Guild Wars 2

Out of sheer curiosity and petty arguments I started doing some math regarding the way damage is handled in the game, and I have come to several conclusions that toughness and vitality are ultimately inferior to straight up damage. For this, I will be operating on a few assumptions:

*The formula listed on the wiki for damage is an accurate representation of how stats interract with one another:
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
*The changes in tooltip damage for skills is an accurate representation of damage change ratios.
*This is in regards to PvE. In PVP and WvW these are far from the case.

If any of these are incorrect then my conclusions will be incorrect.

Now, while looking at the damage tooltips I noticed though much experimentation in the mists that if you increase your power by 916 points, you’ll have double the direct damage. Since the base amount of power at level 80 is 916, I put 2 and 2 together and saw that power is directly reponsible for how much damage you are doing. This is simple enough. Factoring in other things such as precentage increases and precision are far more complicated, so I’ll be getting into that later.

I noticed that the armor attribute is used instead of the toughness attribute for determining how much damage is reduced when struck. To anyone half decent at math, this means that toughness has a proportional decrease in effectiveness per point. But, how much of a decrease in effectiveness? Well, lets get to some maths for that. First, the basic toughness at level 80 is 916. Second, the basic defense supplied by exotic equipment at level 80 is the following:

Light armor: 960
Medium armor: 1064
Heavy armor: 1211

Adding in base toughness of 916, you get a base armor rating of…

Light: 1876
Medium: 1980
Heavy: 2127

These numbers are important, since it represents the base for how much damage is being divided by. The effectiveness of toughness is a proportion of that base armor rating.

Now, for an example I will use my level 80 engineer. My engineer is equipped in full knight equipment (which, in PvE, gives Toughness, precision, power). Ignoring the backpack, with exotic orichalcum emerald jewelry and armor and rifle, my toon has 920 bonus toughness from equipment. Add that to the base armor attribute, and I get a new armor attribute of 2900 armor. With armor being inversly related to the damage received, we can find out how much of a change this is with the following equation:

1 – 1/(new armor / base armor)
= 1 – base armor / new armor

Putting in the numbers…

1 – 1980 / 2900
= 1 – 0.683
= 0.317

So I am taking only 68.3% of the damage I would’ve taken without the toughness, or ultimately a 31.7% reduction in damage. You may be wondering: “That seems alright. What is the problem here?” Well, the problem here is that 920 power would’ve roughly doubled my damage output. A doubled damage output means an enemy would’ve been alive for half as long. An enemy alive for half as long does only half the damage it would’ve done, ultimately resuling in an indirect 50% damage reduction from the enemy. And therein lies the rub: by speccing more heavily in damage you end up taking less damage.

If you repeat this example and equation with light and heavy armor stats, you get the following ratios of reduction:

Light: 1 – 0.671 = 32.9%
Heavy: 1 – 0.698 = 30.2%

Know that these are ratios representing the change within that class, and are not viable for comparing to different classes. Each class has the same damage increase from power, though, so there is no additional math to be done there. It is also worth noting that toughness increases the efficiency of heals by those percentages, but whether it is an advantage is up to debate, because with double damage you’ll also only have to heal away half as much damage.

Vol.5241:

Naqaj.6219:

Jalad Lantana.3027:

Yea, we all saw those forums full of posts asking for AC to be made harder…. NOT!

I don’t see any mention of AC be tuned harder. Do you have some information we don’t?

It’s sarcasm

Yes, they were using sarcasm to point out that AC being made harder isn’t what anyone whats. Which doesn’t make much sense because we have no info that says AC is being made harder.

And, whoa, it’s been decades since I’ve seen someone do the “….. NOT!” thing seriously. Let me go dig out my slap bracelets and pogs.

So how come no one loves to talk about the price of precursors like Storm or Venom?

Oh right, because those precursors are cheap because the market does not want them.

Yet the market loves and wants Dusk, which is justly reflected in it’s price.

All the people complaining about the expensive precursor prices are simply folks who don’t want to pay market price when there are people out there willing to do so. 30 in the last 72 hours, in fact.

Revolution.6301:

On all respect are you telling me 600-700 gold is reasonable? We were promised a game that wasn’t like the rest but grinding out 600 gold doesn’t sound like it.

People keep saying this. But you’re misunderstanding Anet’s intentions.

Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/21/guild-wars-2-interview-monetization/

He never says there’s no grind. What he’s saying is that he doesn’t believe in grinding for stats, but he fully endorses a cosmetic grind. Which is what Legendaries are.

It seriously annoys me when people say “Anet promised no grind!” They made no such promise. They endorse a cosmetic grind, just like in GW1.

Well, you’re assuming that every player actually wants to get a legendary.

Despite all the clamor in this forums, I’m willing to bet that a sizeable portion of the player base do not care about Legendaries at all. Some players, if they get a dusk, their first impression might be “Hey, I’ll sell this dusk so I have money to buy my Infinite Light.” Or something.

People like that do exist, you can’t discount them!

Remember guys, if people want to sell it simply for money, they have to overcome that 15% tax. Right now the highest buy order is at 620G, while the lowest sell order is at 700G. If you’re to buy it for 620G, you’ll have to sell it at a minimum of 713G just to break even.

People talk like it’s easy making money buying/selling precursors. It’s not. It has horrible profit margins, if at all. There’s looooots of other, more lucrative markets out there.

Asura Ranger is great – just zoom in if you feel like admiring yourself, which is absolutely understandable – just do it.

For the following to work I would advise on the longbow, but maybe others can share tacticts with inferior weapons.

If you are solo don’t worry, just start the fight at a distance, send your pet in – now have a good look at yourself while you press available buttons, perhaps 1-3, use 4 if your front view really becomes obstructed by some large mob.

If you are in a group that’s even better, use 5 directly around yourself, you are the most important person to protect in any case. Press 1-4 if you feel like it. Most important, let the others know via say how inferior they are and that they should really kill those mobs faster.

Now the real problem is the character select screen. It is absolutely unacceptable that I’m not even able to see my knees. Perhaps I should delete all other characters, but really Anet has to move the character up – to the center. Center is the keyword. Other races can stay firmly on the bottom (charr should be made smaller because through their sheer size they seem centralized, which is misleading).

Last but not least don’t forget it is our superior intellect that is truly beautiful.

Optionally we could discuss an extra camera that shows us separately instead of the map. Replace the map with an image of me, yes, I like the sound of that. Separately zoomable and movable of course. Plus a pet cam for rangers, I want to see my pet looking up to me. Or directly into my eyes depending on the pet.

Excelsior!

Thank god we have an elite skill to disguise ourselves as golems.

Black Wolf.7348:

The main reason is because the lvl 38 in group with 4 lvl 80 makes the dungeon harder for the 4. it will actually be easier to just go 4 lvl 80s rather than taking the lvl 38 thief since he would die quickly and easily anywhere in the dungeon. thus the 4 lvl 80s have to heal or rez the lvl 80 and force 3 people to do the fighting.

A good player at that level will not go down any faster than a level 80. A level 80 thief will fall to the same things that will kill a level 38 thief.

The same tired arguments. The difference is not that great, people. Unless you are explicitly looking for a speedrun, there is no reason to exclude based on level or class.

Eviator.9746:

I guess the people who log in once every few days don’t care about ascended items, and are happy with their exotics.

This.

Laurels just give me an extra little push to do the dailies, which I like, but I have little trouble skipping them, since I don’t care that much about getting the asc stuff – in fact I just blew ten laurels on dyes.

I think Shelter was designed for WvW zerg fights. The amount of damage you block in a zerg ball is likely way higher than the signet can heal. It also serves as an OH CRAP button if you get out of position. Being feared out of the heal is pretty stupid though and should be fixed -.-

Hey there,

I’m creating this thread to raise awareness about an issue.
Some sections of this forum could use more attention from developers.

For instance the profession section has been collecting dust for a long while.
Last time we had an official word on the *ranger forum was almost *4 months ago.
The balance team is doing a good job engaging the Spvp community, but ironically the profession section is completely ignored.

Please post your positive/negative feedback about “community engagement” and keep it constructive, the point of this Thread is to improve developer/user communication.

Rifter.6591:

Personally i didnt see an issue untill the x-files conspiracy comment, thets when it went from being handled professionally to being handled like a grade school name calling match.

If they would have left out insults and just done their job quietly and found and fixed the issue i think they would be getting a much better response from the playerbase. Like i said above what did they expect the response to be to this after they called the playerbase a bunch of x-files conspiracy theorists, its obviously not going to be a good response at that point once the insults are flying, its going to be even worse because we are right and they are wrong.

I took it as a lighter comment with a twist of sarcasm, which was born of someone tired of fielding the same comments over and over. Again, yes unprofessional, but seeing the tone of some posts which get snuffed here on the forums? NOT undeserved for some posters.

That’s a nice little recounting of what happened but you left out a few points:

- Anet acknowledged the possibility of a problem.
- Anet felt the existing thread was insufficient and wanted more data. This doesn’t mean they ignored the thread they closed, more is well… more not the the same stuff they have.
- They created a stickied thread with an Anet post to start it to make it more apparent, official, and hopefully get noticed easier.
- After declaring it an “X-files level conspiracy” they kept working on it. Seriously, think about that for a moment. The problem they found didn’t jump up and slap them in the face after they gave up. No, they kept looking in to the problem.
- Once they found a problem (may or may not be ’the problem) they were big enough people to admit it publicly. Again, think about this. They created another sticky post to say “Hey, we were wrong. There is a problem. Sorry about that.”

Just the fact they made a post to say “We were wrong” is more than you ever get from most companies. Heck it is more than you get from most people.

Sorry but if you’re going to talk about what happened you have to give credit were it’s due and Anet IS due some credit here. Sure they aren’t perfect but the way you tell it it’s like they covered their ears screaming “LALALALALA” until the code jumped out and slapped them forcing them to fix it. Which is obviously impossible and it’s disrespectful to the hard working people at Anet to ignore the time they put in to checking and double checking loot tables and lines of code to hunt down what amounts to a bug.

You’re list seem wonky.

Elementalist are only A+A if the player is skilled. At which point the enginner actually also ends up as A+A. Guardian is spot on, even a mediocre player can do great with them and not be one trick ponies. They also have a wide vareity of traits that fits whatever playstyle you want.

Mesmer is another class that should be A+A honestly. Even when specced for all out damage they still have great staying power, debuffs and control. It’s also a class that takes semi skill to play well.

Ranger and Necro in B? But warrior in A? Personally I think they all fit in A, but its all a player to player thing. I’ve had the easiest kitten runs in game with 4 rangers and my engi. Necro damage and debuffs in PvE is just top notch, except vs structures, which luckily doesnt matter. Downside is, more than 1 necro is a waste, since they can keep more than 50% of the stack limit up on bleeds solo.

If I were to play an elementalist for instance, it would not be a S-class, it would more likely be a C-class.

When I played with my friend the other day on our engi’s we got a fractal group together. First thing the warrior in our group mentions was “Wow… 2 engineers, never seen that before”. Still, no one in the group had to bother with rezzing us, but on the otherhand, the warrior died several times due to being stubborn and face tanking things he couldnt.

In the end it all comes down to tweaking your spec, knowing your class and picking the right gear to function at optimal preformance. I recently ditched a bunch of berserk gear on my engi to pick up P/V/T gear, losing a whole 13% crit damage 5% crit chance while gaining alot of health and toughness. Damage is close to the same and the burst is still there when needed, which is only in WvW vs solo glasscannons. They still die just as fast, no need to overkill when you can kill them with the same round of burst. In dungeons survivability means better staying power, better staying power means more sustained damage. Losing a little dps isnt the whole work when you are assure to not go down at all. Maximum dps does nothing when you are dead or downed.

I’ve tweaked most of my classes into a more survival oriented spec, without giving up much damage.

All classes can be A+A in the hands of the right person.

OK guys time to stop bashing this guy, with your specific examples of how you own your class haha.

Because when you look at the list in this light, there isn’t much to disagree with: “in this tier, most every player who picks up the profession puts forward the same general play.”

What I mean by this is that every player who plays a guardian, just by virtue of playing that class will have an easier time say in wvw than an engineer would. Sure, there are better engineers who have mastered the class, but over all guardians can be good in the hand of non elite players while some of the lower tiers take better players to get a similar amount of effectiveness.

By no means am I in love with my guardian, warrior, or mesmer..quite the opposite. My main is a ranger, and I’ve got an 80 engineer, necro, ele,and thief, with 3 of those in the bottom 3 places and I don’t even have a heavy armor class. I just know that when you face a class like mesmer, no matter who plays it they have an advantage with clones, and their downed state, whereas a class like ranger has no persistent tricks to gain an edge

Adorable. Adorably misguided, but a commendable effort nonetheless.

First of all, this is an extremely biased view. You’re not providing much to back up your statements, and honestly this kind of thing is so incredibly subjective and vague, even for games more suitable for this kind of tier system, such as fighting games. This is representative of your personal view of the classes, and is in no way representative of any kind of objective means of comparison.

Second of all, your “tiers” are too far from representative of the intricacies, of the finer aspects, of both PvE or WvW. There’s just too much you haven’t accounted for. For example:

• Your build greatly influences how good your character is at different aspects of the game. Different builds of the exact same profession have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, your typical cheese cutter GS “Berserker’s of the Berserker’s” Warrior is one of the best things for most open-world PvE. It’s also one of the most pathetic things for any form of PvP. Single-target spike builds tend to be excellent for roaming in WvW, but hardly the most suited for most of PvE… etc, etc.

• Even within PvE and PvP, there are different areas that emphasize different aspects, thus favoring different builds. For example, consistent DPS is much more valuable than spike DPS in most dungeons full of high health bosses. Specifically, single target consistent DPS is much more valuable in those situations than lower AoE, since you need to kill one high-health boss target, instead of many low health zerglings (a situation more common in open world PvE). Conversely, in WvW, whether you want to run around raiding camps solo, with small groups, or attacking in large numbers, also affects which aspects of your build matter more.

• You’re also not accounting for synergies and objectives. Sure, a defensive Guardian is a powerful thing indeed in a dungeon run, but if you have 5 defensive Guardians you’ll probably be done with it by the time a more balanced party has finished theirs, had lunch and then made a documentary about it. The same is true for PvP. I love picking up my Necro (which is a Power/Condition damage hybrid) and running alongside my friend’s Guardian in WvW. We’re a frightening force to be reckoned with because our two classes and builds have a very strong synergy. We’re stronger than just 2 random characters and builds mashed together.

• You’re also not accounting for match ups. Different builds and classes have different pros and cons. For example, your typical glass cannon, burst, dagger build thief is amazing at taking down individual low defense targets. His build guarantees he has the initiative, and his burst is generally enough to guarantee the other glass cannon doesn’t have time to even the playing field. However, the same build will have serious issues against more defensive characters. They have roughly 0 odds of killing a bunker Guardian or Necro, and trying to kill either with other enemies around is roughly best translated as suicidal tendencies.

etc, etc, etc…

I.e.: There are simply too many variables for you to “tier” classes like such.

Honestly, the usefulness of such ranking lists is only very limited as they are overgeneralizing and highly subjective. I have played 7/8 professions to level 80 and working on the last (elementalist). I would never even dare to make such a list, cause you need to play the professions extensively before making a good judgement call on their strengths and weaknesses. I don’t think many people will have that kind of experience yet (I certainly haven’t), especially in both WvW and PVE. Getting to know all the skills and all the trait builds just takes a huge amount of time.

On top of that, in PVE (dungeons) it is much more about synergy between professions rather than the individual professions by themselves. In a group context with other professions present, you may find that some of your strengths or weaknesses are already covered by others. Therefore, bringing 5 guardians (your top tier profession) will be less effective than bringing a mixed team for sure. Even though some combinations will be more successful than others (for example, bringing multiple condition-builds hurts the party), you cannot simply say that one profession outshines the others in every regard.

In conclusion, it would be much better to discuss specific strengths and weaknesses of the professions rather than making rank lists. I do agree, however, that some professions have very strong (maybe even too strong) mechanics and that some can pull them off more easily than others. However, such discussions would be better suited on the respective profession forums in my opinion.

Solo.9027:

Do people not know about this site?
http://gw2legendary.com

I just came.

Once again i will reiterate, the problem is multifold.

a lot of people enjoy obtaining their rewards themself, or at least a rough direction. They enjoy doing activities that lead towards X. Maybe they wont hunt every single piece, but they like to be able to hunt. You simply cant do this with precursors in anyway that has any tangible progress.

A great many people do not like hoarding money: you say they cant save or have no self control, this may be true, however john smith said about 10 to 15% of people enjoy amassing large amounts of wealth, this means the large majority of players do not.
long story short its not fun for a lot of players.

The key here, is that some people are huge believers in monetization, they love turning everything they do into money. When you have that type of belief, its all the same, everything goes back to how much money it costs, and how much it earns. The game is designed with a HEAVY focus on monetization, however, its important to note, that a great many people do not enjoy monetization. many people like materialism, they like to get an obtain actual things, many others like experiences, they want do and experience interesting things, others like to progress.

Precursor works against all of these people, due to the heavy monetization focus and where that leads.

Experiences are anti rewarded in terms of money. 9/10 times doing something that is mostly for the new interesting experience pays very poorly.

Materialism, when it comes to precursors, materialist need not apply, the only reliable way to get it is to liquidate all of your goods. And you cant hunt it and get the precursor yourself.

Progress lovers simply cannot progress to legendary, except by saving gold. this can be seen as progress, except the price continues to rise, for some people they cannot reach the point of earning toward legendary.

long story short. Precursor is the most ungratifying part of the legendary process, many people dont get that much joy out of directly purchasing something.
Its hard for many people in this subforum to understand, because they mostly think monetarily.

Since this thread is mainly complaining about a €0.05 difference per 1US dollar transactions, perhaps the EU should just convert to American currency already?

I would love to not have to worry about converting monies while taking trips overseas. Is there a way to petition the King or Queen of Europe for this change to be considered?

You euro people are cute.

Try living in Canada.

Our dollars are more or less on par with the US, yet we wind up paying a chunk more for the majority of goods and services on our side of the border than the cost of the same goods south of the border.

In fairness, though, you will find similar disparities on goods even between states within the U.S. where, to paraphrase, ‘1 dollar is not always 1 dollar’.

Suck it up princesses. Welcome to the global economy.

What kills me is, as a highly talented engineer, 5 engineers could work stupidly well. All it takes is grenade kits and rifles. Everyone net shots him for permaroot (2.5s duration, 8s cooldown – permarooted). Grenade spam ensures 25 vuln, barrages hitting stupidly hard, even add in some skills like prybar and acid bomb, and bosses will positively crumble. But nah, 4 war / 1 mes gogogo.

Edit: I’d also like to say that thieves don’t do more sustained than warriors. I’ve done a grand deal of testing – the only time a thief can is sub-25%, at that point they’ll start to pick up in a dagger/X set. And the thing is, that’s not sustained if they’re having to wait every few seconds to heartseeker or pistol whip, while the in-between damage is laughable. The warrior’s autos (axe or GS) hit far harder than the thief’s autos, either in a 20/30/0/10/10 or 20/30/0/0/20 setup (the former being for banner users). In fact, I’ve proven twice now that engineers can outdamage thief sustain in melee, and if a warrior can still out-DPS me when they know their class, I know for certain a thief can’t (it’s not really sustain when you do joke damage while waiting for pistol whip, is it? Especially with whip’s cast time).

It’s not bias when I’ve tested a fully kitted out thief, warrior, guardian, necro, and engineer on how quickly I can slay certain punching bag event bosses solo. Try looking through the engineer’s kit abilities, and try realizing that there’s no cooldown to weapon swapping – juggling prybar and blunderbuss and the like seriously brings the hammer down. Jump Shot hits harder than a backstab while also providing vulnerability. Engineer literally has six abilities with < 15 second cooldowns that hit harder than a <25% heartseeker: Throw Wrench, Shrapnel Grenade, Elixir F, Acid Bomb, Blunderbuss, Prybar. It wasn’t even close, and it’s easy to measure too – go do some PvE testing yourself and maybe you’ll learn. Alpha Drake in Bloodtide Coast is a great method, as there’s even a bar on how much health the fisherman has. As long as no player intervenes (which did take a few trials with some classes, it mostly depends on time of day), and you avoid the super-forecasted eat attack, you can easily get a clear damage-over-time value here.

And stop babbling about stacking 25 might, you’re not even hitting that in your video. The fact you’re saying you can drop a Fire Elemental beforehand shows you’re just digging – the summon doesn’t even make a fire field until it has an enemy nearby, and dropping + using plant banner on the fields would take up precious time once the boss turns red. Go try testing some classes that aren’t thief, and maybe you’ll see. Until then, feel free to keep self-promoting an underperforming class. Even in the vid you’re auto attacking for pretty weak amounts (by comparison to warrior) on the first boss, despite your smart traiting. It’s not to say that thief is bad, but I’ve tested the speed with the piles of CoF tokens I have laying around for raw damage over time across my 80 alts, and while thief can be impressive in the short term, he’s somewhat lackluster in the sustain department.

Exploring and discovering. Getting used to the mechanics of my numerous alts. I have six alts, seven later today when I buy a new slot so I can get myself a norn guardian. I can’t decide whether to make it male or female. They’re going to be keeping me busy for quite a while, regardless.

I really love jumping puzzles. Goemm’s Lab is probably my favorite; I’m visually impaired which makes it especially challenging for me (hell, it makes the whole game challenging) so I can piddle away a few hours trying to get through that thing if I have time to burn.

Farming in Orr, oddly. Very lazy farming since it doubles as exploration. I always played games growing up, but I didn’t get really intensely into it until the survival horror genre was born, and Orr reminds me of it. The place is creepy and I find the water areas downright terrifying (hydrophobia), and there are little hidden nooks and crannies everywhere. I was ecstatic when I discovered Zho’qafa Catacombs for the first time. And I do love running the temples and getting piles of mats from all the moldy bags I pick up. I almost have enough for full crafted exotic gear now. People in Orr are also especially prone to add you to parties, which I find both amusing and fun. You meet some real characters running around out there. I’ve found the concentration of kind, helpful folks to be higher in Orr than in any other zone, at least on Tarnished Coast.

I find WvW to be a joy, especially the epic struggles that happen really late at night.

I’m always elated when I bump into an event I’ve never done before, or a rare event. I’m going to have to catch Shadow Behemoth now that he’s fixed, I’ve actually never been able to fight him before and I started playing on launch day.

I also enjoy Fractals, as long as I’m playing with my guild rather than a pug. It’s typically four of us and one random member, and we almost always wind up with someone fun.

So yes. The game has innumerable issues, and goodness knows I’ve ragged on Anet for those problems, but I’m genuinely happy with many other aspects of the game. I hope, given time, all the kinks can be ironed out.

This morning’s score update brought to you by the adorable baby Quaggan!