Guild Wars 2

Fenrir.5493:

Arganthium.5638:

Fenrir.5493:

Conditions are broken right now, they have no stat or a boon that reduces their incoming damage, like power has toughness/armor and protection.

Give one screenshot or a piece of official information that clearly states this:

“VITALITY REDUCES CONDITION DAMAGE”

If you can not do that then please stop spreading your BS propaganda.

Damage is really just a relative amount. 2k damage means a lot more if you only have 12k health than it means to somebody that has 30k health.

Now, the only reason why you say that toughness “reduces” direct damage done to you is because you don’t understand the nature of damage. If you had 2000 armor and took 300 damage, and then upped it to 3000 armor and took 200 damage, you might think “oh look, I reduced the damage dealt to me”. But this is no different from a person with 20,000 health taking 1000 vitality to get 30,000 health, except in that the latter situation results in a decrease in heal effectiveness. In both situations, you reduced the damage by 2/3 relative to your health, but the difference is that you don’t think that vitality reduced damage to you because you’re stuck in this very narrow world of thought that states “if I don’t see a number go down, it can’t be that damage is decreasing”. What does it matter if the numbers don’t decrease? You can’t just look at two damage values, 200 and 300, and suddenly determine that it’s better to have the former amount of damage done to you, because you don’t know how much your health is in either situation. If you had 500,000 health, would you really take any toughness whatsoever? Would you really be concerned about conditions that deal 100 damage per second to you? Of course not (or if you did, I’d be sincerely concerned about your mental health).

The fact of the matter is that vitality reduces direct damage just as much as toughness does (actually, at least at the start of build creation, by more than does toughness), but when it comes to conditions all that really matters is vitality, as toughness has no effect on condition damage done relative to your health anyways.

That you can’t see through this incredibly simple concept is just… Mind-blowing, really. It takes a supreme level of ignorance to try and leave out this important concept from your mind.

BlackBeard.2873:

Arganhium means well, and it is good to rely on numbers, but any good engineer will tell you that the value of the numbers you get out of a model is only as good as the assumptions/inputs you use into the model. With gw2, the game is so complex, that theory-crafting and creating numerical models will give vastly different results depending on how you base your assumptions and account for intangibles (for instance, are you factoring in there being protection, weakness, opp. heal-rates, blocks/invulns, etc?).

So, your model might show that one spec is better than another, but the actual results don’t hold up versus reality. This means that there were missed assumptions/intangibles not included in your testing. Either improve your modeling and you will see what everyone else has through observation, or rely on empirical evidence (which is much easier for this kind of thing).

Thank you for your understanding.

To describe my models rather briefly: when I created this model, I was looking to see what stats were superior to others. It took me a while to figure out a method by which I could do this, as the DPS equations were seemingly useless to me due to the fact that enemy armor is a variable that I could not control. However, what I did figure out eventually was that it doesn’t matter exactly how much DPS you do to somebody in measuring how powerful different stats are; if you do 2 × 300 damage to somebody with 3000 armor, then you’ll similarly be doing 2 × 400 damage to somebody with 2000 armor. The multipliers remain constant in spite of enemy armor, and that is, in its most basic form, the essence of my calculations. Outside of that, my main assumption is the standard ceteris paribus one, that changing stats is the only variable we’re changing, as that’s the extent to which my models are useful.

As for the other items that you mentioned, they are very much items that I could measure using my models. For example, protection reduces incoming damage by 33%. What other stat reduces incoming damage directly? Toughness, of course. If I multiplied the DPS equations by 2/3 (~33% damage reduction), then I could change the fraction 2/3 to 1/1.5 and thereby simply multiply total defense by 1.5 to give me the resulting damage, and there is of course a place in my equations for that.

Weakness? Even simpler. Before it affected critical hits as well, it would’ve been a bit more difficult for me to calculate, but now that it affects all hits, I can just say that the average damage that I do is equivalent to 1-(Percentage of the time I’m affected by weakness)(.25). I simply multiply the result by my total damage amplification. Of course, that’s the extraordinarily simple version of it, because it could be far more complex, but that’s the general gist of things. Blocks/invulns (especially invulns) can be calculated in a similar way.

Admittedly, enemy healing rates are probably the one thing that my models lack currently, and so I’ve had to rely on empirical evidence to measure the effects of those. I can say, however, that this has been one of the top things on my priority list for me to get done, though. I think that, ultimately, it’ll require me to measure the maximum-efficiency rate of enemy healing and the maximum-efficiency rate of my dealing damage, but those two are extremely… Heavy terms to throw around.

Copestetic.5174:

Arganthium.5638:

Are you happy with the fact that you’re basically another sheep that follows the herd, and then whenever the herd chooses something, you complain that it chose that particular thing? Maybe if you decided to be original with your build crafting you might shift the meta dramatically.

Are you responding to someone in particular? Not trying to be offensive, but your reply is kinda’ random-ish. lol

Maybe it was just because I was tired, but I wrote in response to the OP. I feel that there are a lot of builds in the meta whose values are overblown because people choose to limit their scope of view simply to those builds by themselves. There are plenty of other equally viable builds, but people like the OP choose to ignore them, or not actually try to make them viable.

Lopez.7369:

Arganthium.5638:

Israel.7056:

Kavia.8249:

Israel.7056:

All they really need to do to make the matchmaking fair is remove the elo rating from solo queue and the leaderboards and just make matches truly random. That way anyone could get matched with anyone. Right now what we have is like a team arena lite version.

That would be great as an unrated queue – if only we had the population to support that many different queues.

Perhaps they should remove the leaderboard from solo arena entirely and make it unrated and leave team arena as the only mode with leaderboards.

So that the people who don’t have teams suffer even more?

I think the correct way to fix everything is to have purely random pairing. Not this crap “oh let’s pair top players with one another and see what happens” nonsense. True randomness, which would also give a more accurate indicator of one’s actual skill level.

More randomness would be good.

It’s weird because what you’re describing was the exact problem with the WvW ladders before. Now they’re far more random and, in effect, meaningful.

Haha, I don’t even play WoW. :P

But yes, more randomness would indeed make rank more meaningful. It would also be able to get rid of, for example, sync’ers, make the queue move faster and more smoothly, and fix unfair fights in the long run.

In other words, it would fix everything that everybody is complaining about with SoloQ.

Tellah.8073:

cool story bro

but im not biased because i play most classes, and i play mediocre somewhat gimmicky specs and switch often instead of playing the top tier copypasta specs for months straight. the only thing i wont play is fotm specs.

and even after all your statistical observations (which in the end had nothing to do with the main subject), that doesnt change the fact that condi builds have flooded the meta because they have large inherent advantages and gives forward motion to the faceroll win-monkeys who just wanna run around in ezmode

But you see, your entire post shows the real problem.

For one thing, you could be biased but not willing to accept it (we all are, to some degree), but I don’t have the ability to say that. What I can say is that the math shows that power is far superior to precision, and that’s why the meta is wrong, even though in the post right before your last one you stated that you couldn’t believe that the meta was wrong, that it was unrealistic.

(Before I should continue, I should mention that I don’t use statistics… And that I don’t have to. But it’s an option, albeit a tedious one)

You have to understand that my observations are entirely relevant. The only reason you believe that condi builds are so OP, as you’ve mentioned, is because they’re part of the meta. You don’t know why they’re part of the meta though, even though I’ve been the one providing tons of factual evidence within this thread to dispel any ideas that they’re as powerful as they’re considered to be. You can choose to believe that the meta is powerful, or open your horizons greatly and believe that we only think that the meta is powerful.

sinject.4607:

bumping for visibility

Stealth OP.

Are you happy with the fact that you’re basically another sheep that follows the herd, and then whenever the herd chooses something, you complain that it chose that particular thing? Maybe if you decided to be original with your build crafting you might shift the meta dramatically.

Israel.7056:

Kavia.8249:

Israel.7056:

All they really need to do to make the matchmaking fair is remove the elo rating from solo queue and the leaderboards and just make matches truly random. That way anyone could get matched with anyone. Right now what we have is like a team arena lite version.

That would be great as an unrated queue – if only we had the population to support that many different queues.

Perhaps they should remove the leaderboard from solo arena entirely and make it unrated and leave team arena as the only mode with leaderboards.

So that the people who don’t have teams suffer even more?

I think the correct way to fix everything is to have purely random pairing. Not this crap “oh let’s pair top players with one another and see what happens” nonsense. True randomness, which would also give a more accurate indicator of one’s actual skill level.

Darek.1836:

Arganthium.5638:

Until then, lemme just say a few things…

- Burst ele versus bunker guard should probably be a win in the ele’s favor. Unless I’ve got something horribly wrong, burst eles use/should be using a zerker amulet. As offensive stats scale better than defensive ones, that would suggest that, in theory, a zerker ele should be able to defeat a bunker guard. The same also goes for Evade Thief vs Bunker.

- For evade thief versus condi necro, if you just looked at the meta, I’d say that the thief should win, assuming he’s running zerker (otherwise it’s a tossup). Pretty much a lot of the same reasons as above, and the fact that condis don’t scale quite as well as direct damage does, etc.

I’ll continue adding more input as I think of more things.

nah too many blocks on the guard for an ele to actually land anything, especially if the guardian is half decent and can dodge the fire grabs

That’s true, I guess I didn’t think about the fact that a lot of ele damage might come from individual high-damage attacks rather than attacks in general. I guess that’s the difference between DPS/GC builds and burst builds, though.

Tellah.8073:

and so im supposed to take from this that everything’s alright?
the massive influx of condi builds and the 1st hand observations of condi builds dominating the meta are all just figments of my imagination and i just need to l2p?
the fact that top teams have turned heavily to condi builds are all just a random twist of fate?

cmon now lets be reasonable

Lemme tell you a story, young fella (and likely one that’ll get a bunch of people from the thief forums extremely angry at me… They know why).

A not-so-long time ago there lived a GW2 player who went by the username “Jumper”, and he played a thief called “Jumper X”. One day, he butts into an SOAC tournament that our later prodigy Arganthium was playing in. He magically manages to do well with his zerker S/D build against a team with 5 guardians running tons of boons. He is later credited with winning the match for the team, and, rather than at least giving some degree of credit to his teammates as any alleged “team player” like him would do, he basks in the glory given to him through all those watching the Twitch stream as well as the shoutcasters for the tournament.

Some time later…

Jumper is one of two co-hosts for the Revealed podcast, a podcast dedicated simply to talking about thieves. This being their first podcast, our prodigious young Arganthium.5638 asks a fairly normal albeit insightful question to the hosts. Simply put, the question was “Is 30 Critical Strikes (a thief trait line) really necessary for dealing damage?”. Because of its being apparently common knowledge, the two hosts both said that yes, it is. However, what they could not have known was that Arganthium would later plug some numbers into his magnificent mathematical machine, and find out that…

30 CS, looking at the stats (300 precision, +30% critical damage), only does about 1.4% more damage relative to base than does 10 DA (100 power).

Now, is this the end of the story? Of course not. There was a helluva lot of debate in the thief forums about some of the numbers that I had discovered a while ago, resulting in a lot of kitten among a whole bunch of people, etc etc. But that’s not the point. The point is that people are blinded by their own biases.

So why would people believe that precision (and technically crit damage as well) are both really good traits when, in all practicality, they’re both infinitely weaker than power? I suspect that it has to do with the visual apparency of damage. If I look at a trait and see that it says “Do 20% additional damage to foes under 50% health”, I might think “Oh! That’s marvelous. I’d love to do 20% additional damage!”. Now, if I see some really big numbers with a 50% critical chance with 0 additional crit damage, I might think “wow! That’s amazing! Precision is such an excellent stat!”. On the other hand, if I added 300 power to my build, I might not notice that I actually do ~32.75% more damage than beforehand. I’m not seeing some huge number with a big red background that basically shouts “HEY LOOK AT ME I’M AWESOME”. I might not realize that I’m actually doing ~10.25% more damage relative to base with 300 power than with 966 precision (yes, it’s that bad) because I’m not adding up the numbers and making an accurate statistical observation of each of them. It’s not exactly likely that some of the top players create 2-Sample T-Tests to measure the probability of one stat variation doing more damage than the other, or making 2-Sample Confidence Intervals to measure with a 95% level of confidence the average difference done in damage between the precision and power variations.

The fact of the matter is, when you see a big number pop out of your screen that hit for 1.5 times regular damage 50% of the time, and you see a bunch of fairly regular numbers that, under the covers, actually deal ~10% more damage on average, you might be persuaded to choose the more visually apparent stat even though it’s far worse.

But anyways, to get back to your comment: do I really believe that maybe, just maybe, some people might be wrong about how dominant some builds are? Of course. I believe that people are easily persuaded by experiential observations that are subject to their biases, and don’t look for more objective evidences to disprove them, in fear that they may be wrong.

Stealth.9324:

Cool cool, have your Thief team finished yet?

No, I think it’s going to be a failure unfortunately.

Stealth.9324:

Oh hey Argan. How u doing

‘Ello m8. I’m doing quite well, thanks.

Well, I’m going to pull the “you suck and therefore what you say is wrong” argument here.

Go ahead, try and blast me away with your facts. I’m pretty sure half the crap that you call “facts” is completely, throughly, abhorrently wrong. Try me.

ensoriki.5789:

Arganthium.5638:

Fenrir.5493:

Conditions are broken right now, they have no stat or a boon that reduces their incoming damage, like power has toughness/armor and protection.

This’ll be my motto ’till the day I die.

Fenrir.5493:

Condition damage is so easy to achieve because you only need one stat, and that is Condition damage, while power damage requires Power, Crit chance and Crit damage.

So you can wear a shamans amulet and have all you need to do great condi damage, have healing power and amazing toughness, the result is a tank that can do amazing condition damage.

This is a serious problem right now with the game ite clearly unbalanced towards condition damage because of this, but this is not a warrior problem its a general problem.

Alright, let’s put it this way.

I plugged in some numbers into my spreadsheet, and I found that 500 power improves your average damage amount by approximately an additional 54.6%.

Now, for conditions (excluding Fear), I found that 500 condition damage improves:

- Bleed by 58.8%
- Burn by 38.1%
- Poison by 59.5%
- Confusion by 57.7%

Now, granted, adding 500 CD most of those conditions above increases damage by a slightly larger percentage than does power to overall direct damage (excluding burn, of course). However, there are really only three viable amulets for condi builds: Carrion, Shaman, and Rabid (at least, those are the three most commonly seen amulets).

Now, Carrion is a nice little amulet that turns out to be nearly useless. For both warriors and necros, health tends to be so high after buildcrafting that typically additional toughness is going to be desirable over additional health. Remember, also, that if your health is too high, your heal is almost negligible in the calculation of DPS. But what about the Power? That’s useful, right? Well, it would be to a direct damage build. Let’s look at the necro’s scepter, for example. Its coefficients are awful; the first two attacks in the auto-attack chain each have a rather unimpressive coefficient of .35. This tends to be the case with the majority of condition-applying weapons (the warrior’s sword is a little different, but it’s also a melee weapon, remember). Anyhow, a 62% damage increase on a base 200 damage attack (324 damage) isn’t exactly impressive, so the power is practically negligible as well. So that leaves us with just the condition damage, which is fairly good but requires a fairly useless first two stats.

The second amulet, Shaman’s… Christ, that’s an awful amulet to QQ about. At first glance, it might seem okay. 569 toughness gives Necros ~23.6% more damage reduction, and Warriors ~21.1% damage reduction. The condition damage isn’t bad either. So what’s the problem? Healing power. Healing power is the problem.

Healing power is currently one of the poorest stats in the game. 798 Healing Power currently improves my heal in my thief build by 11%, while the same amount of vitality (an essential defensive stat) makes my heal 42.5% worse. On the other hand, if you had 798 condition damage, you improve the power of your bleeds (for instance) by ~93.9%. I mean- I hate to be harsh, but unless you’re specifically going for being a bunker build, amulets that give you a lot of healing power are absolutely, thoroughly useless, and it’s stupid to even consider using them. For it to start mattering, you have to be healing a ton.

So that leaves us with Rabid Amulet. The toughness improves damage reduction by the same amount that Shaman’s does. Precision is a fairly weak stat (in both condi builds and in general), so it increases direct damage by a fairly meager amount, ~13%. However, the precision does allow you to use “on-crit” sigils fairly effectively; Sigils of Earth, Ice, Purity, and Nullification all become fairly useful options for a player to use. Remember that this comes at the cost of about 50% less direct damage, but then again, 50% doesn’t matter when you’re hardly dealing any direct damage anyways. Finally, as with Carrion, the condition damage is great.

In all honesty, none of the amulets are as good as they’re said to be. We could compare the three that were talked about, for example, to Soldier’s Amulet. Soldier’s increases damage by ~90.9% and damage that is able to be taken (not including healing) by ~96.5%. You want to see a real tanking amulet? That’s the one right there.

The truth of the matter is that conditions are not OP, most people just frankly suck at dealing with them. L2P fools.

EDIT: I made a few errors with some of my numbers on the Shaman’s Amulet, but nonetheless that hardly has any effect on the fact that HPower sucks a lot, unless you’re a bunker, for example.

Fenrir.5493:

Conditions are broken right now, they have no stat or a boon that reduces their incoming damage, like power has toughness/armor and protection.

Until then, lemme just say a few things…

- Burst ele versus bunker guard should probably be a win in the ele’s favor. Unless I’ve got something horribly wrong, burst eles use/should be using a zerker amulet. As offensive stats scale better than defensive ones, that would suggest that, in theory, a zerker ele should be able to defeat a bunker guard. The same also goes for Evade Thief vs Bunker.

- For evade thief versus condi necro, if you just looked at the meta, I’d say that the thief should win, assuming he’s running zerker (otherwise it’s a tossup). Pretty much a lot of the same reasons as above, and the fact that condis don’t scale quite as well as direct damage does, etc.

I’ll continue adding more input as I think of more things.

Oh, I see what this is…

Rather than comparing a set limit of builds, what if…

We actually created a spreadsheet where you could enter in two different builds across two different (or the same, I suppose) professions and compare them?

Somebody’s gonna call me crazy.

Ooooooooooo

If you know anything about me from the thief forums, then this should be my exact type of thing.

However, if any of you are coming here to give some kind of crappy subjective advice, please don’t.

DXIEdge.2789:

Aiden watchu up to…

Nettle, now Vöz?

Something diabolical, no doubt.

Rottaran Owain.6789:

Daecollo suggestion thread. Nothing to see here.

I love this.

Cyhann.2609:

This would increase its cooldown to something like 320 or so.

Why take Scorpion Wire for start when you could just use infi strike → black powder? Your init regeneration should be enough to compensate.

Either way, Deadeye doesn’t really need to be blinded. Even with full zerker, he’s only really going to kill you if you get hit by killshot or run over a mine. Especially with Thieve’s Guild/Ambush (which you could take instead of Scorp Wire).

Looks good to me though.

tichorum.2415:

Korasi.9140:

As european this anet decision is very lame to me, sending the defeated team to PAX. TP won fair and outplayed CC. If they had problems with residence of one of their members they should of told them that before the qualifiers so they could change something. It just seems another bad decision by arenanet( sad to say we are seeing alot of those lately). Theres no need for any discrimination, the important thing is that TP outplayed everyone else. Please dont favour NA teams, beacuse now it seems so, first denial gets out with helseth pax ban, now TP?

Nah it’s TP’s fault.

Sure, Mist League said it should be okay. But that’s ML. They don’t enforce the rules, ArenaNet does. They should have checked with ANet, not ML. Totally TP’s fault.

Here’s a good analogy for you:

bwuki.2175:

Isaac.6041:

I commend Car Crash for persisting and moving on to PAX. Their team followed the rules to the T. They made sure all their players were eligible. They followed the instructions of the tournament organizer and complied with the best of 5 even though the original rules clearly stated best of 3.

We don’t know what fully went on behind the scenes but Car Crash is coming out on top and it’s well deserved. They followed the rules and the other team did not.

if you ask your boss if you can do something on the job, and they say yes. But then lead of HR comes and says no, so you lose out on a paycheck raise. Is it your fault? or your bosses?

It’s the same here, ML was the middle man, they should be the ones dinged, not TP.

Also, to those of you who aren’t going to watch the finals, I have to agree with Folly on this one:

Follidus.8027:

This is indeed a disappointment, but I hope you guys that say “I’m not watching the finals now” are not serious. We need the viewership, this is a big “make or break” moment for the game’s spvp.

We need you to watch, and tell your friends to watch. Based on previous events, I’m assuming there will be little to no promotion of the PAX tournament.

Despite recent balance issues, this is such a great game. It’s disappointing that it’s the easy parts (in comparison) are lacking.

Thanks!

I don’t think SYNC necessarily has a free win at PAX, because admittedly CC did do fairly well in the EU finals.

That being said, although the PAX tournament will kinda be a joke now, I think we can all rally behind the idea of cheering on SYNC to kick CC’s kitten, given CC’s poor sportsmanship.

Auesis is pretty good as well. I just have known RFF for a longer time. The two seem about equal to me in terms of skill though.

Daecollo.9578:

Arganthium.5638:

Daecollo.9578:

Arganthium.5638:

Daecollo.9578:

Arganthium.5638:

Daecollo.9578:

Total Armor: Light=920 Medium=1064 Heavy=1211
The difference between Light/Medium/Heavy Armor is about 150 Toughness per tier, less then you get with a Signet buff.

Please don’t type on these forums unless you know what your talking about, thank you

150 toughness is not even 5% damage reduction, 300 won’t be 16%.

Toughness facts
Heavy armor classes get +36% armor by adding 798 toughness
Medium armor classes +39% armor by adding 798 toughness
Cloth classes +42% armor by adding 798 toughness

Y’know, I’m okay with people being an kitten to me about subjective ideas, but when it comes to mathematics, you’re really screwing with the wrong guy here.

For a medium armor class, adding 150 toughness results in:

(1980)/(1980+150) = 1980/2130 = ~92.96% of the damage you would’ve taken originally, or about 7% damage reduction.

Also, I stated that 300 toughness from the base for a light-armored class is about 14% reduction in damage, not 16%, but nonetheless:

(1836)/(1836+300)= 1836/2136 = 85.96% damage from previously, or about 14.04% damage reduction from base (I said 14.2% originally because of a slight error in the amount of armor I thought that lightly armored classes have. Nonetheless, the difference is only extremely small, about .16%).

Of course, you didn’t even factor in kittening base toughness into your numbers, which is hugely problematic. Grow the hell up.

Where the hell are your kitten equations? Don’t spit in the face of half a year of research into the game when your pebble-sized brain can’t even comprehend basic division.

That only decreases your case, because your not adding toughness from gear you can get. That only makes the numbers between the armor EVEN WEAKER

In other games, mages usually have 1/4 the armor, when in this game its more like 9/10th.

Please just grow up, your proving a base amount and not what people realistically use, Provide the numbers after 2750 armor, because your obviously not taking in diminishing returns here.

At the very base of toughness: 6-9%
At the high end of toughness: 1-3%

Factor this in please, because toughness/armor gets worse and worse the more you get.

Of course, but you’re missing out two bolded words you put into this thread earlier: Opportunity Cost.

Do you know why D/X thieves always die so easily? It’s because, in the current meta, they’re given virtually 0 additional toughness to what they have, even though they could easily survive much longer. But didn’t you just say that, realistically speaking, people have over 2750 armor? Well that’s obviously not true, because if you take that much toughness, you have to sacrifice other stats like power and precision. You can’t wear full Soldier’s gear while also wearing full Zerker gear.

That’s why it’s far more appropriate to compare armor when additional toughness is 0. It’s because, when additional toughness is 0, you haven’t inflicted any opportunity costs upon yourself yet. That’s when build formulation comes in, and that’s entirely variable across everybody.

You want to act like everybody’s running around with +2750 armor? Fine, but you’d better provide the evidence for it, or shut the hell up.

D/P Thieves die easy? …
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Nerf-Black-Powder-Heartseeker/page/5#post2521117

Are we playing the same game?

Calm down kid, no need to cuss.

Also, yes I can. I just did. Its always better to compare to what the most they can get and not the least.

Now you’re including stealth, which is outside the scope of our discussion of stats. If a D/P thief just stood there and let you hit him, he would die incredibly quickly.

So, if you want to compare classes on the most they can get of something, why don’t you compare them in terms of the most power/precs/crit damage they can get, and then compare DPS dealt to them?

Intellectual dishonesty on your own behalf.

Daecollo.9578:

Arganthium.5638:

Daecollo.9578:

Arganthium.5638:

Daecollo.9578:

Total Armor: Light=920 Medium=1064 Heavy=1211
The difference between Light/Medium/Heavy Armor is about 150 Toughness per tier, less then you get with a Signet buff.

Please don’t type on these forums unless you know what your talking about, thank you

150 toughness is not even 5% damage reduction, 300 won’t be 16%.

Toughness facts
Heavy armor classes get +36% armor by adding 798 toughness
Medium armor classes +39% armor by adding 798 toughness
Cloth classes +42% armor by adding 798 toughness

Y’know, I’m okay with people being an kitten to me about subjective ideas, but when it comes to mathematics, you’re really screwing with the wrong guy here.

For a medium armor class, adding 150 toughness results in:

(1980)/(1980+150) = 1980/2130 = ~92.96% of the damage you would’ve taken originally, or about 7% damage reduction.

Also, I stated that 300 toughness from the base for a light-armored class is about 14% reduction in damage, not 16%, but nonetheless:

(1836)/(1836+300)= 1836/2136 = 85.96% damage from previously, or about 14.04% damage reduction from base (I said 14.2% originally because of a slight error in the amount of armor I thought that lightly armored classes have. Nonetheless, the difference is only extremely small, about .16%).

Of course, you didn’t even factor in kittening base toughness into your numbers, which is hugely problematic. Grow the hell up.

Where the hell are your kitten equations? Don’t spit in the face of half a year of research into the game when your pebble-sized brain can’t even comprehend basic division.

That only decreases your case, because your not adding toughness from gear you can get. That only makes the numbers between the armor EVEN WEAKER

In other games, mages usually have 1/4 the armor, when in this game its more like 9/10th.

Please just grow up, your proving a base amount and not what people realistically use, Provide the numbers after 2750 armor, because your obviously not taking in diminishing returns here.

At the very base of toughness: 6-9%
At the high end of toughness: 1-3%

Factor this in please, because toughness/armor gets worse and worse the more you get.

Of course, but you’re missing out two bolded words you put into this thread earlier: Opportunity Cost.

Do you know why D/X thieves always die so easily? It’s because, in the current meta, they’re given virtually 0 additional toughness to what they have, even though they could easily survive much longer. But didn’t you just say that, realistically speaking, people have over 2750 armor? Well that’s obviously not true, because if you take that much toughness, you have to sacrifice other stats like power and precision. You can’t wear full Soldier’s gear while also wearing full Zerker gear.

That’s why it’s far more appropriate to compare armor when additional toughness is 0. It’s because, when additional toughness is 0, you haven’t inflicted any opportunity costs upon yourself yet. That’s when build formulation comes in, and that’s entirely variable across everybody.

You want to act like everybody’s running around with +2750 armor? Fine, but you’d better provide the evidence for it, or shut the hell up.

D/P Thieves die easy? …
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Nerf-Black-Powder-Heartseeker/page/5#post2521117

Are we playing the same game?

Calm down kid, no need to cuss.

Also, yes I can. I just did. Its always better to compare to what the most they can get and not the least.

Now you’re including stealth, which is outside the scope of our discussion of stats. If a D/P thief just stood there and let you hit him, he would die incredibly quickly.

So, if you want to compare classes on the most they can get of something, why don’t you compare them in terms of the most power/precs/crit damage they can get, and then compare DPS dealt to them?

14. You

Jk. I agree with some of your points about getting rewarded. Not the others.

Daecollo.9578:

People who stack condition damage and armor will really hate this idea because it balances them out.

There’s no balancing that needs to be done. Run a zerker amulet and you’re golden.

Daecollo.9578:

Arganthium.5638:

Daecollo.9578:

Total Armor: Light=920 Medium=1064 Heavy=1211
The difference between Light/Medium/Heavy Armor is about 150 Toughness per tier, less then you get with a Signet buff.

Please don’t type on these forums unless you know what your talking about, thank you

150 toughness is not even 5% damage reduction, 300 won’t be 16%.

Toughness facts
Heavy armor classes get +36% armor by adding 798 toughness
Medium armor classes +39% armor by adding 798 toughness
Cloth classes +42% armor by adding 798 toughness

Y’know, I’m okay with people being an kitten to me about subjective ideas, but when it comes to mathematics, you’re really screwing with the wrong guy here.

For a medium armor class, adding 150 toughness results in:

(1980)/(1980+150) = 1980/2130 = ~92.96% of the damage you would’ve taken originally, or about 7% damage reduction.

Also, I stated that 300 toughness from the base for a light-armored class is about 14% reduction in damage, not 16%, but nonetheless:

(1836)/(1836+300)= 1836/2136 = 85.96% damage from previously, or about 14.04% damage reduction from base (I said 14.2% originally because of a slight error in the amount of armor I thought that lightly armored classes have. Nonetheless, the difference is only extremely small, about .16%).

Of course, you didn’t even factor in kittening base toughness into your numbers, which is hugely problematic. Grow the hell up.

Where the hell are your kitten equations? Don’t spit in the face of half a year of research into the game when your pebble-sized brain can’t even comprehend basic division.

That only decreases your case, because your not adding toughness from gear you can get. That only makes the numbers between the armor EVEN WEAKER

In other games, mages usually have 1/4 the armor, when in this game its more like 9/10th.

Please just grow up, your proving a base amount and not what people realistically use, Provide the numbers after 2750 armor, because your obviously not taking in diminishing returns here.

At the very base of toughness: 6-9%
At the high end of toughness: 1-3%

Factor this in please, because toughness/armor gets worse and worse the more you get.

Of course, but you’re missing out two bolded words you put into this thread earlier: Opportunity Cost.

Do you know why D/X thieves always die so easily? It’s because, in the current meta, they’re given virtually 0 additional toughness to what they have, even though they could easily survive much longer. But didn’t you just say that, realistically speaking, people have over 2750 armor? Well that’s obviously not true, because if you take that much toughness, you have to sacrifice other stats like power and precision. You can’t wear full Soldier’s gear while also wearing full Zerker gear.

That’s why it’s far more appropriate to compare armor when additional toughness is 0. It’s because, when additional toughness is 0, you haven’t inflicted any opportunity costs upon yourself yet. That’s when build formulation comes in, and that’s entirely variable across everybody.

You want to act like everybody’s running around with +2750 armor? Fine, but you’d better provide the evidence for it, or shut the hell up.

I support Davinci’s ideas. +1

Why the hell are you even interested in this idea? What empirical evidence do you have to back up the idea that this little scheme of yours would be good for the game? Why should having to split what was originally condition damage into three different stats be considered a “good idea”? And where the hell did you pick those numbers from? Did you throw darts at a board or something?

Daecollo.9578:

Total Armor: Light=920 Medium=1064 Heavy=1211
The difference between Light/Medium/Heavy Armor is about 150 Toughness per tier, less then you get with a Signet buff.

Please don’t type on these forums unless you know what your talking about, thank you

150 toughness is not even 5% damage reduction, 300 won’t be 16%.

Toughness facts
Heavy armor classes get +36% armor by adding 798 toughness
Medium armor classes +39% armor by adding 798 toughness
Cloth classes +42% armor by adding 798 toughness

Y’know, I’m okay with people being an kitten to me about subjective ideas, but when it comes to mathematics, you’re really screwing with the wrong guy here.

For a medium armor class, adding 150 toughness results in:

(1980)/(1980+150) = 1980/2130 = ~92.96% of the damage you would’ve taken originally, or about 7% damage reduction.

Also, I stated that 300 toughness from the base for a light-armored class is about 14% reduction in damage, not 16%, but nonetheless:

(1836)/(1836+300)= 1836/2136 = 85.96% damage from previously, or about 14.04% damage reduction from base (I said 14.2% originally because of a slight error in the amount of armor I thought that lightly armored classes have. Nonetheless, the difference is only extremely small, about .16%).

Of course, you didn’t even factor in kittening base toughness into your numbers, which is hugely problematic. Grow the hell up.

Where the hell are your kitten equations? Don’t spit in the face of half a year of research into the game when your pebble-sized brain can’t even comprehend basic division.

This idea gave me cancer.

Daecollo.9578:

I would rather have SoM on my Warrior then the current HS.

Whirling Axe healing me for 9750 with no healing power!? YES PLEASE!

What your forgetting is: Opportunity Cost

Heavy Armor is almost nothing in this game btw…

Yeah, actually, it’d heal for 100*15 = 1500 health, assuming you hit every hit, which you won’t if you’re playing against somebody half-competent.

As the commenter below mentioned to you, there is a fairly significant reduction in damage taken between heavy armor and light armor (it’s actually more like ~14.2%, but he/she was close enough). If every class was the exact same (exact same traits, weapons, attacks, etc), except for the armor, then, assuming ceteris paribus, the warrior would be doing about ~16.5% more damage over the course of its lifetime due to the increased armor lengthening his lifespan. A lot of top builds, in comparison to one another, end up being somewhere around that distance from one another within classes. For example, when comparing my tank build versus Jumper’s DPS build, I do ~20% more damage over the course of my lifetime than he does. That doesn’t necessarily make my build superior, as there are a wide variety of strategies that opponents can take up that can do things like turn toughness (for example) into a lost opportunity cost. It also results in a sort of “trinity” of build superiority over other builds, ie Tank wins against DPS, Bunker Wins against Tank, DPS wins against Bunker. Of course, even that statement in and of itself is somewhat inaccurate, but it gives you a rough idea of the scheme of things.

Also, @Ashanor: I wouldn’t be so sure that vitality is “the least desirable stat in HotM”, or that, if it is, it’s only due to pathetic biases on the behalf of sPvP players. At base, for a Medium armor class, Vitality increases real health for about twice of how much toughness increases real health. It takes about 900 vitality for an individual point of toughness to be able to amplify real health by the same amount that an individual point of vitality does.

It was pretty broken until one of my SoloQ teams learned how to manipulate it to basically win every game. Unfortunately, the map was soon removed from the rotation.

RaynStargaze.6510:

Silentshoes.1805:

I see, you are EU. See how it goes with lots of games without top players on your team. It will be interesting.

If matchmaking works – why would i be matched WITH bad players vs good players? (in fact i think that beating bads with bad team is always easier than top team v top team – maybe except foefire)

And obviously the first few games i played i didnt have a top team…

Because that’s not how the system works. If you’re lucky and win your first five games, that doesn’t make you a good player. I was paired with one absolutely horrible engineer back when I was 21st on the Leaderboards (kept firing the Skyhammer at empty points, and pretty much melted instantaneously whenever he got into a fight), and I lost three games in a row. After that, I was being paired against average players while my team was fairly crappy, and thus began a rather unfortunate losing streak for me.

I’ve since picked that up a little bit, but it’s going to be incredibly difficult for me to climb the leaderboards again.

Peoples’ ratings are dropping because there are increasingly more people flowing into the Leaderboard.

Looking at my friends, I know the lowest person on my friends list was at in the bottom 5% of all players, meaning that at least 5% of all players were beneath the top 1k. He was also my only friend with a percentage ranking. Now, looking at the Leaderboard, I see 3 of my friends with percentage rankings. The highest-rated one of them is in the bottom 16% of all players, meaning that at least 16% of all rated players are beneath the top 1k. The 5% guy from yesterday was still at 5%.

The Leaderboards are growing rapidly, and that’s causing peoples’ ratings to fall rapidly.

Well, all I can say is that I won a game and lost a game today, making my win-lose ration 53.49% and my rank 304. I’m pretty sure I did go up a bit in the ratings though, because I know that I was about 3-4 places behind Jumper yesterday while the Leaderboard was shifting, and now I’m 5 places ahead of him.

Still, looking at the top of the Leaderboards, I see a lot of people that have a good win-loss ratio that should be representative of their skill level, but I also see a lot of people with a great ratio that have hardly played any games whatsoever.

Try contacting Random Fight Fan, I know that he’s made a lot of tutorials for PvE thieves and he might want to try podcasting for Revealed.

He’s pretty much the only PvE thief I trust to have some kind of good advice on him, and when I PvE for fun I always use his builds, or, if not, a variant of one of his builds that still follows many of the same concepts of the original build.

Travlane.5948:

@ARGANTHIUM

allow me to quote ur buddy who has so much experience on here. i prolly have more experience in life. i guess that would matter a lil more right? but since we are discussing that lets take a look at his intentions here shall we?

Beside Intentionally being given the Golden Key to WvW and Spvp World Domination amd Unlimmitted Superiority Beyond other class and Game Mechanics, what other purpose you (thief) serves?
What Non-Selfish Purpose do you Provide in group parties beside ‘Stealth’?
I’m being Serious
Not too long ago, the (thief-guildies) in guild chat were discussing how ‘bored’ their class feel (repeating/spamming) the same 1,2,3 win skills and about how non-team support their theif class are.
They discussed how Selfish" Theif Class is and how Theif Class is Entirely a Single Player Game Mode that was Intentionally implimented to MMO: Guild Wars 2 class roster in Hope of Leading The Pack in WvW Dominance and Superiortines to the other class roster"
The Impact has been felt from Day 1 in Guild wars 2 release and how Arena net has been the one ‘pulling the string’ in Securing Theifs World Dominance and Superiority in the Game Mechanics all along and Intentionally Refused to Deal with the Irony and Misery it has caused since.
Their “Nefs/Bugs” fix to this class only Excells this classed to Great Measures beyond any Game Mechanics I ever seen in any Mmo’s.
when you hear of ‘Nerfs’ being implimented to this class, ’don’t jump for joy’ becasue the ‘joy’ you will be jumping to is to your ‘joy to your Qucik Silent Sudden Deaths’ to the Grave, (that they’ve already longed prepared for you, longed before you enter their ‘space’.
In conclusion,
I Encourage Arena net , to fully explain Thief class Purpose beside all.

i dont have to know anything more about him than this,/. thank you very much.

ive never had any problem beating thieves on any class ( i dont player ranger and RAAAAAAAARELY ever warrior so i cant speak out to much of them but warriors are def tough…rangers are a face roll for me other than spirit rangers and the ever healing style ones) everything in ther is wrong…..other than his quotes about other players. go ahead back it up. tell me you agree? ive see you disagree with everything in this post ages ago and pretty regularly. you have always been a general voice of agreeable reason in here. would u really like to support this openly?

My opposition to your statements does not translate into me supporting Burnfall. If anything, I think he’s a kitten idiot. Just go read the comments I made on that post you quoted, and that should be more than enough to show you that I absolutely have no interest in supporting him.

That being said, you can’t thrash him for something that we both know is false. He’s been on the forums quite a while. He’s certainly no newbie to the game. That doesn’t make him a rational human being or intelligent about the game. But it means that there are no grounds to accuse him of lacking experience of the game/forums, as that’s clearly untrue.

Travlane.5948:

my writing style was sarcasm about his last post. you should read it. the post about what thieves do good. lol read it. its a good laugh

That’s Really not How He writes, He writes Like This you Know-all Golden Child Thief.

Travlane.5948:

Arganthium.5638:

Burnfall.9573:

[snip]

Actually, BS to the backside isn’t the highest-damage single attack in the game (assuming that’s what you were talking about, given that it is the highest-hitting thief skill). As a matter of fact, Eviscerate Stage 2 for Warrior has a damage coefficient that is .1 above BS’s (it equals 2.5), making it more powerful. The third-stage Eviscerate has a coefficient of 3.0, making it 25% more powerful than BS, and that’s assuming BS is actually done to the back.

Kill Shot from the Warrior does even more damage. To put it simply, akittens maximum power, in does over 150% of Backstab’s damage.

Outside of the Warrior, the Ele’s Churning Earth also does significantly more damage than Backstab. In fact, its coefficient of 3.25 makes it do over 133% more damage than BS does. Dragon’s Tooth does only slightly less damage; its coefficient is .15 less than BS’s is (when done to the backside).

Total damage done by the Engi’s Jump Shot is higher than that of a backstab. Every regular bomb dropped by an Engi’s bomb kit does a little bit more than half of a backside BS’s damage, meaning that it does about the same amount of damage as a BS to the frontside.

With all due respect (read: no respect whatsoever), get the hell out of this forum and go do the kitten math yourself. You don’t even know what you’re saying.

read his NOT clever duh post duh.. it says uh duh…thieves are the best thing ever and they are god mode and they are like powerful and a duh strong like uh a superhero uh. guy is a troglodyte man lol just ignore him. he has no idea about anything. hes new to game and frustrated he cant do well…

fun fact: 90% of all new generation players tested on mario level 1 could not even beat the first level. i think 70% of them actually died on the first goomba and 50% of the total testers died 2x to that same first goomba!!!!!!!!!!!.

what does this mean? the new generation players need tutorials and instructions and well a real crutch and push me along help guide to do anything that requires effort. quite sad. i immediately thought of this guy everytime i read his post and correlated it to that nintendo study.

Wait… What? Your writing style is similar to Cruuk’s, but at least I can actually understand him…

And you clearly don’t know anything about Burnfall. He’s been on these forums longer than you have, m8. That doesn’t legitimize his statements, but you should really think twice before you speak.

Also, I highly doubt the legitimacy of the cited “study” there.

Mammoth.1975:

This doesn’t seem hard to understand, I’m not sure why people have such difficulty with it.

IF you are a good player stuck in the wrong bracket, your team has a good player and 4 bad players. The other team has 5 bad players. Your team is more likely to win. Your rating rises. That’s it in a nutshell.

Luck does play a larger part, as if you get a 4v5 it can snowball into 3v5, and even the best player will have a hard time with that. However, even if you only win one extra game in fifty, you will still go up in the ratings, it’s just going to take you a lot of games to climb out of the bracket with such a poor percentage.

If you’re in a bracket where people are really bad in comparison to you, you will win more than one extra game in fifty, and it won’t take you as long to climb out. Due to the increased randomness of afks and quitters, it can still take a while though.

Unless, of course, your rank was higher than those of the rest of your team, and thus as an outlier the average skill level of your team goes up even though you’re simply an outlier, and the median skill level of your team is much lower. In which case you’d be paired up against a team that is superior to everybody on your team except for you, but you still lose because of this.

And, of course, there’s always the possibility that maybe, just maybe, playing 50 games and winning 52% of them won’t in fact improve your rating- not significantly, anyways. There’s always the possibility that Ostrich Eggs has 70.6% win ratio after playing 51 games, and yet he’s below players with a 100% win ratio after playing too few games to accurately measure their skills. There’s also the ever-so-slight chance that some players, like perhaps (at the time of writing) the one that’s ranked 31st place in NA right now, or the one that’s ranked 44th, that some players can actually have a lower win-loss ratio without having played as many games as Ostrich has, and yet they have a higher rank than he does.

Sorry, but categorical, entirely linear thinking like that isn’t gonna get us places.

Definitely a good guy to have on your team.

Gets my stamp of approval.

Yeah…

I won my first bunch of games, and was near the top of the Leaderboard. Then I got paired with one of the most godawful engis I have ever played with, lost three matches in a row, and it’s been a slow downhill slide since then. I’ve gotten entire teams who haven’t communicated with me whatsoever, but communicated on map chat to brag about how they got to use their cow finishers on people. I’ve gotten people who have rushed into the middle of the battle to be instantly melted into nothingness. The maps aren’t great either; I know Swinsk is gonna hate me for this, but I honestly believe that thieves are at a huge disadvantage on Skyhammer, which seems to be a map that keeps popping up for me.

I’ve gotten some certainly better teams recently, and I’ve rebuilt my rank a bit so that I have a win-lose ratio that is a decent bit over 50% (it’s 53.66%), and I’m ranked 261 after over 40 matches. Which reminds me of another thing: statistically speaking, if people don’t lose, we can’t accurately tell how good they are. Numerically speaking, in fact, we would typically prefer to have a sample size of at least 30 in order to run statistical analyses, and many of the people on the front page of the Leaderboard haven’t done that many. In fact, I feel that, the higher up the Leaderboard you go, the fewer matches people have actually played overall.

I feel lucky to have my fairly good rating, but I know that there are good players who fell off a cliff by having bad ratings because they had bad teams. As for me, as more players join the Leaderboard, I’m going to have to fight to keep my rank up, as I’m sure there are going to be more people with 100% win ratios that are just going to get up the Leaderboards and stay there because of ANet’s poor rating system.

Burnfall.9573:

[snip]

Actually, BS to the backside isn’t the highest-damage single attack in the game (assuming that’s what you were talking about, given that it is the highest-hitting thief skill). As a matter of fact, Eviscerate Stage 2 for Warrior has a damage coefficient that is .1 above BS’s (it equals 2.5), making it more powerful. The third-stage Eviscerate has a coefficient of 3.0, making it 25% more powerful than BS, and that’s assuming BS is actually done to the back.

Kill Shot from the Warrior does even more damage. To put it simply, akittens maximum power, in does over 150% of Backstab’s damage.

Outside of the Warrior, the Ele’s Churning Earth also does significantly more damage than Backstab. In fact, its coefficient of 3.25 makes it do over 133% more damage than BS does. Dragon’s Tooth does only slightly less damage; its coefficient is .15 less than BS’s is (when done to the backside).

Total damage done by the Engi’s Jump Shot is higher than that of a backstab. Every regular bomb dropped by an Engi’s bomb kit does a little bit more than half of a backside BS’s damage, meaning that it does about the same amount of damage as a BS to the frontside.

With all due respect (read: no respect whatsoever), get the hell out of this forum and go do the kitten math yourself. You don’t even know what you’re saying.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Arganthium.5638:

hihey.1075:

Direwind.8409:

its starting to bother me alot..

WHY DO we have no range attacks! every other class can use some sort of 1200 ranged attack?! why not thief?! why do we have to jump up on a wall to even have the chance to hit anything in a keep siege (before we die instantly to focus)

im so sick of watching rather than getting into the battle, we need a ranged attck of 1200

Shadow Refuge->Exit Keep->Do something->Steal on someone at the gate->Get back in->Profit

You can get into keeps/towers via steal?

He said;
“Steal on someone at the gate->Get back in”

Meaning you steal at someone bashing at the gate, then run like a dog inside. I know what he meant ‘cause I’ve done it myself.

Oh, I see.

Would’ve been cool though. : /

hihey.1075:

Direwind.8409:

its starting to bother me alot..

WHY DO we have no range attacks! every other class can use some sort of 1200 ranged attack?! why not thief?! why do we have to jump up on a wall to even have the chance to hit anything in a keep siege (before we die instantly to focus)

im so sick of watching rather than getting into the battle, we need a ranged attck of 1200

Shadow Refuge->Exit Keep->Do something->Steal on someone at the gate->Get back in->Profit

You can get into keeps/towers via steal?