Radiant vs. Survivor

What's your opinions on these insignias for heroes? It's about time I fully outfitted my heroes, so I'd like some opinions.

Obviously for warriors and non-energy using classes, survivor is the way to go. My philosophy has always been though that while survivor may increase your health by 5-10%, radiant can increase your energy by a greater proportion, and that extra energy can turn into a lot more than 5-10% of a heroes HP in terms of healing or extra damage and thus shorter battles.

I've always favored proting over trying to build up a big health pool. Whats your opinion?

for me it depends on what weapons they run. if the hero has a 30hp weap i tend to do more survivor or other health runes. if its more the 30hp either as a 60hp staff or 30hp on shield and other weapon then i do more energy.

Forget radiant in PvE and question the use of survivor

Warrior heroes: More energy means they can attack maybe 1-2 times more before running out of energy. At that point it stops giving any benefit. More energy on a warrior doesn't increase DPS

Survivor in PvE means a warrior will take 1 more hit before blowing up. Whereas more defense will lower the damage he takes and thus live longer and outperform any survivor boosts he may have gotten from armor.

I did a calculation a while back and it is cheaper, item-slot wise, to put defense on armor and any +hp on weapons and offhands.
+10 armor roughly equates to a 16% reduction in damage taken. So all my warriors run +defense on armor.




Radiant on casters, same thing. They'll fire off one more spell before running out. It just postpones the inevitable. If energy is what you need then more pips or more virtual energy pips is what you need.
I run full survivors and vitaes with +health on equipment to at least put my casters over 530hp or more. My warriors have slightly less thanks to a major rune or less +hp. This means my warriors have less hp and hopefully get hit more than casters.

I try to have a 25-50% energy boost from base on my casters. So a mesmer with 30e base gets up to 45e due to wand/offhand(+12 or +17) or staff with insightful or +5e^50(+10). I like to give them some breathing room with more expensive spells but I don't focus on pumping up their energy. I try to make them live longer by making them take less damage while still keeping damage as high as possible, keeping fights as short as possible and winning faster.

So for warriors and people I want to take more hits I have <530-550hp
Casters I try >530-550hp


Radiant I never use except for some PvP situations

Tis my opinion

Quote: Originally Posted by Infanta

Obviously for warriors and non-energy using classes, survivor is the way to go. No - why would it? +AL works fine and there are other choices.

Anyway, back to the question.

The choice bewteen +HP (survivor) or +E (radiant) depends on the use (well thats obvious, meh). Both increase buffers which increases the effectiveness of skills that refill that buffer, healing or energy-management respectively. A characterbuild whose effectiveness relies on e-management (like most necro builds) would be best served by the use of radiant insignia's while a characterbuild that relies on effective health 'management' would be better served with survivor's.

For a build to be effective, you need energy management. That means you need to get energy returned from somewhere, hence you don't need extra energy. If you can't keep your energy recouperated, there's no need to add anything extra to begin with.

Extra life makes you more durable and harder to kill, so that is definitely worth much more.

Survivor by far.

Simply adding more energy does not guarantee a return of energy; you might last a little longer than you would without it, but eventually you'll run out.

The smart thing to do is to take care of your energy in the first place, whether by energy management skills or simply intelligent pacing.

You never, ever, ever, need energy for general PvE.
The only time I can think of that you will need a big energy pool is doing UWSC as the ER bonder.

:edit:
This also goes for PvP
If you have a radiant/attunment rune, you are bad.

High HP on team members you don't want to get attacked, low HP on those you want to get attacked.

Radiant has no use outside of some PvP builds, such as the shock/axe war where exhaustion can be a concern, or some assassin chains...
Survivor isn't always the way to go either...
Additional armor is where its at IMO:
dreadnough on wars, tormentor on necros, prodigy on mesmers, blessed on eles and dervs, centurion on paras, possibly ghostforge on rits...
survivor for the rest.
Unless you're against a majority of armor ignoring damage or degen, 10 more armor does far more than +40hp

Quote: Originally Posted by Taurean

I haven't played in 3-4 years and back then, a sup rune on your headpiece was the way to go for everything except pvp. Nowadays it seems sup runes are gone everywhere except maybe a few death magic builds. I'm just following the meta on this and it seems to require at least more than 530 hp. I think, I'm not sure though, that it is because of some bosses which can deal an overload of damage and spike you so the health buffer is needed in that case. I.e., when your ps doesn't get precast

Just figured I'd throw this in

The only time I'd run either is when there's SY! spam. Radiant for ER eles running p-bond and nobody else. +10-15 Armor is better, it's a 15-23% reduction in phys/ele/wanding damage.

Of course if it's all degen /armor ignoring survivor might be better but PvE mesmers and necros still wand you.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Armor_rating

Quote: Originally Posted by Don Zardeone

I haven't played in 3-4 years and back then, a sup rune on your headpiece was the way to go for everything except pvp. Nowadays it seems sup runes are gone everywhere except maybe a few death magic builds. I'm just following the meta on this and it seems to require at least more than 530 hp. I think, I'm not sure though, that it is because of some bosses which can deal an overload of damage and spike you so the health buffer is needed in that case. I.e., when your ps doesn't get precast

Just figured I'd throw this in Yeah, I'm old-school too, and I didn't change my habits. I still go with sup/runes and radiant. A player/hero with this setup has 485 HP, which IMM is enough most of the time, provided you can back it up with healing. I have the vanquisher title, and since the 7 heroes update, I yet have to see one of my heroes die, despite the fact I don't have any monk in my team, and I went to "hard" places like FoW.

But... I don't have Radiant on all my heroes, just on a bunch of them. Basically, here is what I do to decide. I first make the build setup (with team e-management etc), then I go out and do some missions or slay some foes, with the status bar of one of my heroes opened. I check if he uses properly his skills and if they are efficient, but I also keep an eye on his energy. If he doesn't have radiant insignias and doesn't run out of energy, I do for survivor. If he does despite my team e-management, I go for radiant. Then I repeat that for the 6 other heroes.

Yeah 530+ hp is great, but 485 can work too...

These get my points.

Quote: Originally Posted by Gabs88 High HP on team members you don't want to get attacked, low HP on those you want to get attacked. Quote:

Originally Posted by Don Zardeone I did a calculation a while back and it is cheaper, item-slot wise, to put defense on armor and any +hp on weapons and offhands. +10 armor roughly equates to a 16% reduction in damage taken. So for warriors and people I want to take more hits I have <530-550hp. Casters I try >530-550hp

Quote: Originally Posted by Sir Mad At some point you're gonna run out of health, so you need health-management (healing). See where I'm coming from? Err... Radiant lets you cast 1 more spell before your energy pool is depleted, from full energy, then nothing more...
Survivor works about the same in that it lets you take 1-2 more hits before you die from full health, which is why I like armor better as it always applies.
But about health... Guess what? When your health runs out it doesn't even matter how much energy you had stored... instead it takes 3-5 sec for your team mates to rez you or forces a monk to waste his elite.

If you're in a situation where one more cast would change anything, odds are your insignas dont matter in the first place.

Even though it doesn't apply to heroes, a high energy set (hell, even a +20 energy staff) puts radiant to shame.

EDIT: at below: agreed, if you do find it useful for your hero's build, of course using radiant shouldn't be totaly out of the picture. However you can never have enough health/armor no matter how much healing/prot you have. Best example are the margonite mobs: corrupt and mirror on target then boss' invoke... No, PS covered by SB isn't absolute invinciblity... And this is from experience :'(, Olias didn't have any insignas for the record.

Well actually that's 2 more spells (in the particular case of my mesmer), if you add an attunement rune, but I get your point. However, you seem to forget heroes tend to use what they can, and don't like to stop using skill for saving their mana for a more useful skill.

Let me give you an example. if your hero has, let's say, 2 skills only, one costing 5e, and the other one costing 15e, once he's under 15e, he will spam the 5e skill, and never have enough mana again for the 15e skill. Now with a radiant armour, he will be able to use this 15e skill one more time, which is most of the time enough for a fight (considering the recharge time).

Also, yeah, I'd rather run out of mana than run out of health. But what if you do not need more health to survive? What if you have enough healing / prot so you can make it with only 485 hp?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying one should go for radiant insignias, no matter what. I'm just saying if radiant insignias can help you, go for it, that *may* be ok.

Generally speaking, I'd rate it like this:

armor > health > energy

Sometimes the armor options via runes and insignias kinda sucks for the profession or build, so in that case I'd go with health. Energy, if you need more at all, is easy enough to get from your weapon set. Why just running a staff, a char can easily get +20 energy and +30 health if they want. Radiants and Attunements do have some niche uses, but mostly on farming builds. A paragon might like to use a radiant or two, but only because of the massive cost of Aggressive Refrain. Also, a derv can benefit from a radiant here and there, since derv armor already has native health buffs. This was more true before the update however, and a zealous scythe usually covered it anyway.

I only bother with survivor, and even then only on the chest and legs. That and +60hp weapon sets means you can afford a major rune and still be around 600hp. On the other insignia slots you can put things like bloodstained, extra armour ones or if you really want radiants to get and extra 3 max energy (frankly +10 armour's more useful).

good points raised here

Only time I would consider radiant (+attunement) is if you are trying to pump 25e spells on a necro. Then the energy overhead for soul reaping can become relevant.