tank / defensive shift in pvp (going raw health over resistances)

Wing

saw this more and more, did so myself to better results.

traded out resistances for raw HP and found my mitigation through other sources (that cannot be countered directly and also don't increase enemy damage -_-)

the effect has been great, not any decent counter to just raw HP, and alot of good skills and sets scale positively with HP (we all know the heals)

i think what pushed it over the edge was Hrothgar, why would you build a defense that just makes the enemy stronger? when you can just stack more health, that both gives you the defense your looking for and actually weakens the enemy proc because your not building into it.


i think this will become more common fast, hard to beat raw HP.

mikey_reach

I was actually thinking a of doing something trolly like hrothgar and knight slayer with oblivion enchant. Glad to see that I anticipated the shift specially when hp rec isnt what it used to be.

Wing

like i said, no decent counter, if you have 40k hp, knight slayer wont even do 4k with a fully charged heavy, and im pretty sure that effect gets cut by battle spirit.

its terrible.

gamma71

Glad I didn't gold out all my pariah gear I had a feeling it would turn to trash. I'm gonna go raw hp myself. What sets are you runnin?

Raeyleigh

When you have 30k hp and everyone deals 10k extra damage from a proc that scales off armor, the sensible solution is to now run around with 40k hp.

Wing

gamma71 wrote: »

Glad I didn't gold out all my pariah gear I had a feeling it would turn to trash. I'm gonna go raw hp myself. What sets are you runnin?

i had a perfect swap with a set of gold green pact from a previous patch so i switched to that to test (switched out pariah) but its just because i already had a full gold set. its a roughly ~1500 hp difference from something like plague doctor that just nothing but HP.

my other sets have not changed yet ( titanborn and balorg) as i wanted to test 1-1 the same build just HP vs resistances as i know very well how the build felt previously, switching out one vs the other i would be able to feel the difference right away rather then a full build swap. as stated, so far green pact feels alot better this update.

Raeyleigh wrote: »

When you have 30k hp and everyone deals 10k extra damage from a proc that scales off armor, the sensible solution is to now run around with 40k hp.

especially if you weaken the proc at the same time you increase your health XD

mikey_reach

Wing wrote: »

like i said, no decent counter, if you have 40k hp, knight slayer wont even do 4k with a fully charged heavy, and im pretty sure that effect gets cut by battle spirit.

its terrible.

Oblivion has never listened to battle spirit, so who is not to assume that you might be incorrect about the set as well. And its not just about how much damage it does but the fact that it counters the other defense measure aside from more hp and that is % mitigation. Which got buffed through your friend the battle spirit.

SkaraMinoc

How do you stay alive with lots of HP and very little mitigation?

Is your defense from other sources enough to keep you alive?

Major/Minor Protection, Vampire Stage 3, Evasion, etc

Wing

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

How do you stay alive with lots of HP and very little mitigation?

Is your defense from other sources enough to keep you alive?

Major/Minor Protection, Vampire Stage 3, Evasion, etc

and battle spirit, blocking, etc.

i personally block more as DK both has innate extra block mitigation and they added a new CP passive that gives another 20% (dumb addition btw, its so much)

its all about, and always has been, finding the cheesy % damage mitigation that is hard to / impossible to bypass, thats why spirit mender out of necro has always been so annoying, untyped 10% damage mitigation (another major protection now)

but, im also not saying dump resistances entirely.

simply that if you had a defensive set before (common was pariah) if your looking to help mitigate this current meta, simply swap your one defensive set if it was a resistance set (once again like pariah or brass or what have you) simply make your defensive set health based, like green pact, plague, etc.
it gives you the defenses you need, and does not increase your enemies proc damage, win win.

ResidentContrarian

Stacking resistances was never a good way to increase survivability anyway IMO. Haven't bothered since introduction of things like balorgh, onslaught, and other things that make it kinda pointless to stack over getting better offensive stats, stat pool, or healing or other utility in the build instead.

gariondavey

gamma71 wrote: »

Glad I didn't gold out all my pariah gear I had a feeling it would turn to trash. I'm gonna go raw hp myself. What sets are you runnin?

If you play in no proc, pariah is still very nice

katorga

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

How do you stay alive with lots of HP and very little mitigation?

Is your defense from other sources enough to keep you alive?

Major/Minor Protection, Vampire Stage 3, Evasion, etc

40K HP combined with all the new, and existing % damage mitigation.

katorga

Wing wrote: »

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

How do you stay alive with lots of HP and very little mitigation?

Is your defense from other sources enough to keep you alive?

Major/Minor Protection, Vampire Stage 3, Evasion, etc

its all about, and always has been, finding the cheesy % damage mitigation that is hard to / impossible to bypass, thats why spirit mender out of necro has always been so annoying, untyped 10% damage mitigation (another major protection now)

You can look at it the other way; every single class got mitigation buffed to Necromancer levels this patch.

Necro, ironically, got punished because its spirit guardian 10% reduction is increasing less valuable due to the harsh diminishing returns on the very large number of % damage reductions in the game now.

Dropping guardian for spirit mender healing morph only netted me a 2-3% reduction in % damage mitigation. If I were doing noCP, I would still use the guardian for 10% mitigation.

MadeInVN

Wing wrote: »

saw this more and more, did so myself to better results.

traded out resistances for raw HP and found my mitigation through other sources (that cannot be countered directly and also don't increase enemy damage -_-)

the effect has been great, not any decent counter to just raw HP, and alot of good skills and sets scale positively with HP (we all know the heals)

i think what pushed it over the edge was Hrothgar, why would you build a defense that just makes the enemy stronger? when you can just stack more health, that both gives you the defense your looking for and actually weakens the enemy proc because your not building into it.


i think this will become more common fast, hard to beat raw HP.

Building for max HP has always been better for more than a year now. This trend in fact started when Malacath came out allowing wardens to stack max HP.

Building for max HP became even more relevant last patch when damage was so high you could still explode even with a full defensive setup like Pariah + Trickery. The only thing helping you survive was stacking 40k+ HP.

Stacking max HP will never be outdated unless ZoS buffs all the oblivion dmg sets.

Rossmann

How to stack 40k hp with decent stamina and decent damage? (With Malacath)

divnyi

katorga wrote: »

Wing wrote: »

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

How do you stay alive with lots of HP and very little mitigation?

Is your defense from other sources enough to keep you alive?

Major/Minor Protection, Vampire Stage 3, Evasion, etc

its all about, and always has been, finding the cheesy % damage mitigation that is hard to / impossible to bypass, thats why spirit mender out of necro has always been so annoying, untyped 10% damage mitigation (another major protection now)

Necro, ironically, got punished because its spirit guardian 10% reduction is increasing less valuable due to the harsh diminishing returns on the very large number of % damage reductions in the game now.

There are literally no diminishing returns on percent mitigations. Taking 10% less means you will die 10% slower in any possible scenario.

YandereGirlfriend

divnyi wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

Wing wrote: »

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

How do you stay alive with lots of HP and very little mitigation?

Is your defense from other sources enough to keep you alive?

Major/Minor Protection, Vampire Stage 3, Evasion, etc

its all about, and always has been, finding the cheesy % damage mitigation that is hard to / impossible to bypass, thats why spirit mender out of necro has always been so annoying, untyped 10% damage mitigation (another major protection now)

Necro, ironically, got punished because its spirit guardian 10% reduction is increasing less valuable due to the harsh diminishing returns on the very large number of % damage reductions in the game now.

There are literally no diminishing returns on percent mitigations. Taking 10% less means you will die 10% slower in any possible scenario.

Quite right - you get every last percent in terms of it increasing your Effective HP.

gamma71

I tried stacking health idk I feel I'm still getting hit hard. Thinking of buffer of the swift.... What are you guys using instead of pariah?

Wing

gamma71 wrote: »

I tried stacking health idk I feel I'm still getting hit hard. Thinking of buffer of the swift.... What are you guys using instead of pariah?

either green pact or plague for me depending on if vamp or not.

Bergzorn

divnyi wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

Wing wrote: »

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

How do you stay alive with lots of HP and very little mitigation?

Is your defense from other sources enough to keep you alive?

Major/Minor Protection, Vampire Stage 3, Evasion, etc

its all about, and always has been, finding the cheesy % damage mitigation that is hard to / impossible to bypass, thats why spirit mender out of necro has always been so annoying, untyped 10% damage mitigation (another major protection now)

Necro, ironically, got punished because its spirit guardian 10% reduction is increasing less valuable due to the harsh diminishing returns on the very large number of % damage reductions in the game now.

There are literally no diminishing returns on percent mitigations. Taking 10% less means you will die 10% slower in any possible scenario.

There are if you compare it to stacking armor, which stacks additively with other armor sources and then multiplicatively with percentage based mitigation sources. If there were no penetration in the game, stacking armor would give you more bang for your buck (well, in this context, it's kind of less bang). But there is.

Feaky

I think you have a lot more options for defense this patch than stacking health. Like many last patch, I was using pariah or daedric trickery on a lot of my builds. On most of my builds for this patch, I swapped to mitigation % and have been doing more blocking. I went with 2 dps sets and balorgs / bloodspawn while slotting both major and minor protection, vamp stage 3 and use up to 3 blue defense slottable CPs. I also use either ice staff or S&B on BB for the additional blocking bonuses.

On a few builds I am using sets like Swift or Ironblood paired up with a dps and monster set. Mostly when I either do not need the extra dps or am doing a lot of brawling opposed to ranged attacks.

Some other defense tactics:
- keep major evasion up - that 20% is really helpful.
- know where the green healing AE HoT circles and purge synergies are at all times. Moving to them and hitting X has saved me countless times.
- Block. IMO, blocking is still the most effective way to mitigate damage. It essentially lets you walk out of DC pools. Base blocking is 50% mitigation (that stacks additively with blocking bonuses but multiplicatively with other mitigation).
- Movement speed. A very underrated defense tactic. Moving quickly around obstacles to block LoS or out of range is a very effective defense tactic.
- CC immunity. I try to keep 1 snare & immobilization ability slotted and use 3 red slottable CPs for different types of cc immunity benefits.
- Immovable pots and poisons - make sure you have a few stacks and use them strategically opposed to spamming a pot every time the cool down is over.
- Buff up before charging an opponent or rushing through a keep door (you'd be surprised how many do not do this).
- Major and minor maim - this is equivalent to having major and minor protection on yourself, but opponent specific. These stack multiplicatively with other mitigation bonuses. I do not go out of my way to cast maims, but if they are included in abilities I cast already, it just a plus.
- crowd control. IMO, everyone in PVP should have at least 1 crowd control ability slotted. These are so effective, and now with plaguebreak, less likely to get purged as before. They basically pause your opponent to let you burst them down, heal up or run away.
- Roll dodge. My favorite defense tactic. I favor well fitted and speed in my builds as I like to move around at range, so well fitted works for my play style very well.

Those are just some of my tactics. I am sure there are more out there. While these might be obvious to experienced players, not so much for newer players.

Regards

taugrim

ResidentContrarian wrote: »

Stacking resistances was never a good way to increase survivability anyway IMO

With the recent exception of Waking Flame and its cheese AOE PVP sets (Hrothgar's, Dark Convergence), this has not been true in the time I've played, i.e. July 2020 until Waking Flame.

If you have high HP and low resistances, you're a blimp that has a hard time restoring lost HP efficiently.

The reason Mark of the Pariah was effective pre-Waking Flame is that it make each Health Point go further. Same with healing. Because what you got lasted longer due to mitigation.

This has been the case in the PVP of pretty much every MMORPG I've played. You want to stack enough HP to avoid getting killed in a burst window, but after that, mitigation is important so that your healing and HP go further.

gamma71

Now that they nerfed or fixed Hrothgar might be time to put the gold pariah back on ?

Wing

gamma71 wrote: »

Now that they nerfed or fixed Hrothgar might be time to put the gold pariah back on ?

yuppers

edit: for clarification, its damage was cut in half, and it ignoring battle spirit was fixed, so effectively cut in half again.

however it now will bypass spell resist so assuming your at armor cap of 50% it will ignore it, so it lost ALOT of damage, and gained a little bit back, however people lacking spell resist wont get exploded by it now.

OF NOTE

everyone thinks that next update this proc will be able to critically strike

THIS IS FALSE

as per notes : Item sets that scale off Weapon Damage, Spell Damage, Max Magicka, and Max Stamina can now again Critically Strike.

hrothgar does not scale with those stats, it will not be critically striking.

gamma71

What's better in your guys opion buffer of swift with a flat 10% damage reduction or the pariah with 10k spell and physical buff ? I've been using both and can't tell much of a difference. Just curious on others opions.

Wing

gamma71 wrote: »

What's better in your guys opion buffer of swift with a flat 10% damage reduction or the pariah with 10k spell and physical buff ? I've been using both and can't tell much of a difference. Just curious on others opions.

at face value its a similar amount of % damage reduction (assuming your at middle to low healthy with pariah) you could counter that pariah is subject to penetration but that realistic scenario at which you don't get full value out of pariah has almost no chance of happening (improbable low or high armor values vs equally improbable low or high pen values)

however buffer is a unique source of DR and would suffer from diminishing returns the more various forms of DR you stack, its unique to pvp (i personally don't swap my sets back and forth) and is a light armor set vs pariah heavy, that in and of itself is not bad but depending on your build could be a problem. if you don't want any light armor your looking at jewelry and weapons and that narrows build paths once again depending on what your doing, that logic works backwards if you don't want heavy though.

i would say in straight up pvp its a fine choice if you don't have to compromise anything for it.