We really need rebalanced attributes

Attributes are very poorly balanced, and we've seen very few changes to any of them for a long time. Why things like this are never changed or discussed for ONCE PER QUARTER balance patches is beyond me, and shows the work of the balance team is far, far too myopic for the game's good. Here are just a handful of examples of things I think need attention (ymmv):

Power appears to be overtuned and matters way too much to your offensive potential, which is why it's a primary stat on way too many combos and why everyone recommends avoiding sinkhole stats like Toughness, Vitality, and HP that are supposed to be defensive but actually undermine your defense by crippling your offense too much. Unless maybe, just maybe you are a dedicated group support/healer, which is viable for one or two people in raid content, which most people don't do. As elaborated on below with toughness, offense should have a narrower floor-ceiling range with stats. In reality, we have the opposite, especially when boons get mixed in.

Toughness was undertuned even before there was much condition damage in the game; now it's just a terrible "gotcha" stat that, again, actively ruins your defense by making you kill stuff much more slowly and therefore take a lot more damage (as discussed above). Passive defense through armor/toughness needs to baseline lower and scale higher than power to offset the negatives of having weakened offense, but that isn't the case - if anything it's the opposite, which wouldn't even make sense if the game didn't have active defense mechanics. It's flatly absurd considering it does. I'm also not sure it makes sense to tie threat to Toughness, although it's something I have mixed feelings about.

Vitality is pretty weak also. Adding to health is arguably not the best mechanic. Its value is uneven across classes due to differing base Health pools, and it provides diminishing returns to HP rather than synergizing with it. IMO, Base health should be moderately improved across all classes and Vitality should probably be reworked to add to endurance instead of Health so that it conceptually aligns better with "helping to avoid big damage", is less redundant with Toughness, is strategically more interesting, and removes the impediment to HP scaling. This change would require a bit of peripheral rebalancing, like nerfing Vigor and some daredevil traits, but IMO would be worth it. Max health should probably only be modified as direct % by specialized things like food and sigils.

Healing Power needs better normalization. HP points go to almost total waste on gear unless you are a dedicated group healer. I don't see the point of that. It's a major reason why Celestial stats are far less desired than they should be. A lot of people complain about "bunker" builds, but, IMO, the main problem is that personal healing skills are too strong at baseline and scale too poorly with HP. This needs to be reversed. Or, if they really want to keep it this way, remove Healing Power from Celestial and redistribute those points to the other stats.

The power of condition builds is too heavily weighted toward a single stat (Condition Damage), and this was made even worse by their bizarre and misguided decision to "balance" condi by making the durations last longer (it needs to be balanced through armor ratings, not duration), helping to reduce the need for Expertise on condition builds. This bad weighting is unfair to other builds since it leaves more strategic flexibility to have "suboptimal" extra points in other areas that you want. If you doubt me, try running a Condi build with dire stats and then a power build with soldier stats and observe the difference in efficacy.

Condition damage and Healing Power should probably both be normalized and be turned into stats that provide fixed % increases (replacing Outgoing Healing effectiveness) (i.e. Spirit and Malice, or whatever you want to call them) just like the overhaul Ferocity, Concentration, and Expertise got back in the day. I don't really see the point of having different scaling for different healing/condition skills.

A big problem with increasing toughness is that it puts a huge bullseye on your character in PvE by drawing aggro from more mobs, resulting in being targetted by extra attacks which can quickly counteract its benefits. That makes it very counter-intuitive, especially for newer players that expect higher toughness to equate with higher survivability. Toughness is more evenly balanced for non-AI game modes (PvP, WvW) where there having the highest toughness doesn't generally cause all your enemies to direct their attacks at you first.

Toughness-primary kits currently dominate the PvP formats where they're available in optimal/near-optimal configurations/synergy, and point-per-point, power is one of the lesser-efficient stats in the game as far as damage goes due to its high dependence on ferocity and precision to make the investment into the stat worthwhile.

Toughness, Concentration, Condition Damage, and Expertise vastly outweigh power in efficiency. OP even says this so I don't understand why Power is the problem.

Instead of increasing base HP, why don't we cut the massively-powercreeped expansion damage coefficients, instead? Cut down some of the powercreeped core-game buffs since expansion releases? Fix skills to not be broken on the concept-level? Things are dealing like 50% more damage than core which is more or less the major culprit.

@DeceiverX.8361 said:Toughness-primary kits currently dominate the PvP formats where they're available in optimal/near-optimal configurations/synergy, and point-per-point, power is one of the lesser-efficient stats in the game as far as damage goes due to its high dependence on ferocity and precision to make the investment into the stat worthwhile.

Toughness, Concentration, Condition Damage, and Expertise vastly outweigh power in efficiency. OP even says this so I don't understand why Power is the problem.

Instead of increasing base HP, why don't we cut the massively-powercreeped expansion damage coefficients, instead? Cut down some of the powercreeped core-game buffs since expansion releases? Fix skills to not be broken on the concept-level? Things are dealing like 50% more damage than core which is more or less the major culprit.

Maybe. I think you're overstating a bit, but, regardless, PvE is played far more often by far more players than PvP is, so it makes no sense for PvE's balance to suffer for PvP.

I think Power is overtuned, I just think Condition damage is more overtuned because it doesn't need synergy with other attributes to nearly the degree Power does.

I agree with nerfing offense rather than buffing Health, though. My suggestion to increase base Health was in the context of redesigning Vitality so that it improved Endurance rather than Health, not to compensate for too much damage being thrown around in the game, which I think is a power creep problem that needs to be reigned back.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@DeceiverX.8361 said:Toughness-primary kits currently dominate the PvP formats where they're available in optimal/near-optimal configurations/synergy, and point-per-point, power is one of the lesser-efficient stats in the game as far as damage goes due to its high dependence on ferocity and precision to make the investment into the stat worthwhile.

Toughness, Concentration, Condition Damage, and Expertise vastly outweigh power in efficiency. OP even says this so I don't understand why Power is the problem.

Instead of increasing base HP, why don't we cut the massively-powercreeped expansion damage coefficients, instead? Cut down some of the powercreeped core-game buffs since expansion releases? Fix skills to not be broken on the concept-level? Things are dealing like 50% more damage than core which is more or less the major culprit.

Eh. See, I don't think most PvE players care that much, because most PvE players play in open world, story, and low-mid fractals where nuanced balance isn't super necessary.

The segment of the PvE community that cares a ton about DPS metrics and balance and the likes is the raiding population, which as of PoF's release, was the smallest community in the game, with only 11% of the playerbase as participants (per an ANet post a while ago).

To hinge balance on that is an even worse idea than dismissing the PvP side of things by your logic. Most of the problems in PvP are design-level rather than numeric, anyways. Instant-cast abilities with no activation times or visual tells, infinite CC-locking, boon-stacking providing literally double a character's stats from armor... spammed invulns and mobility without counterplay, and so on.

Vitality is a critical stat in the game, though, too. And endurance refunding breaks a lot of things. Part of why Mirage and Holo are broken in WvW is might-on-dodge/endurance refill food. In another thread in the mesmer forums, I recently broke down that Mirage has a higher dodge uptime than Daredevil and the Acrobatics-traited thief thanks to the food, even when the food is used by the thief. With Holo, it removes Heat, which is the only constraining resource balancing the Holosmith as a whole. A warrior with more dodges has even fewer frames of weakness. Even things like ranger gain potent benefits from increased endurance regen, like protection on dodge, easily made permanent with some tweaks. And obviously thief has plenty as well.

It's just not reasonable for a stat to affect endurance regen. It'd downright break PvP.

Toughness : Power :: Vitality : Conditions.

Since conditions ignore all armor, the only answer to DoT is to have more health or cleanses. Most builds already run between 3-5 cleanses because conditions are just too potent and too spammable, so vitality has a lot of value as-is, while it has diminishing returns as power damage negation without armor.

To do away with vitality, they'd need to overhaul condition application and the condition stats as well. This couldn't be through making toughness negate condition damage, either; I already established toughness is already at the top of the list of efficient stats, so all this would do is exacerbate existing problems.

I think part of the PvE/PvP split problem is that PvE encounter design is just absolutely nothing like PvP. Remember the Itzel Shadowleapers from HoT? When people were frustrated with getting OHKO'ed on their PvE builds and not establishing defensive postures? Those somewhat resemble how a number of professions in PvP play (not just the thief).

Stats are ok. Its the power creep that is the problem.

@Imperadordf.2687 said:Stats are ok. Its the power creep that is the problem.

I disagree.

@Imperadordf.2687 said:Stats are ok. Its the power creep that is the problem.

^this^

@Arzurag.7506 said:

@Imperadordf.2687 said:Stats are ok. Its the power creep that is the problem.

If this was the case, the problems I'm describing above wouldn't have predated HoT, but they very much did.

Power creep is a problem, but it's not the whole problem.

But we can agree that vitality is useless?

I mean...You spend 300 stat point to have +3000 HP. What is it. One or two attacks. 3 to 4 seconds of your current healing. Often less. In other words: a complete waste.

It's probably useful to have some for classes with low hp (personnaly i play a warrior so you have the right to complaint i don't realize).

Vitality is much less relevant than toughness, and healing on heal builds. And concentration. The hp evolve way too fast to make a slight bonus any relevant.

I really don't see how it could change. I don't imagine it being linked to endurance, the number doesn't suit. Maybe make +100 vitality=+5% endurance regeneration? I don't know.

Another possibility would be to make ALL heals (and barriers) in the game based on max health percentage, with healing power increasing this proportion. These way, by increasing your hp, you also increase your regeneration, which is much more relevant. The skills description would precise the coefficient and the actual amount based on your current max hp and healing power.Ex for regeneration: 1% max hp per second.Any point spent in healing power would increase healing by 0,05%

@Lametoile.7394 said:But we can agree that vitality is useless?

I mean...You spend 300 stat point to have +3000 HP. What is it. One or two attacks. 3 to 4 seconds of your current healing. Often less. In other words: a complete waste.

It's probably useful to have some for classes with low hp (personnaly i play a warrior so you have the right to complaint i don't realize).

Vitality is much less relevant than toughness, and healing on heal builds. And concentration. The hp evolve way too fast to make a slight bonus any relevant.

I really don't see how it could change. I don't imagine it being linked to endurance, the number doesn't suit. Maybe make +100 vitality=+5% endurance regeneration? I don't know.

Another possibility would be to make ALL heals (and barriers) in the game based on max health percentage, with healing power increasing this proportion. These way, by increasing your hp, you also increase your regeneration, which is much more relevant. The skills description would precise the coefficient and the actual amount based on your current max hp and healing power.Ex for regeneration: 1% max hp per second.Any point spent in healing power would increase healing by 0,05%

Percent based would screw over all the low HP classes ... if you lower those classes defenses you will need to increase something else

I tend to think of defensive stats as training wheels. They provide a safety net of sorts while players learn game mechanics and builds. I dont think that the fact that bikes with training wheels are slower than those without means that non training wheel bikes need to be slowed down or that training wheels need to be sped up.

@Ashen.2907 said:I tend to think of defensive stats as training wheels. They provide a safety net of sorts while players learn game mechanics and builds. I dont think that the fact that bikes with training wheels are slower than those without means that non training wheel bikes need to be slowed down or that training wheels need to be sped up.

I disagree that this is the right approach, but they aren't even that. They do more to gimp you than they do to help you in the vast majority of situations precisely because of what I describe in the OP - the baselines and scaling for the attributes and how they affect your skills is way off in numerous cases.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:I tend to think of defensive stats as training wheels. They provide a safety net of sorts while players learn game mechanics and builds. I dont think that the fact that bikes with training wheels are slower than those without means that non training wheel bikes need to be slowed down or that training wheels need to be sped up.

I disagree. Someone who has not yet learned how to dodge appropriately, how to maneuver for best defense, or how to build effectively has more time to live with PVT than zerker gear.

@Ashen.2907 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:I tend to think of defensive stats as training wheels. They provide a safety net of sorts while players learn game mechanics and builds. I dont think that the fact that bikes with training wheels are slower than those without means that non training wheel bikes need to be slowed down or that training wheels need to be sped up.

And you are just wrong. I have brought people into this game and coached them on at least four separate occasions, and they universally do better with offensive gear than they do with defensive gear because TTL is benefited the most by being able to kill enemies quickly. They also enjoy the game more because they kill things faster, and using offensive gear helps them get better faster than using defensive gear.

The simple truth is that defensive stats just aren't well balanced with offensive ones. Offensive ones matter too much, and defensive ones don't matter enough. The floor-ceiling disparity needs to be lowered with stats like power and condition damage, and it needs to be raised with stats like toughness and vitality.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:I tend to think of defensive stats as training wheels. They provide a safety net of sorts while players learn game mechanics and builds. I dont think that the fact that bikes with training wheels are slower than those without means that non training wheel bikes need to be slowed down or that training wheels need to be sped up.

Nope.

Been there. Done that.

As others have noticed, you've conveniently forgotten about precision and ferocity. To do a lot of direct damage, you want to have a lot of ferocity, and in most builds precision as well.

I might need to reconsider my own opinion on this one, but I remember concluding from seeing the damage formula that it's always beneficial (in terms of overall gains) to run some toughness in your build, but not a lot. That's supposedly because "medium-power" enemies will do significantly less damage to you, while similarly lowering damage from "high-power" enemies would require a lot of toughness in your build which isn't quite practical.

There are no diminishing returns in regards of vitality. If every 150 points allow you to survive one more hit, 1500 points allow you to survive ten more hits. The relationship is linear.

Healing is too easy to make too strong. It's always possible that a marginal increase in your healing power would allow your ally to survive just one second longer which in turn would be just enough for their healing skill to recharge, at which point they can heal themselves and continue to be alive so they can heal you in turn. Healing power has the potential to synergize too well in GW 2's manaless combat system (sorry, thieves and revenants).

Condition damage vs Expertise - this is a delicate matter. You only discuss damage output and conveniently ignore thar expertise also increases the duration of non-damaging conditions. Almost all of non-damaging conditions are control effects, and there are also synergies a-la chronomancer's increased critical damage when hitting a slowed enemy. Probably not the best example, but you get the point. It's not as black and white as you paint it.

Bonus point. There used to be a single best thing about berserker meta, and that was you only ever needed a single attribute set to clear any content. It's quite convenient and goes well with the game's philosophy of having as little (gear) grind as possible.

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:I tend to think of defensive stats as training wheels. They provide a safety net of sorts while players learn game mechanics and builds. I dont think that the fact that bikes with training wheels are slower than those without means that non training wheel bikes need to be slowed down or that training wheels need to be sped up.

That is simply wrong. Offensive stats should be stronger because they have no alternative. They are the only option to do damage. No power, no damage. No condi, no damage.

But that isn't the case with defense. They have alternatives. No Vitality? Cleanse condis. No Toughness? Just block, evade or invuln.

And there was already a thread you made about this matter, why did you make a new one?

@"Einlanzer.1627" said:Power appears to be overtuned and matters way too much to your offensive potential, which is why it's a primary stat on way too many combos and why everyone recommends avoiding sinkhole stats like Toughness, Vitality, and HP that are supposed to be defensive but actually undermine your defense by crippling your offense too much. Unless maybe, just maybe you are a dedicated group support/healer, which is viable for one or two people in raid content, which most people don't do.

Power is on everything because most content requires things to die. There are only a handful of times in the game where the end goal isn't to kill something. Power is also more reliable than conditions since there are some things that are either partially or completely immune to conditions.

Everyone recommends avoiding toughness and vitality because all those people giving recommendations assumes the person asking for advice has a reasonable level of skill to use dodges(presumably anyone who would even as ask that question is above "completely oblivious to everything" level of casualness that they are either at the required level of skill or trying to get there), avoids standing in red circles/getting punched in the face, etc. unless otherwise stated. If there are other restrictions stated then whoever is giving the advice should take that into account if they are any good at giving advice. Glass cannon isn't actually appropriate for everyone.

The power of condition builds is too heavily weighted toward a single stat (Condition Damage), and this was made even worse by their bizarre and misguided decision to "balance" condi by making the durations last longer (it needs to be balanced through armor ratings, not duration), helping to reduce the need for Expertise on condition builds. This bad weighting is unfair to other builds since it leaves more strategic flexibility to have "suboptimal" extra points in other areas that you want. If you doubt me, try running a Condi build with dire stats and then a power build with soldier stats and observe the difference in efficacy.

You have managed to missed the elephant in the room on those condition changes. They increased duration but decreased stacks by the same percent. The total damage for any given condition application remained mostly the same, there were a few that gained or loss a tick's worth of damage. The end result is a longer ramp up time. That means having stay alive lower to allow the conditions to do their damage.

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@"Einlanzer.1627" said:Power appears to be overtuned and matters way too much to your offensive potential, which is why it's a primary stat on way too many combos and why everyone recommends avoiding sinkhole stats like Toughness, Vitality, and HP that are supposed to be defensive but actually undermine your defense by crippling your offense too much. Unless maybe, just maybe you are a dedicated group support/healer, which is viable for one or two people in raid content, which most people don't do.

The power of condition builds is too heavily weighted toward a single stat (Condition Damage), and this was made even worse by their bizarre and misguided decision to "balance" condi by making the durations last longer (it needs to be balanced through armor ratings, not duration), helping to reduce the need for Expertise on condition builds. This bad weighting is unfair to other builds since it leaves more strategic flexibility to have "suboptimal" extra points in other areas that you want. If you doubt me, try running a Condi build with dire stats and then a power build with soldier stats and observe the difference in efficacy.

And even then power is still meta in most content in part due to the fact that it doesnt have a ramp up time(like 65% of it) and the other is that now you lose all your tics and have to start over should a boss go invuln(15%) and the other 15% of is the fact that in almost all of PVE things DIE so quickly you cant get max stacks by the time its dead.

@Dante.1763 said:

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@"Einlanzer.1627" said:Power appears to be overtuned and matters way too much to your offensive potential, which is why it's a primary stat on way too many combos and why everyone recommends avoiding sinkhole stats like Toughness, Vitality, and HP that are supposed to be defensive but actually undermine your defense by crippling your offense too much. Unless maybe, just maybe you are a dedicated group support/healer, which is viable for one or two people in raid content, which most people don't do.

The power of condition builds is too heavily weighted toward a single stat (Condition Damage), and this was made even worse by their bizarre and misguided decision to "balance" condi by making the durations last longer (it needs to be balanced through armor ratings, not duration), helping to reduce the need for Expertise on condition builds. This bad weighting is unfair to other builds since it leaves more strategic flexibility to have "suboptimal" extra points in other areas that you want. If you doubt me, try running a Condi build with dire stats and then a power build with soldier stats and observe the difference in efficacy.

Which is a problem. This is why condi needed to be balanced around armor rating and not around "ramp up time". The overall mechanics of the game mean that condi should have short duration and fast ramp up time. It needed to be balanced around the fact that it penetrates armor.

It's a prime example of how the balance just isn't focused in the right way.

@Lametoile.7394 said:But we can agree that vitality is useless?

I mean...You spend 300 stat point to have +3000 HP. What is it. One or two attacks. 3 to 4 seconds of your current healing. Often less. In other words: a complete waste.

It's probably useful to have some for classes with low hp (personnaly i play a warrior so you have the right to complaint i don't realize).

Vitality is much less relevant than toughness, and healing on heal builds. And concentration. The hp evolve way too fast to make a slight bonus any relevant.

I really don't see how it could change. I don't imagine it being linked to endurance, the number doesn't suit. Maybe make +100 vitality=+5% endurance regeneration? I don't know.

Another possibility would be to make ALL heals (and barriers) in the game based on max health percentage, with healing power increasing this proportion. These way, by increasing your hp, you also increase your regeneration, which is much more relevant. The skills description would precise the coefficient and the actual amount based on your current max hp and healing power.Ex for regeneration: 1% max hp per second.Any point spent in healing power would increase healing by 0,05%

Vitality is less effective with higher base health, and it's also less effective into power point-for-point (until very high toughness) because it's balanced around negating two types of damage (power and condition) versus just one, per armor.

On something like a thief, the gain from vitality is generally much better than toughness, since with 11k hp, it takes only three or so ticks of conditions for most condi bomb builds to kill (or massive confusion damage which is applied while trying to cleanse the confusion itself and also inflicts itself on the class' primary form of negation: dodging).

It's generally more imperative to reach a certain threshold of health or forms of negation relative to your condition management needs before investing into toughness, which is why you rarely see thieves and mesmers prioritizing armor, while eles and guardians often skip the health-stacking given their better baseline hit/condi negation.

Just going to copy from wiki for you:"The best defense is a good offense" is an adage that has been applied to many fields of endeavor, including games and military combat.It is also known as the strategic offensive principle of war. Generally, the idea is that proactivity (a strong offensive action) instead of a passive attitude will preoccupy the opposition and ultimately hinder its ability to mount an opposing counterattack, leading to a strategic advantage

@"Robban.1256" said:Just going to copy from wiki for you:"The best defense is a good offense" is an adage that has been applied to many fields of endeavor, including games and military combat.It is also known as the strategic offensive principle of war. Generally, the idea is that proactivity (a strong offensive action) instead of a passive attitude will preoccupy the opposition and ultimately hinder its ability to mount an opposing counterattack, leading to a strategic advantage

Yeah, except that the adage is false

To quote Clausewitz, defense is superior to attack. Because defense is NOT just passive defense, and attack is not just reckless offense. Defending well where you are advantaged can offers you a lot of opportunity for efficient counterattacks while the ennemies is weakened b the offense. Psychology factor and energy management. In martial arts, you attack and defend yourselves at the same time.So, no, the best defense is not offense. It's active, clever defense.

You're right though, video games are not war, and they are not like real fights. The adage can somewhat apply to them.

The theory is very simple: you have to kill the ennemy before it kills you. DPS, sustain, resistance and max helath are the parameters, with controls, blocks and dodge working as additionnal jokers.

Time alive=HP/((DPS/armor)-sustain)

The parameters vary greatly between game modes but the idea remains the same.

However, so far, against ennemies with equivalent health:

• power, precision and ferocity (condition damage and expertise if you play condi) offer the most benefits when correctly mixed
• toughness help quite well but progressively lose its efficiency
• vitality is not significant at all, being secondary in regards to sustain

There is a simple reason why power is above toughness:

to obtain the damage you take, you DIVIDE by your armor. However, the curve of the reverse function quicly lose its amplitude

to obtain the damage you do, you MULTIPLY by your power. Thus, the stats seems somehow equivalent (in terms of benefits when you decide to increase it further by X point)except that toughnness has a further advantage: you multiply AGAIN by (1 + (crit probability)*(crit damage)). Thus, you improve the damage much more than by just increaing power with the same amount of stats (okay, you can argue we have to increase 3 stats at a time anyway).

Armor does not possess such synergy. If existing, it would be sustain. But most classes does not benefits much from healing power.

Plus, we always prefer, myself included, to kill ennemies fast, for a lot of reasons. And if you manage dodge and cc well, you can safely sacrifice some survivability.

That's why GW2 system currently favor high damage stats rather than high armor.

So...Yeah

Honestly I'd go a step further.

Does GW2 need item stats at all?

Because IMO, no. It doesn't. I have no clue how to handle the economics side of this (because obviously removing item stats would remove much of the need for crafting and a slew of materials). But ignoring that for a second, I feel if all there was to balancing classes were the base values on skills, stats would not be a thing, and all modifiers would be runes, sigils and traits, it'd all be worlds easier to balance, and classes could be made much more interesting.