Don't really understand why...

[Einlanzer.1627]

It's still a widely held belief that Soldier's gear is terrible. It isn't. 

In fact, Power, Toughness, and Vitality happen to be the three stats that carry the most weight with regard to TTK and TTL metrics. Toughness and Vitality both have roughtly the same impact on TTL individually that Precision and Ferocity combined do on TTK.

There was a spreadsheet someone put out doing mechancial comparisions of the different stat combos. If you follow the math, you'll see that Soldier's gear does about 65% of the damage that Berserker's gear does, while Berserker's has about 35% of the survivability of Soldier's (depending a little on class/base health). Soldier's is mathematically nearly twice as good as Berserkers. Active defense and offense are both generally more important than passive defense, of course, but acting like it's possible to avoid all damage in the game is nonsensical, so passive defense absolutely makes a signficant difference most of the time - especially since it reduces the frequency that you need to perfectly evade to stay alive, generally allowing you to compense for a portion of the DPS loss.

In practice, this means Soldier's and Berserkers are quite well balanced with one another overall, and Soldiers is unquestionably better unless and until you become very, very skilled with a purely offensive build. Even then, it depends, and it's not a bad approach to mix some Soldier's into your build to gain a bit of defense and a comparitively minor DPS loss.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Einlanzer.1627

[Linken.6345]

Even better with either knight if you want some toughness and more focus from monsters or maruader if you want some more vitality over soldier tho.

[Erich.1783]

I ran mostly marauder gear for years, the extra survivability is nice (necros love the extra shroud up time) and the increased crit chance offsets some of the DPS reduction vs berserkers.  That started changing some when celestial got the extra stats added as I swapped professions that could make full use of that, but I think the only build I run berserks on is my mechanist, as that build can maintain range and use the mech to tank if need be.  The exception to all of that is my renegade who runs a mix of various things, I honestly do not remember what, due to crit capping without needing all the precision stat when accounting for the traits.  All of this is based on solo play, in an organized group that I know and trust I will run full zerker and depend on the others to do their job.

[AliamRationem.5172]

3 hours ago, Einlanzer.1627 said:

It's still a widely held belief that Soldier's gear is terrible. It isn't. 

In fact, Power, Toughness, and Vitality happen to be the three stats that carry the most weight with regard to TTK and TTL metrics. Toughness and Vitality both have roughtly the same impact on TTL individually that Precision and Ferocity combined do on TTK.

There was a spreadsheet someone put out doing mechancial comparisions of the different stat combos. If you follow the math, you'll see that Soldier's gear does about 65% of the damage that Berserker's gear does, while Berserker's has about 35% of the survivability of Soldier's (depending a little on class/base health). Soldier's is mathematically nearly twice as good as Berserkers. Active defense and offense are both generally more important than passive defense, of course, but acting like it's possible to avoid all damage in the game is nonsensical, so passive defense absolutely makes a signficant difference most of the time - especially since it reduces the frequency that you need to perfectly evade to stay alive, generally allowing you to compense for a portion of the DPS loss.

In practice, this means Soldier's and Berserkers are quite well balanced with one another overall, and Soldiers is unquestionably better unless and until you become very, very skilled with a purely offensive build. Even then, it depends, and it's not a bad approach to mix some Soldier's into your build to gain a bit of defense and a comparitively minor DPS loss.

Can you put down your calculator and show us some video or perhaps share an actual build that uses soldier stats and what kind of DPS we might expect from it?  I'm going to assume we're talking open world builds, since you wouldn't typically bother with toughness in a group scenario.  I'll get the ball rolling with a point for comparison.  Here's another toughness set, Trailblazer, doing over 25k DPS in actual solo gameplay.  What sort of DPS do you get out of your Soldier's stats?

Edit: I'll add a clip of a full Viper build doing the same boss for comparison.  It takes about the same amount of time (although I did drop 20% bleed duration in exchange for protection on aura).  My point is that even if your math is accurate (it isn't because it's so contrived as to be completely useless in application), soldier's is still a bad bet.  Why give up a third of your damage when you could, for example, grab protection boon and be just fine?  Or run a toughness build like Trailblazer that barely sacrifices any damage?

Go ahead and use soldier's stats if that's what you like, but don't try to sell it to others as a superior choice.  It's terrible advice to give to other players, in particular those who don't know enough to tell that your supporting evidence is complete nonsense.

Edited November 11, 2023 by AliamRationem.5172

[Ashen.2907]

Definitely depends on the opposition and other aspects of your build. Nothing against Soldiers but I prefer to get my survivability via skills, boons, dodges and the like normally. That said, it can be fun to put together nigh immortal builds on occasion.

[ugrakarma.9416]

1 healer + 4 bersekers > 5 soldiers.

The dps metas are with group in mind.

Also too low critic chance could deprive you for other stuff.

Soldier is for a some kind of extremy solo content.

Edited November 11, 2023 by ugrakarma.9416

[Cuks.8241]

There is no TTL if you don't get killed.

Also TTL doesn't really matter as long as TTK <TTL.

And I am not even going into active defences and also passive traits because we have some crazy builds out there that can run full glass and be just fine, maybe some Marauder or Ritualist and youre safe fine for pretty much anything. It's quite sensical to avoid most dmg anyway so that impacts TTL in a huge way. Avoid the big attacks (because most of the dangerous dmg comes in bursts) and your TTL is non existent.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Cuks.8241

[SeTect.5918]

This "math" also depends on the class and build you are playing. There are builds with 300% crit dmg (Edit 1: Basic snowcrows power soulbeast with 313% crit dmg: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAwelZwAZXsNmJWyX/P/JsD-DSIYR0wXG1mAVUA2eLgGKcGBqA-e). And on these builds you just deal 50% dmg just because you dont crit.

Also dont forget lots of traits depend on critting, so thats another dps loss. No clue how u came to 65% but how about you rather test it (and make a Video proof) instead of just doing the theoretical part and hoping everyone believes you.

Edit 2:
There is also this one utility item every power benchmark uses.
Its this one: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Sharpening_Stone
"Gain Power Equal to 3% of Your Precision
Gain Power Equal to 6% of Your Ferocity"
-> Yeah that doesnt work out so well without precision or ferocity.

Edited November 11, 2023 by SeTect.5918
Spelling

[Cyninja.2954]

Soldier does not do 65% of berserker gear damage.  If you had bothered with double checking instead of assuming, you'd know.

There a a lot of fights in this game from short to long, where extending the fight makes the encounter more difficult. This counts double for when the limited active defences a player has are used up and on cooldown.

By now, and for years, soldier gear has been outperformed by other stat combinations in regards to damage and survival. Trailblazer is one, celestial is the most recent other (with new characters now getting boosted to full celestial instead of soldier) and dire used to be a classic one. Power wise marauder with a few select pieces knights is better too.

[Surelia.2651]

Call me crazy, but I actually like running around in open world with my gear optimized for raids or other group content, especially if on a power build.  I ran through HOT and all of LWS3, 4, and IBS, and also POF for example on two different alts with a total Berserker's set up in ascended, and had zero survival issues.  Stuff was just dead way before it gave me any trouble.  I don't find value in throwing out that much dmg just for vitality when I don't seem to even need it.  Granted I wasn't trying to solo legendary bounties 24/7, but still - I don't think the need for survival in ow is as high as it would appear; obviously in other game modes it is a different story.  I think survival in most game modes is more a learn to play issue than it is a gear issue per say.  Just my 2 cents.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I have been attempting to solve a puzzle.  When I came here today I found I had a series of likes/thanks on random posts I made years ago with no sequence.  I am assuming that this thread was made in response to a  post I made many years ago, since it says similar things.  It is a bit of a shame that the formatting changes on the forums have scuffed all the old posts.  No profile views, so I'm assuming that post was found by via a search for Soldier's gear.  So, something was said, which then prompted the search, which then resulted in this thread.  It is a bit of real-life environmental storytelling.

There's a bit more to the story than just me showing the math of the matter.  I had to do all of that to defend a previous post I had made, which went into the conditions of gear preferences:

Because several people on the forums are now adamantly against following links, I'll give the short gist of it.  Soldiers gear is good in places where there is high damage pressure and you aren't necessarily pressed for time.  I myself run around in pure assassin/berserker gear, and I won't lie: there have been times where I've really felt the squishiness of it.  Particularly when I have to solo bounties for the Wizards Vault, there is no way to out-DPS mechanics and that lack of effective health can really be felt.  That all said, as I have said above, it is generally better to go for higher damage gear for things like timers and loot rate.

This was also all said before Jade Bot Cores and the Jade Tech Combat buffs (whatever they're called) were introduced.  Given those, it is a rarity to need anything more than what Berserker or Vipers gives you now.  That all said, if extra survival is needed either full Marauders or a mixture of Marauder and Dragon is good to go with, since they have 90% of the damage of Berserkers with 6.3k extra health.  

[fatihso.7258]

Are you one of those survival stackers in wvw that commander trusts and attacks the enemy force just to notice his group does no damage and fails miserably?

[AliamRationem.5172]

5 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

I have been attempting to solve a puzzle.  When I came here today I found I had a series of likes/thanks on random posts I made years ago with no sequence.  I am assuming that this thread was made in response to a  post I made many years ago, since it says similar things.  It is a bit of a shame that the formatting changes on the forums have scuffed all the old posts.  No profile views, so I'm assuming that post was found by via a search for Soldier's gear.  So, something was said, which then prompted the search, which then resulted in this thread.  It is a bit of real-life environmental storytelling.

There's a bit more to the story than just me showing the math of the matter.  I had to do all of that to defend a previous post I had made, which went into the conditions of gear preferences:

Because several people on the forums are now adamantly against following links, I'll give the short gist of it.  Soldiers gear is good in places where there is high damage pressure and you aren't necessarily pressed for time.  I myself run around in pure assassin/berserker gear, and I won't lie: there have been times where I've really felt the squishiness of it.  Particularly when I have to solo bounties for the Wizards Vault, there is no way to out-DPS mechanics and that lack of effective health can really be felt.  That all said, as I have said above, it is generally better to go for higher damage gear for things like timers and loot rate.

This was also all said before Jade Bot Cores and the Jade Tech Combat buffs (whatever they're called) were introduced.  Given those, it is a rarity to need anything more than what Berserker or Vipers gives you now.  That all said, if extra survival is needed either full Marauders or a mixture of Marauder and Dragon is good to go with, since they have 90% of the damage of Berserkers with 6.3k extra health.  

It's "good" nowhere because "good" is relative to other available options which, as you note, are better because they give you what you need without sacrificing as much damage.  And forget about it if you're using jade tech boons.  In that case a full glass build can melt champions so fast they can barely fight back!  Those videos I linked above don't even use jade tech and I'm still able to melt Balthazar down without bothering to dodge in full viper gear.  It's a perfect example because soldier gear would take so long to complete this fight you'd almost certainly have to play defensively rather than simply relying on its toughness and vitality to soak the damage.

[Danikat.8537]

12 hours ago, Einlanzer.1627 said:

There was a spreadsheet someone put out doing mechancial comparisions of the different stat combos. If you follow the math, you'll see that Soldier's gear does about 65% of the damage that Berserker's gear does, while Berserker's has about 35% of the survivability of Soldier's (depending a little on class/base health). Soldier's is mathematically nearly twice as good as Berserkers. Active defense and offense are both generally more important than passive defense, of course, but acting like it's possible to avoid all damage in the game is nonsensical, so passive defense absolutely makes a signficant difference most of the time - especially since it reduces the frequency that you need to perfectly evade to stay alive, generally allowing you to compense for a portion of the DPS loss.

If you want to prove it mathmatically you need to work out what proportion of attacks this is relevant to. You say it makes a significant difference "most of the time" but that's a shift in presentation from the rest of your post. How often do you get hit with an attack you cannot dodge (either because it's impossible or because you miss the timing, or have used all your dodges and evades) which does just enough damage that a character in Beserkers would die but one in Soldier's would survive?

I don't disagree with you, I think Soldier's (and other sets with defensive stats) can be useful. But if you want to present it as a mathmatical certainty you can't shift to unspecified perception based arguments part-way through.

Although it would be difficult to calculate how often defensive stats make the difference between surviving an attack and going down, because it will depend on the player and the build as well as the attack strength. I like having some defense (although I usually go got vitality or toughness) because I know I'm not the best player and also know I'm usually not paying as much attention as I should, so for me it absolutely makes a difference, but I wouldn't recommend it for everyone because I know it won't be as good as other choices for them.

[AliamRationem.5172]

51 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

If you want to prove it mathmatically you need to work out what proportion of attacks this is relevant to. You say it makes a significant difference "most of the time" but that's a shift in presentation from the rest of your post. How often do you get hit with an attack you cannot dodge (either because it's impossible or because you miss the timing, or have used all your dodges and evades) which does just enough damage that a character in Beserkers would die but one in Soldier's would survive?

I don't disagree with you, I think Soldier's (and other sets with defensive stats) can be useful. But if you want to present it as a mathmatical certainty you can't shift to unspecified perception based arguments part-way through.

Although it would be difficult to calculate how often defensive stats make the difference between surviving an attack and going down, because it will depend on the player and the build as well as the attack strength. I like having some defense (although I usually go got vitality or toughness) because I know I'm not the best player and also know I'm usually not paying as much attention as I should, so for me it absolutely makes a difference, but I wouldn't recommend it for everyone because I know it won't be as good as other choices for them.

The same issue applies to the damage calculation.  You can't just do the math ignoring all of the variables, which obviously must be applied case by case.  For example, on crit effects can have a major impact on DPS, but there's no way to account for them in one size fits all fashion.  The long and short of it is that soldier stats are a much bigger DPS loss than this "math" suggests.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

Ok, I want proof of that claim. In video form. 

I want to see a full soldier gear build do 65% of snowcrows benchmark. 

 

[Cyninja.2954]

5 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Although it would be difficult to calculate how often defensive stats make the difference between surviving an attack and going down, because it will depend on the player and the build as well as the attack strength. I like having some defense (although I usually go got vitality or toughness) because I know I'm not the best player and also know I'm usually not paying as much attention as I should, so for me it absolutely makes a difference, but I wouldn't recommend it for everyone because I know it won't be as good as other choices for them.

True, at which point soldiers is running into it's 2nd issue:

it's not even the best stat combination available for what it does. It's severely less powerful than condition alternatives. It would be less powerful than paladins, if paladins was available in pve. It's worse than mix and matching marauders and knights, one of which is a great side grade stat (marauder) and the other a great toughness primary with power damage secondaries.

The only thing soldiers had going for it was: boosted characters in the past had access to it, meaning new players could have kept some parts and splashed them in. Now that celestial is a thing, and is far superior to soldier, and more and more stat select-able gear is available, there is even less reason to go for soldier gear.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Cyninja.2954

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

4 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

It's "good" nowhere because "good" is relative to other available options which, as you note, are better because they give you what you need without sacrificing as much damage.  And forget about it if you're using jade tech boons.  In that case a full glass build can melt champions so fast they can barely fight back!  Those videos I linked above don't even use jade tech and I'm still able to melt Balthazar down without bothering to dodge in full viper gear.  It's a perfect example because soldier gear would take so long to complete this fight you'd almost certainly have to play defensively rather than simply relying on its toughness and vitality to soak the damage.

...Still?  After all this time.  Alright, if you insist...

I maintain that soldiers is effective in WvW.  There, when a fight starts you'll be under constant damage from ranged attacks and pets and stuff.  The Effective Health X Effective Power product becomes a big factor in those areas, as their superior statistical bulk allows you to engage in more aggressive and risky tactics forcing the opponent to constantly evade and run away. There's no Overcharge buffs or Bot Cores, either. so the extra health and armor has a bigger value there.  It is also great for manning siege, since the damage is independent of power but your health remains a factor.  The value of toughness comes into play here, since extra health is ablative, but extra armor increase the efficiency of sustain.  

PVE wise can be a bit more complicated.  I did a quick calc using weaver, and found that the EH x EP product for a Soldier Weaver is 136,900,394, while the EH x EP for a Marauder/Dragon mix is 121,642,124.  Soldiers is still about 13% higher, but the margin isn't nearly as far away as it is for a pure berserker/assassin build.  Granted, their strengths are in vastly different places, so if there is a spot where the strike damage is high enough to force more disengagement from the Marauder Mix, that will cause Soldiers to pull ahead in overall performance.  However, the spots where that would be true are exceedingly rare.  Without those circumstances, the extra health/armor is largely meaningless.  A marauder mix Ele sits at over 20k health, so unless someone is planning to solo difficult bounties that is going to be enough.  

[AliamRationem.5172]

43 minutes ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

...Still?  After all this time.  Alright, if you insist...

I maintain that soldiers is effective in WvW.  There, when a fight starts you'll be under constant damage from ranged attacks and pets and stuff.  The Effective Health X Effective Power product becomes a big factor in those areas, as their superior statistical bulk allows you to engage in more aggressive and risky tactics forcing the opponent to constantly evade and run away. There's no Overcharge buffs or Bot Cores, either. so the extra health and armor has a bigger value there.  It is also great for manning siege, since the damage is independent of power but your health remains a factor.  The value of toughness comes into play here, since extra health is ablative, but extra armor increase the efficiency of sustain.  

PVE wise can be a bit more complicated.  I did a quick calc using weaver, and found that the EH x EP product for a Soldier Weaver is 136,900,394, while the EH x EP for a Marauder/Dragon mix is 121,642,124.  Soldiers is still about 13% higher, but the margin isn't nearly as far away as it is for a pure berserker/assassin build.  Granted, their strengths are in vastly different places, so if there is a spot where the strike damage is high enough to force more disengagement from the Marauder Mix, that will cause Soldiers to pull ahead in overall performance.  However, the spots where that would be true are exceedingly rare.  Without those circumstances, the extra health/armor is largely meaningless.  A marauder mix Ele sits at over 20k health, so unless someone is planning to solo difficult bounties that is going to be enough.  

It was bad advice then and it still is.

[Fueki.4753]

In the early days of the game, I regularly had great success tanking Giganticus Lupicus in Arah using Soldier gear, which used to be one of the more challenging encounters in the game. But then people started cheese Lupi with reflects on the wall, which sapped all the fun out of the encounter.

Soldier gear definitely has its place in the game when you want to face-tank encounters, even if that is rarely the optimal choice.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Fueki.4753

[AliamRationem.5172]

31 minutes ago, Fueki.4753 said:

In the early days of the game, I regularly had great success tanking Giganticus Lupicus in Arah using Soldier gear, which used to be one of the more challenging encounters in the game. But then people started cheese Lupi with reflects on the wall, which sapped all the fun out of the encounter.

Soldier gear definitely has its place in the game when you want to face-tank encounters, even if that is rarely the optimal choice.

That was a long time ago.  There are better sets for both sustain and damage.

[DeanBB.4268]

For us noobs....what are TTL & TTK?

I have a Soldier's dual sword DH that I am working towards world completion. Just designed a build around not doing crits. Works great, walk in the park in core Tyria, but that's all I use it for.

[AliamRationem.5172]

23 minutes ago, DeanBB.4268 said:

For us noobs....what are TTL & TTK?

I have a Soldier's dual sword DH that I am working towards world completion. Just designed a build around not doing crits. Works great, walk in the park in core Tyria, but that's all I use it for.

Time to live/time to kill and effective health are basically metrics intended to allow a ballpark comparison between stats.  The problem is they are effectively worthless because they don't take into account any of the variable factors of actual builds and combat.

For example, if you look at the link below the video above it shows a build with no defensive stats fighting a heavy hitting champion without dodging.  We could calculate TTL and EH for that build and they would be terrible, but in the video I comfortably finish the fight at almost max health because of the mechanics of the fight, my DPS shortening the TTK, self healing, and other factors that make EH and TTL useless metrics for making any prediction about actual performance.

[Sweetbread.3678]

The game's design actively devalues passive defensive stats like Toughness and Vitality, because active defenses (chain blocks, dodges, etc.) don't scale off of any sort of stat or gear investment; a dodge or chain block will always have the same amount of iFrames regardless of your stat spread. Basically once you get to the point where you can just straight-up avoid all of the telegraphed PvE damage through positioning and active defense usage (or can just nigh-infinitely chain invulnerabilities in PvP ala Mesmer...) then defensive stats lose almost all of their value.

And if you are going to go the Toughness + Vitality route then Power is the absolute worst damage type to do it on. Condi only has Condi Duration as a secondary dps stat and that caps at only a 100% damage increase, while Power has both Precision and Ferocity to invest in which grant a whopping 250% damage increase when both are maxed. If you go Soldier's with a Power build then you'll only be doing ~29% of your potential max damage, whereas if you go Dire (condi, tough, vit) with a Condition build you'll be doing a much more reasonable 50% of your potential max damage.

So it's basically the worst stat spread possible efficiency-wise. 2/3 of it's stats are essentially worthless once you've learned how to actively avoid damage and even before then, where it has a place as a sort of entry level, training stat spread, it's still catered to the damage type most harmed by making that offense > defense stat tradeoff.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Sweetbread.3678

[AliamRationem.5172]

7 minutes ago, Sweetbread.3678 said:

The game's design actively devalues passive defensive stats like Toughness and Vitality, because active defenses (chain blocks, dodges, etc.) don't scale off of any sort of stat or gear investment; a dodge or chain block will always have the same amount of iFrames regardless of your stat spread. Basically once you get to the point where you can just straight-up avoid all of the telegraphed PvE damage through positioning and active defense usage (or can just nigh-infinitely chain invulnerabilities in PvP ala Mesmer...) then defensive stats lose almost all of their value.

And if you are going to go the Toughness + Vitality route then Power is the absolute worst damage type to do it on. Condi only has Condi Duration as a secondary dps stat and that caps at only a 100% damage increase, while Power has both Precision and Ferocity to invest in which grant a whopping 250% damage increase when both are maxed. If you go Soldier's with a Power build then you'll only be doing ~29% of your potential max damage, whereas if you go Dire (condi, tough, vit) with a Condition build you'll be doing a much more reasonable 50% of your potential max damage.

So it's basically the worst stat spread possible efficiency-wise. 2/3 of it's stats are essentially worthless once you've learned how to actively avoid damage and even before then, where it has a place as a sort of entry level, training stat spread, it's still catered to the damage type most harmed by making that offense > defense stat tradeoff.

I wouldn't say that defensive stats lose their value due to the impact of active defense.  Active defense isn't free.  It's a finite resource and it comes at a cost in time.  If, for example, you spend too much time actively avoiding attacks under pressure due to a lack of passive defense, you may lose more DPS than you would gain by using a build with better passive defense.  This is most noticeable when the DPS variance is relatively small such as it is between the trailblazer and viper builds in the videos I linked.  While the kill times were pretty much identical and neither build needed to play defensively to survive, if TTK had been longer the trailblazer build would have quickly pulled ahead due to its vastly superior passive defense.

As it pertains to soldier stats, the problem is that the DPS disparity is not small.  No amount of dodging around is going to make up the difference between a full DPS build and the soldier build short of the full DPS build simply being unable to survive at all.  And while that's certainly a possibility, there are other stats you can choose that would provide comparable (or at least sufficient) passive defense without giving up so much damage.