Build submission

I do not feel that this thread is fundamentally about damage. It is about threat, about battlefield presence. It is about the differences between a high and low priority target that creates threat through his ability to deal damage and kill opponents. Now obviously not all threat comes from damage. For example a properly specced and played Mesmer is an incredibly high threat character because of the havoc he wrecks in a backline through disruption and shutdown. Hell, sometimes he's the highest value target on the field because of it. But Warriors and Elementalists don't work that way, they are threatening because of their ability to deal damage. The thing about damage as threat, though, and this is the key I think, is that the threat doesn't get diminished significantly even if damage is mitigated.

In reality a Warrior will have a lot of his damage mitigated. An unmitigated Warrior with a couple of attack skills can pump out close to 3000 damage per minute, and you'd be a fool if you let him do that. So you mitigate his damage. You use snares to limit his mobility and kite away when he gets close. When he does close you use Guardian and other protective effects upon whoever he's attacking to mitigate even more of his damage. Maybe you'll set traps in the back and force him to run through them, or have a Blinding Flash guy babysitting him. With proper attention a Warrior can be reduced to a shadow of himself, perhaps only kicking out 800 damage in a minute on whomever he can get a blow in on.

On the other side of the equation you have something like an Offering of Blood powered blood nuker. He can cycle Dark Pact and Vampiric Gaze upon the other team all day and there's very little they can do about it - the skills are non-trivial to interrupt, the packet size is small, and each attack ignores a lot of defenses (or all defenses in the case of Vampiric Gaze). Because of the short cooldowns and the energy provided by Offering of Blood, this character can dish out around 1200 defense ignoring autohit damage every minute.

Side by side you look at the Warrior dishing out 800 damage and the Necro dealing 1200 and you conclude that the Necromancer was more effective, right? After all he dealt 50% more damage, that's a lot better!

Dead wrong.

The difference is that while the Warrior only dealt 800 actual damage, the extra 2000 damage that wasn't dealt to HP went directly into the other team's attention, energy, and skill usage. It is not a trivial job to constantly pre-kite the Warriors to keep them from getting hits in, especially if there are multiples operating independently. But being forced to kite can be incredibly disruptive. Sure your energy continues to regenerate, but you aren't casting, and every time you stop to cast you have to balance that against the hits you're going to take from doing so. Sure it's an effective way to mitigate some damage, but it's not free by any means. Following a Warrior around with Guardian and maintaining that on his target requires a good amount of attention and is not cheap by any means. It will stop a good amount of damage and frustrate the Warrior but it's still energy that isn't going to be spent healing. Snaring or Blinding the Warrior work on similar principles, it's damage that isn't dealt but it's time and energy that has to be spent to control that damage. Aegis isn't attention intensive but it chews up a lot of energy. Etc, etc, etc. The net effect of all this is that while the Warrior only does a fraction of his damage potential, the amount of trouble he caused his opponent is a whole lot higher. Why? Because of the threat he posed if they didn't address him. In short, the damage he dealt might have been mitigated, but *the threat, largely, was not*.

The Necromancer on the other hand deals more raw damage but isn't threatening. There isn't a lot that the opponent can do about it, but there isn't any need to. They can easily keep up with that damage with normal healing. This theoretical Necromancer, in short, is not scary. He might deal his damage while another guy gets shut down but he doesn't provoke any sort of reaction from the opponent. He doesn't force them to change their gameplan, or expend time and energy on things they otherwise wouldn't want to. Or, in short, he just doesn't matter. I started to explain this, then decided it was easier to steal a post from Ensign and save my time.