Guild Wars 2 Terminology: Primary Attributes
Since the release of Guild Wars 2, we have been playing a ton of it. It’s a fun game and has lived up to my expectations, but I will talk about what I think of it another time. Today, and in future posts, I want to discuss Guild Wars 2 mechanics. I’m not talking about the unique special abilities that each profession has like virtues for the guardian, but things like damage, healing and defense.
At some point, likely early in development, ArenaNet decided that they wanted to have unique terms for their mechanics. I’m guessing that they wanted to keep people from getting confused with similar terms seen in other RPGs. Most people know that in games if you increase your strength, you do more damage when you hit things with pointy sticks. Guild Wars 2 has a simplified attribute system: one example is that power increases both melee and spell damage.
With power, the renaming of attributes isn’t as confusing, but with other attributes it gets much more complicated. The next major attribute is called “precision,” which from the name alone, you wouldn’t necessarily guess that it’s an increase of critical hit chance. The issue with this and other multiple-named attributes is that they don’t stick with one name. As you look through the traits of many of the professions, you will see where they refer to both precision and critical hit chance separately.
The third primary attribute, toughness, while a little easier to understand, has not one but two alternate names. Toughness, defense and armor are all the same thing: one toughness is the same as one armor or one defense. Really, the only difference they try to make is that toughness is the attribute and when, for example, a trait says it increases your toughness by ten percent, it isn’t taking into account any defense you may be getting from armor. The in-game tooltip says that toughness plus defense equals your armor, but they are all the same.
The final primary attribute is thankfully straightforward. Vitality directly adds to health: for every point in vitality added, you gain ten points of health. But don’t confuse this with vigor, which has nothing to do with your health.
As this post is running on much longer than I wanted it to, I will stop here, but next time I will go over secondary attributes, which are even more confusing than the primary ones.
09 Oct 2012
Seems awfully confusing for a naming scheme created to reduce confusion =p