Forge Pathfinder Stat Maximization Guide

Forge Pathfinder Stat Maximization Guide by TunesForToons

This is going to be a guide on Stat Maximization on Pathfinders.

Before most I would like to say that I used data found on the forums and formula’s to calculate where each of the stats breaking points lay. For example, each new point of armor you gain will give you less and less amount of effective result from that stat. If you had 100 armor and this would give you 10% damage reduction then that does not mean 1000 armor will give you 100% damage reduction. Using this information I could come up with breaking points at which numbers exactly where each of the departments like Speed or Energy would start to outweigh each other. These are the results I came up with depending on your play style;

Base Stats; (Level One)
425 Physical Defence   (~30.00% Dmg reduction)   14 A/S/P-Points left
625 Nature Defence   (~38.50% Dmg reduction)   44 armor points left
200 Spiritual Defence (~16.67% Dmg reduction)
375 Magic Defence   (~27.25% Dmg reduction)

100 Energy
100% Speed

44 armor points (1 per level)  = 132 armor points in total (will refer to these from now on)

General Stat Prioritization; (This goes for all Pathfinders)

1)   Increase Spiritual Defence to 242 using 42 armor points, reduce your Nature Defence in order to get the 42 points.
2)   Use 4 A/S/P-Points to take 4 points out of Armor and put 4 points into Energy.
3)   You took 4 points out of armor, this means you need to pick Spiritual. Reduce your Spiritual Defence to 2.
4)   Take 2 points out of Energy and put them back into Armor. Increase your Magic Defence by 60 and your Physical Defence by 60.

General Maximized Stats;
485 Physical Defence   (~32.60% Dmg reduction) 10 A/S/P-Points left
583 Nature Defence   (~36.70% Dmg reduction) 90 armor points left
002 Spiritual Defence (~00.00% Dmg reduction)
435 Magic Defence (~30.25% Dmg reduction)

110 Energy
100% Speed

Now you have 4 choices;
Go Offensive, Defensive, Balanced or “Speedy”.

Balanced Stat Prioritization;

5)  Take 15 Armor Points out of Nature Defence and put these into Physical Defence.
6)  Take 66 Armor Points out of Nature Defence and put these into Magic Defence.

Balanced Maximized Stats;
500 Physical Defence   (~33.33% Dmg reduction) 10 A/S/P-Points left.
502 Nature Defence (~33.35% Dmg reduction)  9 armor points left
002 Spiritual Defence (~00.00% Dmg reduction)
499 Magic Defence   (~33.32% Dmg reduction)

110 Energy
100% Speed

Defensive Stat Prioritization;

5) Take 6 A/S/P-Points out of Energy and 4 out of Speed. Reducing your Speed from 100% to 94% and your Energy to 80.
6) Put these 10 A/S/P-Point into Armor. Increase your Physical Defence by 300 and increase your Magical Defence by 300.
7) Take 21 Armor Points out of Magic Defence and into Nature Defence. Take 69 Armor Points from Physical into Nature Defence.

Defensive Maximized Stats;
714 Physical Defence (~41.60% Dmg reduction)
715 Nature Defence   (~41.61% Dmg reduction)
002 Spiritual Defence (~00.00% Dmg reduction)
714 Magic Defence (~41.60% Dmg reduction)

100 Energy
87% Speed

Defensive Stat Explanation;
My opinion is that Energy is more important for survivability than Speed. This is why I didn’t go full –Energy on the Defensive Stats. I tested how much speed you would lose if you took out points and exactly how this would affect your wall-jumping abilities. The effects are minimal and compared to the Energy you’re going to need to control your target using your CC it turns out you’re going to need Energy more as Speed since Speed scales so low in comparison to what Armor and Energy gives. Your stat priority would be Armor > Energy  > Speed.

Offensive Stat Prioritization;

5)   Take 10 A/S/P-Points out of Speed. Reduce your speed from 100% to 85%.
6)   Put these 10 A/S/P-Point into Energy. You now have 160 Energy.
7)   Take 15 points from Nature Defence and into Physical Defence.
8)   Take 66 points from Nature Defence and into Magic Defence.

Offensive Maximized Stats;
500 Physical Defence   (~33.33% Dmg reduction)
502 Nature Defence   (~33.34% Dmg reduction) 9 armor points left
002 Spiritual Defence (~00.00% Dmg reduction)
499 Magic Defence (~33.32% Dmg reduction)

160 Energy
85% Speed

Offensive Stat Explanation;
As I explained in the Defensive Stat Explanation, Speed turned out to be less effective than Energy for defensives than previously thought. If we compare Energy to Speed from a damage perspective than we see that Speed really is not necessary to put out damage. Even if you factor in that if you’re being targeted by an enemy you need to survive longer to be able to put out more damage, you’ll find that Armor offers you more survivability than Speed and thus offers Armors you more time to put out that Damage.

Addition: If you want to go fully offensive you can remove all 14 A/S/P-Points out from Speed and into Energy, this will make you move at a 79% Speed and give you 170 Energy. Although this will give you even more damage through the use of more Poison Arrow it turns out to be quite ineffective as it’s impractical. You move slow and your armor is not high compared to a Defensive Spec and this will make you die really fast.

Why I didn’t go full -Armor? Taking out all 14 A/S/P-Points out from Armor and into Energy is something I do not recommend as Armor at low values scales a lot more than it does at higher values, if you remove your armor you will die before you’ll be able to do damage. This is what Rethink experienced on his level 99 Assassin when he shifted all his Armor to Speed.

“Speedy” Stat Prioritization;

5) Take 2 A/S/P-Points out of Nature Armor and put these into Speed. Decreasing your Nature Armor to 463 and increasing your Speed to 103%.
6) Take 4 A/S/P-Points out of Energy and put these into Speed. Decreasing your Energy to 90 and increasing your Speed to 109%.
7) Take 24 Armor Points from Physical Defence and put these into Magical Armor.

“Speedy” Maximized Stats;
461 Physical Defence   (~31.50% Dmg reduction) 4 A/S/P-Points left
463 Nature Defence   (~31.51% Dmg reduction) 66 Armor-Points left
002 Spiritual Defence (~00.00% Dmg reduction)
459 Magic Defence (~31.49% Dmg reduction)

90 Energy
109% Speed

“Speedy” Stat Explanation;
A spec for playes who’d like to be quick on their feet.

General Explanation on Spiritual Defence;

You get 132 armor points in total, you can freely spend these to your heart’s content without sacrificing Energy/Speed. However, it’s best to use these to increase your base spiritual 200 armor points to 242. Leaving you with 90 armor points left. Why increase Spiritual Defence? Because the more A/S/P-Points  you take out of armor (spiritual) the least amount of Energy/Speed you have to sacrifice. This turned out to be a great way to balance your stats.

General Explanation for Balanced/Defensive/Offensive/Speedy Stat Prioritization;

As Balanced you have more Speed and thus a bit more survivability against Assassins which do Physical Damage. As Offensive you do not have Speed and are very vulnerable to Assassins. This is where the difference in 90 armor points comes from. I already explained why as Offensive you take points out of Speed to fuel your Energy, because lowering your Armor will get you killed before you can apply your damage on the enemy.

Why Magic/Physical-difference? As Offensive you have a high amount of extra energy which allows you to pump out much more damage than any other build. Pyromancers have very little Nature Defence (200), and thus take high damage from your abilities. As Offensive it is more likely you will kill the Pyromancer before he kills you. It is however less likely you will survive an Assassin, which is why as Offensive you go for Physical Defence and as for Balanced for example you go Magical Defence.

General Explanation for my opinion on Energy > Speed;

Energy: The more Energy you have the more GCD’s it will take you to run out of this Energy the more GCD’s and Time are spent on passively regenerating Energy. With this in mind, let’s look at a 3v3 arena match where burst damage is your most important stat;

If you had a maximized Energy pool you’d be sitting at 170 Energy.

Volley costs 15 Energy and does about 50 damage on each target in your Field of View.
Tow scenario’s that are both equally likely;
1) That’s 150 damage for 15 energy, assuming all 3 enemy targets are clustered together.
2) That’s 100 damage for 15 energy, assuming only 2 enemy targets are together and one is sniping from a top.

Calculating the amount of Volley’s you can shoot consecutively without having to use M1, factoring in the amount of time spent in GCD and the 3e/s base regeneration you’d end up with 13 Volley’s before you run out of Energy and you’d be sitting at 9 Energy left.

Analysis of scenario’s;
1) 13 consecutive Volleys mean you can pump out 1950 total damage in situation 1. Those are 2 kills right there. Means you’ve already done enough damage to have brought 2 out of the 3 enemies down.

Now the damage might be spread and if there’s a healer he could’ve healed + bubbled/dome in the meantime but the damage stays the same and the pressure is still there. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from highly rated WoW arena’s is that well designed spread-burst can bring an enemy healer to his knees. It’s just as good as it is underrated.

2) 13 consecutive Volleys mean you can pump out 1300 total damage in situation 2. That’s 1300 damage spread on 2 targets, 650 damage for each. You just brought both your targets down to 35% by yourself. In the time you were doing this your partner has picked 1 target and tried to burst this one down. You’ve been an amazing help because even if you weren’t able to bring one target down completely, the healer is now in panic and tries to heal himself up first, neglecting his buddy who is now getting finished off by your Pyromancer partner.

Energy matters since most of the fights won’t last longer than a minute. Especially in Forge where I see that healers have such obvious weakpoints and can’t consistantly heal for high amounts I predict that high rated arena matches will more likely be about who can pump out the higher amount of DPS and which team can coördinate their DPS and CC the best. Because of this I believe Energy will mean a lot more to your damage than 6/7% speed. That combined with the tests below is why Energy > Speed.

Speed: (A very big thanks to Crop for testing and theorizing with me on this!):

These are the un-confirmed(!) base class speeds;

Assassin 112.5%
Pathfinder 105%
Pyromancer 100%
Shaman 97.5%
Warden 95%

We gathered the numbers by doing timed runs.

Holding down Shift (Sprint) will increase your class’ base speed by 35%, except for Assassins, they will get a 45% increase.
For Pathfinders the only real reason you’d ever want to increase your speed is to outrun Assassins. Let’s see how much you can get if you maximize your speed:
Pathfinder: (105% + 21%) x1.35 = 170% movement speed. Now compare this to an Assassins;
Assassin: (112.5% + 4.5% )x1.45 = 170% movement speed.

This means that even if you maximize your Speed on Pathfinder, throwing all 14 A/S/P-Points into Speed and seriously crippling your armor, you will still NOT outrun an Assassin who spent 3 A/S/P-Points into Speed. Another way of looking at it is that Speed has a 4.66x higher stat value for Assassins as it has for Pathfinders.