90% of Stat Sets are Un-Used

Nezuralli.2794 · January 26, 2021

Most stat sets serve no purpose in any game mode making build craft much more narrow that it would appear. However at the same time a new player is quite rightly overwhelmed by it. Making every stat set available to all classes or even tying stats to gear at all was a huge mistake in my opinion but we're well past fixing that. The solution has been played with a bit by the balance team but never far enough to make running anything other than Berserker best in slot for most classes. Why would you ever run Crusader, Marshal, Rabid, or Vigilant? Do you even remember what stats these sets give without checking the wiki?

That solution that we've seen work is : Traits that allow for Crit Chance, Boon Duration, or Condition Duration to be swapped off of gear for another stat.

That's it.

The important distinction is that these are Traits, as in, profession specific. So they are allowed to be overpowered compared to what all classes have access to.A few examples of this are : Revenant receiving 40% Crit Chance from Fury and 33% from full Endurance, Necromancer receiving 50% Crit Chance from Vulnerability and 33% from Shroud, 20% modifiers on specific conditions allowing you to hit duration cap with just Krait/Balthazar runes, sigils, and food, etc...

So what would happen if there were other stats that could be "replaced" like this? There actually are plenty of attempts by the game to encourage it, they're just woefully inadequate.

And those are : The Conversion Traits

Such as, 10% of Toughness is converted to Power from the Warrior Defense line. This is actually a really interesting idea when you think about it, the higher I stack my Toughness the more Power I get. These conversions are very thematic to the class and encourage building up a currently "useless" stat (toughness is extra worthless due to raid boss agro problems but ignore that for a second). Now imagine this was an insane 100% conversion and you got yourself some Soldier's or Knight's gear. Go ahead and run the numbers yourself but I'll just tell you: it still would be less damage than Berserker. Which is actually perfect! We don't want to remove glass canon builds as an option. However now you have an actual choice to make : Trade off ~some~ damage for the ability to use Toughness gear, which was otherwise completely worthless (and still will be to most other classes without a similar trait).

This pushes class identity, build diversity, and especially the new player experience to new levels. Glass canon will still be top damage and raid meta but new players who are simply doing what the game already encourages them to do wont be doing 10x less damage and complaining that story content and open world is too hard. The fact is, getting one shot by any enemy, even a raid boss, feels cheap when you're too inexperienced to be perfectly avoiding damage. But that's what new players are forced to do in order to do any damage and not feel equally awful for smacking an enemy for 20 minutes with a mace because they wanted to run the appropriate sounding Knight's gear on their Warrior. The difference between a meta build and not should not be 3k DPS to 30k DPS, that's simply a failure of balance and makes true end game content seem completely impossible to new players and story content beatable with only auto attacking to compensate.

We should be encouraging Toughness, Vitality, and Healing Power as stats to look for on builds other than pure raid healing/support builds because that is a much cleaner experience for a new player to learn the game in while still being able to see the difference they make in a fight through damage, team healing, conditions, and/or boons. This could even allow for the fabled "Hybrid" damage build to be a possibility if tuned correctly and open up all the stat sets with both Power and Condition Damage. Try to think of examples of conversions already existing or new being pushed to ludicrous levels but requiring a non-offensive stat and imagine if that would break the game.

For example Ranger has 7% Vitality to Expertise in the Wilderness Survival line. Even with a Maximum Vitality stat set like Shamans and Warrior Runes that only equals 13% Condition Duration. The tradeoff is : you're using Shaman's gear... so you're not even above 1000 Condition Damage and your bleeding does 80 damage per second, good luck. Let's say we make it 5x better and now with maxed out Vitality you can get 65% Condition Duration as a trade-off for running a more defensive trait line and stat set. That's still 20% less than running Vipers with runes and sigils plus you get a decent amount of Power damage.

Now if you've been reading and thinking to yourself that PvP and WvW would be a nightmare to have changes like these added I'll explain how they're actually where they would shine the most. What's the number one complaint new players have with PvP? "I walked onto the point and got CC'd and killed in about 2.5 seconds." So naturally they try and add some defense to their build, only to find that the time to kill them has increased to 4.5 seconds and they now have no chance of killing anyone. It's exactly the same problem as before, the difference between a meta build and not should not be 10x damage. Active defenses will always be more effective than passive, that's exactly how most PvP builds work. By blocking or ignoring damage entirely while running a high damage setup. This will still be the meta and always will be because it allows for the highest skill ceiling. But we need a way to slow down the time to kill without allowing for un-killable Bunker builds. You can't just add a Defensive stat set amulet as we've seen before, because one class or another would be able to abuse the hell out of it in combination with their active defenses. So basically we need to use these conversion traits as a way to make our own stat sets on the classes where they make sense.

We see this already with builds like Valkyrie Reaper, which is able to have a high Vitality and still do damage thanks to all the traits that replace Precision on it's gear. AND THAT'S STILL NOT META. Let me repeat that, even after getting 100% Crit Chance without putting a single point into Precision and dumping all of that into extra health (effectively a health pool of about 60,000), that's not even listed as a viable option on MetaBattle. That's because higher damage is always worth it but higher health or toughness is cut through almost instantly anyway without active defenses.

Thanks for reading, what stat combos would you want to see available on your characters? I personally want to see some way to buff condition duration specifically for Elementalist, rather than focusing on either Bleeding or Burning alone so I can play my Support Tempest and still do damage.

Randulf.7614 · January 26, 2021

If it makes you feel better, I have a Celestial Weaver, Zealot's Guardian and Soldier's Warrior. Yes, the warrior wields a mace (as does the Guardian, but don't tell anyone!)

Blood Red Arachnid.2493 · January 27, 2021

The important thing to remember is that the META is largely about community enforcement. The community is focusing on speed clears and defined roles when they recommend builds. A strong case can be made for creating builds that don't do things quickly, but comfortably. Even for raids, you don't need to run the super-effective comps with pure glass builds to win. A community can have expectations where the players prefer not to wear glass cannon gear, because they don't want to spend their time dealing with losses from thin margins of error.

The gear prefixes are there largely to help with preference in play. Factoring in overworld preferences and WvW builds of limitless specialization, there are far more uses for gear sets than you'd expect. I myself have a Marshall Weaver for WvW and particularly stubborn PVE overworld bosses.

Konrad Curze.5130 · January 27, 2021

Agree but I think that ship sailed long ago. I really doubt Anet ever had the intention of balancing gear, even in the first year of the game when berserker was what 99,9999% of the player base run they didn't even bait an eyelid.

Defensive stats exist only in name in this game, in fact building defensively is more likely to make things harder for you, you won't be substantially more survivable, but your dps will fall off a cliff so fights will last longer, you'll take more damage as a result, and die even sooner.

If they had any intention of making toughness, healing power or vitality count for shit they'd have done so years ago, it doesn't require a huge commitment to change anything massive, it's as simple as balancing numbers, moving knobs up and down.

They didn't. They still don't. What we have is what we get. We'll keep looking at 95% of stat combinations and shaking our heads while we equip nothing but berserker, viper and maybe marauder if your lucky that doesn't get you kicked

Demonhead.7584 · January 27, 2021

-- removing comment due to OP's obnoxious, rude and misleading response --

Nezuralli.2794 · January 27, 2021

I'm not a new player, I spend more time in that build editor than I do playing the game. But that's terrible advice for a new player. They don't know what they don't know and so can't look for it just by browsing the wiki. The game should do the bare minimum to teach players and ease them into it.

SoftFootpaws.9134 · January 27, 2021

If you think glass cannon builds are all there is you've obviously never played an Ele. Getting killed every single hit just because you missed a dodge or ran out of Endurance gets old very fast, and you quickly learn that 15k HP and 2.2k armor is the minimum.

Its just alot less noticeable on classes that already start off with enough defensive stats.

Even Guardian and Thief, who have similar health, still start with more armor (and your first few hundred points into it are most effective), and more ways to keep themselves alive like Guardian's generous 33% damage resistance and Thief's critical strike healing.

There's alot of other examples in the game I could list, this is just the most glaring one.

Btw, Healing Power is a defensive stat too, so no support builds are truly glass at all, even those on Harrier's or Seraph's.

I'd say that almost every stat combination is used in the game between PvE and WvW. I can't think of any stat combo that is truly useless; even the less common ones still get integrated into other builds piecemeal for min/maxing.

If anything we need more combinations to increase build diversity. For example, there's no equivalent of Valkyrie's and Magi's that has Toughness instead of Vitality, e.g Cavalier's has Toughness as its main stat instead of Power. This is important because sometimes higher health can be a liability rather than an asset, as its harder to heal the missing hit points compared to just taking less damage instead.

That said, something like how Fractal Potions work (stat conversion) would be very good for the game.

Veprovina.4876 · January 27, 2021

@Hannelore.8153 said:That said, something like how Fractal Potions work (stat conversion) would be very good for the game.

Isn't that why we have food and utility buffs?Especially utilty like, Gain Power Equal to 3% of Your Precision, Gain Power Equal to 6% of Your Ferocity, Gain Concentration Equal to 3% of Your Precision, Gain Concentration Equal to 6% of Your Healing Power. You can like, build to raise your crit chance to also boost your concentration.

Danikat.8537 · January 27, 2021

I don't know the numbers of course but it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of players actually do use those sets "no one" uses. I know there's a very vocal crowd who insists everyone must or does use their designated meta-builds, but given the number of people in-game who don't know about this forum or the Wiki or some of the more popular fan sites it wouldn't surprise me if the majority of players have no idea what the meta crowd say they're supposed to use. Add in ones who do know what the meta-builds are and choose to do something different anyway and I think you'd have a hard time finding a stat combination which genuinely no one uses or likes.

I'm in that second group, I know some of the recommended sets but in most cases I've decided they're not right for me. I'm not in a hurry to get combat over with as fast as possible, I'd rather have a longer fight with more mechanics in play because I enjoy the combat in this game, and I like having some defensive stats so I don't have to perfectly time every dodge and counter or end up dead. I've got characters using rabid, a mix of rabid and vipers, soldiers, marauder, celestial and some I can't remember. But I think the only one I've got using beserker's is my warrior and I might change that.

@"Nezuralli.2794" said:Such as, 10% of Toughness is converted to Power from the Warrior Defense line. This is actually a really interesting idea when you think about it, the higher I stack my Toughness the more Power I get. These conversions are very thematic to the class and encourage building up a currently "useless" stat (toughness is extra worthless due to raid boss agro problems but ignore that for a second). Now imagine this was an insane 100% conversion and you got yourself some Soldier's or Knight's gear. Go ahead and run the numbers yourself but I'll just tell you: it still would be less damage than Berserker. Which is actually perfect! We don't want to remove glass canon builds as an option. However now you have an actual choice to make : Trade off ~some~ damage for the ability to use Toughness gear, which was otherwise completely worthless (and still will be to most other classes without a similar trait).

We already have the option of trading off some damage for extra defence, on all professions. That's exactly what using those "useless" sets does. It's only non-viable if you're working on the assumption that the absolute number 1 priority overriding everything else must be to kill things as quickly as possible and anything which detracts from that is automatically not worth considering. Adding absurd boosts so you're actually still getting the same damage (or so close the difference is irrelevant) isn't opening up the option for a trade-off, it's removing the trade - it means you get both benefits and no downsides, which is simply power-creep.

The Boz.2038 · January 27, 2021

Rabid is fairly popular... but yes.Also, why are some stat sets that make 100% sense PVP-only? Deadshot, Wizard, Demolisher, all these would be great for a lot of the classes and specs. Why is there no power-based expertise option for non-damage conditions like vulnerability or weakness?

kharmin.7683 · January 27, 2021

I certainly don't use the more "popular" runes and sigils because I don't want to pay the price for them across all of my characters and builds. But then, I'm a very casual player. Perhaps I could find more success in content with which I struggle if I invested in them.

maddoctor.2738 · January 27, 2021

I think a lot of the sets are simply in the game for completeness, to have as many possible combinations as possible. There are some combinations that make no sense, on all tiers of play.

1-stat gear with Toughness provides no meaningful boost to effective health at low levels.2-stat gear with Power and Ferocity is worthless as critical damage without critical chance is useless3-stat gear like Nomad which are only for the memes

Just some quick examples of gear combinations that are absolutely terrible for new or old players, there are many more bad choices out there.To be honest though, multiple stat combinations (at least in the core game) exist to make good gear more rare. If all the gear drops you ever got where the 2-3 good core sets, then it would make gear even easier/faster (for new players) to acquire than it already is. Or alternatively they'd need to lower the chances of anything good dropping.

Tseison.4659 · January 27, 2021

A new stat combination I’d like to see in EoD is a:Condition DamageCondition DurationPower

As nice as Vipers is, I feel since my precision is sitting less than 50% regardless of getting fury or spotter, I don’t really think it’s that useful of a stat. In groups that provide those boons I mentioned then sure, but if soloing or in WvW you’re not really gonna notice it.

I personally believe they should merge the Condition Duration stat into the Condition Damage and have it where a certain % of condition damage increases your overall condition and cc duration. But it’s just a thought and not a must for me.

Sobx.1758 · January 27, 2021

Taking away options just because you think nothing other than optimal choices should remain in the game is a bit weird imo. Not only that, but you can mix and match different stat pieces.

AND THAT'S STILL NOT META.

Nobody cares. Well... At least nobody should care.

@"Nezuralli.2794" said:I'm not a new player, I spend more time in that build editor than I do playing the game. But that's terrible advice for a new player. They don't know what they don't know and so can't look for it just by browsing the wiki. The game should do the bare minimum to teach players and ease them into it.

Cool. And were you a new player? Because I was and I don't remember being overwhelmed by all the stat options available -I looked into it, picked what I wanted and played. If your hypothetical new player is so confused about what to build and they're not interested in using their own brain then there's plenty of sites, resources and people that can (and do) help. What's that with people feeling the need to speak for every new player's experience?

...also what do you mean they don't know what they don't know? They know what they're confused by. They know what options are problematic for them to pick from. That's enough to search for answers or "look for it just by browsing the wiki".

Obtena.7952 · January 27, 2021

@Nezuralli.2794 said:I'm not a new player, I spend more time in that build editor than I do playing the game. But that's terrible advice for a new player. They don't know what they don't know and so can't look for it just by browsing the wiki. The game should do the bare minimum to teach players and ease them into it.

Right and THAT is the answer here because even if you make a whole bunch of stat changes ... those new players STILL don't know.

It really doesn't matter if you think stat sets are useful or not. That's not a reason to change them.

Danikat.8537 · January 27, 2021

@Sobx.1758 said:
@"Nezuralli.2794" said:I'm not a new player, I spend more time in that build editor than I do playing the game. But that's terrible advice for a new player. They don't know what they don't know and so can't look for it just by browsing the wiki. The game should do the bare minimum to teach players and ease them into it.

Cool. And were you a new player? Because I was and I don't remember being overwhelmed by all the stat options available -I looked into it, picked what I wanted and played. If your

hypothetical new player

is so confused about what to build and they're not interested in using their own brain then there's plenty of sites, resources and people that can (and do) help. What's that with people feeling the need to speak for every new player's experience?

...also what do you mean they don't know what they don't know? They know what they're confused by. They know what options are problematic for them to pick from. That's enough to search for answers or "look for it just by browsing the wiki".

I agree. Even if they don't know that they've missed or misunderstood something they can still find out from the Wiki and other sites. That's what happened to me. Early on, thanks to the way the old trait system tied stats to trait lines I thought power was only useful for melee weapons and precision did the same thing but for ranged weapons. I found out how it really works largely by coincidence while looking up available stat combinations.

Also, far from being overwhelmed I was actually disappointed by the limited range of options when I first started looking at what stats I wanted. I knew level 80 gear had 3 stats and I assumed I could choose any 3 I wanted and it was just a matter of finding out the name and how to get it, my plans were completely messed up when I found out only certain combinations were available and I was restricted to choosing between them. (And this was back in early 2013, when there were a lot fewer options.)

Tyncale.1629 · January 27, 2021

In the first years I used to hoard Exotics of any stat-set in my Bank, thinking "hey, I might need that for an Alt maybe someday!" With my bank space pretty tight by now, I just immediately Salvage anything that isn't Berserker or Ogden Armor (for my many Condi Scourges, since I am too cheap to make them all Vipers).

Yes, GW2 is missing the mark on a few things. The uselessness of any item or consumable lower then level 80 is another such wasted effort. Oh, and craft skills.

Fuchslein.8639 · January 27, 2021

I find this funny. I am looking atm for a good combie to equip my Mirage with. Since I don't have access to Viper jewelry except I think fractals or raids~, which all still takes a bit.And it's scary how overpowered all the meta stuff is.Sure you don't have to play meta, but some still don't want to lag behind and when I then read on reddit that without Viper you lag 50-80% behind no matter how well you would play, that's just not justifiable in my eyes ...

Obtena.7952 · January 28, 2021

@Fuchslein.8639 said:I find this funny. I am looking atm for a good combie to equip my Mirage with. Since I don't have access to Viper jewelry except I think fractals or raids~, which all still takes a bit.And it's scary how overpowered all the meta stuff is.Sure you don't have to play meta, but some still don't want to lag behind and when I then read on reddit that without Viper you lag 50-80% behind no matter how well you would play, that's just not justifiable in my eyes ...

You shouldn't believe everything you read on reddit. You certainly don't lag 50-80% behind Viper setups if you use something else. Well ... maybe if you decide you're going to rock some Nomads ...

Fuchslein.8639 · January 28, 2021

@Obtena.7952 said:
@Fuchslein.8639 said:I find this funny. I am looking atm for a good combie to equip my Mirage with. Since I don't have access to Viper jewelry except I think fractals or raids~, which all still takes a bit.And it's scary how overpowered all the meta stuff is.Sure you don't have to play meta, but some still don't want to lag behind and when I then read on reddit that without Viper you lag 50-80% behind no matter how well you would play, that's just not justifiable in my eyes ...

You shouldn't believe everything you read on reddit. You certainly don't lag 50-80% behind Viper setups if you use something else. Well ... maybe if you decide you're going to rock some Nomads ...

So you have numbers what makes how much dmg?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493 · January 28, 2021

@"Fuchslein.8639" said:
So you have numbers what makes how much dmg?

Why yes, I do ;) At least, I know how to get them.

The way that the game calculates damage isn't mysterious. All of the equations are on the wiki (condi, power. The only hard part is putting it all together. But, what you can do is take some shortcuts to see how much you'll be doing in each little part.

Say, for example, you want to compare how much condition damage you do in Sinister gear as compared to Viper. The Item Nomenclature page has how much each set gives you. Throw on some runes and sigils (Bursting, Malice, Nightmare), and you'll get the following stats

Sinister: 1,556 condition damage, 0 expertise, 30% total condi duration, 5% increased damageViper: 1,348 condition damage, 633 expertise, 72.2% total condi duration, 5% increased damage

From there, you can see how much damage you'll do with each condition. For example, say that you have a skill that inflicts 1 stack of bleeding. Bleeding does 0.06 condition damage + 22 for every second. So, we'd get the final numbers:

Sinister: 121.13 damage per second for 1.3 seconds, coming to 157.47 damageViper: 108.02 damage per second for 1.72 seconds, coming to 185.80 damage

You can do these kinds of calculations for all of the other conditions, and for all of the other gear prefixes. You can change runes, add or subtract traits, add might, etc. For reference, this means that Sinister does 84.8% the damage of Viper.

Doing power damage is more straightforward. So long as you don't throw in a bunch of confounding variables, you can compare gear sets by using the effective power method:

Effective Power = Power x (Crit Chance x Crit damage + Chance to not Crit) x Damage modifiers

There's a similar value I use for durability. I call it effective health, and it is basically this:

Effective Health = Health x (Armor / 1920) x damage reduction modifiers

The whole thing is divided by 1920 to make it much easier to understand. 1920 being the base armor for exotic scholar professions.

An example of this is something I did awhile ago to cut someone down. I gave an ele a Berserker Set, and then a Soldier set, and showed how they compare. It looked like this:

Berserkers:Power: 2556Crit Chance: 50.8%Crit Damage: 229.1%Health: 11,645Armor: 1967

Effective Health = 11,645 x (1967/1920) = 11,930Effective Power = 2556 x (.502 + 2.2914 x 0.498) = 2556 x 1.656 = 4,233Effective Health X Effective Power 50,499,690

Soldiers:Power: 2556Crit Chance: 5%Crit Damage: 165%Health: 21,255Armor: 2928

Effective Health = 21,255 x (2928 / 1920) = 32,414Effective Power: 2556 x (.95 + 1.65 x 0.05) = 2639Effective Health X Effective Power: 85,540,546

Now again, you can do this with all sorts of different sets. Just keep in mind that effective power isn't that useful when comparing two different professions. When you do that, all of those pesky variables that normally cancel out suddenly don't, and the math quickly becomes nightmarish. Effective Health, however, is useful across all professions. For reference, Soldiers has 62% the damage of Berserkers, while (for Ele) it has 272% of the effective health.

Finally, there's always the brute force version. For this one, you basically buy the gear sets, go to the training golem, and see which one does more damage. This method is highly subject to your personal skill level, but your chief concern should be how well you do personally anyway. I actually did something like this years ago when I compared the auto attack damage of... nearly everything on the meta builds.

@Konrad Curze.5130 said:Agree but I think that ship sailed long ago. I really doubt Anet ever had the intention of balancing gear, even in the first year of the game when berserker was what 99,9999% of the player base run they didn't even bait an eyelid.
Defensive stats exist only in name in this game, in fact building defensively is more likely to make things harder for you, you won't be substantially more survivable, but your dps will fall off a cliff so fights will last longer, you'll take more damage as a result, and die even sooner.
If they had any intention of making toughness, healing power or vitality count for kitten they'd have done so years ago, it doesn't require a huge commitment to change anything massive, it's as simple as balancing numbers, moving knobs up and down.
They didn't. They still don't. What we have is what we get. We'll keep looking at 95% of stat combinations and shaking our heads while we equip nothing but berserker, viper and maybe marauder if your lucky that doesn't get you kicked

That is a very common misconception. I did some math to show it above, but when it comes to overall impact the defensive stats are quite useful. The Effective Health X Effective Power product I did above has Soldier gear leaving Berserker gear in the dust by a significant lead. This is because the increase in overall durability far outpaces the loss in DPS. If you wanted to build your toons for overall statistical effectiveness, you'd stay away from the glass cannon prefixes. I can make a strong case that Marauder is actually the best set in the game, because it has 90% of the damage of Berserker with 6,330 additional health on top. You won't end up doing worse overall by going with tankier gear.

This myth comes largely from players not understanding how important tactics are. Most of the damage that meta builds do comes from the meta tactics. When a player decides that they want to do well in the game, they adopt both the tactics and the gear prefixes of raiders, and when they see a massive increase in performance they attribute it to gear. Personally, one of the reasons why I'll swap to Marshall (Power, Healing Power, Precision, Condition Damage) gear on my weaver is because it lets me beat champions that I struggle with otherwise. That wouldn't work if the healing power did nothing.

I still recommend Berserker to most people though, because it is the best in time efficiency and loot per second... but only if you're good. Granted, there are places in the game where durability is nigh useless. Anyone who's fought the Sand Giant has learned that lesson.

Fuchslein.8639 · January 28, 2021

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:
@"Fuchslein.8639" said:
So you have numbers what makes how much dmg?

Why yes, I do ;) At least, I know how to get them.

The way that the game calculates damage isn't mysterious. All of the equations are on the wiki (

condi,

power

. The only hard part is putting it all together. But, what you can do is take some shortcuts to see how much you'll be doing in each little part.

Say, for example, you want to compare how much condition damage you do in Sinister gear as compared to Viper. The

Item Nomenclature

page has how much each set gives you. Throw on some runes and sigils (Bursting, Malice, Nightmare), and you'll get the following stats