Spotlight on Skills #3
Originally Published by Sausaletus Rex
Every so often this column will shine the spotlight on a particular skill or set of skills for an in-depth analysis of just what that skill can do for you and the best ways to make it work. Keep in mind that Guild Wars is still under development and the information in this column is subject to swift and drastic change.
And, by popular request - okay, by singular request, but it was the only request I've had so it counts for 100% of an overwhelming mandate - this week we turn the light on not one, but two skills. We at the Guru are always concerned with giving you value for your entertainment dollar so we've packed twice the analysis in one column. Granted, we've done so because the two skills are virtually identical, one being the supercharged elite version of the other but as long as we're going to be picky about things you're not exactly paying a lot for this, either. Without further ado, I present :
“For 8 seconds, you have an additional 90-258 health and an additional 20 AL.” – Defy Pain
“For 7-12 seconds you gain an additional 90-258 health.” – Endure Pain
Two skills, both from the Warrior's Strength line, almost an identical effect. Both are generic “skills” which will temporarily increase both the current and maximum health points of your character when cast. Defy Pain is the elite version and should, therefore, be a bit more powerful or specialized. It is, too, as in addition to tossing in a bit more protection with +20AL it also is an adrenaline-based skill while Endure Pain is an energy-based skill. So, Defy Pain is an incremental step above Endure Pain but in order to use it in favor of Endure you’ll have to devote an elite slot to it.
When used, either version, this is what happens: You will gain a bonus to your hit points of an amount determined by your Strength attribute immediately once the duration of the skill is up, those hit points go away just as suddenly. The Pains pair are both instant cast, they take effect as soon as you activate them. As such, they can’t be interrupted or otherwise prevented from going off. And, as skills rather than stances or enchantments, they cannot be dispelled, either. And once activated they raise your characters health by a set amount. Let’s say your character had the level twenty maximum of 480 hit points and your character also has Strength of 12, their health – current and maximum – is 480/480. When you cast Defy Pain you’ll gain 258 hit points and 20AL for 7 seconds and have 738/738. Endure Pain will likewise give you 738/738 but for 12 seconds. If you started at less than your full health you’ll still get that 258/258 bonus. If you start at 400/480 you’ll have 658/738 and you can be healed up to a full 738 hit points. When the skills fade, you’ll drop back down to your unbuffed maximum. If you had 480/480 when the skill started you’ll have 480/480 when it’s over. However, what happens when you take damage while buffed up with the Pain pair bears close scrutiny. If you start with 400 health and you buff up to 658/738 and take, say, 50 points of damage to drop to 608/738 before the skill is over what happens when it fades is not that your maximum hit points will drop back down to 480 and you’ll simply lose the 128 hit points to fall back to 480/480. No, the Pain pair won’t heal you at all. The whole 258/258 bonus goes away when the skill ends. So, rather than being at full health you’d be at 350/480 health.
In other words, damage dealt while you have the Pain pair up comes out of your current, non-bonus hit points first. It’s only after all those are depleted that your bonus hit points will protect you from dying. That’s because no matter what your current hit points are when the Pain pair end you cannot drop below 1 hit point. If you have 20/758 health when your skill fades you be at –238/480 health, you’ll be only at 1/480. That’s not much better, granted, but at least you’ll be alive for at least one more hit.
What, then, is the point of the Pain pair? What good is gaining a few hundred health only to lose it again in a few seconds? Especially when those bonus hit points are going to be taken away at all until all the rest of your hit points are. And those bonus hit points are going away extremely quickly so you can’t count on them being able to do much in the way of saving you, either.
What temporarily boosting your health does is to increase your margin of error, so to speak. The point of the Pain pair is not to save your character permanently but to buy a little more time. They’re what you use as a panic button – as some sort of defense to throw up as a last resort when you’re coming under focused fire and are about to go down. And they’re what you use to buy your healer that extra second or two to deliver the heal that’s actually going to save you. Or for your own self-healing to work. They’re not permanent defenses but they excel in spot duty. When you need them, they’re there, and you’ll be glad of them.
The question, though, is if these skills are actually any good at buying your character those few extra seconds. What they do is add a few hundred hit points of health. But in a pitched battle a few hundred hit points of health are nothing. A character taking damage and being supported by healing can expect to cycle through several hundred, if not several thousand hit points before either their healers start to run out of energy or their attackers give up and try elsewhere. A few hundred hit points here or there, seemingly, isn’t going to make much of a difference. What’s important with the Pain pair though, is not that they offer a few hundred hit points here and there but that they offer it on demand. When needed those few hundred hit points can be the difference between your character under focus being slaughtered and your character lasting long enough to survive a burst of damage and have their health pendulumed back.
More than that, though, is the question of just what health means to your character. What health is, really, is defense. In Guild Wars it doesn’t matter if you have 100% health or 1%, your character will hit as hard, cast as often, move as well, and everything else no matter the amount of hit points they have. All that health is important for is for keeping alive and not entering the death state. There’s certainly a difference between what your character can do alive and what they can do dead and you really want to stay in the first camp. All you need to do that is to stay about zero health. Every other hit point is nowhere near as important as that last one. They’re just padding the difference between your character being alive and your character being dead. The more health you have, the more protected you are from dying. That’s a type of defense not unlike armor. Where adding armor will keep you from dying by reducing the amount of damage each attack will do, adding health will keep you from dying by increasing your ability to survive each attack. With 100 hits points you can be hit for 20 damage five times before you die. If you increase your armor so that you take 10 damage a hit you’ll last for ten blows. But if you increase your health by 100 hit points, so that you’ll have 200, you’ve accomplished the same thing, just through another method. Adding health, then, can be seen as analogous to adding more armor. What the Pain pair do, by adding more health is almost the same as if they’d temporarily increased your armor. Adding 258 health to a character with 480 health is roughly equivalent to temporarily adding 40AL to that character. You’ll halve the damage you take, not by dropping the numbers on the hits, but by dropping the percentage of your overall health they’re taking away. But, since you rapidly transition from that increased protection back to your normal protection – and, unlike if you’d added armor you’ll bear the full brunt of the effects of damage long after your protection fades - it’s probably not going to aid your character that much.
As skill tied to Strength, the Pain pair are skill that are almost strictly for primary Warriors. Warriors who are likely to adopt a tanking role – characters that are going to be taking the brunt of the damage for the rest of their party – are likely to find some use from them. Defy Pain is arguably better, of course, as not only does it add more armor, reducing the overall damage you’ll take, the properly prepared Warrior can take good advantage of its adrenal recharge. If it takes 7 strikes of adrenaline before it can be reused, a Warrior can use any number of ways of increasing their adrenaline to reuse it quickly. They can use skills like To The Limit!, for one. But the easiest way is just to increase the rate at which they swing their weapon. By using a skill, like Tiger's Fury, which will increase their attack speed, they’ll decrease the amount of time it takes to charge up Defy Pain. When you can use a skill like that every 7 or 8 seconds, it’s not a bad skill at all. That’s a much better recharge time than Endure Pain, which will work, at best for 12 or so seconds out of the 30 it takes to recharge. Endure Pain has the added problem of costing a lot of energy to use for a Warrior’s 20/2 energy pool. 10 energy takes a Warrior a full fifteen seconds to regenerate with their two pips. That means a Warrior can’t spend more than a further 10 energy in those 30 seconds it takes to recharge Endure pain if they want to be able to use it indefinitely. Improper energy management can swiftly drain their entire energy store and leave them ineffectual. Adrenal skills can help compensate for this; of course, by reducing a Warrior’s reliance on energy but 10 energy still remains a heavy hit to a Warrior’s energy. However, what Endure Pain has going for it is that as an energy based skill it can be used whenever you like. You don't have to wait to gain adrenaline first before using it and that can make the difference between having it available in an emergency and taking that 15% DP. It's also not an elite skill.
Given the other elite skills available not just within Strength but to a Warrior overall to say nothing of their secondary profession Defy Pain is probably forgettable unless you expect your character to be receiving a lot of damage and need to make sure they can survive long enough to heal. Warriors already have a lot of built in protection from their superior armor rating as well as other, non-elite skills they can use for survivability, anyway. Endure Pain should see more use from Warriors but it’s still a skill they can forget if they trust their healers and self-healing or just can’t find the room on their skill bar. They’re both of more use in PvE where Warriors can tank for their party more easily than in PvP, though. And, yes, you could stack them up on one character, to more than double their hit points, but ask yourself, would you really want to do that since it’s going to cost you two of your eight skill slots?
Below you’ll find a list of where to find Endure Pain and Defy Pain as well as some builds which make use of either skill.
And, by popular request - okay, by singular request, but it was the only request I've had so it counts for 100% of an overwhelming mandate - this week we turn the light on not one, but two skills. We at the Guru are always concerned with giving you value for your entertainment dollar so we've packed twice the analysis in one column. Granted, we've done so because the two skills are virtually identical, one being the supercharged elite version of the other but as long as we're going to be picky about things you're not exactly paying a lot for this, either. Without further ado, I present :
Defy Pain and Endure Pain
“For 8 seconds, you have an additional 90-258 health and an additional 20 AL.” – Defy Pain
“For 7-12 seconds you gain an additional 90-258 health.” – Endure Pain
Two skills, both from the Warrior's Strength line, almost an identical effect. Both are generic “skills” which will temporarily increase both the current and maximum health points of your character when cast. Defy Pain is the elite version and should, therefore, be a bit more powerful or specialized. It is, too, as in addition to tossing in a bit more protection with +20AL it also is an adrenaline-based skill while Endure Pain is an energy-based skill. So, Defy Pain is an incremental step above Endure Pain but in order to use it in favor of Endure you’ll have to devote an elite slot to it.
When used, either version, this is what happens: You will gain a bonus to your hit points of an amount determined by your Strength attribute immediately once the duration of the skill is up, those hit points go away just as suddenly. The Pains pair are both instant cast, they take effect as soon as you activate them. As such, they can’t be interrupted or otherwise prevented from going off. And, as skills rather than stances or enchantments, they cannot be dispelled, either. And once activated they raise your characters health by a set amount. Let’s say your character had the level twenty maximum of 480 hit points and your character also has Strength of 12, their health – current and maximum – is 480/480. When you cast Defy Pain you’ll gain 258 hit points and 20AL for 7 seconds and have 738/738. Endure Pain will likewise give you 738/738 but for 12 seconds. If you started at less than your full health you’ll still get that 258/258 bonus. If you start at 400/480 you’ll have 658/738 and you can be healed up to a full 738 hit points. When the skills fade, you’ll drop back down to your unbuffed maximum. If you had 480/480 when the skill started you’ll have 480/480 when it’s over. However, what happens when you take damage while buffed up with the Pain pair bears close scrutiny. If you start with 400 health and you buff up to 658/738 and take, say, 50 points of damage to drop to 608/738 before the skill is over what happens when it fades is not that your maximum hit points will drop back down to 480 and you’ll simply lose the 128 hit points to fall back to 480/480. No, the Pain pair won’t heal you at all. The whole 258/258 bonus goes away when the skill ends. So, rather than being at full health you’d be at 350/480 health.
In other words, damage dealt while you have the Pain pair up comes out of your current, non-bonus hit points first. It’s only after all those are depleted that your bonus hit points will protect you from dying. That’s because no matter what your current hit points are when the Pain pair end you cannot drop below 1 hit point. If you have 20/758 health when your skill fades you be at –238/480 health, you’ll be only at 1/480. That’s not much better, granted, but at least you’ll be alive for at least one more hit.
What, then, is the point of the Pain pair? What good is gaining a few hundred health only to lose it again in a few seconds? Especially when those bonus hit points are going to be taken away at all until all the rest of your hit points are. And those bonus hit points are going away extremely quickly so you can’t count on them being able to do much in the way of saving you, either.
What temporarily boosting your health does is to increase your margin of error, so to speak. The point of the Pain pair is not to save your character permanently but to buy a little more time. They’re what you use as a panic button – as some sort of defense to throw up as a last resort when you’re coming under focused fire and are about to go down. And they’re what you use to buy your healer that extra second or two to deliver the heal that’s actually going to save you. Or for your own self-healing to work. They’re not permanent defenses but they excel in spot duty. When you need them, they’re there, and you’ll be glad of them.
The question, though, is if these skills are actually any good at buying your character those few extra seconds. What they do is add a few hundred hit points of health. But in a pitched battle a few hundred hit points of health are nothing. A character taking damage and being supported by healing can expect to cycle through several hundred, if not several thousand hit points before either their healers start to run out of energy or their attackers give up and try elsewhere. A few hundred hit points here or there, seemingly, isn’t going to make much of a difference. What’s important with the Pain pair though, is not that they offer a few hundred hit points here and there but that they offer it on demand. When needed those few hundred hit points can be the difference between your character under focus being slaughtered and your character lasting long enough to survive a burst of damage and have their health pendulumed back.
More than that, though, is the question of just what health means to your character. What health is, really, is defense. In Guild Wars it doesn’t matter if you have 100% health or 1%, your character will hit as hard, cast as often, move as well, and everything else no matter the amount of hit points they have. All that health is important for is for keeping alive and not entering the death state. There’s certainly a difference between what your character can do alive and what they can do dead and you really want to stay in the first camp. All you need to do that is to stay about zero health. Every other hit point is nowhere near as important as that last one. They’re just padding the difference between your character being alive and your character being dead. The more health you have, the more protected you are from dying. That’s a type of defense not unlike armor. Where adding armor will keep you from dying by reducing the amount of damage each attack will do, adding health will keep you from dying by increasing your ability to survive each attack. With 100 hits points you can be hit for 20 damage five times before you die. If you increase your armor so that you take 10 damage a hit you’ll last for ten blows. But if you increase your health by 100 hit points, so that you’ll have 200, you’ve accomplished the same thing, just through another method. Adding health, then, can be seen as analogous to adding more armor. What the Pain pair do, by adding more health is almost the same as if they’d temporarily increased your armor. Adding 258 health to a character with 480 health is roughly equivalent to temporarily adding 40AL to that character. You’ll halve the damage you take, not by dropping the numbers on the hits, but by dropping the percentage of your overall health they’re taking away. But, since you rapidly transition from that increased protection back to your normal protection – and, unlike if you’d added armor you’ll bear the full brunt of the effects of damage long after your protection fades - it’s probably not going to aid your character that much.
As skill tied to Strength, the Pain pair are skill that are almost strictly for primary Warriors. Warriors who are likely to adopt a tanking role – characters that are going to be taking the brunt of the damage for the rest of their party – are likely to find some use from them. Defy Pain is arguably better, of course, as not only does it add more armor, reducing the overall damage you’ll take, the properly prepared Warrior can take good advantage of its adrenal recharge. If it takes 7 strikes of adrenaline before it can be reused, a Warrior can use any number of ways of increasing their adrenaline to reuse it quickly. They can use skills like To The Limit!, for one. But the easiest way is just to increase the rate at which they swing their weapon. By using a skill, like Tiger's Fury, which will increase their attack speed, they’ll decrease the amount of time it takes to charge up Defy Pain. When you can use a skill like that every 7 or 8 seconds, it’s not a bad skill at all. That’s a much better recharge time than Endure Pain, which will work, at best for 12 or so seconds out of the 30 it takes to recharge. Endure Pain has the added problem of costing a lot of energy to use for a Warrior’s 20/2 energy pool. 10 energy takes a Warrior a full fifteen seconds to regenerate with their two pips. That means a Warrior can’t spend more than a further 10 energy in those 30 seconds it takes to recharge Endure pain if they want to be able to use it indefinitely. Improper energy management can swiftly drain their entire energy store and leave them ineffectual. Adrenal skills can help compensate for this; of course, by reducing a Warrior’s reliance on energy but 10 energy still remains a heavy hit to a Warrior’s energy. However, what Endure Pain has going for it is that as an energy based skill it can be used whenever you like. You don't have to wait to gain adrenaline first before using it and that can make the difference between having it available in an emergency and taking that 15% DP. It's also not an elite skill.
Given the other elite skills available not just within Strength but to a Warrior overall to say nothing of their secondary profession Defy Pain is probably forgettable unless you expect your character to be receiving a lot of damage and need to make sure they can survive long enough to heal. Warriors already have a lot of built in protection from their superior armor rating as well as other, non-elite skills they can use for survivability, anyway. Endure Pain should see more use from Warriors but it’s still a skill they can forget if they trust their healers and self-healing or just can’t find the room on their skill bar. They’re both of more use in PvE where Warriors can tank for their party more easily than in PvP, though. And, yes, you could stack them up on one character, to more than double their hit points, but ask yourself, would you really want to do that since it’s going to cost you two of your eight skill slots?
Below you’ll find a list of where to find Endure Pain and Defy Pain as well as some builds which make use of either skill.
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