Questions on Design Choice

I'm just going to post these here, since I don't know when the next AMA would be.

1. Why all of these +%Damage Bonuses everywhere in all of the classes? I can't help but think these are redundant. Also going to harp on you for this but it deadlocks Druid as the only reasonable support class to take into raiding, because they give roughly 30% for existing. Thanks.
   • What sounds more interesting to you? +10% Damage When Endurance is Full/Empty/After Dodge? Or When you do X, you can then do Y?
   • If we were to remove every +% Condition Damage and +% Damage trait/rune/sigil/utility/food in the game, where would that leave us?
   • If you're worried about raids now no longer dealing enough damage to the boss, then reduce the boss health, or raise baseline damage.
   • If you're worried about WvW health and toughness becoming a problem... actually I don't have an opinion on that, I don't think it could be in the large roaming zergs.
2. Don't mean to contradict my earlier point(s), but why are we tying so much damage into dodge rolls? This is true for Warriors, as well as potentially Rangers and a couple other classes who bank on using dodges. It sounds like a risk/reward, but I don't think in practice it is:
   • In PVE, you dodge, but have to keep doing so, wasting them at inopportune times and risk getting hit by the boss.
   • In PVP, you're always dodging in fights, so those effects are happening anyways.
3. Getting more specific here, for the Warrior, Necromancer, and I think Ranger, you have traits that increase attack speed of various weapons or attack speed overall, but they don't seem to stack with, or interact with quickness poorly? Why is this?
   • Wouldn't it be more user friendly to just let them stack additively?
4. You have Healing Power, and Outgoing Healing. Why?
   • It's redundant and it's telling me that you don't want actual healing power to do it's "on the tin" job.
   • It devalues gear with healing power on it.
   • It creates similar situations as the above on +%Damage bonuses.
5. What goes into consideration when creating new attribute blocks/combinations? The Path of Fire series seems slightly sparse in comparison.

For healing Part. If all those X% outgoing healing things would heal urself too, bunkers would Be unkillable

Why ? Why not ? ... I don't feel like anything you're talking about is a problem. That's the way GW2 works, between an infinite number of other ways, they chose this one, and that's fine in my opinion.

I feel like a lot of these things as they are now are contributing to several balance issues across the board.

Wanna know the reason why druids are taken as healers over every other profession in the game? Even Tempests which can do very strong healing on their own are passed up.

Because Druids bring a natural 30% party-wide damage increase through the mere act of existing in the raid. Well not necessarily EXISTING but their effort is minimal. Hit a button. Do some healing. Have Frost Spirit out.

It eliminates any possibility of another support outside of Druids and by slightly lesser extent Chronomancers. Why would you ever pass such massive buff factories over say: a Ventari Herald? Alacrity generation that's significantly weaker than what Chronos can pull? A Firebrand to generate quickness, aegis, and splash healing? Sorry, Chrono trumps it every time.

Also, again, why go with such a boring way to increase damage. I think it defeats the purpose of the initial design philosophy that was adopted at the start of the game: "bring the player, not the profession."

So how do you make a profession/specialization COMPETE with the others without causing massive power creep? You can't give those professions similar buffs to bring to the party, otherwise squad damage skyrockets.

My suggestion has and always will be to change things like Grace of the Land into MIGHT or similar boon stacking mechanics.

Anything with a bonus contributes to balance problems..... it is fundamentally an unbalancing figure. What you should be examining is how the game is built for diversity through utility, but rewards raw damage output more then anything. That is a common problem that exists across all game modes, and actively fights the class design at every turn. Even the fringe cases where Bunkers are favorable, they're ultimately just stall tactics to allow friendly damage dealers time to mop up. Supports and CCs fill the same purpose, either directly or indirectly boosting the effectiveness of friendly Damage builds.

This means alternate strategies have to have a non-mathematical vector; which preempts it from the majority of PvE content, given the AI's inability to reason. So with the vast majority of game play being DPS centric, a difference in kind model of balance doesn't have the impact it needs to be effective. Firebrand show cases this problem more then any other class, as its a support build which now holds the top personal DPS slot due to Burning's out of control scaling. Its mathmatically the best condition in the game since is conversion to intensity stacks, and its been historically shown that any class capable of sustaining even a moderate number of stacks will land up in the top 5 DPS benchmarks.

For any meaningful change to occur, the philosophy of encounter design has to disfavor raw damage in favor of control/counter mechanics. Looking at the most complained about mobs to fight, nearly all of them employ strategies that make employing burst DPS difficult, remain dangerous after death, utilize multi-hit attacks, or have access to hard CCs. IE: things that don't just let you wail on them, and die by the time you've blown all your cool downs.
But the math, again, creates another trap in this scenario. Every mob in the game is unintentionally built to be a tank buster; and the reasoning is depressingly simple. If players are allowed to play it safe and still succeed, everyone will default to Bunker builds to minimize risk (and was for a time when 5 Bunker Guards were guaranteed to clear a dungeon without wiping). The current model is attempting to reward riskier/aggressive builds, but DPS is the only vector to which those types of builds consistently scale on. The only reason PvP and WvW see the level of build variation is that players operate a much smaller damage/HP scales then PvE, so they can afford to, and are rewarded for trading offensive burst for defensive sustain. They're also susceptible to physiological exploits, which allow mechanics like Stealth, Retaliation, and Counter attacks to serve a function in combat.

So if "class balance" as you describe it is ever going to happen, the whole design philosophy of PvE has to mirror PvP combat as close as possible. Some of that is impossible to accomplish with the kind of AI this uses.... but at the very least, they can mimic the build strategy portion of that offering fights that consistently reward things that aren't DPS. However, the sticking point in this rests in the "solo content" expectation people have for open world. HOT was an attempt to push passive group comp behavior in an open world environment, and players backlashed on it hard. For all the Adhoc cooperation that occurs in Core Tyria, there was never a reliance on other players to back each other up in most situations. For both HOT and POF, there is a snow balling effect where any non-meta event or static content (IE patrol mobs or personal level tasks), are largely avoided by other players because they don't think it will be successful without X number of people present. Events got around this problem by highlighting additional rewards, which naturally attracts a crowd, and in-turn makes it more likely to succeed. But that threshold is a big determining factor on whether or not people will passively join. Bounty Trains are a good example, as even sizable bounty trains will still avoid certain targets unless its reached a critical mass of 30+ people. The harder the fight, the more its presumed needed to succeed.... and to a large extent thats true; since large groups can dilute the effectiveness of AOE attacks due to target caps on most skills. Event mobs also group scale on HP, but they don't on Attack power- so its less pressure per player in large fights.

For as long as I've been going on about it in this post, notice how little it has to do with what specific skills and buffs each Class has. Increasing or Decreasing the DPS potential of a class doesn't solve the problem, when all the bench marks revolve around a single numerical scale, but the classes themselves are designed around Difference in Kind. Its like trying to build a WoW raid comp to play a game of LOL.