Flux - September 2011

I could be wrong, but I can't imagine that the condition pressure component of 3 melee builds are going to scale well with the Flux.

So this month the meta will be plain simple massive damage over hexes/armor-ignoring one and degeneration?

Oh thats pretty funny, now one should really bring a crab pet into pvp.

"being based on japaneese history... So here is this giant enemy crab! And you attack its weak point for massive damage.

Pretty funny if that is what they are referencing to.

Am I correct in assuming mesmers and necro's are at a huge disadvantage as most of their skills do not benefit from a loss of armor, but they themselves just have become alot more squishy?

Lol professions being favored damage dealers in HM should be disfavored in PvP this month, me thinks.

skills like 'watch yourself' or 'stand your ground' and 'spirit bond' become very desirable?

Great. Now people don't want to play monk.

superdefence spikes or superdamage pressure builds?

fun month.

OK...Can someone explain this to me in dummy terms please?

If I monk, my usual equip is full Disciples then a shield for whatever situation and a sword with a def mod.

I understand that if I run +hp runes that my armour is reduced to 40 but if I run the correct equip does that basically drop me down to 60 again?

Sorry if that makes no sense but clarity would be appreciated :3

You're right... the result of me trying to test against inconsistent retards in RA.

Looking at it now, I'm pretty sure the armour reduction is applied after the effect of armour penetration is calculated.
FWIW:
159 and 177 from Invoke at 14 and 16 respectively on a 60AR target suggest either the armour penetration is removing 16 armour instead of 10 (quite a big discrepancy, usually it's only 1 armour out or something) or that the armour penetration is being applied to the 60 base (removing 16* armour) before the flux is applied (taking armour down to the observed 24). Clearly one of these is more sensible. Summoning a level 13 Bone Fiend (has 40 armour according to the wiki and confirmed using Flare) then hitting it with Invoke Lightning confirms the latter; you deal the predicted 143 damage.
This also implies that the flux's reduction is put at the very end of the armour calculation. This is consistent with what might have been initially (if perhaps, naively) expected.

*25% penetration on a 60AR target is one of those irregularities, it will remove 16 armour rather than 15.

TLDR
This flux is functionally equivalent to "You have +200 health but whenever you take armour sensitive damage it is increased by 41%"

yay more trip derv/invoke in GvG in HA that's exactly what we all wanted!!!

hopefully split mesmers will see less play, since this flux nerfs IoP and mesmers damage options generally, the flag pushing we have presently with a split mesmer and often 2 other snare characters is incedibly boring. Probably more so than the triple dervish metagame we saw 3-4 months ago, at least then people were less bothered with flag pushing and made a conscious effort to kill the other team (and were able to do so).

Now every team has a mesmer with two snares, a cripshot ranger and either a water ele or a blood necro with snares. The whole thing is just incredibly boring, the battle has become about spending 26 mins trying to cap a flag through an endless spam of hex snares and cripple, and then buttonmash lord damage for 2 minutes, since a large percentage of games are going all the way to the tiebreaker again.

tl;dr. I hate split mesmers, they are almost impossible to kill and extremely boring to face. I hope this meta will make them go away at least for a month, although in reality they probably wont cos they provide so much utility.

Oh, the health boost behaves like other health changes so the effect of Death Penalty on health is weakened; 15% DP is now more like 10%.

So does the hp increase nerf AP spike or the lower armor actually improve its damage far beyond the hp increase?

If we take this to be true...

I'm not sure how much damage the AP/RtP spike does, so I'll say 600 since it usually kills targets with that much health.

I'd say 80% of that damage is affected by armor, so that takes it to 480.

480*1.41 = 676.8.

Add in the roughly 120 damage of armor ignoring, you get around 800 damage.

Avg health of a char is 600, +200 = 800.

TL;DR: It basically scales identically with these (highly assumed) numbers.

However, difference is, it'll take much more energy to recover from this sort of damage.

As someone said, it's roughly equivalent to a 30% reduction in healing.

Indeed. I believe Spirit Bond will make up for the 10 energy cost.

The main armour ignoring components of the spike are the Deep Wound and, if present, an ESurge Mesmer and Spirit's Strength. DW is exactly 100 damage, an ESurge is above and SS is below.
The rest of the spike (almost all armour sensitive) is increased.

Overall AP Spike isn't affected that much; it will probably still kill whilst Spirit Bond and Aegis still stop it and Infuse can still save.

Trip melee with ele midlines will still be very effective though. We were having a lot of success after the american AT last night running 2x onslaught, hammer, shatterstone, and invoke with breeze. Dervishes were hitting for 100x2 with twin moon, shatterstone was landing for 120x2 on casters, invoke was going for 150+ on casters. This is going to be a retarded month.


This flux increases the effectiveness of AP spike. +200 health effectively equates to a +33% increase (probably a little more in most cases) increase in max health. The reduction in armor (as seen above) leads to about a 41% increase in damage. Since almost all of the damage in AP spike is NOT armor ignoring it benefits a lot from this flux.

Enraged Lunge with Otyugh's Cry is fun for this flux.

Since this Flux your armor rating can actually be below 0!

So the next MATs we'll probably see again either triple derv for huge damage + conditions spread or watch spike teams killing anything that moves, seems refreshing...

I thought about it later and this sounds right. Kind of wish that this had been checked beforehand.


Health scaled by ~33% (base 600, its ~35% at base 570, and 39% at base 540 [not on shield set]) and damage by 41%, which when you account for the still present degen and armor ignoring damage, I tend to make a rough assumption that overall it is going to take the same amount of damage to take someone from full to zero. As such I prefer to look at this meta, instead of the complicated health/damage modifiers, as an overall 29-30% reduction in healing, which mechanically it is nearabout the same and much easier to get one's head around.