Once you're fully levelled, you'll have 64 attribute points to spend on health / magicka / stamina. I don't know, historically, why that is, e.g. whether it has anything to do with the original veteran ranks.

Since your title mentions being a DD, I'll assume you're talking about group play. I'll talk about the epitome of that first, e.g. veteran trials. The same roughly holds for veteran dungeons. See further below for solo play and other stuff.

If you are a DD in a veteran trial, you should have ~20K health. The main way to have more is via your choice of food. Race, armor enchants and (red) champion points also play a role, albeit as far as enchants I'm mainly talking about (expensive) tri-stat ones. As a rule of thumb, don't use pure health enchants on a DD and, for sure, use the Thief mundus (crit chance). Furthermore a warden healer in the group will provide Minor Toughness, increasing everyone's health by another ~2K, or so (10%).

Having more than ~25K health (unbuffed by warden healer) is not productive. Your maximum stamina or magicka contributes to your damage output and basically anyone other than the tanks in vet trials can and will be one shot, regardless of their health or armor, if they don't know mechanics or stand in the wrong place. Surviving is a question of learning mechanics, not of being tanky. Ideally stand at the back of the boss, the other side of the boss from the tank, with a healer behind you. Don't stand in red. Dodge roll or block, if you have to.

Dodge rolls will avoid everything but area-of-effect (AOE) damage altogether. Blocking is the next most powerful technique. Tanks are specced for high block mitigation and block sustain. They will mitigate 70%-80% of damage via blocking alone. This stacks, multiplicatively, with their armor, but armor can mitigate 50% of damage at most. That's the armor cap.

Bosses can hit for in excess of 100K in terms of raw damage. If you're accidentally hit by one of their big hits, instead of the tank, you will pretty much die instantly as a DD or healer, regardless of your stats and what you're wearing. Only outright tanks can mitigate that. On the other hand, the trials are designed, basically, such that everything not aimed at the tank, is survivable by squishy DDs and healers, just so long as you position yourself correctly.

That said, I've been talking about veteran trials. In normal trials you have more flexibility. You don't need the same damage and being a little bit tanky may help you survive, e.g. in case the tank(s) aren't doing their jobs. You can compensate for that, but by the time you get to vet DLC content, if the tank(s) make many mistakes, the group wipes. You can't really compensate by being a tanky DD.

In solo play you can do what you want. Being tanky can help, although the two solo arenas are most efficiently done with high damage, squishy builds that have self-healing, but a minimum of tankiness, if at all. Tankiness, be it higher health or resistances, can help to solo the harder world bosses, though.

In PvP everything is different. Self-sufficiency rules. Blocking, dodge rolling, speed, line-of-sight and sustain are all needed for defense. 30K+ health is the order of the day for most players.

Infinite Archive is completely different from everything else. If you want to go really far, especially solo, you may have to shift everything into health. However we're talking beyond arc 5 here.

Beyond buffing your health with Food and Champion Points, you basically rely upon your Tanks and Healers to buff you up and heal you. Stand between your Tank and Healer, then avoid taking damage while always being in front of your Healer so they can heal you.

If you're running solo, slot a tank skill to buff yourself and a self heal to heal yourself. Then dodge/dance around incoming damage as best you can.

The more damage you can do, the squishier you get.

Zombocalypse wrote: »

DenverRalphy wrote: »

The more damage you can do, the squishier you get.

As in, you become more and more glass cannon? Does squishy mean you are brittle and die easily?

Yep.

There are cases where you need to self-heal in trials, such as when you are a "portal DD". The way to do that, though, is with a skill, for example Resolving Vigor, which also makes you a little tankier. You don't really (need to) compromise your build to become passively tanky via extra health or a tanky armor set, as long as you sit in that 20K to 25K health range.

Of course I'm painting in very broad strokes and I'm talking about endgame group play, where you should mostly be together with capable healer(s) and tank(s), and it's all about the group effort. You have to rely on them. Since you asked about being a DD specifically, that's what that means.

The term DD really has no meaning when you're playing solo or, to some degree, in PvP. Also, when you're only starting out and you do normal content, or base-game veteran content, the game doesn't push you very hard. You can do what it says on the tin, e.g. "play as you want". A veteran player who knows all the game mechanics often doesn't need it, but you can make a tanky DD and this may enable you to complete some content you could not otherwise do. It may also allow you to carry a dungeon group.

Ok so to break things down.

you gain up to 64 points to invest into magicka/stamina/health as you level up as some levelups give more than 1 attribute point.

For PvE damage you'll want to invest all 64 into magicka or stamina (depending on your playstyle) to crank your damage as high as it'll go.

You can have some HP boosts without gimping your damage, namely the Boundless Vitality Champion Point slottable, Hero's Vigor Champion point passive, Your buff food (make sure you pick one that works with your stats first and foremost), Undaunted Mettle Passive and if you are lucky buffs/sets your group members will be wearing will also increase your avaiable HP.

As for avoiding getting 1-shot, this is the neat part, you eaither crank your damage so high that you kill the enemy before they get a chance to try and 1-tap you, or you learn how to dodge/block/shield/mechanics to circumvent the 1-shot, on top of that there's also common sense for positioning, such as stay behind the boss and don't stand in the AoE's.

The final note is for the love of all that is holy don't wear heavy armour if you're trying to be a damage dealer, the passives from light/medium armour make a considerble impact on your damage output.