Flux - September 2011

Massive Damage

Your armor is reduced by 20, but your maximum health is increased by 200.




My inital thought, eww, I dislike losing my armor xD

Taking aside degen, armor ignoring damage, and prot prayers interactions, this is near mechanically identical to a 30% reduction in healing.

In RA you can play an invoke elly with Prot Spirit instead of Blind. Deal 'massive damage', stick prot spirit on team mates.

Which greatly favors the templates that already OP: ele spikes and dervish pressures.

At what stage in the armor calculation is the armour reduction applied?
(A test would involve other sources of armour bonuses and armour penetration...).

I love dervishes!

I think this flux has to be the worst one for monks npcs in JQ die in 2 secs or less

Meanwhile splits become proportionally weaker because sins get no benefit out of this flux (almost all of their damage is bonus from skills + conjures which ignore armor already)

I think you mean Spirit Bond. With the 200 health increase Prot Spirit is virtually the same for armor susceptible damage, and horribly ineffective for armor ignoring damage.

Or spirit bond, that would reduce a 130ish invoke down do about 50-60 after the heal, but with prot spirit you can maintain it on 2 people at a time, though that will only reduce damage to 70-80.

Ah yes, and armor ignoring damage rarely hits for that much, so I'll try spirit bond next.

Hmm, but invoke is doing 177 damage on squishies ...

Yeah, something is glitched then if you are pulling 177 (or someone isn't wearing armor).

85 base damage (14 air) 25% pen 60 armor is 110 or 18.33333% of total health at 600
85 base damage 25% pen 40 armor is 143 or 17.875% at 800 health

In either case prot spirit reduces damage to 10% of max, so prior to the flux prot spirit reduced invoke by 8.33333% now it reduces it by 7.875%, being less effective now than it was before. Spirit bond, as a converse will trigger on far more things.

Armor penetration has always been slightly glitchy; I'm hitting 60 AR targets for 159 damage with a rank 14 Invoke. AP often removes more armour than it should.
Also, the armour reduction is applied before Cracked Armour.

Wrong. The cracked armour is being applied before the environment effect so you're going to see rangers, sins, and dervs at around 40-50 armor (along with casters which will be down at 40 on their wand sets)

16 air magic ... You dont use 14 in RA

I hate to sound completely newbie, but if I played on my Mesmer, would I have 40 armor?

Anyone know if the armor reduction applies to npcs in JQ and FA? I'd assume no.

If it's like any of the past fluxes, it should have no effect on any NPCs.

It would depend on your equipment. If you do not run any armor insignias and you don't have any bonus armor (from a martial weapon + shield) then yes you would have 40 armor. I wouldn't advise playing a mesmer during this flux though. Most mesmers deal armor ignoring damage so they don't benefit at all from this flux. The profesions that REALLY benefit from this flux are eles, warriors, dervishes and paragons. Rangers don't deal enough direct damage to benefit; necros deal mostly degen, lifesteal, and armor ignoring damage; rits operate more in a support capacity than a damage dealer role, but there are some channeling spells which benefit; assassin damage comes almost entirely from bonus damage on skills which is already armor ignoring.

Archers and boat NPCs were taking normal damage when I was GvGing earlier so I'd assume FA and JQ NPCs would not be effected either.

Yes I was monking but I couldn't even get a spell cast before the npc died so ya it applies. Unfortunetly

Agree with this... but that flux is pathetic to be honest. People are just going to run builds that pump damage easily by c-spacing.... so more triple dervs ranger + necro....

Also, what about these terrible jokes :
- killing blue team on 1v1 koth in HA
- teams in RA dying faster to monk teams