Gorwe

Wordsworth, on 31 March 2013 - 08:30 PM, said:

Ah, the "no one is forcing you" argument that comes up so often when flaws are brought to surface.

Magic find shouldn't take away from other gear stats, it should be added an "infusion" slot would be, you could pay to infuse your gear with varying degree of magic find depending on costs, other than that it should be restricted to consumables.

Gorwe, on 18 March 2013 - 08:27 PM, said:

Concerning this, it's probably because resurrection really *s with game lore. FF is a great example when you can buy a phoenix down in most any item shop yet if someone dies in the story they stay dead. Aerith dead? Why can't I use any of my 99 phoenix downs!?! Let alone villains.

As for TSW, you do die. But the bees from Agartha supposedly put your pieces back together. One of the quests actually requires you to die so you can interact and see things you can't when you're alive. I have no idea why. It was even mentioned in a cinematic.

Gorwe, on 05 February 2013 - 11:56 PM, said:

At this point, any of them that work...  Substituting is exactly what it sounds like, you identify the root of the compulsion, and find something else that fires the same neurons without the same level of self-destructive "downward spiral" involvement.  In my case, it's been refocusing that compulsory "Control Freak" aspect towards CG-Artwork instead.  In your case, it could be damn near anything since you clearly said you don't have this same problem in several other game genres where the "mechanics for a clear victory" are very different.  I'll be honest, the ONLY game I ever get a craving to go back and play is GW1, and Gw2 to some degree mainly b/c those success metrics were so clearly "structured".  Especially GW1 where DP would pile up and kick you out of the area in hardmode if you didn't play like it was HardCore Diablo.


But yeah, don't listen to these jerks who are saying "professional" help is the only hope... those people obviously know nothing about how shoddy & underfunded the Mental Health community really is in this country & have never actually gotten professional help for something like this.

ExplosivePinata, on 19 December 2012 - 09:19 AM, said:

Why not one of the MMO developers out there understands this is beyond me.

Temporary transformation item/buff: 99.9% of people are going to destroy it and see it as a hindrance. It'll become a hated thing by the many. It'll never sell, even if the price is 1 gem.

Permanent toggle-based transformation item/buff: A good amount of people are going to find these desirable for the fun factor. Look at how popular the charr one was in GW1. They could likely sell these on the gem store for 1,000 gems a piece and that would fund the game for years to come.

To be honest, they wouldn't need predatory BS like forcing people to grind their life away or convert gems to gold if they had anything worth buying with gems. This is the damned problem. Make a product we want to buy and we'll buy it. Stop trying to force people to buy gems by making the game unfun to play unless you buy gems just to make it playable, let alone fun. BLARGH!

Why are marketing people as stupid as they are greedy?

I think it shows that the focus of the game is on the cash shop casuals. That would also be the reason why the game then lacks resources to give us good content and we instead get grind for stats - simply because that's the easiest/fastest content to make.

Tonics are like Black Lion chests, an inconvenience that I have to destroy.

I'm a bit surprised that no one has come up with any guidelines for choosing between toughness and vitality yet, given that all the required info is already out there.

The info that I'm talking about is the damage calculation which can be found in this reddit thread (there are some misleading info such as 100 toughness blocking 34 damage per 1000, which we will correct below). For the lazy, damage is given by

Quote

I remove vulnerability from the formula since vulnerability has been changed. Vulnerability is now a multiplier on the total damage and has no bearing on our calculation below.

To simplify things, we will rename all the terms in the numerator as K and all the terms in the denominator as A (armor = sum of toughness and defense).

The question now is: If a player initially has A armor, what is the damage reduction achieved if the player adds X amount of armor either through toughness or defense? The calculation is actually straightforward:

Damage reduction ratio, R
= [(Damage taken with A armor) - (Damage taken with A+X armor)]/Damage taken with A armor
= [(K/A) - (K/(A+X))]/(K/A)
= 1 - A/(A+X)
= X/(A+X)

The formula implies that to reduce damage by 50%, you'll have to double your current armor.
Adding 100 armor for (note the diminishing returns)

• a soldier with 2127 armor gives 4.49% damage reduction
  
• an adventurer with 1980 armor gives 4.81% damage reduction
  
• a scholar with 1836 armor gives 5.17% damage reduction

To compare between the professions (with base armor),

• a soldier has an additional 13.68% damage reduction compared to a scholar
  
• a soldier has an additional 6.91% damage reduction compared to a an adventurer
  
• an adventurer has an additional 7.27% damage reduction compared to a scholar

Arm with this formula, we can now figure out the effectiveness of toughness and vitality. The effectiveness of the two attributes can be quantified by looking at effective hitpoints (EHP). Each point of vitality increases EHP by 10.

For toughness, EHP is a little more complicated. First, let's ignore healing and condition damage which bypasses toughness. If your hitpoint is currently HP and your armor is A, then

EHP increase for X points in toughness
= [HP/(1-R)] - HP
= HP*X/A

To incorporate healing and condition damage, you'll have to estimate two things

• The proportion of damage received which is condition damage before going down, say C
  
  
• The amount of healing received before going down, say H

I know that these estimation are iffy but this is not WoW where your DPS could be precisely calculated to the decimal points, so all these is more of a rough guideline than a precise method to gearing your character.

Then the estimated EHP increase for X points in toughness is
(1-C)*(HP+H)*X/A

In short, if you wish to know whether you should invest the next point in vitality or toughness, just check the following:

Quote

Calculation example
For a guardian playing non-dungeon PvE with 2400 armor, 14000 hitpoints, and estimated C = 0.1 (not much condition damage in PvE) and H = 12000 (virtue of resolve heals for a lot over time), we see that

(0.9)*(14000 +  12000)/2400 = 9.75 < 10

So the guardian is better off investing the next point in vitality.

Healing increases as EHP increases
As pointed out by Lumm at this post, toughness and vitality both allow you to survive longer and so as you increase either or both attributes, you are likely to receive more healing. That's why it's not optimal to use the formula to allocate the next 100 points in toughness or vitality.

How should the formula be used to decide how to allocate the next X points?
You allocate such that at the end of the allocation
(1-C)*(HP+H)/A = 10
where HP, H and A are values at the end of the allocation.

Now, tell me, is stacking toughness a good idea?
For GW1 players, you'll be disappointed. The answer is not as good as GW1 as armor increases EHP linearly in GW2 as opposed to exponentially in GW1.

In GW1, armor-respecting damage is halved for every 40-armor increase. This means that for a monk with a base armor of 60 and a HP of 500, the EHP is 1000 if the monk's armor is increased to 100 and the EHP is 2000 if the monk's armor is increased to 140. Basically, each point of armor increases the EHP more than the previous point and that's why stacking armor is prevalent in GW1.

In GW2, armor-respecting damage is halved when you double your current armor. If you disregard healing, then EHP increases linearly with armor.

Converting damage reduction to equivalent toughness gain
The conversion will be done assuming a 2600-armor character. The formula is A*R/(1-R).
50% = 2600 toughness
33% = 1300 toughness (Protection)
25% = 867 toughness
20% = 650 toughness
15% = 459 toughness (Signet of Judgement with perfect insriptions)
10% = 289 toughness (Signet of Judgement)
5%   = 137 toughness

Survivability Hierarchy
Here's a simple and crude way to determine your survivability against direct damage. Just take the product of your armor and HP. If you want to know how you rank against other builds/classes, here's a hierarchy for comparison. Note that you have to first divide the obtained number by 10000. Also, this hierarchy is only meant as a rough comparison and doesn't take into account traits, skills and utilities that provide additional survivability.

- 3500   Break on touch
3501 - 4000   Fragile
4001 - 4500   Middle ground
4501 - 5000   Durable
5001 - 5500   Tanky
5501 - 6000   Built to last
6001 - Moving Fortress  

The description is for dungeon. From my experience, unless one knows the dungeon thoroughly, 4000 is the baseline that players new to dungeon should strive for, while 4500 is my personal recommendation. Just keep in mind that dodging is more important any number shown here.

Changelog (for the sake of those who have read this before)
10/13

• Added some additional information on converting damage reduction to equivalent toughness gain.
  
• Added a simple way to calculate and compare your survivability.

Ensign - is that you?

the main reason is that anet thinks they are always correct and customers are always wrong
Arenanet is acting like a dictator and facist. i want to support lucas' statement that they censor the crap in the official forums. Of course all the flame threads were removed but what about the 'game bugs report, unhappy customers who want to have their view'. And they call USA democratic and freedom of speech....

I doubt anyone who saw my posts a few months ago would have accused me of being a GW2 hater. However they have failed to add depth to PVP beyond dps spamming and its just a Zerg. They failed to capitalize on the very pve systems they put in place and have opted to trash all of that and do what they said they were not going to do. Now I see topics asking why they even have DEs when they are just going to make fractals for progression loot grinding later on. They promoted themselves as an Esport they cant even do RvR and make it interesting, how are they going to make a successful Esport. Not to mention on top of how utterly boring the pvp spec options are, dps or dps, hmm dps, the pvp mats are god awful. They have all these talented people and they manage to make pvp maps that feel ike 4X4 boxes. I played better maps on N64 playing Perfect Dark and you know I am right.

I mean I was optomistic and took up for the game but it seems to be built for a 2 month dead end. As soon as we all figured out how to spec and had all the combo fields, specs, other combos and synergies down, you quickly realize the so called hybrids are all heavy dps with accents, roaming, zerging and Bunker. I don't care what logic you come up with, pvp built around 95% depedendy on pure dps is a shoot out and I can just Play Halo if I want that.

Chances are by the time the next expansion is out Necromancers will still be broken, vampirism will still be utterly useless and Rangers still won't use shouts, they will ignore or just scrap the DEs they had in mind and do more fking fractals because everyone of course wants more phat lootz.

I love it when people say you are not playing GW2 right, like its their fault the game is boring as hell, ITS BORING. Its just that simple, the game is boring as hell. There is not a nice way of saying the game puts me to sleep. It doesnt have to be that way but GW2 has ignored all the interesting aspects of the game that are either broken, bugged or underpowered, etc. and just adds crap none of us wanted in the first place. Christ even the gear grinders who wanted 20 man raids a few months ago think its sucks, they dont know what the hell kind of game they want to be, and you can tell.

Wise old ancient American saying: "The wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the grease." - Josh Billings

If you don't feedback to ArenaNet they won't know what we want.  They are not psychic.

If you want ArenaNet to give you what you want, rather than what they think you want, then you should let them know what it is you really want.

I wish everyone would debate on the issues rather than resort to personal attacks and name calling.  Perhaps the average age of posters here is very young.

PandaGeist, on 15 December 2012 - 12:53 PM, said:

Welcome to the internet.
However, most people expected the game to be different. Like Anet said the game would be..

Paid posters just doing their job.  Heck, this entire website is a thinly disguised PR subcontractor to Anet.  The new customer relations manifesto they operate under is "the customer is always wrong" coupled with "we know best".  Criticize anything about this game and open yourself up to personal attacks and general harassment.

Maybe there would be less negativity if Anet did not release half baked, buggy content.

... that they do not need to give rewards better than what is existing to entice players to participate in new content?

As long as they are FUN, people will play and people will keep playing them, even if they might be getting more gold per hour etc elsewhere.

Making specific content rewards better than anywhere else in the game is not a sustainable model.

Please have more confidence in your own content, Anet.