What do these mean?

You know with your generic mmo you have health, strength, intelligence, etc: How do they match up with GW2 power, condition damage, etc:I think I have a rough idea but want to make sure. I don't know why A-net had to change what is the universal language.

Vitality increases your Health. Power is for direct attack and Condition is for damage over time condition stacks. We don't get intelligence in this game since there are no skill checks or any kind of skill effect it would apply to.

There is some damage calculation math, but like most games they unnecessarily complicate stats without telling us what it directly gives at a glance.

Power is commonly known as Attack, Damage or StrengthDamage(%) is a hidden stat that increases your physical damage exponentially, derived only from your buildToughness has no equivalent in most games but its basically armor points as a stat; damage reductionVitality is commonly known as Health, Life, Constitution, or just VitalityPrecision is commonly known as Accuracy, Dexterity or Critical Hit ChanceFerocity is commonly known as Critical Hit Damage, though many games don't allow you to increase it like you can hereCondition Damage is commonly known as Damage Over TimeCondition Duration (Expertise) is the duration of debuffs and damaging conditions, so it affects Damage Over Time as wellHealing Power is Healing Over Time, but here it affects self-heals too, not just on alliesHealing(%) is a hidden stat that increases your healing linearly to allies, derived only from your buildBoon Duration (Concentration) is the duration of buffs including Regeneration, so it affects Healing Over Time as wellLife Steal is a special mechanic affected by both Power and Healing Power

What @"Hannelore.8153" said is mostly correct. Mostly because stats like Precision aren't directly Critical Hit Chance. Just in case you're confused why there is both Precision and Critical Chance on your character sheet.

Stats like Armor, Boon Duration, Critical Chance, etc are derived attributes. This means they take other attributes and even your equipped armor, throw them into some kind of formula and out comes a calculated number. You can find a great description of what the attributes do on the wiki.

The biggest difference to other games is that there isn't separate stats based on profession that basically do the same. So it's not like the Wizard has to invest in Intelligence and the Barbarian in Strength, so they both deal more damage. In GW2 raw damage is based on your strength for every profession. Even the mages have to invest in strength to strengthen their spells.

@Hannelore.8153 said:Power is commonly known as Attack, Damage or StrengthDamage(%) is a hidden stat that increases your physical damage exponentially, derived only from your buildToughness has no equivalent in most games but its basically armor points as a stat; damage reductionVitality is commonly known as Health, Life, Constitution, or just VitalityPrecision is commonly known as Accuracy, Dexterity or Critical Hit ChanceFerocity is commonly known as Critical Hit Damage, though many games don't allow you to increase it like you can hereCondition Damage is commonly known as Damage Over TimeCondition Duration (Expertise) is the duration of debuffs and damaging conditions, so it affects Damage Over Time as wellHealing Power is Healing Over Time, but here it affects self-heals too, not just on alliesHealing(%) is a hidden stat that increases your healing linearly to allies, derived only from your buildBoon Duration (Concentration) is the duration of buffs including Regeneration, so it affects Healing Over Time as wellLife Steal is a special mechanic affected by both Power and Healing Power

Says it all thanks. There are a couple here I had wrong and that would have had some effect on my build choices. It's great to know what your doing rather than a mad guess.

Just to be on the safe side what would a magic user benefit mostly from ?

@Joote.4081 said:Just to be on the safe side what would a magic user benefit mostly from ?

Magic in this game is not like other games. Power increases the damage of all attacks. Instead of magic vs physical, look at it as power, condition, support, and tank. Power builds use power, precision, and ferocity, and rely on dealing direct damage as opposed to condition damage. Condition builds use condition damage, expertise, and precision, and rely on using damaging conditions: bleeding, poison, burning, confusion, and torment. Support builds use healing power and concentration and are all about healing and boons. Tanks are all about taking hits for others and use toughness and vitality. This applies to all classes in GW2, not just the physical classes or the spell casters.

Also, lore wise, all classes use magic, just some more so than others.

@Joote.4081 said:Just to be on the safe side what would a magic user benefit mostly from ?

We don't really have magic users in the way other games use them so it depends on how you want o build your characters - dps, condition (dots), healing, support, bit of everything.

Basically, take what you know from games like WoW and Dungeons and Dragons...and throw it all out the window

@"Joote.4081" said:Just to be on the safe side what would a magic user benefit mostly from ?

Guild Wars 2 do not have any "magic" user, profession or any other thing that other game tend to separate and build up on. In GW2 you either have Condition damage or Power based damage as source and from there try to build on how your trait lines will work (even Elite trait line are only changing what weapon you now can equip, which skills that are connected to that trait line that now will be possible to use and profession skills (F1-F5 this depends on what profession that are your core profession).

There are three weight classes that correspond to each profession: light armour or scholar class, medium armour or Adventurer class and then the heavy armour class called soldier class. As label for those classes you can imagine that light armour or scholar class correspond more with Mage class in other game are Elementalist, Mesmer or Necromancer. Adventure class are Thief, Ranger and Engineer. Soldier class are Guardian, Warrior or Revenant and Revenant where added into game with HoT package (you did have to buy HoT to have access to Revenant during that time).

I would suggest that you take a look at GW2 wiki which explains this and when you do the story part will also indirectly introduce you to other profession in the way the use their skills. Kasmeer as an example are a Mesmer and her best friend is a Necromancer as profession.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kasmeer_Meadehttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Marjory_Delaqua

Scholar class is more related to traditional use of elemental magic (see last part of this text)(here fire, water, earth and air in the form of condition damage types as fire damage, water as chill or heals from water fields, earth as causing bleeding or a short time hardening (invulnerable) and then we have air which can cause stun from lightning or give boon in the from swiftness or superspeed (not a boon, but a faster form of swiftness)). As you see Elementalist make use of the elements as a base idea that take different forms, same for Mesmer where use of Illusions in the form of Clones and Phantasm both work as distraction and to provide source for Confusion (condition damage) or Torment (for Mirage this is a larger source of condition damage) in combination with skills that are more related to causing or inflicting damage that attacker will increase on itself. This is just to give an idea how this game make use of its own rule set to how profession work within more traditional RPG and MMORPGs.

Note about magicMagic is not only elemental but can have different form like Illusion, manipulation of life force (Necromancer) or Thiefs ability to combine both physical and mental (magic) to avoid getting caught while "stealing" or doing their typical less honourable, but still justified things. Guardian even as Soldier class are more related to "magic" then tradtional physical based abilities. In short "magic" is something else in this game and means something else then other games as this game are built around it in another way.

Basically they split the "magic" into conditions and boons. And both have 2 stats each: Condition duration and condition damage. And the boon duration and healing power. (Most boons use only boon duration. Healing power - besides for the direct healing - also used for the regeneration boon I think.)

The toughness and armor I think counters the direct damage from power. While vitality is against the conditions (I think they just affect the health directly bypassing toughness and you can just counter with more health pool) ... similar to I think "constitution" in some Pen and Paper rpg. (Where there are checks agains illness, poison and stuff ... based on this stat.)

Best to check the wiki for details: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Attribute

@"Joote.4081" said:You know with your generic mmo you have health, strength, intelligence, etc: How do they match up with GW2 power, condition damage, etc:I think I have a rough idea but want to make sure. I don't know why A-net had to change what is the universal language.

Press "H" to open hero panel (the one with items your character has equipped), then put your cursor over each stat on the right side and it'll tell you what they do.

In guild wars every class is a mage. Even warrior uses magic, so why would they use different stats for the same thing?

GW2 is more simplistic, and i like it, it doenst have "inteligence". most MMO's separate "magic' skill(thats improve with inteligence) from physical skills(thats improve with power), this doenst exists there.

But we have condition damage, that increase the damage of "conditions"(bleed, poison, burn and others), due to balance issues most condition professions are a bit more nerfed than power based professions, but still fun in open world. So theres 2 ways to make damage in gw2: from "power" and from "conditions". but conditions also include non-damage conditions, they are mostly related to cloud-control(CC) like chill, cripple, they can be improved only with condition duration.

While power-based professions improve with Power/Precision/Ferocity, the condition based professions improve with condition and condition duration. Theres also some rare hibrid's Power and condition damage, they most doesnt need condition duration.

Precision and Ferocity are like 99% of other MMO's, precision increase your critical chance, and ferocity the % of damage done by critical hit.

What you are bringing up partially makes GW2 so confusing to beginning players and those who try to Min/Max without full understanding of the synchronicity of the stats.

It's one thing for a person to tell you which skills/builds to use for each type of game play, it's totally another to know HOW to use them in gameplay...that takes time, experience, and a bit of intuition.

Use http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/ to play with equipment sets to see how Scholar runes affect armor vs Berserker vs Viper vs Maurader. Or main hand weapons synch with off-hand.

Before you spend a ton on a complete set of Ascended Berserker armor/weapons/trinkets make sure the end stat results are what you want. You can stat change, but do it right the first time and save the time.

@"Joote.4081" said:You know with your generic mmo you have health, strength, intelligence, etc: How do they match up with GW2 power, condition damage, etc:I think I have a rough idea but want to make sure. I don't know why A-net had to change what is the universal language.

Just cause one or the other game does something, doesn't mean it is universal. I never played a game with intelligence.The wiki is a great help with any term. wiki.guildwars2.comSpecifically this page: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Attribute

Power: Increases outgoing direct damage.Precision: Increases Critical Chance.Toughness: Increases Armor.Vitality: Increases Health.

Concentration: Increases Boon Duration.Condition Damage: Increases the damage done by inflicting conditions.Expertise: Increases Condition Duration.Ferocity: Increases Critical Damage.Healing Power: Increases all outgoing healing your character does, including self heals.

Just so you know even tanking in this game is different. In PvE for most content you don't really need a tank since either you are killing solo and need some sustain yourself, or it is a massive group fight, in which case tanking is kinda unimportant. The only content that really needs a tank are raids (10 man content). Raids have a mix of agro methods. For some raids the person with the highest toughness becomes the tank no matter what, so so long as your abilities and traits do not increase your toughness mid battle you can do practically anything and not have to worry about the tank changing. In other raids that tank essentially pick something up and so long as they are alive, they will remain the tank throughout the encounter. Another mechanic is for the agro to focus on the furthest player, this is all about positioning and so once again what moves you use (besides movement moves) does nothing to affect the agro.

Since agro does not need to really be managed tanks instead focus on positioning the boss as well as forcing the boss to face certain directions since fights tend to be somewhat mobile. For a long time the best tank was actually a light armor mesmer because it could evade most attacks while also supplying a ton of buffs. Now there tend to be a greater mix of professions that tank.

@"ugrakarma.9416" said:GW2 is more simplistic, and i like it, it doenst have "inteligence". most MMO's separate "magic' skill(thats improve with inteligence) from physical skills(thats improve with power), this doenst exists there.

But we have condition damage, that increase the damage of "conditions"(bleed, poison, burn and others), due to balance issues most condition professions are a bit more nerfed than power based professions, but still fun in open world. So theres 2 ways to make damage in gw2: from "power" and from "conditions". but conditions also include non-damage conditions, they are mostly related to cloud-control(CC) like chill, cripple, they can be improved only with condition duration.

While power-based professions improve with Power/Precision/Ferocity, the condition based professions improve with condition and condition duration. Theres also some rare hibrid's Power and condition damage, they most doesnt need condition duration.

Precision and Ferocity are like 99% of other MMO's, precision increase your critical chance, and ferocity the % of damage done by critical hit.

Your focus on duration in relation to only do damage, but lack the information that duration also scale up defensive condition like Blind, Weakness and so on (it is the same when one start to look for duration on boons: Aegis, Protection reduce damage taken and Might/Vulnerability increase both condition AND power based damage at the same time; each increase in duration means next stack/tick will last longer so it is easier to scale up damage before next stack/tick will time out).

The reason why condition build can survive where a power based would have problems are exactly that duration for condition is directly connected to this package (condition that do damage over time, condition which is part of soft Crowd Control (CC) effect like chill or even slow (which again make target take longer time to attack or react/move) and then we have condition which work to prevent target from hitting you (Blind or Weakness). That is the reason quadruple attribute (those with 4 instead of 3 attribute) become popular even when their nominal numbers where lower then the older 3 attribute version. In group (even as a duo) this also means that party or squad scale much faster, then a solo player as they have priority for how in range will get those boons (and condition always are target dependent - meaning you need to apply it on target instead of player). This is another reason why condition vs power work different as when one look as how to the help with damage and how they need to adjust for group content as condition (as based on duration) are much more depending on getting enough damage each second vs boon/power which have to use "windows" where target will take damage and don't forget that in calculation that power will be reduced from toughness and base defence (armour rating) before it start to chip away on Health Pool. Condition isn't reduced by any of these, but can instead be removed fully with condition cleanse (as long we talk about player vs player or NPCs vs player).

I was a fan of guild war's attribute system. I don't know why guild wars 2 abandoned it. In the first game if you specialized in curses then you used curse skills and it didn't matter if a curse did direct damage, or damage over time or healed you were good at it because you were good at curses.

I think they wanted everyone to use the same attributes in GW2. Also some of the GW1 versions wouldn't have worked at all in GW2. For example elementalists had to choose between the 4 elements - if you put points into fire it only helped your fire skills, points in earth only helped earth skills and so on. That was ok in GW1 where you basically had to pick an element (or maybe 2) and stick to it unless you went back to an outpost and changed your build, but GW2 elementalists were designed around the idea that they'd swap between all the elements during a battle, so having to specialise in just one wouldn't work.

I found it confusing as well. Back when trait lines gave you attribute points the ranger's Marksmanship line had precision and Skirmishing had power, which meant for months I thought precision was for ranged attacks and power was for melee. It was only when I got my first character to level 80 and started looking up what stats I wanted that I found out it didn't work that way. Then I had to rethink a bunch of my other characters too because I'd been choosing based on that. (Although it was more annoying to find out that only certain combinations of traits were available. I wanted Condition Damage, Power and Toughness for one build and spent ages trying to find where to get it before learning it was impossible.)