Barrier mechanic prevent crits or something?

It's been a while already with pof release that the barrier mechanic was implementing to the game.

The more obvious is of course on scourge.

I wonder why if I hit a scourge with no barrier with my trueshot I crit up to 6-7 in wvw, in spvp it's less.

When I hit that same scourge which has a barrier that same shot barely remove 1.3-1.4k barrier with a crit.

Never happened to crit a barrier for 6-7k.

Barrier is not just extra health pool?

Or it has an internal damage mitigation of some kind?

I hope I am not the only one noticing it.

It happens with other attacks too, the barrier seems to mitigate a lot the damage received.

This is something I noticed as well (in both PvP and WvW mind you). I figured it was the mechanic and never thought anything of it.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/29015/why-does-barrier-seem-to-reduce-damage-or-grant-toughness

Have a read of this thread...

@"sephiroth.4217" said:https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/29015/why-does-barrier-seem-to-reduce-damage-or-grant-toughness

Have a read of this thread...

So? Is that a bug?https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Barrier

It doesn't talk of any damage reduction associated with it, it's just gets removed before your original health pool.

If that's a bug could be simple the reason why scourge are still so cancerous (apart from spamming brainless gameplay). Just fixing it would make it balanced.

I’ve also noticed barrier seemingly taking less damage but I haven’t exactly tested it in a controlled environment so it is just speculation. If it prevented crits or something I’d be looking again at invigorating strikes and going for more dodge spam to stack barrier.

Don't know exactly what kind of mitigation we have to deal with here, but barrier definitely has some kind of damage mitigation. It has at least the same toughness level as its user - if not even more. Barrier on a full dire scourge absorbs an absurd amount of damage.

A few others and myself had tested this last season at some point. What it's doing is it is negating critical hits. When a Barrier is up, precision/feroc count for nothing. Test it for yourself and do this:

• Make a Valk build that uses intelligence sigils
• Smack around someone's Scourge with auto attacks without procing the intelligence sigil first. Pay attention to the damage. Make sure Scourge is not using Barrier.
• Now start swapping to benefit the intelligence procs and smack the Scourge around with the same autos while he is using Barrier. You'll see that the Barrier is simply negating critical hits as the damage scores reflect as much.

If that is the case, it kind of makes thematic sense. You cant crit structures, and a sand shell technically counts as a structure.I'm fine with it either way. It would be nice if a tooltip reflected that you cannot be crit with a barrier if this is the case, and is intended functionality.

The only problem I see with it, is that the negating of the crit spills over to the normal health pool. So if a Barrier proc had only 100 health left before it washed off the Scourge, then a D/P Thief Backstabs it as example, even if that Backstab should have been a crit, that remaining tiny 100 health with negate the entire crit, and when the damage spills over to the normal health, that damage will also not be a crit.

In other words, sparse out the use of Barrier rather than spamming it. A little bit left goes a long way in a power meta.

I haven't tested it, but if this is true it's surely not intended.

I have video footatge from the beta weekend where i tried out spellbreaker and crit a scourge's barrier for 5731 (and an extra 3488 to the scourge's health). And i don't remember the devs ever talking about any mechanical change to barrier other than extend the duration before it naturally decays.

(if anyone wants the link to that : https://youtu.be/CUZHJ50buRM?t=8m15s )

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:The only problem I see with it, is that the negating of the crit spills over to the normal health pool. So if a Barrier proc had only 100 health left before it washed off the Scourge, then a D/P Thief Backstabs it as example, even if that Backstab should have been a crit, that remaining tiny 100 health with negate the entire crit, and when the damage spills over to the normal health, that damage will also not be a crit.

In other words, sparse out the use of Barrier rather than spamming it. A little bit left goes a long way in a power meta.

I am not complaining about barried mechanic guys.

The real problem is that NOWHERE is writter that barried mitigate damage or deny crits, but seems works that way, like they presented it and how the wiki says, it's just another health pool to sum to your base health, and nobody mention a damage mitigation when barrier is up. That's the problem.

There was never any mention to mechanic changes. In fact, it wasn't even like that upon PoF release. It was right before S10 I believe when it happened. I remember the day I noticed it and thought.... what? I went back and read the patch notes and there was absolutely no mention of anything changed, so I assumed it was some unintended bug. But it is true, go test what I explained. It isn't a -25% static damage reduction or anything. It's definitely plainly negating critical hits.

Likely a bug. People talked about this before and got ignored. Hopefully as anet is getting more communicative we may get an answer.

It does negate critical hits. I duelled a scourge today. Did not land any crits in shroud (death perception on full berserk = 100% crit chance in shroud). On top of that it seems (hard to say with my limited testing) that barrier uses also the same toughness values the scourge has.

I did land a full soul spiral (hardest hitting skill in the game) and hit his barrier for about 4k (no protection on the scourge, no weakness on me).

Under these circumstances an 8k barrier (easy to achieve on dire/tb) is basically a 5 second lasting block for the scourge in a 1v1 situation. You can't melt it. And of course he is free to use all his skills during that time.

Don't say scourge is broken in general. Just saying the scaling of barrier is a very bad joke.

Agreed I definitely feel like something is reducing damage when a target has Barrier.

Barrier shouldn't even be such a crutch and I don't understand why it can stack so high. Why was this introduced again? Was the game really needing a disposable health that is easily replenished? I wouldn't be surprised it is reducing more than expected. Heck, even Barrier application from outside sources should have a diminishing return to put it in line. It shouldn't be such a dominant force in reliance but of course, this is my opinion which probably won't matter but I'll say it anyway since people say far worse than myself attempting to make things right.Also Barrier thematically was tossed out of the sand theme when Scrapper got it and is now a shield like health bar that stays temporary but can indefinitely be brought up.

Eh. Alright then, guess nothing to see here~Ty for log checks.

Have you guys thought about the fact that a Scourge has a trait that can apply weakness when activating shroud?

Might also corrupts into weakness.

lol

@shadowpass.4236 said:Have you guys thought about the fact that a Scourge has a trait that can apply weakness when activating shroud?

Might also corrupts into weakness.

lol

True, but it's unlikely that this would be the case in the above situation. Enfeeble only applies to people hugging the scourge, and OP was playing Longbow DH.Unlikely but not impossible.At any rate, working as intended apparently

@shadowpass.4236 said:Have you guys thought about the fact that a Scourge has a trait that can apply weakness when activating shroud?

Might also corrupts into weakness.

lol

Weakening Shroud is rarely if ever taken on Scourge, especially nowadays when most Scourges are running Blood Magic over Curses.

cant agree to OP. dmg on scourge is the same with barrier like w/o. and barrier is not the Problem, cause you can still give the scourge dmg if he cast it. invuls of many other classes are way stronger defense mechanics, and way more annoying...sure scourge is hard to fight if he walks in a greater Group. but their defense mechanic( barrier) is only good in Groups where many scourges Support each other. just 1 scourge barrier isnt a Problem. but this mechanis is (like i said) way weaker than blocks/dodges/invuls...so i dont see a Problem with barrier in its current state.

It might seem like that because the damage color is yellow regardless of whether or not you crit into the barrier. I could be wrong though because I haven't tested it.

@Cal Cohen.3527

I noticed it myself while also playing Ranger. Let me try to recreate this situate again with a record. Everyone in this forum should know by now that I'm not the type to start posting about something like this without being sure that something was wrong, concerning numbers in combat. I am 100% positive that the last time I ran this test, which was about 3 months ago, Barrier was definitely negating critical hits.

Keep in mind that not all bugs happen all of the time. Sometimes there are certain circumstances that trigger on the bug. I'll try to dig at this a bit.

WvW has innately higher stats than sPvP which will bolster damage pretty dramatically into glass opponents. Scourge also gets the passive shroud 50% power damage reduction when using Sand Shroud. The log damage is the same but the DR is still applied.That's also kind of why it's OP. It still has all its weapon skills + shroud skills + utils to apply outgoing pressure and burst but also the sustain from utils/heal, the 50% DR, and the actual barrier itself, all at the same time.