User:Quizzical/Defense Wins

So you want to do a hard mode mission? Well, you'll obviously need some build. You pull out your finely-tuned combination of skills to do the maximum possible damage as quickly as possible, right?

Wrong. When designing a build, the key question to ask is, how can I help the group get through this mission? There are a lot of possible correct answers. Maybe you can remove some critical hexes or enchantments. Maybe you can daze or otherwise interrupt particular mobs. Maybe you bring wards or shouts that let your party members block or give them more armor. Maybe you heal yourself and other party members. There are many others, though which are useful varies by mission.

But doing lots of damage is almost invariably a wrong answer. That is like trying out for a football team and saying you should make the team because you can breathe. Everyone and his neighbor's dog can deal damage. The question is, what else can you do? If all you can do is deal damage, in most places, that makes you a dead weight.

Without defensive skills, your group simply can't deal damage fast enough to kill mobs without taking some deaths. No matter how well you've optimized your damage per second, it's won't be enough. Many groups of mobs in hard mode are simply too strong and take too long to kill, and can dish out too much damage in the meantime.

Some may protest that they've used this or that purely offensive build and cleared a lot of missions with it. All that that proves is that some missions are easy enough that a group can take a couple of dead weight characters and still win.

But do you only want to complete the mission if someone in the group doesn't mess up? To go short on defensive skills is to live on the edge of disaster. What should have been only a minor setback can easily turn into a full wipe. Is it not better to take the proper measures so that even if some mistakes are made along the way, you still win?

Some may protest, but what about the time it takes to complete the mission? I'm not saying you should abandon offensive skills entirely. Five or six skills to help you do damage, along with a rez and one or two to defend, is often a sensible build, except for the few characters being relied upon for heavy healing.

Bringing a couple of defensive skills doesn't hamper your damage much, anyway. If all eight skills on your skillbar are chosen to boost your damage, the least important of these probably isn't adding much benefit. To spend the energy that you'd burn on your least important skill on another already on your skillbar instead may make your net loss of damage virtually nothing.

Builds aren't the only things that matter. There's also the gear you wear, especially armor. Anything you stick on your armor ought to increase its effectiveness in keeping you alive, not decrease it. But major and superior attribute runes generally do the latter, due to their health malus. If you're giving up a lot of max HP that way, you make yourself far more fragile.

Again, some may protest that they've beaten many missions with superior attribute runes. And if you had replaced those superior runes with minor ones, you'd have cleared those same missions in a cakewalk. It's the same question as before: do you want to win only if everything goes right, or would you like to also win if some mistakes are made along the way?

And no, you can't make up for your loss of HP from attribute runes by adding a vigor rune or fortitude weapon mod. Runes with a health malus don't magically create extra insignia and weapon slots. If you're using up such slots to add HP, then the amount of HP you should have is what you have before the health malus from attribute runes. Use those slots to cover up your loss of HP from attribute runes and the net effect is that you're throwing away valuable slots for insignias and weapon mods, or giving up the vital boost from a vigor rune.

The -75 HP from a superior attribute rune is like having an automatic -16% death penalty. Surely you've noticed how deaths tend to lead to more deaths until you wipe entirely, as it's hard to keep characters with too much death penalty alive. If you wouldn't start a mission by intentionally letting mobs kill you once, then you shouldn't seek a stronger version of the negative effects of that by bringing runes with a large health malus. After all, standard death penalty can be worked off.

Mobs have enough ways to kill you in hard mode. There's no need to go out of your way to help them kill you.

There are a couple of caveats to the above argument. First is people who are grouping with only henchmen and heroes. If you want to find creative ways to wipe your group when there aren't any other players in it, that's fine with me. Just don't blame me if your heroes desert you. Additionally, killing speed does matter to people who are farming mobs, while wiping against those mobs doesn't matter. The above analysis is based on the assumption that wiping your group is a bad thing, and does not apply to other circumstances.