Guild Wars 2

Quickness was used quite a lot on my engineer, and also on my thief. I hear rangers get it to but I’ve never really noticed, since all the ones I’ve seen just hang back and spam 2.

If I were to make a bet I would say that a buff for warriors would be in the near future, considering many points of this change seem to be an oversight to warriors. They are, after all, the only class where the haste mechanic is now useless since your enemies will do equal amounts of damage right back.

With all this talk about warriors being weak I’m not considering running one as my 6th toon. But what can I say? I love the underdog.

Once I discovered how useful sitting duck was, I actually traited out of rifled barrel turrets in order to get it on my turret control build. It was more than possible to get those 15 stacks of vulnerability on an enemy, increasing my damage as well as the turret damage. I will miss the insane range on the rocket turret, though.

But for a more conventional vunlerability stacking, grenades are definitely the way to go. Works in an AoE while doing quite a bit of damage and conditions.

Since I’ve been running a turret control build, I really liked the buffs to turrets. It has been my experience that most criticisms levied against turrets are actually incorrect, and I am going to continue running a turret control build.

Though I do understand where people are coming from when then they complain about losing something so powerful. I remember back before the grenade nerf…

On my necro I haven’t been taking advantage of it. I also haven’t gone into WvWvW with it, so… there’s that.

Necros have had long duration conditions for a very long time. Hemophilia gives 20% bleed, 30 into the power tree gives a further 30% into everything (including bleeds), and then from there you can get the extra 50% bleed duration from countless sources. One is 2 runes of the krait + 2 runes of the afflicted + 2 runs of the centaur for a total 95% bleed duration. Currently on my necro I use sigil of superior agony + rare veggie pizza for a 100% bleed duration and 70% duration for other conditions. I don’t want to invest too heavily onto anything since I switch between power necro to hybrid to condition necro on the fly, so 100%/70% has been sufficient for what I plan to do.

And then you have to include lingering curses, which gives an extra 33% on top of all that to scepter skills. Ah… nothing quite like a 13 second bleed on auto attack. But regardless, at 70% duration necros already have perma poison, perma cripple/chill, and perma weakness depending on what weapons and traits they’ve opted for.

I suppose an advantage would be that Necros can, instead of investing into the power tree, could invest into other things and then just let the giver’s weapons increase the duration instead. For a pure condition build, this seems like a viable option.

Right now I am running a minion master power build in sPVP, and I like it more than any other build I’ve tried. I think this is because the lack of a gaming mouse and the fact that I"m not very good at sPVP. Things like spirit weapons and turrets and minions appeal to me because they take the managing out of my hands. But alas, the necromancer’s minions do several things for me that I couldn’t find elsewhere:

#1: Control. The bone fiend has an immobilize, and the flesh golem has a knockdown charge. These I find to be incredibly useful, since it stuns and lets me pounce on enemies that would’ve otherwise gotten away. This also lets the minions build up damage with their attacks, and the flesh golem hits like a truck. I currently use dagger/warhorn to come in close and control my opponent, letting me build up lifeforce and letting my minions wail on the opponent. I use this to maximize LF gain (and the power build lets DS hit for a lot) and use it defensively, letting the minions attack for even longer.

#2: Burst damage + damage overall. Bone minions make for great burst damage and an AoE blast finisher, and burst damage is something a necromancer lacks. Normally.

#3: Body blocking. I can’t count how many times someone has ended up targeting one of my minions with single target attacks instead of me, or has had their projectiles hit the minion instead of me. Any attack that hits the minion is O.K. in my book.

#4: Minions have what is arguably the best stun breaker in Flesh Worm. Even though it is immobile, it hits like a truck and has far range. With the recharge trait it is up every 32 seconds, and the whole time you are not stunned and in a dire situation the flesh worm is adding to your DPS. The worm also acts as a teleport, getting you out of a bad situation in every sense of the phrase. It does have a problem in that it needs to be summoned first before it can be activated, and that a smart opponent would realize it is best to kill the worm first before doing anything, but nothing is perfect.

#5: High sustained damage regardless of build. The minions do a lot of damage when traited up, and the best part about this damage is that it works no matter what I try to run. I can make a condition build, a glass cannon build, or a bulky build and they’ll still be there racking up the DPS. Currently I run all soldier’s gear with a superior runes of the Earth set, so suffice to say I am incredibly durable, and the minions let me have a high offensive alongside of this statistical fortitude.

My current build is the following:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNBIhZakRrUvVzWjeTBIz4ZqhUsr0RFOm+w6A;TsAA1Cto2xsjYH7Oudk7sEZUwUEA

I forewent wurm for the spectral armor at half health bonus. The cool thing with this build is that, as the fight goes on, it becomes harder and harder to fight. At the beginning the earth runes will give me protection most of the time, meaning that the initial burst damage will fail. Then, at half health all stuns are broken, protection is applied again and then there is a burst of LF gain from there. Should health get low enough, at 20% health I get a magnetic aura which reflects all projectiles, and this will often clench the fight in my favor had I not already won. Usually at that point the other player has switched to fighting at range, since running up to melee only leaves them susceptible to all my control and minions. The whole time, every time I switch I get 3 stacks of might for 25 seconds, so eventually I’ll have anywhere from 6 to 9 stacks sustained in the battle.

Something that I learned using a guardian in sPVP a long time ago is that you don’t need a single point in condition damage for burning to add pressure. 328 damage per second is pretty good, roughly equivalent to 7.7 bleeds at 0 condition damage. The biggest thing that guardians can accomplish is how easily they cause permanent burning single-hand. There’s only a few classes that can do this, and even if they can do this they don’t do it as reliably or as often as the guardian does. The best way for a guardian to burn other players is through rapidly applying short duration burns. Doing this makes it so condition curing doesn’t do a thing to the burns, because they just come right back. With VoJ’s ability to recharge with every kill, enemy forces will find themselves constantly on fire because of it.

In PVE and in parts of PVP there is a big diminishing return, though. Applying burning has a finite threshold where it is permanently on, after which applying more burning doesn’t do any good. In PVP there is more flexibility with condition curing and enemy evasion and all, so it is still worth it to invest in condition duration. In PVE it is a giant brick wall that gets closer and closer for every member who adds burning, and it is so bad that a single extra player who applies burning becomes redundant in a dungeon. It also becomes a contest of condition damage, since whomever applied the previous burn has their damage used, making it so one player will be overriding another player’s effectiveness in burning.

So, if someone was obtuse enough to want to make a condition build guardian, there is only two things to do. Either A) they never play with another player who uses burning ever, or Focus on AoE burning. Burning on multiple enemies doesn’t have a diminishing return that approaches quicker than a hungry lion, so that would be the way to go. There is a bit of a problem with that, though, too:

The two other classes that apply big burns (elementalist and engineer) do it better in AoEs. Rocket turret + flame turret is enough to apply a permanent burn to enemies in a group, and can be used alongside of fire bomb (AoE), Blowtorch (Cone), and the flamethrower (cone). The elementalist has too many to list. Those two classes also have many more conditions available for a condition build. All in all, my recommendation with condition guardians is to not make one unless you want to be really defiant, are running with a static group of friends who are playing neither an engineer or elementalist, and/or accept the fact that pretty much anyone else using a guardian or a condition build will be doing better than you.

Even if pistols were buffed in their condition department, they would probably still be inferior to grenades as far as condition damage goes. Frankly I see no reason to not buff something when it would still be inferior to the best.

Wait… epidemic originally worked without LoS?

To be fair, Time Warp was really OP to begin with. 10 Second AoE haste with no drawbacks is intense, even with haste’s reduction in potency.

One thing that is underlooked for engineers is the coated bullets trait for pistols. Until you use it on massive enemies in Orr, it is difficult to comprehend how good it is at farming. But, some math:

Coated Bullets makes the pistol’s auto attack pierce, which means it can hit up to 5 enemies in a row. Every time it hits an enemy it explodes, hitting 5 nearby enemies as well. This comes to a whopping total of 25 hits per auto attack. Now, this ideal situation rarely happens (cough temple of grenth event cough), and these explosions have a tendency to hit the same enemies instead of bouncing about hitting many…

But 25 hits per auto attack… in layman’s terms this means THEIR NUMBERS COUNT FOR NOTHING!!! I’m serious there, on my engineer with a zerker pistol build can mow down a dozen orrians in a few seconds, far quicker than it can take down an individual one. Every pull of that trigger looks like a number explosion, and combine it with Toss Elixir U for projectile blocking and Drink Elixir U for haste and for five seconds it’s bloody Armageddon. It was with this that I and 3 others managed to do the final event in the Grenth Chain, which still spawns more enemies than the game can process with 4 people, BTW.

The pistol also comes with a bouncing attack to tag multiple enemies, and on offhand it comes with a cripple patch and an AoE cone burn + high damage. You’ll only want to use the #2 skill when it is, like, just 2 enemies in a line at close range. But still, overall it makes for a great farming tool.

The engineer itself has a lot of farming tools. There’s coated bullet pistols as well as the grenade kit, and lesser mention also goes to the flamethrower and the bomb kit. The bomb kit, IMO, is one nearly any engineer can use due to it’s raw power and how easily it is traited into a farming tool. Just 10 points in explosives to increase the explosion range and then you can nuke anything that gets near Plinx with little effort. It combines well with the rifle, which can use jump shot for a high damage AoE. In fact, it is harder to find something the engineer cannot use to farm.

The advantage to hybrid builds are that, even though you are less effective at doing one thing, whenever a situation arises where you should do something different you do it well. While a conditionmancer does more damage overall than a power build, conditionmancers aren’t nearly as strong against objects, and they lose power if other players are running condition builds.

I myself currently run either 30/30/10/0/0 or 20/30/20/0/0 in PVE, and run a bit of a tank-necro style even when hybriding. That is, the armor is soldier’s gear, the trinkets are carrion, the runes are 3x superior krait and 3x superior afflicted, and the weapons are either soldier’s gear (dagger, axe, warhorn, focus), rabid gear (another dagger, scepter), or carrion (staff) depending on what I need. The difference in trait points really depends on what you want more: a 15% increase in axe damage/ 20% increase against enemies at half health, or minions with more HP/ 20% recharge reduction on staff skills. There’s no real right answer, which is why I flip flop between the two.

The advantage is that, with multiple gear choices you can easily swap between one or the other. I keep on hand a set of carrion armor as well as emerald trinkets, just in case I want to go either full conditions or a tankier power/crit build. This is… not the norm, however. Most people I know who run hybrids usually run a rampager set, which is precision/power/malice. This lets you do everything at the same time instead of flip-flopping, but this comes at the expense of defense. IMO, necros don’t really have the tools to defend themselves like other classes, instead relying on their attributes for defense.

Heinel.6548:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I ran Corrupt Boon for awhile on my necromancer in sPVP. I don’t run it anymore, for a few reasons.

#1: Unless your opponent is boon heavy, it is dead weight.
#2: Even when they are boon heavy, its effects aren’t too potent. Best part being the removal of boons and not the conditions anyway.
#3: Most of the time the conditions were quickly cured and the boons were put back on anyway, and Corrupt Boon has a slow recharge.

Even though I main the engineer, another boon heavy class, and also play the guardian, I’m not too worried about boon hate mostly because I think it will most likely follow in the footsteps of necromancer and mesmer boon hate: medum-long recharges on skills that only do a bit when their situation shows up. IMO mesmer boon hate is a little better than the necromancer, since it is more reliable and doesn’t punish the mesmer as much for using them.

The exception to this is spinal shivers, which is readily available and useful. Even looking at spinal shivers as the base “model” for boon hate, it isn’t too worrying. Sure, upon removing 3 boons it does two and a half times damage, but its base damage is so low that even with the boost it still does less damage than Life Blast, a skill that all necromancers have that is on a shorter activation time, or the dagger’s auto attack which takes about the same activation time to go through the whole chain. This would translate into boon hate being skills that do low damage, but against boons do average damage. Again, it isn’t much to worry about.

There is the remote possibility that Arenanet is going to make boon hate so powerful that it actively punishes players with boons so much they avoid using them. I can’t deny that. But… it seems so unlikely with Arenanets tendency to tiptoe through these issues.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare necros and thieves. Necros are designed to tank and outlast their opponents, even in full zerker life blast builds. Thieves are designed to spike people down before they can react and counter. Obviously the numbers won’t be the same.

I am not comparing necros and thieves.

I’ve only dealt with thieves in sPVP, but I can usually beat them with a dagger necro. The biggest thing to use against a dagger thief is the utility Well of Darkness. It’s a great utility overall, so I highly recommend it. Unless the thief is using haste, it completely disables the thief’s offense. After that, a dagger necro will win the auto attack war against a dagger thief because, kitten for tat, the necro’s dagger has higher base power in its auto attack, and also the necro has 80% higher base health than the thief.

From there, there are a couple more things that can be to down a thief. Bone Minions are quite powerful without any trait investment, and make for good burst damage. They don’t have to really chase the thief down if the thief is trying to backstab you, because the thief is automatically in range. If you want to really double up, Well of Suffering can be used alongside of the bone minions for higher burst damage, but if you have to choose between one or the other Bone Minion is far superior.

Something else I would recommend is having flesh golem out while just randomly wandering. This is because you can switch from a summoned flesh golem into another elite without that second elite being in cool down, so this lets the flesh golem be around whenever you need it, and it doesn’t cost anything when you don’t need it.

I mention the flesh golem because, while the necro will win the auto attack war, the necro has to make the thief stay in place to do so and those skills are notably lacking on a necro. The flesh golem’s charge can knock down the thief while doing quite a bit of damage, and then afterward will attack the thief for more damage than the dagger does. Other options for disabling a thief include traiting into Chilling Darkness, which makes Well of Darkness and plague form much more powerful. Your tactics will also change depending on the off-hand, but for taking out a thief I would recommend a warhorn. The locust swarm cripples and does damage while granting swiftness and life force, making it very hard for any class to “get away” from the necro while under the locust swarm. The warhorn also has a cone daze of decent length, which is important for controlling a thief because they can’t stealth themselves while dazed, and this lets you use chills and the immobilize freely against the thief. Remember: in auto attacks they will go down twice as fast as the necro, so use that to your advantage.

As for Death Shroud, I’ve found it more effective to trait for abilities that activate upon entering it, due to the circumstances in which you enter it. Two of the better ones are Spiteful Spirit and Weakening Shroud. Spiteful spirit grants retaliation, which makes rapid attacks hurt the thief right back. IMO Weakening Shroud is far superior, since it casts Enfeebling Blood PBAoE, causing 10 seconds of weakness and two 10-second bleeds. This is both defensive and offensive in one shot, reducing damage taken and dealing it right back.

Depending on your equipment and traits, Shadow Refuge can be either a blessing or a curse. The thief will not exit Shadow Refuge until the skill runs out, so it is effectively locked in that area for 4 seconds. If you have a staff with the greater marks trait… have fun with it. You can either run the thief out immediately, ending stealth, or you can just lay down some hurt in the process then defend yourself with reaper’s mark. If you have the scepter/dagger setup, Enfeebling Blood and Grasping Dead both take up nearly the whole area of the refuge, so use both to cripple and weaken the thief while bleeding him. It is also worth noting that thieves don’t have any real way to cure weakness reliably.

And well… that’s pretty much all the advice I can give while fighting dagger thieves.

Softspoken.2410:

Oh no, I’ll gladly agree with you that the option to not take damage is better than one involving taking damage. I just argue that in any given class, the option to not take damage is not always present. Everyone runs out of endurance, even if they (unlike Necromancers) have traits to manage vigor and the like. Plus, invulnerability / block on utilities is more the exception than the rule.

It is possible to make a build in other classes that doesn’t have a blocking or good control mechanics, but the fact remains that every other class has the option to take skills that block or reflect or evade damage or regenerate endurance quicker or grant stability or grant vigor or layer control effects. Heck, the Elementalist, Guardian, Thief, and Mesmer have active defense as a theme of theirs, with the warrior and engineer having plenty of methods to block and/or reflect on their own. The class with the second least amount of blocking and evading skills is the Ranger, who has to go through some loops to get a long delay blocking skill, but itself still has plenty of evading techniques and vigor. But at least the ranger has arguably the best immobilize in the game to make up for it.

Softspoken.2410:

I know you didn’t say dagger, it’s just the quintessential LF generating weapon, in my mind.
So we’ve established that you don’t find a use for burst LF generation which honestly makes me shrug, but whatever. I can’t be the only person who thinks the claim that swiftness is useless during a fight odd though. I also find the claim that SA is never up odd, but I don’t PvP that much so maybe combat really is rapid enough that you’re losing two major fights waiting for it to come off cooldown.

“Burst” as the term is only so much of an accurate description. If you’re lucky then you’ll get hit… 10 times during that period? Maybe even 15 times for classes that attack a lot. At 3% LF gain for each attack, you’ll be getting only a third of your LF pool back. That amount goes away in 2 or 3 attacks once you are in DS, and against high DPS classes it drops instantly. You have to take enough hits in that 6 second timeframe to make a difference, and that doesn’t always happen. And yes, the recharge on SA at 90 seconds is so long that yes, you can go through two fights without it coming back again.

Softspoken.2410:

I’ll give you that you have to give up one thing for another, and I’ll even give you that stacking fully on defensive traits probably isn’t a good choice in terms of overall performance, but I’m surprised that the argument against these traits is “If all you choose are defensive things, you can’t do the damages.” Obviously you’re sacrificing offensive output for defensive measures. How many seconds of damage life siphon heals back depends greatly on your healing power and toughness.

The argument is in response to the statement that you should be using these things altogether in order for them to matter. Standing by themselves they aren’t effective at all, and together they cost too much of an investment. Also, Life siphon scales quite horribly. If you invest 1000+ points into toughness, it amounts to around a 33% decrease in damage (and in respect, a 33% increase in heal effectiveness). Putting 1000 points into healing power amounts to a 20% increase in the healing potential of life siphon. Considering you can double raw damage with 916 points of power or double condition damage with 850 points of malice, it is highly counterproductive to try and maximize life siphon any further than 10 points into blood magic.

Softspoken.2410:

Then don’t bring up regeneration as a reason to not use life siphoning traits. “I can get a similar effect somewhere else” is only relevant if they actively conflict with each other.

Um no, it is relevant when discussing class balance when a renown class mechanic is impotent in the shadow of a widely available boon.

Softspoken.2410:

Running out of space in this post, so for the last part of yours: I won’t insist a spectral / life steal build is secretly great and that we should all convert now or anything. All I’m saying is, life steal and spectrals don’t have to be the complete basis of a build to be useful, and they don’t necessitate drastic investments in traits, either.

But what I am saying is that there are far better things to invest in, and that these systems as attrition mechanics don’t work at all.

I ran Corrupt Boon for awhile on my necromancer in sPVP. I don’t run it anymore, for a few reasons.

#1: Unless your opponent is boon heavy, it is dead weight.
#2: Even when they are boon heavy, its effects aren’t too potent. Best part being the removal of boons and not the conditions anyway.
#3: Most of the time the conditions were quickly cured and the boons were put back on anyway, and Corrupt Boon has a slow recharge.

Even though I main the engineer, another boon heavy class, and also play the guardian, I’m not too worried about boon hate mostly because I think it will most likely follow in the footsteps of necromancer and mesmer boon hate: medum-long recharges on skills that only do a bit when their situation shows up. IMO mesmer boon hate is a little better than the necromancer, since it is more reliable and doesn’t punish the mesmer as much for using them.

The exception to this is spinal shivers, which is readily available and useful. Even looking at spinal shivers as the base “model” for boon hate, it isn’t too worrying. Sure, upon removing 3 boons it does two and a half times damage, but its base damage is so low that even with the boost it still does less damage than Life Blast, a skill that all necromancers have that is on a shorter activation time, or the dagger’s auto attack which takes about the same activation time to go through the whole chain. This would translate into boon hate being skills that do low damage, but against boons do average damage. Again, it isn’t much to worry about.

There is the remote possibility that Arenanet is going to make boon hate so powerful that it actively punishes players with boons so much they avoid using them. I can’t deny that. But… it seems so unlikely with Arenanets tendency to tiptoe through these issues.

No, the big point is that ultimately they are an ineffective waste of space, even when used at the same time. The problem being you’re always taking damage “sometime”. The point is that gaining lifeforce is vastly inferior to evasion and blocking and controls as a defensive mechanic. Given the option to take damage and gain LF or not take damage, the latter will beat out the former. Every single time.

I also never said dagger. The weapon skills in general will outpace spectral skills when fighting against bunkers, and sure you can use those spectral skills to get a burst gain in LF, but you most likely don’t need a burst gain in life force when fighting against a bunker. You’re better off putting something else in those utilities. And the biggest problem with SW and SA is that, as utilities, they accomplish very little. SW is a stun breaker that grants swiftness, making it the most useless stun breaker a necro has. You can’t use it to grant yourself swiftness before the fight because then you’ve lost your stun breaker for the fight. SA is useful as a stun breaker because it grants protection, but is never around to do it. This makes the life force gain of SA at best a tertiary perk.

And that is a big problem with traits and utilities: whenever you pick one you must pick it over another one. If you put your traits into life draining and spectral abilities and choose utilities and weapons to life drain and gain LF, then in the end you aren’t doing much of anything at all. First because SW and SA are horrible as far as utilities go and are horrible with gaining LF, second because life draining heals for paltry amounts when it does work and most of the time it doesn’t work. LIfe siphon is weak because it takes 3.5 seconds to heal away 1.5 seconds worth of damage, and does about a third of the auto attacks damage in that time.

Again, the comparison between regen and vampiric traits isn’t that they are exclusive, but that it is far better to invest into something else and just use regen for healing, for investing in both requires requires a lot of resources to do not much more than just using regeneration.

Look, I’ve been down that road. I’ve tried running multiple spectral skills for stunbreakers, and I’ve tried using life siphoning skills to heal, and I’ve tried doing them both at the same time. It doesn’t work because, in the end, all you end up doing is chasing around an enemy trying to use the dagger’s auto attack while you get controlled and beaten down by another class who either fights at further range, simply has more damage per survivability, uses burst damage to bypass all that nonsense,, or has enough controls that those do-nothing stun breakers get used up then end up on cool down. You don’t have any combos that can do massive amounts of damage because your utilities are all used up for spectral skills, and your weapons clash because you’re running dagger and staff or something like that, or you use the scepter and staff and make Deathshroud utterly useless as anything but a sponge where you absorb hits and do nothing back in return and then not regenerate life force because the scepter sucks at it

The biggest problem with spectral skills gaining lifeforce is that they are on very long recharges and are only situational at best. Their mechanic is that you have to take damage in order to gain lifeforce, which makes them at best a moot point. Remember: you are still taking hits to get lifeforce, which is used defensively. Because of this they are far inferior to a skill that simply blocks or evades damage: you don’t need to take damage to block damage.

The situations that they are used for are themselves not superbly effective. The fun thing about bunker builds is that many classes can fight a bunker build and stay alive for a long time, since bunker builds don’t do a lot of damage. This makes spectral walk and armor fulfill the role of “I can take less damage against enemies that don’t do very much damage”, which is the exact wrong place where you would need such a thing, and also the wrong situation where you would bother charging up lifeforce anyway. Considering that, with a 90 and 60 second recharge respectively, even with recharge reducing traits these skills aren’t up enough to make significant use of themselves. Given such long term fights, the life force regeneration from weapons far outpace what spectral skills will give. So instead you would have to use spectral skills for other reasons and just tack on the extra life force gain as a plus. And those other reasons are stun breakers, with one granting swiftness (not very useful in a stun breaker) and the other granting projection. Granted, Spectral Armor is excellent when you use it as a stun breaker, but on such a long recharge you never get to use it as a stun breaker. In sPVP I would go through two fights and die before that 72 second recharge finished.

I myself could never find any use for life siphoning abilities. I spent a week testing them, and I never noticed an appreciable difference in survivability. I think this boils down to a couple of factors:
#1: In order for life siphoning to be “good” you have to invest in many traits to do it. This takes away from other traits that offer, theoretically, a higher contribution to survivability than 37 life per hit.
#2: It was unreliable. Vampiric Mastery requires successful minion attacks, which doesn’t work too well because minions spend most of their time either on the other side of the map, chasing a moving target in futility, not attacking, or dead. Plus it is then necessary to invest in traits that improve minions to the point where they would drain reliably instead of attacking twice then dying.
2b. Vampiric Precision was also unreliable because it meant that you needed to invest a lot in precision to get healing, which for defensive purposes probably would’ve been better invested in toughness. Without fury or crit rate increasing abilities, Vampiric Precision only worked half the time.
2c. Enemies just walk out of wells, making Vampiric rituals nigh useless.
#3. Even though healing was improved by attacking groups of enemies, this in turn lead to groups of enemies attacking you.
#4: Necromancer’s spend a large portion of their time feared, immobilized, dazed, stunned, knocked down, or attacking distortion, evading techniques, or blocking techniques. Yes, without active defense or control the healing from their offense dwindled to nothing.
#5: The regeneration boon is far easier to apply, less constricting, and healed for more.

The biggest issue with all of the life stealing and LF regen through spectrals is that enemies that do damage aren’t some rarity that exist in localized niches. Builds that “do damage” are the norm in the game. I’m not saying that glass cannons are more common than bunkers (which factors in, actually), but that a standard all-around build will end up doing quite a bit of damage, whether through bursts or just from sustained damage. So all in all, necros have problems under many circumstances when using life stealing:

*Classes with potent controlling abilities.
*Classes with good defensive, evasive, and blocking abilities.
*Classes with burst damage.
*Classes with high damage
*Classes with good distance.

So basically any class that isn’t another necro. I don’t think that health stealing is really a salvageable mechanic with the way it is now.

So in short, DS is a one trick pony used once a fight that doesn’t really do much other than an AoE attack. This might be worth it if all of those missing controls, blocks, reflects, evades, condition cures, stability, and good stun breakers would amount to something useful in their place, but it doesn’t. Necros have slow and weak weapon skills alongside of utilities that are at best situational and at worst downright harmful, with the only two utilities that stand out enough to be considered good being Epidemic and Well of Darkness.

The saddest part is, almost all of this applies to PVE as well as PVP. Though cripples and chills are more useful in PVE. IMO Arenanet should abandon the idea of an attrition class with no active defenses. It is contradictory, and “This class is meant to take 100 blades to the face” is not a selling point.

EDIT: Completely forgot about weakness. Now weakness is probably the best thing a necro has for a defensive condition, except for the fact that high critical hit builds go right through it, condition curing removes the benefit completely, and it is unreliable in PVE because you never know if an enemy has a high crit chance or a low one.

I think the biggest problems with necro’s and attrition is the fact that passive defense and higher HP bars are the worst defensive mechanics in the game, period. They barely count for defense at all. I spent awhile talking about why investing in toughness and vitality amounts to only a paltry increase in survivability, so now I’ll talk about active defenses.

I’ve played 6 classes in sPVP, with only the ranger and warrior escaping my interest. And my final thoughts on the necromancer are so simply explained in one sentence:

“Boy do I get knocked down a lot…”

And it took me awhile to figure out why, but basically it is because necromancers have no active defenses. What are active defenses? Well, these are skills and abilities that you use in order to block or evade attacks, well as as control or disable your opponent. Because these require the player to actively use particular skills or traits that prevent damage, I call them active defenses.

Active defenses are important because they function without statistical fortitude and also have limitless potential when used correctly. If you think of the most damaging attack chain or skill that any class has, always know that a blocking skill or evade skill will stop it. So when a warrior goes to use 100 blades, tapping Roll for Initiative prevents 100% of the damage. Another side effect of the control effects are that they prevent your opponents defenses as well. When that warrior uses bull’s charge, this prevents the enemy not only from attacking, but also from defending as well. So all in all, blocking and evade make for a powerful defense while disabling control effects make both a good defense and offense.

Necros have none of that. Instead, their active defenses lie in using cripple and chill, which are horrible active defenses because the only thing they prevent is a melee enemy who refuses to use condition curing or teleports or leaps. They aren’t even that good at those, since most cripples are short range and half the chills just close the distance between the two. Necros have few blinds, with one being Deathly Swarm, which is slower than a hippo on Valium, and then probably the only good defense utility in Well of Darkness. They have fear, most of which are awkward skills on long recharges that apply the control for a single second on long cooldown. Of course, whenever a thief steals from you, they get a free 3 second fear that makes you perfect backstab and heartseeker fodder.

Necros are light on other controls. They have only two sources of immobilize: a short range one from a melee weapon that can’t be used for combos, and then another short range one from the loldamage bone fiend that doesn’t work half the time since minions spend half the time lollygagging across the map. They have one delayed daze in the warhorn, which doesn’t do anything else worthwhile otherwise (swiftness that does minor damage and draws aggro, slowing the player down again), and a knockback with the flesh golem’s charged attack.

Necros are also light on condition removal. There’s one in a heal, and then almost all other condition removal requires you to transfer conditions to a target. Which means you have to hit the target. Which means that if you can’t hit the target, you’re helpless against conditions. So either you use the staff and it’s strafeable auto attack, or you use plague signet which does damage to you as an intended function. Well of Power does get mention, although it works slowly and is on a long recharge. Necros have no form of vigor to grant additional dodges, no form of endurance regeneration, pitiful and expensive stability that is nigh unuseable, and horrible stun breakers to boot. Heck, I went back to running the buggy minion master build in sPVP because then I could have a stun breaker that was available more than once a minute.

The one thing that we do have is Death Shroud. Problem: it is only available once each fight, and otherwise DS doesn’t do anything but annoy your opponent. You can use it in the beginning of the fight to try and regain more lifeforce to use it again, but this ruins your panic button and doesn’t accomplish much while doing so. So instead you have DS as a panic button that most classes have the ability to plow right through with their offensive power, and your weapon choice determines how well you can regain life force. Unfortunately the best necro weapon, the scepter, regains life force so slowly that it is insulting. There are no adequate traits to regain life force, either.

Did they change turrets to take condition damage now? I haven’t checked in a few months, but last I did turrets didn’t take condition damage, which is why I quit using them in PvE for awhile.

I am not sure that the turret’s weakness in dungeons is something that will ever be looked at. Mostly because turrets can do well in so many other places. In the main map, zerg events benefit well from turrets that automatically engage enemies and are usually safe from harm, increasing the engineer’s damage and monster tagging. Against large bosses they also offer meaningful damage and control effects (looking at the net turret there) and can, again, enhance the damage done by an engineer. In WvWvW turrets are great for supplemental pressure, defending points, attacking from behind walls, and as a signal to sneaking enemies. In sPVP turrets have the most potent and plentiful control effects in the game, and with minimal effort can apply permanent burning to multiple players.

But in dungeons… oh boy they do suck. Even with armor plating, they go down in very few hits. The enemies in dungeons use a lot of AoEs and will swarm and scatter enough so they’ll attack the turrets, causing them to go down very quickly. Because of this, they don’t contribute that much. But… there is the question on how to fix this. If you make them more durable, then they become too powerful in PVP. If you make them do more damage, then they become too powerful in PVP again. The closest thing I can think of to a solution would be to make them have shorter recharges, which would let them be placed more often and wouldn’t severely affect their PVP performance.

Not interrupted. When that happens, it goes onto a 5 second cooldown then I can drink it again. When I go to drink it, It plays the “you drunk an elixir” sound, goes onto full cooldown, and gives no buffs. I can be standing still and not taking any damage when this happens.

I get the feeling this might be a bug…

@Timberwolf: I have to respectfully disagree about the HP pool comparison. The ability to out-sustain champion damage is a frequent occurrence, and surpassing the threshold where a champion can never kill you is an even more frequent occurrence.

Since I do not have any numbers regarding the DPS of any champion with any given player population around them, I will have to give anecdotes:

There is a group event in Malchor’s leap called “Defeat the Mark II YF-Gold golem that’s destroying the area” that occurs just north-west of the waste hollows in the eastern side of the map. This is a single champion golem that I love to solo. Mostly because there is no one else around… but on occasion someone else will run up and fight it with me. The results of their efforts can be anything from hilarious to intriguing.

There are two cases that stand out in my memory, particularly because they contrast so well. In both of them, a guardian came out of nowhere and helped me to fight this golem. The first guardian that ran up was… ineffective. He would down frequently and would spend most of the time running futilely around obstacles to avoid getting killed. It didn’t do much good, what with the golem’s long reach and ranged attacks. I spent half the fight trying to chase and immobilize this golem just so I could line up my rifle skills, for the golem had inexplicably decided that this guardian was his sworn lifelong archenemy that killed its parents, and would chase only the guardian around. The fight was far easier without this other player’s “help”.

Come the second fight, and months later I am again soloing that golem. This time, when a guardian came out of nowhere, he entered into a straight up no-holds barred close quarters MMA brawl with the golem. I swear I only saw this guardian dodge twice for the whole thing. He didn’t loop around the enemy or use immobilizes to kite or anything of the sort, and I know from an unfortunate pistol-related event that blinds were ineffective as a defense. He just straight up fought the golem while not moving, and didn’t down once. I stood back with my pistol at the “sweet spot”, just shooting it over and over again, watching this guardian in awe as he took his whippings like a big boy. It was like he wasn’t even trying. I have the distinct feeling that, were I not there, the guardian could’ve sustained the fight with this golem indefinitely. The fight didn’t end any quicker than when I solo the thing, but it was interesting to watch this guy put his bunker build to the test and pass.

I, personally, have never solo’d the golem in my rampager gear. This may be under technicality, since I’ve only tried twice without being aided and both times with the pistol/pistol (which is far inferior to the rifle for the fight, to which I can attest), and I can theoretically do it given my ability to avoid nearly all of its attacks. However, once I put on the knight gear and the rifle, I can fight the thing endlessly. I make plenty of mistakes, since I am very shaky and am using an inferior mouse pad to play the game, but that boatload of toughness gives me enough survivability to heal away my damage, letting me fight the golem for very long amounts of time. More than enough to kill it and walk away with at least half health overall.

I’ve had that experience in other places, too. A big one is the Statue of Dwayna. Before I discovered that a perma-vigor build would let me dodge every attack, the first time I tanked it with a small group, I would just eat the AoE blind attack while I dodged the damage wave and the rain of fire. At first this didn’t go so well, but after dying and coming back in knight gear I could just heal away the damage and stare down that statute forever. It isn’t particularly useful, since I can do the same in rampager gear now with some quick mods to my traits, but nonetheless it beautifully demonstrates the principle of a survivability threshold against bosses.

As for finite survivability, finding any specific example of that is difficult. Mostly because I either have a boat load of toughness, or no toughness at all (not so big on vitality investment). Just think of any time where a player tried soloing a boss, and only barely won the fight. Or, since it is relevant now, any instance where a player barely survived being attacked by a group of enemies. Of course if the fight went on for longer they would’ve died, but since they killed the enemy first they didn’t die. I can’t really look at anyone and say that a thief or elementalist or guardian having nearly twice their HP wouldn’t help them beat enemies they couldn’t before.

I’m a bit surprised this has become an issue, but I will address it: fighting multiple enemies.

Frankly, I do not see the big deal about having to fight multiple enemies on a glass cannon build. I only have experience fighting masses of enemies in glass cannon equipment with two classes at the moment (and the necromancer is only half way through leveling), but so far it has not been a problem. Currently I am running a rampager set alongside of the knight set for my engineer. I alternate on the weapons I use, but pistol/pistol is definitely the “zerg melter”. I call it this, because with the coated bullets trait (which is readily accessible without having to re-trait my current build), for every enemy it pierces it explodes, causing small AoE burst of damage each time it hits an enemy. Multiply that by 5 or so enemies, and the auto attack hits the whole group 5 times, quintupling the damage output of the auto attack. Unless enemies are scattered about and attacking from all sides at the same time, their numbers count for nothing against my pistols. Worst case scenarios I put down the glue puddle to stop a besieging group of melee fighters or I toss elixir U to make a barrier against certain ranged enemies.

My necromancer currently has similar luck. Set up a few marks, Use Scepter 2 + Dagger 5 on an enemy group, follow up with epidemic, drop well of suffering then swap to death shroud for life transfer. Enemy groups of seemingly any number just melt away. Now, the engineer may be an exception because they have exceptional AoE damage as a class, but pretty much every class has many attacks that hit in a cone or pierce or bounce or in an AoE. There are weapons and utilities that only hit enemies one at a time, but this brings up a question: Why would anyone use a single target weapon in a place where there are hordes of enemies? It would make so much more sense to use multi hitting weapons against multiple enemies.

The same rule of “enemies that die quicker do less damage” applies to groups just as well as single enemies. Toughness and Vitality gear lets you survive longer, but the enemies live longer, too, so they end up doing more damage. The case for durability can only be made in circumstances where you are ambushed very quickly (and thus the start of the fight behaves much like burst damage), or if the enemies happen to stack disabling abilities far beyond with the stun breaker or condition cure normally manages. This isn’t much more different than burst damage or control effects from a large single boss enemy.

penatbater.4710:

The OP forgot one fundamental question: If you’re a bad player, does toughness/vit suck less?

Not forgotten. Just implied. The answer is yes, it does suck less. To a certain degree, anyway. If someone is so bad at the game that they’re indistinguishable from some impotent manimal clobbering his frustrations out on the keyboard, then no stats will help. If they’re half decent, then toughness and vitality really help as a safety net, allowing you to make more mistakes (which, if you are new, you will) and learn the game better. But once you’ve broken the game down to a science, then you’ll want to go more for DPS since you’re good enough to take those risks now.

And breaking the game down to a science is something I do for fun.

@SneakyErvin

I guess you do bring up a point that I haven’t covered yet. Most of what I’m doing here deals with equipment stats and not traits or utilities. This is mostly because of the minimal impact that trait points give for the most part A maximum of 300 isn’t that much no matter where you go. Since the attributes from equipment breech 1000 points in their primary, that is the main focus of “investing”.

As for my advice on making builds, I always say that you should build for the trait abilities, and not really the trait points themselves. I.E. on my engineer, when I’m running the rifle I switch to the firearms trait that gives 10% more rifle damage. It is a master trait, so it requires 20 points in firearms to get (200 precision and cond damage). While the build normally has 2000 power or so, that single trait gives me 200 extra power (roughly). So, by investing 20 points into precision, I ended up getting 20 points worth into power as well. If I just put those into power, I would get the power but then I’d lose out on the precision and condition damage.

It is all of those little tricks and techniques that make traits worth far more than their attribute points, so analyzing them mathematically based on efficiency just isn’t correct. It isn’t like equipment, which is only the sum of its stats.

ThiBash.5634:

So what is the math on the all-stats items like Rune of Divinity and Triforge Pendant? Seeing as how the elementalist in many ways uses a mix of all playstyles (conditions, burst, dps over time, healing, etc.) you’d assume that going for a mix of all stats would limit the effects of inherent diminishing returns. Also, since the total amount of stats granted by those items is higher, that would be a double gain. Or not?

The all-stat items, although giving more raw attribute points to everything, are not always ideal for every class or build. The main problem with the all-stats are that they give attributes to where a player will likely not need them. There are two big offenders here, with two minor offenders as well:

#1: Healing Power. This attribute is only useful if you use plenty of regen or weapon/utility heals. Otherwise it does very little and isn’t worth investing.

#2: Condition Damage. Simply put, not everyone uses condition damage.

Those two make up 1/3rd of an all-stat’s attributes.

Minor #1: Crit Damage. In order for crit damage to be valuable, high power and high precision are necessary. Without high precision, it never factors into the equation. Without high power, it does a paltry increase since it multiplies based on power. All-stat items themselves don’t give that high power or precision, so they really should only be used to supplement builds that are starting to hit diminishing returns.

Minor #2: Precision. That 50 point increase from the Tri-Forge pendant gives a whopping 2% increase in critical chance. Again, only valuable if you have so much power/vitality/toughness already that you’re better off with other stats.

So all in all, I would recommend that you use omni stats on classes that almost always end up using conditions and/or regen + supplementary heals. Things like the elementalist, the necromancer, and the engineer. Otherwise, the extra points just go into places that don’t get use.

As for how they interact with each other, in short they sort of multiply each other regarding survivability. In length, however…

(Enemy DPS x damage decrease factor of toughness) / (player DPS ratio increase)

So if there was a 20% damage decrease from toughness, and a 50% increase in damage, then it would look like

Enemy DPS x 0.8 / 1.5 = Enemy DPS x 0.53

This is a generic version, though. To get the real numbers, you’d have to factor in the effectiveness of each attribute depending on the class. For example, lets use a thief. This will get us:

Power
Toughness x 916 / 1980
Vitality x 916 / 1080.5
Precision (Power x (100 – (4 + (precision – 916)/21) + crit damage (4 + (precision – 916)/21)

And so on. Another interesting bit I can see here is that the omni-increasing items seem to benefit lightly armored classes more than heavily armored classes.

Man… I really should come up with a “theory of everything” here. Might make things more comprehensive than just scattered mathematical relationships.

Not referring to toss elixir U. I’m referring to Drink Elixir U.

Though I’ve never seen toss elixir U ever fail before. I know it alternates between 3 buffs, but I have yet to see it grant those three buffs. It is the Drink Elixir U that is bugging out and not working on me.

Alright, I haven’t seen these anywhere else, but they are kind of messing with me.

#1: Elixir U will now randomly not work. I have been trying this out for a bit, and so far I have found no set pattern. My best guess is that, while in the midsts of combat, if you use another skill too quickly after using elixir U, then elixir U’s effect will not apply. It still goes onto full cooldown, however. Then again, that explanation isn’t consistant with what I’ve observed, which is the effect not working even while standing still doing nothing. If Elixir U was nerfed somehow so that it doesn’t always work, it would be really nice to know in the patch notes instead of letting engineers get themselves killed. That, or it is a bug…

#2: Rifled Barrels trait has been nerfed for Rifle Skills 3 and 4. It now has a shorter range, which has been messing up all of my trick shots.

Has anyone else seen anything that hasn’t been mentioned or maybe just isn’t working right?

They really can’t come up with a simpler solution than this?

I have an idea: double the damage of conditions, halve their duration, no change in duration to confusion (PVE). Adjust accordingly for very short duration attacks.

There. Now a target can take twice as many bleeds, while making burn and poison use twice as effective. Or, another idea:

Double the bleed cap on champions and dragons and other giant enemies, and only for them.

Requires very little extra data, but provides a temporary solution to help condition builds where they hurt the most.

Now, there comes another side of the offense = defense and vice versa part. It is true that a dead player does not contribute. Thresholds and survivability and all that jazz I’ve covered before and just covered again now.

But, in a given theoretical group of players, when an enemy has singled out a player and has started attacking him, that players survivability is dependent on the total DPS of that group. If everyone goes for lower DPS and defensive builds, then the enemy has an increased survival time, which means it deals more damage overall, which can result in more players being killed by it. There are many bosses in the game with just absurd amounts of damage, so much that investing 900 toughness does little more than just going with the minimum needed to survive an attack, if any is needed at all. We’ve all seen those world events where the champion does some attack, and then 5 people nearby are all kissing pavement. So, a situation like this wouldn’t be unheard of.

Then it gets a bit more complicated when including how overworld bosses gain power and hit points depending on how many people are around. Every player added to the group has to be able to pull their own weight, lest the group be better off without that extra player. Due to the general inefficiency of defensive attributes, adding durable players won’t accomplish as much, since they’ll be just be tissue paper before the boss like everyone else.

It is actually really hard to wrap one’s head around all the ways that offense and defense compete for the same attention. Now, the final thing worth discussing is using statistical bulk to use more offensive tactics. In an ideal world this will work… if defensive attributes gave roughly the same efficiency per point as offensive attributes do. Since they currently do not, survivability allowing for more reckless and damaging tactics is currently an extremely situational strategy. Unless built for stupid high durability, most bosses and champions will bring players down in a few hits regardless of what their build is. On the other end of the spectrum are bosses that can’t do very much damage at all, which in those cases even DPS builds don’t have to do much dodging. So there is a very fine point in which a DPS build can’t take too many hits, but a more durable build can take enough hits where to compensate in in more damaging tactics for the raw statistical power they’ve lost. These situations are, as per my experience, quite rare. As someone said before, the game is built around the concept of dodging instead of tanking.

What I would like to see is more discussion on where it would be good to put the theoretical new efficiency of toughness, vitality, and healing power, and a method to do so without throwing classes out of balance or drastically changing how damage is dealt with. That right there is the hard part.

Is it wrong that I find it more interesting what people are doing here instead of what people are saying here?

I suppose the big thing people seem to forget is that I didn’t write this as some kind of justification for making all power builds, or as an act of condemnation for anyone who doesn’t run a glass cannon. I wrote this because I sincerely believe that toughness (and by extension vitality and healing power) need to be fixed so they provide the same efficiency in attribute investment. It would help if I had come up with a solution to this problem, but unfortunately one still eludes me.

Now, as to where I came to the conclusion about tactics and dodging being capable of sustaining an active defense even on glass cannons, it stems from a video I saw:

When I watched this, it melted my paradigm. For those who do not want to click on a link, it is a video of a berserker build warrior soloing Arah path 2. Long story short: he succeeds. This knife into the heart of what I believed made me curious: why is it that someone would run an incredibly frail setup to solo dungeons? Were I crazy enough to even attempt the task, I wouldn’t have done it unless I were in full soldier’s gear under the belief that it would take so much just to survive basic enemy encounters. It brought me back to some theorycrafting I read about in City of Heroes awhile ago, and then it clicked that offense = defense and vice versa.

So I puzzled and puzzled until my puzzler… was stuck in second gear at late night, so I wrote this whole thing as I came up with it, not knowing what would happen as I was writing it. It was a peculiar thing I had witnessed in game a few times, where I was capable of soloing certain champions in yellow magic find gear just as well as I could in exotic knight gear.

In my musing I had already come up with most criticisms levied against me. I’m not sure most of them are even worth a response when I can just refer to one of the three topic posts where I covered it already. Though there is still plenty to add:

On the increased efficiency of heals, I have only very briefly touched on it, so now I will elaborate more on survival thresholds. The best formulas I can come up with are these:

(Heal amount – damage sustained ) / (heal recharge) = adjusted enemy DPS

It is healing per second minus DPS sustained from an enemy. If this is greater or equal to zero, then there is a limitless amount of fight time in which you can be engaged to the enemy; barring any mistake they will never kill you. If this is less than zero, then the total fight time is

maximum health / adjusted enemy DPS = Player survival time

Which actually tells you how toughness and vitality truly interact with an enemy encounter. Toughness reduces the damage sustained from direct attacks, letting you get a longer survival time and also lets many builds reach a certain threshold when they are undefeatable by an enemy. Vitality never pushes the adjusted enemy DPS, so a finite fight time stays finite, but the duration for for which you can stay in the fight can be increased greatly depending on the class. This makes coming up with my “solution” even more difficult, since the change in healing power has to be considered.

There are two problems when factoring in healing changes with toughness in the offense vs. defense debate. First is that there is no circumstance in which you will realistically know how much damage you’ll sustain in a fight. It is all an abstract, and all we can say about it is that player skill decreases it and toughness decreases it. The second problem is that there is another important factor to include: enemy survival time.

Player survival time – enemy survival time = success factor.

Where enemy survival time is their HP / player DPS. If the success factor is above 0, the player wins. Below 0, the enemy wins. At 0, it can go either way or even tie. The end of the line in the DPS debate is this success factor: all it ever needs to do is be above 0. Any toughness or vitality higher than what is necessary to make it positive for the majority of relevant situations is just excess. Since players are fully healed between fights, all that matters is survival and not really how well a player can survive.

I suppose a side effect of improving the effectiveness of toughness and vitality would be that less is needed as an investment before going full DPS. But… this all hinges on whether or not there are a sufficient amount of enemies in the game that can still pose a threat to a player with improved toughness stats. We don’t want to make it too easy to just tank champions, but we also don’t want to make players who invest in durability to be little more than handicapped distractions while the real DPS players get the job done.

It is actually quite hard to accomplish, so I applaud arenanet for coming as close as they have.

Man I wish this browser had a spell checker… anyway, it would really help to give more thorough and honest evaluations of the issue instead of calling DPS builds selfish and ending on that note (especially when they ultimately aren’t).

What I’d like to see is the effectiveness of investing in toughness adjusted so that, for the low armor group, investing in toughness results in about a 45% or so increase in survivability. It doesn’t have to be on par with investing in damage for every class, but for those who would benefit from it the most I’d like to see a better return. I have yet to figure out how to go about doing this, however. At least not in a matter as inelegant as just throwing on a multiplier to light armor classes…

Anyway, the thing with pure damage builds (berserker, mostly) is that their bonuses tend to scale together well. After increasing power, increasing precision to get higher crit rates gives an overall higher damage boost off of the higher power. The higher crit rates combine well with higher crit damage which combines with higher power to get an overall higher return. This, of course, stacks even further with vulnerability, and also grows further with percentage increases garnered through traits. On another forum I once did a calculation regarding the damage done with grenades in a rampager set made with a full build, and the overall damage of each grenade breached a damage ratio of over 6 times damage before vulnerability was factored in. It gets scary after awhile with how much damage a pure DPS build can really inflict.

Didn’t expect to get as much hostility as I did. Anyway, I get the feeling that a lot of the issues I’m getting come from people reading the 5 sentence version, like someone adding the diminishing returns on damage dealing when I’ve already mentioned it, first sentence of the third post. I like to use dialetic reasoning in order to come to a conclusion, so points and counterpoints are contained within the text.

That said, I completely forgot to factor in boons. I’ve always had a hard time factoring in boons because they are extremely dependent on the group dynamics, and are almost never something that can be counted on in a stand-alone setting. To this date, I have only achieved the might cap once, and it was in a large group while I was running an HGH + Juggernaut hybrid engineer. It was all well and good, except for having to use the flamethrower against a champion to achieve those numbers. But regardless, I’ll take your word for it.

When looking at relevant boons (regeneration, protection, vigor, might, and fury), the ease at which defense is obtained has to be considered. Looking at the armor levels above, the protection boon can be considered a virtual additional amount of toughness added on to the player. For low armor, it is 966 toughness. For medium, it is 1020 toughness. For heavy, it is 1096 toughness. This is assuming the base armor amount, since more of the real toughness stat will cause protection to give an even higher virtual bonus to toughness. With this knowledge, it is safe to say that defensive stats are not far harder to gain through boons than offensive stats. It is very similar to how weakness and vulnerability work, in that weakness provides a 25% damage reduction to the enemy (roughly) immediately while vulnerability needs to be stacked up to a maximum of a 25% damage increase. The bonus from weakness can be, at maximum, 625 toughness on light armor, 660 in medium, and 709 on heavy.

So, from a comparative standpoint of might vs. protection for building stats, you’ll really have to ask yourself what will be easier to maintain, a 15 stacks of might for when you need it, or protection for when you need it? The hardest part about this is that no two classes seem to have the same ability to stack up might or protection, so this decision will have to be made on a class by class basis, further complicated on a group by group basis in which might would be sustained. Then you have to look at what is lost in order to have these boons: do you sacrifice a reflection move so you can get might, or immobilizes to get fury? To get these boons to compensate for damage lost in defenses, you may very well be losing the defenses that would’ve been had otherwise. Then you also have to consider if you stacked might while still running a damage set, and how effective that would be from a survival standpoint as well.

I prefer to build on an individual basis; an inevitable constant that will always be there with every group you play with in any mission you play is the fact that you are there playing it. Other people’s presence or competence is always up in the air.

@Star Ace: It is real useful for min/maxers, though. Sometimes you just wanna push it to the limits, and see how far you can go.

@Salicious:

Looking at the point deficits, you can see that an elementalist has 7,567 less HP and 251 less armor than a warrior. So in a statistical point of view…

Elementalist + 251 toughness + 757 vitality = Warrior.

Darn, I can’t believe I forgot this:

The decrease in efficiency of toughness is = 916 / base armor. The decrease in efficiency of vitality = 9160 / base health. Interestingly, the class that benefits the least from any sort of toughness or vitality is the warrior, and the class that benefits the most is the elementalist.

EDIT: If you want a five sentence version:

1) Toughness sucks.
2) Vitality sucks.
3) Pure damage is awesome.
4) But only if you are a good player.
5) I do math to prove it.

Keeping in mind #3, pure damage will eventually have a diminishing return. If you can kill an enemy 3 times as quickly, it isn’t nearly as much of a jump in survivability than killing them twice as quickly. What also must be considered is that stats always work in groups of 3, and never alone. You can achieve an overall greater survivability, in theory, though the correct combination of stats. This does have one issue, though: any survivability above necessity is inefficient, since killing an enemy quicker does far more than contribute to survivability. It also contributes to income and free time. But, only if you are a skilled enough player, since failure at a task is time consuming and income consuming.

It is also here that this analysis falls apart in PvP and WvW. In PVP, pretty much everyone you encounter has high sustained damage that is nearly unavoidable, and so the point of maximizing survivability through damage and other traits becomes a necessity, and not something that less skilled players do to survive.

As for a way to make toughness and vitality more efficient… I have not come up with a solution yet. This is mostly because I don’t think this analysis is fully complete yet, and I’m afraid that I would break the system further with anything I suggest. But, unless I am missing my guess, toughness and vitality are overall fools errands to invest in anything but the minimum required to survive certain encounters.

I suppose that ends the bulk of this analysis on toughness. For reference, I will list a few extra formula for anyone who wants to pursue this further.

Factoring in critical hits:

1 x (chance of not hitting crit) + (1 + 0.5 + crit damage) x (chance of hitting crit) = total crititcal multiplier of damage.

So, for example, berserker armor, weapon, and jewels (not factoring backpack) give 58% crit damage and 667 precision (36% crit chance), so…

1 × .64 + 2.08 × .36 = 1.39

Or a 139% damage multiplier to power. So if power does double damage, that’ll be 2 × 1.39 = 2.78 total increase in damage. Things become more complicated when factoring in the presence of fury or other things that increase crit rate.

Condition Damage:
Bleeds do double damage 850 condition damage.
Poison does double damage at 840 condition damage.
Burns do double damage at 1312 condition damage.
Confusion does double damage at 867 condition damage.

Factoring damage increases by percentage: Things such as 5% bonus to damage when endurance isn’t full, 10% increase to rifle damage, 5% damage while under the effect of might, etc. For now, I assume a geometic relationship, multiplying the damage ratio from power by 1.05 then 1.05 then 1.10 and so on. An arithmatic relationship would be to just add them together (1.05 + 1.05 + 1.1) and multiply them afterwards. I’ll need clarification on this.

But what of vitality? Well, that works on a similar principle. If we were to say that the 920 toughness were 920 vitality instead, then this would add 9200 HP to the character. Going off of the different base HP of each class:

Warrior, Necromancer: 18,372
Engineer, Ranger, Mesmer: 15,082
Guardian, Thief, Elementalist: 10,805

And using this forumla:

1 – Base HP / New HP

We would get the following:

Highest base: 1 – 0.666 = 33.3%
Medium Base: 1 – 0.621 = 37.9%
Lowest base: 1 – .540 = 46.0%

So on a short term basis, vitality investment is either more effective than toughness or a lot more effective than toughness. For the lowest base HP, vitality is almost as good as investing in power. Vitality comes with the advantage that it can mitigate condition damage better, but heals remain steady in their effectiveness, although they heal less as a percentage of health. It is for this reason that vitality is often called ablative, for once the extra HP is worn away the effectiveness is gone. This, again, isn’t a problem for damage, though, since an enemy that is alive for half as long will inflict half as many conditions.

A final advantage to high damage builds is that they also reduce the damage for teammates as well. Killing an enemy twice as fast means that teammates also take half as much damage. Because of this, high damage is ultimately a cooperative form of defense, which is something neither toughness nor vitality can claim (unless you count standing around and taking hits while rezzing someone as cooperative).

This is all well and good, but you’re probably thinking that in practice it isn’t as simple as “if the enemy lives half as long, it’ll only do half the damage”. And this is correct to a certain degree: stats do not exist in a vacuum by themselves, and enemies have bursts of damage and may live for very long amounts of time despite being dealt more damage. However, it is by the game’s very design that the tools for mitigating the various problematic portions of a pure damage build are built into nearly each and every class. Taking a look at the various problems:

1) Burst damage from enemies. A lot of vets and champions may have an attack or two that is capable of bowling over a pure damage build in one hit, and toughness/vitality letting you survive that hit would be crucial. However, this is what dodging was made for: when that OHKO attack starts coming your way, you get out of the way. With copious blocking skills and reflecting skills and dodging skills with control effects, immobilizes, blinds, and vigor, the only barrier to a pure damage build surviving an encounter is how well they can read enemy patterns. Because of this, toughness and vitality become like a safety net until players get good enough that they no longer need them.

2) Conditions. Enemies can apply conditions in one of two ways: either steadily or in bursts. Steadily applied conditions benefit greatly from an enemy dying sooner, since they act like regular damage output. Burst conditions follow the same dodging mechanics as in #1, but with the added bonus that condition curing abilities can get rid of the problem before it escalates into something severe.

It is because of #1 and #2 that, eventually, players will upgrade to pure damage builds as they learn enough about the game. In the long run they survive better while accomplishing tasks faster. There is one unavoidable caveat, though:

3) High sustained damage and thresholds. There exists many enemies in the game that are incredibly durable while having high non-burst damage. They are rare, but nonetheless they are encountered on occasion. Often they are champions that seem to only have a ranged auto attack. It is here that a pure damage build suffers, since there needs to be a certain survivability threshold that they need to achieve. This threshold, of course, is how much damage the enemy does (considering all mitigation techniques like dodging and control) compared to how much the player can heal in the timeframe between healing. It is here that toughness shines, since vitality lasts but for a moment. High damage builds often have to contemplate where this threshold is when building traits, since it will allow them to beat those elusive but very difficult bosses, or they have to develop specific tactics to get around those bosses.

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.

It is a very sad day when capital gains is considered abuse. Frankly I find the whole issue of “having” to play the market to not make any real sense.

Take one look at how money works in real life, and you will come to a very quick discovery: capital gains is the #1 source of income for the worlds richest. You may be asking yourself “What is a capital gain”? To be stated simply, a capital gain is the profit made when any investment is sold or traded for a value worth more than what the current owner bought it for. So, say, if I bought 30 acres of land for $100 an acre, and then sold it for $120 an acre, that $20 is considered a capital gain. Now, the important thing to note is that capital gains are the #1 source of income for the worlds richest people in real life. It is simply a principle of economic law: The more money that is invested, the greater gains or losses that can be had from those investments. The income is quick and simple, making it a fast and relatively easy way to make money.

Since this is an economic law, it is absurd to expect these laws to be suspended in any place that uses a free economy.. When people can trade for prices they want, ultimately this will be the best way to make money. It is true in real life, and it will be true in the games.

Now, an important distinction to be made here is the difference between real life and the game: In the game there are no truly “necessary” commodities. In real life, there are things like oil, water, food, electricity, and shelter that are nearly an absolute necessity for nations to function, so when one of these goes out of control it is necessary to reel it in, for the outcome of not doing so could be dire. In this game, however, all commodities are a luxury, and are generated by a system with ultimately infinite supply. Because of this, there is little to no need to “control” the market in the game. Almost everything will always work itself out in one way or another. There can never be a true monopoly on things, since those things can be always spontaneously generated by another party.

So then we have the strange part of this conundrum: Players who want to be rich or own rich things, know how to get rich (by playing the market), but refuse to do so. If the distaste for playing the market is so strong, then it’ll have to be accepted that getting something like a precursor won’t be worth the agony of having to mass trade on the TP. If the desire to have a precursor is so strong, then it should be enough to willingly sacrifice some of their entertainment in order to afford one. This makes me question the validity of these complaints that things are too expensive because people play the market. If you’ve resolved yourself to live by an inferior money making method, then you shouldn’t complain about people who use a superior money making method: it is your choice, after all.

IRL it is understandable why people don’t go with capital gains. It is risky, the stakes are higher, there is more to loose, and figuring out the market is much harder. But in this game, you’ll practically stumble upon a way to make a good capital gain once a week, and you’ll have plenty of gold available to act on this since gold isn’t going into necessities like food, water. and power. This is nice, since with all of the untradeable expenses needed for things like legendary weapons, it can cut down on the grind significantly if you make good predictions on the trading post.

A player who is evasive and skilled enough needs no heals. Seriously, any player’s mindset when entering a dungeon should be, first and foremost, to take care of themselves.

Pretty much every increase that doesn’t come from the trait points isn’t reflected. This includes runes, sigils, and trait abilities.

IMO, FoTM does fail, but it isn’t because the enemies are extremely hard or anything. The biggest problem with the dungeon are the cheap tactics and the fact that you can’t self rez unless everyone in the team dies.

Normally you would want to go with either cheap tactics or an inability to rez. But this combines both at the same time, which makes for a very unpleasant dungeon. For example, while doing the underwater fractal there is a pathway that you have to go through that is extremely dark and does high damage in this darkness. The only way to go forward are to grab luminous plants and go from luminous plant to luminous plant.

Problem is, with 5 people and only 2 or 3 plants at each point, someone dies from the darkness. Or they die because the krait in that area use nothing but stuns and sinks and immobilizes. So you have to go back to rez them, but they die immediately since they’re in the darkness without protection, and you’ll likely die if you go there since krait will be around their carcass. So the team dwindles down from 5 to 2 or 1, and those few can’t fight off the vet kraits that await them at the end and then they get killed. Restart event. Then, if someone manages to get forward far enough to hit the checkpoint, they have to suicide themselves so the whole team can arrive and respawn finally.

So you have an obstacle with nearly instant-kill pitfalls that requires most of the team to make it to the end to have a chance, and make it so once someone dies they can’t come back unless everyone dies or someone else manages to rez them but will most likely die in that same spot anyway. That isn’t fun. Dying because someone grabbed the plant you were going to grab along the way isn’t fun. Dying because some invisible krait from behind a sea structure decided to fragment sinks isn’t fun. It’s more like trial and error where the whole event fringes on your weakest link.

Sometimes, players won’t even go back to rez you if 1 or 2 die. Instead, they’ll just continue on the event without you, making sure you get no rewards. That’s arguably worse, because then someone is left out and not because the other players don’t want to rez him, but because he’s too much of a problem to rez.

This is ignoring many of the bugs that occur, such as how if a player falls into laval during one of the events, there is no way to rez that player again. The game will sometimes try to teleport you to a safe place, but this only works on the dead player’s screens. Other players still see your carcass in the midsts of a death trap; unable to save it. Of course, this happens quite often since the place with the lava is a jumping puzzle with nearly invisible holes in the only pathway you can take.

Look, you can take instant death mechanics and put them into the game. That’s cool. You can make places that have no zerg ability due to the lack of rezzing. That is also cool. But you can’t put them both into the same place, since then it becomes a source of neverending frustration fueled by misfortune more than any lack of skill.

I think nearly any profession can be support.

Honestly I’m disappointed that more games don’t take the 4-tier system that City of Heroes had: Tanks, offense, support, control. When I first heard about the trinity, it made me wonder why someone would just arbitrarily cut off one leg of the table. Then I learned it is just a simpler and not as thought out system.

I think the thing I like about the lack of a trinity in GW2 is that team makeup isn’t dependent on the skill of one player. Instead, everyone is responsible for themselves and it minimizes the effect of one slacker joining your team. I’m surprised that, as a challenge, more people aren’t running dungeons with fewer players.

The only issue with the mortar is that it is outdone by a grenadier build. However, if you aren’t running grenades, the mortar does have it’s uses. In dungeons it is useful for setting up choke points as well as holding them. I used a mortar to defeat the mass bandit spawns in CM explore mode. It is also useful against large bosses and champion mobs who get attacked by a ton of players, since you can usually hang back and just attack then heal.

I just found the whole thing grating and uncomfortable, and didn’t find it subtle at all.

2 seconds, eh? I think I’ve dropped one quicker than that with my guardian. I saw the thief coming and knew he was running a dagger ambush build. So, I laid down scepter #2 skill at my location, switch to greatsword and then used Symbol of Wrath and Whirling Wrath. Predictably the thief stealed himself over to me and begin to assault me as hard as possible. The thief was down before Whirling Wrath finished.

The best I’ve manged to get out of a condition damage build was just from taking traits that extended bleed duration and putting that on top of my power minion master build. Doing that made the scepter do a bit more damage than the axe. However, I had to nerf my dagger damage and loose a few more traits to get bleed damage up, and after all that the extra damage didn’t beat out the usefulness of the axe. In the end, the axe’s vulnerability, life force generating abilities, and retalation works better for a minion master.

PVE Solo, PVE Dung, and WvWvW all use different specs depending on what you’re doing. Respecs in this game are cheap, so it’ll probably be best to experiment around. However, if you want grenades and don’t mind the hand cramping, I’d recommend the following:

PvE and Dungeons: 30/0/10/30/0. Explosives traits: II, VII, XI, Inventions Trait VI, Alchemy Traits II, IX, X. Weapon can be anything and equipment could be anything, since grenades do both high damage and conditions You can go from durable to glass cannon. This is an alchemy build, and a turret build can also work nicely. Utilities are grenade kit, elixir U, then any other elixir.

WvWvW: Same spread, but for alchemy take trait VI instead of IX.

fddcsjxk.2358:

nofo.8469:

match or beat a guardian for point control

Mind posting a build that can do that? It’s not that I don’t believe you, but I’ve had a lot of trouble with guardians in particular.

Well, I do have a build that can hold points really well in tPVP.

20/10/30/10/0

Explosives ability 6 and 9
Firearms ability 6
Inventions Ability 3, 10, 12
Alchemy Ability 6

Rifle w/ Sigil of Superior Force
6 Superior Runes of Melandru
Soldier’s Amulet w/ Soldiers Jewel

Healing Turret
Net Turret
Rocket Turret
Flame Turret
Supply Crate

This is a rough sketch, since the turrets can be swapped out for other things you need or other turrets, and the abilities can be changed around to get what you need to get, often times in the same match.

But yeah, this setup can hold a point like a boss. With the rifle and the net turret (both toolbelt and the turret itself), you can have your opponent immobilized for a very long period of time, or you can break up the immobilizes to constantly annoy your opponent. Just immobilize the enemy then use rifle #4 to blow them out of the capture area to prevent them from grabbing. The net turret’s overcharged ability lets you stun the enemy for extended lengths of time, letting you get in close and use the rifle’s more damaging abilities. The rocket turret snipes enemies from, like, 1500 distance and can apply a regular knockdown along with AoE burning. The flame turret is the most expendable, since that exists for the defensive smoke field and to apply additional burning in a cone. Between the flame and the rocket turret, the enemy will be almost constantly on fire, ticking at 328 damage per second. The supply crate stuns while laying down a constant regen, along with another flame and net turret. Combine those together, and you will be incredibly controlling, and incredibly hard to kill.

Other things to use other than the flame turret include the thumper turret and nearly any of the elixirs. The thumper turret’s overcharge ability is an AoE Knockback that will blow any enemy players out of the point, but otherwise doesn’t do much. Elixir S is IMO the best elixir to go for since it breaks stuns, avoids damage spikes, grants stability or stealth. Elixir U can be good for damage spikes and also for the projectile stopping fields it can put up. Elixir C is bland condition removal, but that is quite important since otherwise this set has no good condition removal. Elixir B is kind of “Meh”, but gets mention because the power focus of this set makes retaliation a great boon to have.

The weaknesses of this set are that it doesn’t have good condition removal or a stun breaker. Usually you end up relying on something like the healing turret’s detonate to blow back a damage spike, but that is often times unreliable. The runes of Melandru are there to decrease condition duration and stun duration, and the primary defense against damage spikes is Protection Injection from the alchemy trait line. It is a really nice ability that gives protection for 3 seconds (CD 5 seconds) each time you are disabled, AKA right when you need it and every time you need it. But otherwise, controlling effects are your main defense, along with the fact that you’ll have over 3k armor and 22K HP if you go defensive like the above set.

Of course, you can also build it offensively, too. If you forgo accelerent packed turrets, you can invest more in firearms to get Rifle Mod and something like Go for the Eyes. Or you can hybrid it with the Juggernaut Trait and the flamethrower for more control effects and increased durability. Or you can go into the alchemy set and get elixir support or Self-Regulating Defenses which is another extremely awesome ability from that trait line. The beauty of these controlling turret sets are that they are quick and easy to change up. You can’t run to a point, see a turret engineer holding it and go “Yeah, I know exactly what he’s going to do” because he could do anything.

Pannonica.5378:

Not sure if it is a bug (while definitely being annoying).
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Healing_Turret

Quote: "This turret’s overcharge ability Cleansing Burst applies when the turret next fires, not instantly. "

What really puzzles me though is that the tooltip of the healing turret reflects Regeneration ticks correctly, but the turret doesn’t apply it.

Quoting from the German forum:

“Regeneration has a base healing of 130. Plus 12,5 healing on top per 100 healing power.

Regenerating mist works, but the turret never exceeds 130 healing/tick – no matter how high my healing power is.

Whats even more strange, is that the tooltip shows the correct values:

Healing power 0:
— Tooltip: 8s Regeneration: 1040 Healing
— actual healing ticks: 130 Heal (in 8s = 1040 Heal) – correct

Healing power 1223:
— Tooltip: 8s Regeneration: 2263 Healing
— actual healing ticks: 130 Heal (in 8s = 1040 Heal) – false"

Be aware I can’t verify this at the moment. Also it could be either the tooltip or the implementation that is wrong.
Moreover this is off topic. Sorry.

That is working as intended. Turrets and other skill summoned entities don’t receive stat bonuses from anything on the player. Because of this, the regen caused by the healing turret will always be for the same amount.