Developer Clarification Request: Sand Savant - Bug or Intended?

Hey Karl et all!

I want to first start with I'm super hyped that you guys are engaging with the community, despite the negativity and incivility in the form lately, and I'd like to start a civil discussion about an issue I'm passionate about: Support Scourge and its issues targeting the Squad!

With all the discussion going on about damage benchmarks and adjustments coming, there is a critically important targeting bug that I do not believe has received sufficient attention, particularly as it relates to the role of a Support Scourge in providing condition cleanse and barrier to their Squad.

Framing The Problem

The trait "Sand Savant" changes the behavior of our Shades into a singular, larger target maximum "Greater Sand Shade." With the most recent adjustments to the nomral Shades, we now no longer benefit from stacking multiples in the same area (a change I'm all for in the long run honestly.) That said, that clarifies that in no circumstance should overlapping shade abilities target the same foe.

Unfortunately, this logic has not been transferred over to the Greater Sand Shade.

Using the magic of digital art, here are stunning visual renditions of this bug in action:

When Things Work Well

Behold, the majestic Scourge in a Squad of extremely coordinated chums, each arranged with 5 allies around the Greater Sand Shade, and four allies around our lovely Norn Scourge:https://imgur.com/sU9MGjB

As can be seen in this meticulously sculpted image, all 10 Squad members would benefit from Sand Cascade (F3) and Nefarious Favor (F2). This allows for a single Scourge to, despite being in only one subsquad, actually support the efforts of the entire Squad, allowing them to bring sufficient support to make some of the more difficult encounters (Sloth and Mathias for example), a little more forgiving than some other, more standard support builds.

Graphic Evidence of Seemingly Unintentional Targeting Injustice

The problem arises in the grizzly scene depicted below:

https://imgur.com/dZrF0R9

Dreadful, I know. In this horrific, tragic scene, we can see that in a traditional Squad formation, of which I lovingly refer to as the Murder Ball, 5 intrepid allies are shunned and do not receive the Scourge's love, while the 5 allies in the Scourge's Subgroup receive preferential treatment by being targeted by both the Greater Sand Shade and the Scourge's personal area effect. Greedy jerks!

The result is that you have a conundrum of 10 allies being in range total, but 5 receive "double targeting" from both the Scourge and the Greater Sand Shade, effectively wasting a significant amount of Barrier and Condition Cleanses per second on your squad, which makes it harder to justify bringing a support Scourge into raids.

Brief History of the Problem and How Its Evolved From Beta to Launch

Prior to live during the preview weekends, this was not a noted issue, as the original Sand Savant increased the targeting to 10 targets around the Greater Sand Shade, and 10 around the Scourge. Clearly, this was too strong for WvW and probably open world PvE for tagging mobs, but the resulting reduction to a 5 target cap around self and around shade has now introduced what appears to be very unintended targeting behavior.

Finding A Solution

If we agree fixing the targeting bug on the Damage aspect of Shade stacking was an urgent issue that needed to be addressed to rightfully adjust the damage to a point you deem is balanced, can the same please be done for Sand Savant's Greater Sand Shade? Its hard to know if we are really functioning as well as a support should if our targeting of our primary support skills are inconsistent.

If the coding of smarter targeting is not a viable option to ensure all 10 allies are targeted when clustering, a potential solution could be to make the Baseline effective targeting of all Shade abilities 5 target around the Scourge and 3 targets around each Shade, and alter the effect of Sand Savant to:

You can summon only one shade at a time. This greater shade has reduced recharge. You affect more targets and influence a larger area with Shade skills, affecting a total of 10 allies around yourself or within the radius of your shade, prioritizing allies and foes closer to yourself. A greater shade counts as three shades for related traits.

Number of targets around self and shade: Increased Targets: 10 TotalRecharge Reduced: 33%Radius Increase: 120

With the above targeting change, the Shade Skills would by default hit up to 10 allies and enemies near the Scourge as a priority, and for any target limits left over, it would then shift its targeting priority to remaining targets within the Sand Shade. This still has the beneficial effect of limiting each ability to an absolute maximum targeting of 10 foes and 10 allies in the best situation, but would never have the issues with double-targeting and wasting potential targets on the same target.

Thank you for considering this request,

Swifty

I don't think that anyone left at anet knows enough about this game's spaghetti engine to understand why the targeting system would do this, but another solution might be to just make the greater mark affect 10 targets while removing the PBAoE effects from the around the necro (user).

The mark is egregiously huge, so if the necro wanted the f-skill buffs, then he/she just has to stand inside of the giant circle that can easily be re-applied elsewhere. It'd be an actual play-style change rather than just a direct upgrade, and it would allow the necro to also support more allies without having things get too crazy.

For what it's worth I think it should work like this

user input (f2-f5)draw an array of targets for each shade (and the player)draw a new array which draws all elements from the first arrays, adds a value to each array element (is this from the player, shade 1, shade 2, shade 3), and removes all duplicate targetsoutput effects to targets in the array cycling through shade value count

does this make sensei worry that it may be a backend nightmare

@Swagg.9236 said:I don't think that anyone left at anet knows enough about this game's spaghetti engine to understand why the targeting system would do this, but another solution might be to just make the greater mark affect 10 targets while removing the PBAoE effects from the around the necro (user).

The mark is egregiously huge, so if the necro wanted the f-skill buffs, then he/she just has to stand inside of the giant circle that can easily be re-applied elsewhere. It'd be an actual play-style change rather than just a direct upgrade, and it would allow the necro to also support more allies without having things get too crazy.

While I'm not entirely opposed to this, that would really hurt the viability of the spec in PvP and WvW, as the shade does have a long cast time, so having to reposition it even to get self-effects would be very harmful to the build's viability.

I'd still prefer my solution of capping it at 10 total targets, and just have it prioritize target in order of closest to you, to target in the shade's radius with any remaining.

This targeting issue definitely needs attention. Also, I love your graphics to help demonstrate the issue.

The biggest draw of a Scourge support is that a single one supports the entire raid. No need to double-up on it. Except, due to double-targeting, this doesn't happen.

I see no reason for Larger shades to not just be the Default. I find it hard to believe they forgot to include the language under manifest sand shade to say it can only affect 1 target per iteration but remembered to include it on all the other 4 abilities. And then that they further tested it and didn't realize it was overlapping targets. Clearly it was intentional overlap, they simply didn't realize how powerful it would be when applied to smaller shades. Simple fix, get RID of smaller shades.

1. Make the Savant shade default.
2. Make 5 target on Player and Shade Default.
3. Make a new grand Master trait as follows :i. Barrier applied has 33% slower degeneration rate, and applies 15% dmg reduction and 15% condition dmg reduction. Healing power is increased by a 10% of toughness.
4. Make the Middle GM trait in Scourge: Manifest Sand Shade now applies burning (1 stack 3 seconds). Your Burning duration is increased by 33% when wielding a torch.
5. Make the bottom GM trait in Scourge: When you corrupt or remove a boon from an enemy, refresh your shade duration, and reduce the cooldown of your shade abilities 1 second. This reduction can not occur more than once per interval. Interval 3 seconds.

@Meetshield.1756 said:I see no reason for Larger shades to not just be the Default. I find it hard to believe they forgot to include the language under manifest sand shade to say it can only affect 1 target per iteration but remembered to include it on all the other 4 abilities. And then that they further tested it and didn't realize it was overlapping targets. Clearly it was intentional overlap, they simply didn't realize how powerful it would be when applied to smaller shades. Simple fix, get RID of smaller shades.

1. Make the Savant shade default.
2. Make 5 target on Player and Shade Default.
3. Make a new grand Master trait as follows :i. Barrier applied has 33% slower degeneration rate, and applies 15% dmg reduction and 15% condition dmg reduction. Healing power is increased by a 10% of toughness.
4. Make the Middle GM trait in Scourge: Manifest Sand Shade now applies burning (1 stack 3 seconds). Your Burning duration is increased by 33% when wielding a torch.
5. Make the bottom GM trait in Scourge: When you corrupt or remove a boon from an enemy, refresh your shade duration, and reduce the cooldown of your shade abilities 1 second. This reduction can not occur more than once per interval. Interval 3 seconds.

You forgot the part about re re rolling "feed from corruption" (bottom grand master trait) mechanic into baseline necro with this idea >.> core necro needs access to those lovely boons

I wont stop pointing this out till it happens or sand savant goes default

I agree that default sand savant shade mechanics, along with some other changes, could definitely go a long way toward making the specialization a bit more streamlined.

I hope they also focus on longer duration conditions with fewer stacks. I dont mind a long ramp time in damage in pve for condition builds in general, as long as the eventual pay off is good.

I really love the idea of having some unique passive with the support grandmaster as well foe allies in the shade's radius. Id love it to be something that doesn't stack with existing effects but can be used as an alternative to them.

Regardless, i really hope a developer can come in here and clarify if this double targeting is a bug or intended. It really feels bugged and unintuitive.

@ZDragon.3046 said:

You forgot the part about re re rolling "feed from corruption" (bottom grand master trait) mechanic into baseline necro with this idea >.> core necro needs access to those lovely boons

I wont stop pointing this out till it happens or sand savant goes default

While I would love them to buff necro across the board, there would be a cost to that. You would give Necro access to all enemy boons in PVP and WvW? Go make a new thread for that if you want. Me personally, I don't want more boons that can just be converted into conditions. I already got enough boons to manage without having to think about who gets corrupted and what boons I want to Steal from them. This sounds more like a spellbreaker trait or a thief trait to me.

Wait, so they went out of their way to fix a bug with damage until it's working perfectly, but the "fix" they did to Savant caused another problem, and it went overlooked due to being support related? Are we supposed to be heavy supports or not?

@Karl McLain.5604 said:We are looking to fix this with Sand Savant, so that the scourge can effectively affect 10 targets simultaneously when using the larger shade. I can't give an ETA because the solutions are still being evaluated, but I can say it's on our radar.

Thank you. Regardless of the quality of the support Scourge brings (which is certainly debatable), it will never realize its full potential as long as this bug exists.

Thank you for the quick response. On hindsight, it's indeed important to realize a change that doesn't kitten up the rest of targetting mechanics isn't that easy.

@"Karl McLain.5604" said:We are looking to fix this with Sand Savant, so that the scourge can effectively affect 10 targets simultaneously when using the larger shade. I can't give an ETA because the solutions are still being evaluated, but I can say it's on our radar.

Oh my gosh thank you so much. This simple response has made my week and reassured me you guys are truly trying to get this elite spec in a good place.

The only other thing I noticed, is that originally in the Beta Weekend, the barrier gained from Desert Empowerment used to also hit potentially 10 targets when you used Manifest Sand Shade.

Is there any chance that we could also regain that functionality once the 10-targeting is also restored? It made it very fluid to try to "extend" a barrier during the preview weekend by using F1, F3, and then F1 again or a third time to try to maintain a barrier when you anticipate a burst over the next 4 seconds or so. That would be fantastic if we could do that again once more, even if only in PvE if that would be too strong for WvW.

Another interesting idea one of my guild mates proposed was to lower its barrier amount by 50%, but have it grant barrier to allies each time you activate a Shade ability. This would improve the Might Stacking build, and would make it easier to maintain Barrier, at the cost of having to really work to maintain our life force enough to do so.

I hope you all have a great weekend :)

@Karl McLain.5604 said:We are looking to fix this with Sand Savant, so that the scourge can effectively affect 10 targets simultaneously when using the larger shade. I can't give an ETA because the solutions are still being evaluated, but I can say it's on our radar.

TEN? Whilst other aoe's have a five cap. Yep, sounds perfectly reasonable....

@Karl McLain.5604 said:We are looking to fix this with Sand Savant, so that the scourge can effectively affect 10 targets simultaneously when using the larger shade. I can't give an ETA because the solutions are still being evaluated, but I can say it's on our radar.

10 targets? this is a joke right?I wouldn't mind this in PvE, but making this trait target 10 people is completely broken in WvW. No point playing anything else beside scourge and firebrand i guess?

@Baldrick.8967 said:

@Karl McLain.5604 said:We are looking to fix this with Sand Savant, so that the scourge can effectively affect 10 targets simultaneously when using the larger shade. I can't give an ETA because the solutions are still being evaluated, but I can say it's on our radar.

You lose nearly 25-30% damage from not taking Demonic Lore to achieve this and it requires the use of a T3 trait AND it only affects the Shroud skills which we can barely utilize due to pitiful LF generation. Are you really trying to say this is an OP change?

@Exqq.7451 said:

@Baldrick.8967 said:

@Karl McLain.5604 said:We are looking to fix this with Sand Savant, so that the scourge can effectively affect 10 targets simultaneously when using the larger shade. I can't give an ETA because the solutions are still being evaluated, but I can say it's on our radar.

Yes, it is OP. The whole class is. I'm sorry. But yeah, sure, let's buff it even more, so that literally everyone can receive free loot bags. Sometimes I'm baffled by the amount of nerve some players have....asking for more and more, while they're already on top..

@Alwayshappy.2549 said:

@Exqq.7451 said:

@Baldrick.8967 said:

@Karl McLain.5604 said:We are looking to fix this with Sand Savant, so that the scourge can effectively affect 10 targets simultaneously when using the larger shade. I can't give an ETA because the solutions are still being evaluated, but I can say it's on our radar.

Guys, I know is tempting, but don't feed the troll.

This wasn't a bug introduced with the patch, this has been happening since Scourge was introduced, and its not just a sand savant bug last I tested. Even with the smaller shades, if you were stacked on your shade you would only ever give barrier/other shade effects to 3 or 5 people in the overlapping radius, because of the way the skill targeting was off, and didn't choose other targets.

To the people freaking out about the target cap, it already IS 10 targets, however if the shade/you overlap, it doesn't target correctly and doesnt choose 5 different targets for the shade and you, if you don't overlap, it still effects 10 targets. This isn't some sort of OP buff, this is literally just fixing it so the targeting works correctly regardless.

Being honest with you Karl, Sand Savant shouldn't be a thing in my opinion. It takes up the slot which could be used for the support line, covers an entire node with just 1 shade and is generally a QoL trait that tries to nullify a mechanic brought in the same specialization. It also puts any creative possible mechanics, traits and utilities associated with having more than 1 shade out on hold.

Having another trait in that spot would raise the overall skill of the Scourge back up, shine some more light on the other two grandmasters and perhaps give us an alternative option that could tie support side of the specialization into a more feasible form, rather than a sub-par sidekick.

@Rym.1469 said:Being honest with you Karl, Sand Savant shouldn't be a thing in my opinion. It takes up the slot which could be used for the support line, covers an entire node with just 1 shade and is generally a QoL trait that tries to nullify a mechanic brought in the same specialization. It also puts any creative possible mechanics, traits and utilities associated with having more than 1 shade out on hold.

Having another trait in that spot would raise the overall skill of the Scourge back up, shine some more light on the other two grandmasters and perhaps give us an alternative option that could tie support side of the specialization into a more feasible form, rather than a sub-par sidekick.

Agreed. The fact that Scourge is supposed to be the premier Barrier elite spec, but doesn't have a Barrier grandmaster trait, is absurd.

It is clear to everyone that the arena gave the Scourge a very dangerous instrument, Shades. They themselves said this. Quote: "the Sand Shades were the most controversial (and dangerous!) Mechanics we added with the Path of Fire Elite Specs."And the whole community is clear that the arena is not happy that the Scourge was too effective (even better than their favorite elementalist)honestly, some elite specializations are mostly useless (mirage. spellbreaker) so dear Arena just rework scourge give him something new. Not nerf like you do it.

@Swiftwynd.1685 said:

@Karl McLain.5604 said:We are looking to fix this with Sand Savant, so that the scourge can effectively affect 10 targets simultaneously when using the larger shade. I can't give an ETA because the solutions are still being evaluated, but I can say it's on our radar.

@Karl McLain.5604 said:We are looking to fix this with Sand Savant, so that the scourge can effectively affect 10 targets simultaneously when using the larger shade. I can't give an ETA because the solutions are still being evaluated, but I can say it's on our radar.

It already hits 10 targets, potentially, its just very unreliable and inconsistent due to the targeting bug.

@Rym.1469 said:Being honest with you Karl, Sand Savant shouldn't be a thing in my opinion. It takes up the slot which could be used for the support line, covers an entire node with just 1 shade and is generally a QoL trait that tries to nullify a mechanic brought in the same specialization. It also puts any creative possible mechanics, traits and utilities associated with having more than 1 shade out on hold.

Having another trait in that spot would raise the overall skill of the Scourge back up, shine some more light on the other two grandmasters and perhaps give us an alternative option that could tie support side of the specialization into a more feasible form, rather than a sub-par sidekick.

While I agree that it probably would be better baseline, just like Infinite Horizon on Mirage, I still like the trade off of chosing it or the dps trait in the grandmaster.

It would be nice, however, for it to receive a moderate bump, OR for the Master Trait "Desert Empowerment" to become "Any shade skill you use generates barrier on allies" and lower its barrier amount by 50%. This would let us gain a bit more barrier across all our skills and help us use any skill to "maintain" a barrier so it doesnt fade.