39 replies to this topic

[Al Shamari]

Red_Falcon, on 07 November 2012 - 11:26 PM, said:

Knight's armor, zerk everything else, ruby orbs, crit sigils.
Never regretted a bit, I'm actually very fond of this setup.

PS: Toughness from Knight's armor is about 30% damage reduction btw.
You lose 16% crit dmg, no big deal, I believe I'm still sitting on 230% crit damage.

Have you compared this to the benefits of full Valkyrie's armor? I feel the the vitality would get you further as a Thief than toughness, but I can only speculate.

[Lilitu]

I prefer soldier gear. I find the dps difference between that and knight to be negligible due to the lower PWR on knight despite the higher precision. This is especially true on chars without a good +30% crit traitline such as warriors. On thieves however I would love to take knight gear.. but the hp hit is a heavy burden, so I go soldier gear and zerker jewels. Knight gear and zerker jewels if I'm feeling ballsy. I would sooner go soldier/zerker than valk/zerker because I do not believe 72 of one stat to be worth a mere 5% crit damage on the chestpiece for example. I get my crit dmg from traits and from jewellery where it scales better where possible.

Switch everything to zerker for glass fun of course.

As Red Falcon pointed out, ~33% dmg reduction is nothing small. It's actually a 50% effective HP buff, so you'll live 50% longer.

Edited by Lilitu, 07 November 2012 - 11:42 PM.

[Xades]

Al Shamari, on 07 November 2012 - 11:35 PM, said:

Have you compared this to the benefits of full Valkyrie's armor? I feel the the vitality would get you further as a Thief than toughness, but I can only speculate.

Crit seems better. The health overall on the thief seems low but that is because a thief has to move to strike in all directions.

[rlsquared2]

Crit chance at a certain points becomes redundant. I mix it up with valk and zerk.

[Red_Falcon]

Al Shamari, on 07 November 2012 - 11:35 PM, said:

Have you compared this to the benefits of full Valkyrie's armor? I feel the the vitality would get you further as a Thief than toughness, but I can only speculate.

I'd rather take 30% less damage.

Vitality only shines above Toughness in long fights, and a Thief should never let an enemy live that much.
Also, full Valk means losing a large amount of crit chance, thus sacrificing a lot of damage.

[shadowstorme1122]

@Elr3d
Hi, I don't know what is the exact numbers on damage reduction is but here is what i found out based on my testing.  Vit and Toughness really do affect your survival but on a different manner.

Vit
• Absorbs condition damage, while toughness doesn't do anything about condition damage.
• Can save you from being one hit by boss, etc. as compared to toughness, if the above post is really true that toughness really negates 30% damage thats seem low than having more HP.

Toughness
• Reduces incoming damage, no idea if works on spells or just physical damage, maybe the game doesn't have magical and physical damage as wiki says just damage.  So lets just assume that toughness and armor negates ALL damage (magical or physical).
• Can't reduce condition damage.

Nice stat build by the way pretty defensive for a thief standards =).



@Al Shamari
The game was designed not needing specific roles (tank, heal, dps) in a dungeon you can run a dungeon as you want to play your character as you please, which was for me really nice, but do you think a thief can take the same number of hits over a guardian or a warrior both of them having the same gear setup.  I'll bet thief will be the first class to go down before the two.

Now how does DPS meter benefit the game.
• Determines which build and gear setup has potentially the most and least damage, having that info will provide players the means on tweaking there toon on dps and survivability as the game doesnt have a HEALER role in a dungeon so each character must be self sufficient.

• Yes class outweighing each other will surely arise but each class can't do what the other does.  Im just assuming here, that there are more class in game  better in healing a party compared to a thief and could take more hits before going down than a thief.

• Having DPS meter can bring both good and bad for the game but i feel the good out weighs the bad.

• Find out which stat is better more crit chance or crit damage, etc.

People might say that im not a tank or a healer im a dps class so a ROLE issue might arise if the game made a dps meter, i think it will not because, the game has no aggro table and the game needs you to be self sufficient, so no matter how try to make a tank, healer and 3 dps party, your tank will never be able to take all the damage for the group.

Now after further testing on the Valk~Knight~Zerker gear
My hunch was right, the +560 toughness and armor which came from my gear reduced damage which was proven that i was able to take on more mobs as to having no toughness from gears.

I still have no exact numbers but i feel if you want to add survivability to the thief class having an HP of 16.5k up with X toughness is needed.

But not all of us are defensive minded people, most probably all wants to have a balance build in terms of dps and survivability.

Knight gear in a dps perspective
> provides precision

VS

Valkyrie gear in a dps perspective
> provides higher power
> provides crit damage

Im just guessing here again but i think a full valkyrie gear will yield more survivability and dps as compared to a full knights gear assuming you don't plan on taking several mobs at a time.  Because valk provides more stable damage via power and more dps stat in terms of crit damage over precision  valk gives 6% crit damage vs knight gives X precision which will just give you ?? 1-2% increase crit chance.

Now why did i say valk has more survivability over knight its bec when facing one opponent you will not be taking continous hits in where damage mitigation is needed > again this is just me if someone could have an indept explanation on the matter at hand it would be nice, but based on my testing i felt better wearing full valk over knight and i felt i provided more dps aswell.

[shadowstorme1122]

Red_Falcon, on 08 November 2012 - 12:48 AM, said:

I'd rather take 30% less damage.

Vitality only shines above Toughness in long fights, and a Thief should never let an enemy live that much.
Also, full Valk means losing a large amount of crit chance, thus sacrificing a lot of damage.

Im speaking in PvE realm so you obviously can't dps down a boss quickly same for champions.  In terms of damage i don't think Valk has less dps over knight as Valk gives more Power which is constant over precision.  Like what ive posted above you get more damage in valk bec it provides 6% crit damage over + 1-2% of crit chance.

Edited by shadowstorme1122, 08 November 2012 - 03:20 AM.

[Elr3d]

shadowstorme1122, on 08 November 2012 - 02:52 AM, said:

@Elr3d
Hi, I don't know what is the exact numbers on damage reduction is but here is what i found out based on my testing.  Vit and Toughness really do affect your survival but on a different manner.

Vit
• Absorbs condition damage, while toughness doesn't do anything about condition damage.
• Can save you from being one hit by boss, etc. as compared to toughness, if the above post is really true that toughness really negates 30% damage thats seem low than having more HP.

Toughness
• Reduces incoming damage, no idea if works on spells or just physical damage, maybe the game doesn't have magical and physical damage as wiki says just damage.  So lets just assume that toughness and armor negates ALL damage (magical or physical).
• Can't reduce condition damage.

Nice stat build by the way pretty defensive for a thief standards =).

I can tell you a defensive Thief is the key to defeating over aggressive ones. However my damage is still very decent, especially if I'm not the only AoE stealthing guy in the group (still, 10 might is nothing to be taken lightly)

Other than that I can confirm Toughness negates all damage for the simple reason that the game doesn't make a difference between magical and physical damage. Only thing affected by the type of damage you use is the death animation, but there is no sword paper scissor like damage interactivity like "resilient to fire" for fire enemies and the like (only destroyers are immune to burning, by lore definition, but they still don't take reduced fire damage, while in GW1 they were reduced)

Still, if Vitality can avoid a OS from a boss, so can Toughness since bosses attacks are also negated.

I'm a great defender of the "have a mix of both" idea.

[shadowstorme1122]

Elr3d, on 08 November 2012 - 08:33 AM, said:

I can tell you a defensive Thief is the key to defeating over aggressive ones. However my damage is still very decent, especially if I'm not the only AoE stealthing guy in the group (still, 10 might is nothing to be taken lightly)

Other than that I can confirm Toughness negates all damage for the simple reason that the game doesn't make a difference between magical and physical damage. Only thing affected by the type of damage you use is the death animation, but there is no sword paper scissor like damage interactivity like "resilient to fire" for fire enemies and the like (only destroyers are immune to burning, by lore definition, but they still don't take reduced fire damage, while in GW1 they were reduced)

Still, if Vitality can avoid a OS from a boss, so can Toughness since bosses attacks are also negated.

I'm a great defender of the "have a mix of both" idea.

Yes where on the same both of mixing toughness with vit, but in terms of dps how much are you lacking behind in the threshold of dps and being alive that we don't know bec a DPS meter is nowhere to be found.  We have a similar build in where we stack might for offense but i have more power, prec and crit damage and i stack might up to 20+ most of the time during long fights bec of my build.

Its true that toughness negates damage but here is where the difference lies.

Boss hits you for 16,000 points of damage less 30% since someone posted that toughness negates 30% of damage which is 4800

Your HP is is at 11,000 , you will still die bec the reduced damage is 11,200. Don't forget toughness and armor DOESN'T negate condition damage.

Bottomline if you want to have survival over dps you'll go for a full soldier setup.  Now Knight vs Valkyrie, valkyrie gets my vote bec of the higher dps and bigger health pool

[Elr3d]

shadowstorme1122, on 08 November 2012 - 09:06 AM, said:

Yes where on the same both of mixing toughness with vit, but in terms of dps how much are you lacking behind in the threshold of dps and being alive that we don't know bec a DPS meter is nowhere to be found.  We have a similar build in where we stack might for offense but i have more power, prec and crit damage and i stack might up to 20+ most of the time during long fights bec of my build.

Its true that toughness negates damage but here is where the difference lies.

Boss hits you for 16,000 points of damage less 30% since someone posted that toughness negates 30% of damage which is 4800

Your HP is is at 11,000 , you will still die bec the reduced damage is 11,200. Don't forget toughness and armor DOESN'T negate condition damage.

Bottomline if you want to have survival over dps you'll go for a full soldier setup.  Now Knight vs Valkyrie, valkyrie gets my vote bec of the higher dps and bigger health pool

I understand *only* toughness can be less attractive than *only* vitality, but as I stack both, I'll get hit for maybe 13k from your boss hit while having 15k hp thus surviving (less damage reduction but more hp to absorb it).

My main damage source is my sword autoattack damage buffed by the 10 might stacks from the Shadow Arts 25 trait. It usually hits 700-900 on the 2 first hits and 1100-1300 on the last. Critical gets them up to ~1500 on the first hits and 1800-1900 on the last. Enough damage to get trough most dungeons while being the one bulky enough to revive people if needed.

In a WvWvW context, considering I constantly regen from stealth and additionally regen while in Stealth and adding up to my armor and 15k hp, it's very much enough to outlast my opponent. Especially if they build glass cannon because they feel my (maybe) subpar damage way way more while not being able to burn me out due to my regen/stealth/daze (from sword stealth hit).

I'm obviously weak to mesmer confusion/shatter builds though and pretty much can't 1v1 them given equal skill level. Still, as I run mostly in duo with another bulky/support player (D/D auramentalist) we can get the most out of each other since I can cloak him at critical times and in return he can give me fire, frost and shocking armor

Edited by Elr3d, 08 November 2012 - 10:53 AM.