Guild Wars 2

Knight has high toughness and medium precision/power.
Soldier has high power and medium vitality/toughness.

Personally I believe power is far superior to precision. My own numbers tell me soldier is very close behind knight for dps, and I am not prepared to take a large effective HP hit in order to gain a little bit more dps by switching from soldier to knight.

I’m actually hoping ANet release a bit more info around the maths of the game (:

Asura is correct, weakness hurts non crit builds.
50% of non crits deal 50% damage while weakened. If your crit rate is 24% (Let’s say you have fury up) then 76%/2 = 38% of your hits will do half damage, aka 19% damage decrease overall.

Agree there will be a breakpoint somewhere, but I think it’ll be tough to reach. It’s alright saying power is great, but you can only get so much of it. pwr/pwr/+pwr gear doesn’t exist. To push past that barrier of dps you need crit gear, but it comes down to the age old question – do you want to sacrifice survivability for it?

Napkin math.. If you have 1800 power, 50% crit, and 150% crit damage… let’s say you do 100 base damage (200 after doubling your power) which goes up to 250 when you factor crits. 30% crit damage brings that to 280. An extra 300 power instead of the 30% crit damage would add ~33% of your base damage, bringing it to 283. Then keep in mind that crit is not valued the same on gear. Eg berzerker coat gives 72 precision but only 5% crit damage. I view that as 22 stat points going missing in addition to the poor scaling. If I was going to take crit damage the most efficient way is through the traits.

Anyway I’m jetting off to another country for a week so I won’t be around to make any posts (: ciao! Thanks for all the feedback.

Thanks, I will give spiked armor another run.

Some food for thought around soldier (pwr/tough/vit) vs cleric (healing/tough/pwr).

Soldier shout: 1432
Cleric shout: 2170

soldier
surge 291 hps 17460 per minute
mending 234 14040
signet 181hps if active, 210 passive
6 shouts per minute (lung capacity) = 8592 hp per minute
6.8 shouts per minute (shrug it off) = 9737 hp per minute

max 27197 hp mer min

cleric
surge 322 hps 19320 per minute
mending 271 16260
signet 227hps if active, 240 passive
6 shouts per minute (lung capacity) = 13020 hp per minute
6.8 shouts per minute (shrug it off) = 14756 hp per minute

max 34076 hp per min

max of 6879 total difference over a minute
soldier amulet = 6440hp

Therefore if the fight lasts over a minute, your own personal HP is better off by using cleric amulet and your team mates gain roughly 240hp per second. The 279 power loss isn’t fun for your dps though. This is useful in a large group perhaps.

Ah nevermind then, I used to know a warrior called Braxxus is all ty

Random comment. Braxxus, did you used to play on Draenor in WoW?

I agree with the thread though, we can have much more of an impact on a fight than other classes and change the outcome if we want to.

Very close to what I use when I mean business (aka not trying out wacky specs) and I love it. I know everyone harps on about warhorn being great, but a shout warrior can do what he does best OFF that global cooldown which is amazing. I assume you use power/vit/toughness gear.

One more heart +1 for offhand mace (amazing knockdown) and the bloodlust + might sigils. I think if you spec for surviving and get the bloodlust stacks you start doing damage close to a glass spec.

Some might argue swapping the defense traits to missile deflection, shieldmaster and merciless hammer, but I think embrace pain is a great mitigation trait. Possibly moreso than shield master. Why? Adren = earthshaker, which means damage prevention via stun.

I’m not a fan of either 30 traits for defense tbh. Spiked armor has low uptime and is only useful if you’re being attacked (if you are being attacked and not your groupmates, you’ve already won the fight). It also doesn’t sit well with proccing followed by you stunning or knocking the enemy to the ground. Defy pain is just meh. 3 seconds on an already tanky character… eh. But I guess what else could you pick? Best of a bad bunch I suppose. Possibly the mace trait for more knockdowns but that’s not a great pick either. Putting the 10 points elsewhere won’t work well either because of the toughness→power conversion minor.

I feel naked without balanced stance. And I don’t rate the traited version… proccing while you’re sitting on your kitten on the floor isn’t helpful. It should proc AND prevent the cc that hits you.

Power, vit and toughness are my favorite stats by far, which is why a build like this suitkittenreat.

Anyway, darn you for posting this. I’ll be facing more of em now ):

It’s slightly under 2% per boon. I don’t know if it has a cap on the amount of boons, but under For Great Justice it gives roughly 6% damage increase. This can be tested with steady weapons and golems in the pvp zone. It’s quite a nice boost for a 10 point trait.

Hi all,

Here’s a post I made on gw2 guru that I felt could help some people. I’m happy to be corrected on any of it, but for now I hope at least a few people get some help from it.

Damage formula (best guess so far, appears accurate enough….)
(P + M * 35) * WS * SC / (T + D) = Total Damage
P = Power, M = Might Stacks, WS = Weapon Strength, SC = Skill Coefficient, T = Toughness, D = defense

We don’t need to know weapon strengths or skill coefficients in order to do comparative tests.
Let’s take base toughness+armor of a warrior; 2127 and assume the output of the damage formula was 2,127,000 to make the math easy. You will take 1,000 damage from this hit after mitigation. (2127000/2127).

It is clear that adding 100 toughness to the base results in the formula changing to 2127000/2227, or roughly 955.
It is then clear that adding 200 toughness to the base results in the formula changing to 2,127,000/2,327, or roughly 914.
It is then clear that adding 300 toughness to the base results in the formula changing to 2,127,000/2,427, or roughly 876.

We can see adding 100 toughness reduced our damage taken by 45, a further 100 reduced it by another 41, and the final 100 reduced it by a further 38.
This is the diminishing returns some people think they are seeing.

However, turn that into EHP terms… (Effective Health Points)
If you had 1000hp and base toughness, you would die in 1 hit.
If you had 1,000hp and +100 toughness, you would require 1.047 hits (1000/955).
If you had 1,000hp and +200 toughness, you would require 1.094 hits (1000/914).
If you had 1,000hp and +300 toughness, you would require 1.141 hits (1000/876).

And you can now see that toughness scales the same way for survivability as power does for damage: linearly.

The major difference between mitigation and damage is that you can double your base power (resulting in double damage) by simply adding 916. The same does not apply for defense because it is made up of 916 toughness (which you can double) and a further ~1000 or so from your profession’s armor class.

Taking the original formula you can see why this is the case…
(P + M * 35) * WS * SC / (T + D) = Total Damage.
Because the bracket on the left (which refers to power plus might stacks) is multiplied by the weapon strength and then by the coefficient.
Call it 2 * 3 * 5 for example.. we know this results in 30. Double ANY part of this… the power, weapon strength or the skill coefficient and you result in double your damage. Eg 4 * 3 * 5 = 60. 2 * 6 * 5 = 60. 2 * 3 * 10 = 60. This means that going from 916 power to 1832 power doubles your damage, adding a further 916 up to 2748 results in 300% of your base damage, or 50% more than you had at 1832 power.
This simpler logic does not work for the mitigation side of things because it is an addition of toughness and defense. rather than a multiplication.

As a contrast to that first 916 power doubling your base damage, you would need +50% crit damage and 100% crit chance to match that return (roughly 2500 points worth of stats!). As a contrast to that second load of 916 power giving you an extra 50% on top of your doubled damage (3x base), you would need either +50% crit damage and 50% crit chance (roughly 1500 points worth of stats) or 100% crit chance at 50% damage (roughly 2000 points worth of stats) or somewhere in-between those two extremes to match the return to dps granted by power. TLDR : Power is my favourite damage stat in terms of bang for buck. To maximise my character I go all out power, toughness and vitality.

Hope this helps at least one person, like I said I’m more than happy to be corrected if any of it is wrong.