirements take you out of melee range for a span of time, and so on.
In other words: Almost anything is better than Soldier’s armor for damage in something like this. The way you think about this kind of build is a little counter intuitive. Start from a standard DPS loadout (basically, all Berserkers or a Soldier/Berserker or Knight/Berserker combo if you aren’t comfortable with that) and then begin replacing things with Rampager gear. You have tons of power by virtue of going fully into Zeal, so you don’t really need to invest more in that because you’re getting more out of critical chance at that point.
Anyway, long story short I’d do something more like this.
Still keeping some Soldier’s stuff if you want the little bit of pillow, but (roughly) 40%-50% more damage than what you would have gotten. It should also be a crime to have full Virtues and not Master of Consecrations, because Wall of Reflection is just that good, and Purging Flames is also excellent especially since you don’t have the AoE condition dump from Absolute Resolution if you pick up Supreme Justice instead. I also took one point out of Honor and put it into Radiance instead for the very important Justice is Blind which can save your butt in dungeons when used properly.
It’s still not ideal, but like I said I’m holding off on going into details til I’ve fixed some stuff.
Is this for PvE or WvW?
Shattered Aegis has a range of 240, so it’s much more difficult to pull off a sea of numbers; There isn’t as much overlap as you’d expect.
You run into the same problems in WvW – No Wall to punish ranged attackers, no Purging Flames to mass cleanse after condition bursts, no Hallowed Ground to support your zerg clash at choke points.
Oh triple shouts is dead in zerg wvw too? What are people building then? Do tell, I’ve been wanting to do consecrations for quite a while.
Pretty much what I said – WoR to punish ranged, Hallowed Ground to give mass stability in zerg clashes and during fights over choke points, Purging Flames for mass cleanses after the initial merge, and Sanctuary never because it’s basically only useful for point control in sPvP. Stand Your Ground remains excellent though, always good to bring that – again for the Stability. Gotta do something about those hammer warriors.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t HG require you to stay in the field to let it stack up the stability?
Personally I’ve been doing SYG/WoR, then swapping around my third between retreat (mainly for catching up lol), Sanctuary and Purging flames. Is HG worth using outside of just stacking at a choke point? Will definetly be considering swapping it in during those situation but I’m right in thinking that open field it’ll go mostly unused as we’ll be running right out of it aye? or do you use it for the initial surge and just get a few stacks while you might stack?
There are a lot of choke points where it becomes useful. Bridges, gates, and so on. But it’s actually less about stacking stability and more about having stability at the right moment. For example, one of the first things that can happen as you go through a gate that just went down is you get met by a stacked zerg hiding around a corner. You don’t need ten seconds of stability to resist the initial wave of hard CC when that zerg merges into yours. You just need a burst of AOE stability. So it’s less about “where” and more about “when.” You don’t use it in preparation. You use it proactively right as the CC starts flying.
The reason you have zergs is that there is no player collision in the game, there is an AOE cap on most damage skills, and the ranges on most support abilities are short, often below 600. Between those three reasons there is no disincentive to not stand as close together as possible.
Player collision alone would be enough to mitigate the majority of zerging, and removing the AOE cap or increasing it greatly to 8 or 10 would put the last nail in the coffin. Increasing the range on support skills would also enable people to spread out more without feeling like they have to be standing inside one another in order to get the full effect of an ability.
Player collision means the few can block the many.
AOE cap increase means the few can damage the many.
Support range increase means the few can support each other more effectively.
No more zergs, tbh.
Then they just all stop standing on top of each other and start ranged zerging.
If you’ve got five, and they’ve got ten, and both sides have the same cap of 10 on their AOEs, then the five are doing more aggregate damage than the ten. Doesn’t matter if they’re ranged or melee. Meanwhile, assuming a balanced number of players per side, you have another 5 guys that can be off capping or whatever else.
To be honest though, even if all it accomplished is abolishing stacking I’d be happy.
The reason you have zergs is that there is no player collision in the game, there is an AOE cap on most damage skills, and the ranges on most support abilities are short, often below 600. Between those three reasons there is no disincentive to not stand as close together as possible.
Player collision alone would be enough to mitigate the majority of zerging, and removing the AOE cap or increasing it greatly to 8 or 10 would put the last nail in the coffin. Increasing the range on support skills would also enable people to spread out more without feeling like they have to be standing inside one another in order to get the full effect of an ability.
Player collision means the few can block the many.
AOE cap increase means the few can damage the many.
Support range increase means the few can support each other more effectively.
No more zergs, tbh.
Take the “whole zerg” comments with a grain of salt. Communal Defenses has a very short range. It’s slightly larger than the range of Purging Flames, and a little more than half the range of a shout. If everyone is stacking and very tight in maneuvers then yeah you might get most of them. Maybe.
(edited by foofad.5162)
Don’t forget that at that point it’s not JUST condi removal. You pop your virtue right after the initial merge, after the condi people have done their bursts. At that point you’ve cleansed their bursts (at 1200 range, twice that of shouts), and healed for a decent chunk, and thanks to virtues 5 you also apply regen. You can think of it like a PoV Hold the Line on steroids.
You run into the same problems in WvW – No Wall to punish ranged attackers, no Purging Flames to mass cleanse after condition bursts, no Hallowed Ground to support your zerg clash at choke points.
Oh triple shouts is dead in zerg wvw too? What are people building then? Do tell, I’ve been wanting to do consecrations for quite a while.
Pretty much what I said – WoR to punish ranged, Hallowed Ground to give mass stability in zerg clashes and during fights over choke points, Purging Flames for mass cleanses after the initial merge, and Sanctuary never because it’s basically only useful for point control in sPvP. Stand Your Ground remains excellent though, always good to bring that – again for the Stability. Gotta do something about those hammer warriors.
Someone mentioned on this forum that the 6th bonus only applies to allies and not the caster ( like Sigil of Benevolence ).
I’ll add it to my list of things to test though
“Mentioned it”? It’s on the rune description. I don’t know why, but people don’t tend to read the effect properly: “10% Outgoing heal effectiveness TO ALLIES”.
Except that literally every other skill in the game that mentions allies also affects the caster. Every single one.
This is a new mechanic they mentioned it in the first stream about the patch that this is something new.
Then it needs to be reworded to be clear that it doesn’t work like everything else. Not everyone watches the streams.
Someone mentioned on this forum that the 6th bonus only applies to allies and not the caster ( like Sigil of Benevolence ).
I’ll add it to my list of things to test though
“Mentioned it”? It’s on the rune description. I don’t know why, but people don’t tend to read the effect properly: “10% Outgoing heal effectiveness TO ALLIES”.
Except that literally every other skill in the game that mentions allies also affects the caster. Every single one.
That’s false.
I run a triple shouts build and not only I’m unkillable but with the best support in the game I can turn any battle.
Not only are you not turning the tide of a battle with a few seconds of Hold the Line or Save Yourselves, you’re actively robbing your team or party of much better, game changing abilities. If you’re bunking in sPvP shouts are useless because they don’t help you resecure points when decappers roll in, nor are you going to successfully contest a point if you’re trying to harass mid or far. No Hallowed Ground keeping you on the point, no Wall of Reflection keeping kiters from pecking at you with your poor ranged counters, and no Sanctuary to actively force enemies off the point. SYG is fine and is definitely useful for everyone, but triple shouts is not. You run into the same problems in WvW – No Wall to punish ranged attackers, no Purging Flames to mass cleanse after condition bursts, no Hallowed Ground to support your zerg clash at choke points.
Triple shouts is totally dead in sPVP. You need Consecrations and SYG.
Similar story in WvW, though triple meds roamers work well too.
Be aware that several of the duration increases are bugged currently. I think the affected are Sigil of Smoldering and the Radiance trait. From what I can gather it’s very difficult to hit 100% right now. Double check that your tics are actually hitting twice.
Who is going to be regenning 900+ DPS from burning alone, exactly?
literally everyone.
That’s not an answer. Explain what class and build and numbers you’re specifically talking about.
Who is going to be regenning 900+ DPS from burning alone, exactly?
It’s decent to questionable in PvP, but I’d never use this for PvE. The actual aggregate DPS is not going to be as high as standard PvE builds. But that doesn’t actually matter in PvP, it’s not a DPS race. What matters is time on target, spikes, and pressure. This doesn’t have spikes (unless you count Spirit Weapon commanding) but it does have time on target and pressure. Two out of three is decent.
If you have 10 seconds of Protection and you immediately cast and drop out of the Tome, does it erase your boons? Or is the duration of the infinite Protection from the Tome simply “covering up” the expiration of the others?
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