Hm changes discuss...

um no? dw decreases hp by 20%.
So the higher their hp the better dw becomes, its simple.

I agree that on the whole, elly skills are simply useless in their function, rather than not having enough damage. If you drop an ebon damage ward and fire off AoEs from it, you could even wipe out pre nerf BFLA mobs with ease on NM.

Try it on HM though and the enemy scatter makes it completely useless. So what else could ellys do on HM? Searing Flames, Mind Blast or Invoke was about it, and two of those were useless in most of EOTN.

Thankfully they could heal or prot instead and let other classes deal damage instead.

Deep Wound removes 100 health or 20% of the target's maximum health, whichever is smaller. Most enemies in the game even close to worth discussion have quite a bit more than 500 health and so will never lose more than 100 to Deep Wound.

That's how I interpret it.

I believe that is exactly what a-net is thinking.


Unfortunately, if this is what the update's going to be, the health gain is way too small.

Here's why:

1. The overall raw damage it takes to kill something is going way down. Take a lvl 28 caster for an example. Under the current system, a non-special-case lvl 28 caster is going to have 640hp and 84AL. Assuming you are doing 100% armor-respecting damage, you will have to dish out ~970 raw damage to kill it. Under the (maybe) leaked system, that caster would have 800hp and 60AL. Again assuming that you are doing 100% armor-respecting damage, it's only going to take 800 raw damage to kill him now. So the game gets much easier.

1.5. Unsurprisingly, this effect goes away if people continue to run builds that are heavily invested in armor-ignoring damage. For instance, if you are doing 50% armor-respecting damage and 50% armor-ignoring damage, then it's almost a wash. (For those following along with the math, I'm making this 50/50 split at the raw damage phase, not the final damage phase.) The sample caster under the current system requires ~771 raw damage to kill him. The cast under the (maybe) leaked system takes 800. The nerf to your armor-ignoring damage slightly outweighs the buff to your armor-respecting damage. Of course, few people going to be dumb enough to continue running builds heavy on armor-ignoring damage if it's numerically inferior to armor-respecting options.

(Aside: One good thing that can be said for this (maybe) update is that it makes choosing skills a lot more straightforward. We move a lot closer to a "what you see is what you get" scenario where skills generally do the damage listed in the skilltext, and players can trust that the skill with the bigger number in its skilltext really does more damage without needing to check wiki about its respect for armor.)

2. The more fundamental problem with a straight +20AL is that it's trying to substitute a linear health gain for a non-linear armor effect, and it's just not possible to balance that at more than one point along the curve.

[edit: Removed formula that must be wrong on closer inspection.]

There is still an increase in armour above the 60 base. I'm not sure if it's scaled with level and the extra boost does not appear to necessarily be uniform across professions.

This may be because armor is not uniform across professions.. and even some monsters of the same profession.

The progression was, as a rule, armour=[level]*3 + [profession bonus] + [any extra bonuses]

The extra bonuses tended to be species dependent; Destroyers being strong versus Fire, weak versus Cold, etc.

Quick testing in Vloxen found that a level 26 Stone Summit Ranger had approximately 105-107 armour versus Fire whereas the level 26 casters in that group all had something around 70-72 armour. I don't think I did the calculations wrong. Previously I would have expected approximately 78 armour on the casters (78=26*3 + 0 = 60 + 6*3) and 118 on the Ranger (118 = 26*3 + 10 + 30 = 100 + 6*3). Now I find a 'level' bonus of 10-12 on the casters and after taking into account the +40 bonus a Ranger has versus Fire, only a mere 5-7 bonus on the Ranger.

I was just messing with barrels... maybe its just applied to a base armor (type that prevents all damage types) instead of specialized bonus armor with it

Edit: and i think the progression is for every level above lvl 20.... so you should be using 6 instead of 26

Basic arithmetic:
26*3 = 20*3 + 6*3 = 60+6*3.

Well. All we can do know is see how it plays.

I don't think SC will get faster, since they rely mainly in armor-ignoring damage. And that's the only thing that really annoys me in PvE: People that don't take time to watch the scenery, relax and and take it easy.

Shatterstone, at 105 damage, deals 65 damage to Ministry of Purity spellcasters.

That's pretty disapointing.

It's like a bad Energy Surge for now. Guess I'll have to rely more on the new support elites, but it also depends if their respective elements are good for PvE.

Water non-elites are still lacking, although something decent can be done with Maelstrom, Blurred Vision, the improved Ice Spikes. Fire depends too much on armor, so the best strategy remains to stick the Heat skills with EBSoH. Air has a lot of potential (Gust, Thunderclap, Glimmering Mark), but the none-elites are very lacking, now with the nerf to chain lightning. And earth seems to have the most potential (new Shockwave or better Unsteady Ground + Eruption + better Churning Earth + EBSoH).

Or you simply still have to use cracked armor and glyph of elemental power to deal decent damage.

Everything Ive heard so far though indicates that the armour reduction is barely nothing compared to the health increase, so HM is actually harder now, which isnt a bad thing.

I think its safe to say Anet didn't fully nerf the armor of WiK/WoC mobs.

Sadly... Mesmer > Ele... still

Do we have any indication at all as to what the health increase is? Something like that is much harder to approximate and verify experimentally.

Base weapon damage (about 22 per hit for a bow) was pretty meaningless, it was the stacking of added bonus damage that made bows a little bit usefull. Similarly, pets got their damage from skills and bonusses like Great Dwarf Weapon.
But all that (stacked) bonus damage is armor ignoring damage, which just got less effective due to the increased HP. The 22 average base damage got buffed from around 10 against the 100 AL HM foes to 14, while the 40-60 bonus damage has to eat away 20% more HP. Basically, rangers got nerfed, again.
The professions that got a relative boost are those not having (a lot of) armor ignoring damage options at their disposal, like elementalists...

I think what it boils down to is that mobs > level 20 in Normal Mode will have the same armor in Hard Mode as they have in Normal Mode, while any mobs < level 20 in Normal Mode will have level 20 armor for their class/race in Hard Mode.

I'm not saying rangers aren't bad off, they are, but this was an indirect nerf to all physical damage dealers consecutively following the devastating loss of the original Scan and BuH. If Anet allowed SoH to work on ranged physical attacks you'd be far better off until the eventual overhaul comes along.

I run a 7H build with VoS dervs, who have grown in strength exponentially. VoS' slashing damage now hits for more, Sand Shards' AoE earth damage hits for more and when I cast Mark of Pain on a target, they last longer and thus procs more AoE damage.

I can confirm this. I don't really like this solution, as it makes eles extremely area dependent. Worth using in early-mid zones HM (and WiK), still worthless in the "high-end" areas.

How are ellys useless in high end areas? They now do more damage than rits for DoA due to the rit nefrs, nukers are still used in the deep and urgoz, and E/Mo bonders are used in every UWSC group. The only place that doesnt seem to want ellys is Fowsc, but you can do that easily with heroes so it doesnt matter.

E/Mo bonders aren't "eles". Maybe I chose my words wrong because it's broader than endgame farming. Let's look at these areas:

Most of EotN.
Desolation and Torment in Nightfall.
Southern Shiverpeaks and Ring of Fire
Half of echovald/jade sea, all of shiroken.

Basically anywhere that level 24+ mobs are running around in normal mode, barring special circumstances, your damage is still very questionable. Moreso now that the easy invoke + chain lightning combo is gone. We're only talking about 6-9 armor difference in these areas between NM and HM.

Glaiveway was never the "best" build but it still looks to work better than any equally mindless ele build you will make. Unless you think SF eles have a chance there when normal mode armor hasn't budged.