2 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:
What profession are you playing in organized groups? The duration of Stability on Stand Your Ground for Guardian is six seconds base, concentration cap puts it at almost 12, when you can cast it every 18 with the Alacrity from a Renegade. Speaking of, the duration of Alacrity on Orders from Above is three seconds of Alacrity, every second, for six seconds, so it stacks itself up to the 15 seconds you need to maintain permanent Alac on Renegade. Renegade also stacks Resistance with Pain Absorption, taking the three second base duration to six seconds, giving you almost perfect uptime as long as you're using it twice while you're inside your Demon Stance rotation like you're supposed to. Meanwhile, Inspiring Reinforcement is 3 seconds of Stability, pulsing every second for five seconds, so boon duration bumps that to six seconds of Stab every second for five seconds. Like Demon Stance, you can drop Reinforcement immediately when entering Dwarf, and immediately before leaving, and cover Stability almost entirely by yourself. None of these rotations work without Concentration capped.
See AlsoStrength/Arms Needs Another Pass (pvp/wvw) (Newly edited)[Top 5] Guild Wars 2 Best Deadeye Builds For PvP and PvEPostCount.Net - Guild Wars 2Jobber.6348's Content - Page 44Concentration is the single most important stat to make these builds function, because they are all long duration boon uptime skills, or uptime skills that pulse. You can talk about nerfing the strength of pulsing skills if you want, that's fair, but getting rid of Concentration prevents a lot of the current boonball meta from working effectively.
I play a lot of things, and explore a lot of builds. One thing to note is that Minstrel gear is BIS for Heal Firebrand, but not exactly due to concentration extending boons. There's a lot of reasons why, but mostly it's because having concentration gives you the most outgoing heal modifier...it doesn't make sense to not stack concentration on a heal firebrand, since no other stat is going to give you more healing. So in this sense, its like a juicy bonus for playing heal firebrand : Free boon duration.
Similiar principles drive gear selection for pretty much all heal and support builds, which is why one commonly sees them all running Minstrels gear rather than Harrier Gear... Bountiful Maintence Oil and Rice Balls...rather than Spiced Pepper Creme Brule. The way the heal equation works is that the more Healing Modifiers you have, and the more healing power you have, the more healing that you will typically do, depending on what skills you press (the skill coefficient) The Heal equation is trivial in the sense that the more you have of everything, the better healer that you are (The equation can be described by just addition and multiplication). So ideally, people aim for the highest outgoing heal modifier as possible...Heal Power, plus secondary concentration via mainetence oil gives 16 - 20 something percent, which is a pretty big chunk. Imagine you play a DPS build, and i said "you are gonna do 20% less DPS" that is what it is like to not use bountiful maintence oil, and why many classes are preassured into straight up taking ministrels over anything else.
Not all heal builds have minstrel as their only BIS option though because it really depends on what skills you have in your build, what those skills do, and how you intend to play or look at the game and its mechanics. For instance, Vitality and Toughness, are only useful to you, if you are actually being hit by attacks. If your build consists of many invuln or evade frames...or if you are just really good at playing the game and don't stand in the red circles, than vitality and toughness mean way less to you, and options like Clerics...Magi's...or oddballs like Apothecary become reasonable replacements without loss in effectiveness (some of us veterans actually see minstrels as training wheels). In the same vein: if you happen to have boons that are either very low base duration, or very high base duration, than concentration starts to mean less to you : Why invest in boon duration when you have a boon that lasts for 1 second and only get an additional 1 second duration...likewise if your boon lasts 20 seconds why do you need it to last 40 seconds? If it's not the only option, and your getting massive diminishing returns on the stat, then it gets hard to justify it at all.
For instance, If a healer has say...100% outgoing heal modifiers, and wants to shave off 10% of it to go into a different stat that might allow said healer to press new buttons that would produce bigger heal numbers or to gain a new function all together even...than Minstrels is no longer a BIS choice for that profession. Mileage varies, but some builds have this kind of freedom to choose.
You can parse this kind information in several different ways. For instance on my druid : I changed from Minstrels to Clerics some time ago...mostly because i don't really need vitality (Ranger has 16000 base health, which is high enough) having Power gives me Healing Power, and Concentration doesn't do much for me because my boons either have a long enough base duration, or they are too short to even care to press them....the most important aspect of the build, is entering celestial avatar and staying in it as long as possible, to use my healing skills and condition cleanse, to then reenter it again as soon as possible because of lingering light. Due to these choices, which makes my heal output far larger, I run Anti-toxin since the idea is i can double my condition cleanse output (rather than +10% healing) which augments the playstyle of camping CA, even further. It also makes for a really sweet rotation with no downtime, so I don't have to wait for opportune moments to use my skills, I just use my rotation, and the boons are just output as a result of that rotation (, therefor negating the need for concentration.)
Alterative way to parse this sort of information : In principle, a zerg doesn't even want to have a fight that lasts for a long time. The most ideal fight scenario for a zerg is one where you instantly destroy the enemy. Therefor, boons like Alacrity, a boon that becomes more valuable the longer a fight goes on, becomes less valuable to you, if your zerg can just roll people over on the first burst. In other words, the usefulness of alacrity is not objective...it's contextual.Me personally, I could care less about when or if i get alacrity, because when I curate my builds, I build them without the assumption that i will be under boon effects. If my build can't heal (or kill) people without alacrity well that's a pretty poo build to me and it doesn't even enter my build creation process. I should be able to do the job i need to do, with zero boons or at least boons i can supply to myself. That's just how i do things and think about its value.
There's a laundry list of ways to parse and pick apart this topic from many different angles...many different kinds of builds, and playstyles and perspectives to consider that could be discussed in depth. Celestials is a good example of people splintering off in changing value judgements away from full heal firebrands, to damage firebrands which lets be honest, actually makes way more sense for firebrand. It always had this idea of being a fire damage based boon engine, now it finally has arrived, and i think that's cool. Not exactly sure about celestial being the best stat choice...but anyway I haven't analyzed the theorycraft of the build to say much about it.
Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
