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Holos, Condi Revs, and Soulbeasts


aaron.7850

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Has Anet acknowledged how unfair these classes are? Most classes have trade-offs and weaknesses, but these three have none of that.

Mesmer is my favorite class, but I just cant play mine right now because I do half the damage of those three classes while having none of their surviability.

Last balance patch did very little to change the meta in spvp, when can we hope the next rework to come up?

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@Shiyo.3578 said:

@Eugchriss.2046 said:Revs and soulbeasts have their tradeoffs. Only holo is lacking ( a real) tradeoff right now.

Nothing should have a trade off. This concept needs to stop.

It needs to, otherwise it's a straight upgrade. Herald and Renegade were always upgrades over core just because of extra utility in general until Ancient Echo was made to be a thing. It's just one button yeah but they make a great difference when well used.

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@Eugchriss.2046 said:

@Eugchriss.2046 said:Revs and soulbeasts have their tradeoffs. Only holo is lacking ( a real) tradeoff right now.

Nothing should have a trade off. This concept needs to stop.You re too used to pay for win games.I don't know understand how people think buying an expansions for a game is pay to win. That is stretching the meaning of pay to win so far.
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I see no issue with Elites being upgrades over core. It's meant to give something to the class that the class didn't have before. Problems arise when it's so much of an upgrade that anything that core can do, the elite can do better. Holosmith is in that state currently. How do we fix this? I can think of two main options:

  1. Buff Core traitlines enough that they compete with Elites in terms of power. Creating an opportunity cost by giving the player options in their core spec that you regret having to give up in order to access your elite spec. In my opinion, these are the trade-offs that feel the most natural. `

Ranger did this even before their tradeoffs were introduced. Core ranger has it's place over Slb and Druid. If you want either you have to give up:Wilderness Survival - Cleanses galore and reduces the cooldown on your stunbreaks, plus some extra prot and sustain.Beastmastery - Greatsword and axe synergy, reduced cooldown on commands which buffs important skills like Sic Em, SotP, and Protect me, stronger pets (or beastmode)Marksmanship - Longbow synergy. You have a lot of damage modifiers in here that can significantly increase your damage output.Skirmishing - Worth it for Quick Draw alone, but also great for trapper builds.

Guardian does this very well It's core lines each have a reason why you want to take it:Radiance - Retal or burn synergy + might gen.Virtues - more burn synergy, cleanses and stunbreaks.I get honor and valor confused but the symbol trait and medi trait are both highly valued.

Core rev has it's place thanks to it's increased energy pool. Core lines are also powerful in and of themselves. Invocation, Retribution, Corruption and to a lesser extent Devistation are all desirable traitlines.


Engi doesn't feel like it has enough of a trade off because core has been overnerfed to tone down it's elites.

When you nerf core to bring down an elite spec, you're creating an even larger gap between core and elite, the exact opposite effect of what these arbitrary "trade-offs" are supposed to achieve.

In order to run holosmith you have to give up

Elixirs - Heavily nerfed boons. Nerfed sustain. You won't miss it much since holo has heat therapy and barrier.Firearms - Lol.Explosives - Arguably the only line that matters thanks to EE, flashbang, and grenadierInventions - another overnerfed traitline. It has good synergy with prot holo.

Engis core traitlines are criminally underperforming, and it's because so much power has been stripped away while so little power has been trimmed from the places it should have been.

If you're not going to take this path you can

  1. Rip something away from the Elite to create an arbitrary trade-off which may or may not kill the flow or depth of the spec... Or in Scrapper's case, run completely counter intuitive to the spec's design in the first place.

Remember when scrapper's trade-off was so heavy handed that it vanished from PvP alltogether? A spec designed to be tanky gained the trade-off of... less tankinesss. What?

Remember when the Mirage, a spec about being elusive, gained the trade-off of... being less elusive?

I don't like these trade-offs because they technically do the job of lowering the power level of the spec, but they do it is so poorly thought out. It's a band-aid solution at best, and In some cases the band-aid doesn't even cover the problem, it just makes it stand out that much more.

Anet should abandon these trade-offs and revert them. Instead of arbitrarily ripping power out of elites, start giving love to the underperforming core traitlines that need them. Core Ele and Core engi especially could use the attention. If this breaks the elites, then you can start pulling power out of them to compensate.

For example, if you buff the sustain of Elixirs, but this causes Holo's sustain to skyrocket, consider nerfing the sustain of holo to compensate. Holo's sustain should remain roughly the same, but now it has to run the buffed core traitline to access that sustain. Repeat that process for the other nerfed traitlines. Move some superspeed access out of Holo and Scapper and into inventions. Now Holo has a trade off.

What this will roughly look like is as follows:

Alchemy - Boons, sustain, and cleansing synergyExplosives - EE, Flashbang, and Nade/Bomb synergyInventions - Superspeed, Protection, and Shield synergy. Perhaps give this traitline some stunbreak access as well.Firearms - Move some of the might generation and damage modifiers of holosmith into this traitline. Because these bonuses now come with an opportunity cost you can make them more powerful to compensate.

Now Holo has a real trade off. Want to run people down with nades while having crazy sustain, perma superspeed, and passive 17-25 might? You can't. You'll have to give up at least two of those because they're each spread out across various traitlines.

However, what you can do is create a core engi build that can successfully do three of those things.


In summary. What Elites need isn't arbitrary trade-offs. We need opportunity costs. It's more fun to mix and match between traitlines which each feel potent in their own way, than to simply pick the one or two core lines that weren't nerfed to the ground alongside an elite that was given an arbitrary nerf that makes little sense given the design of the spec.

While the former promotes creativity and diversity, the latter promotes stagnant builds and playstyles.

`

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@Shiyo.3578 said:

@Eugchriss.2046 said:Revs and soulbeasts have their tradeoffs. Only holo is lacking ( a real) tradeoff right now.

Nothing should have a trade off. This concept needs to stop.

...Why? Trade-offs increase class diversity. Having elite specs be direct upgrades from core immediately ostracizes people who want to play core builds from any competitive game mode. I can't understand why you would want to reduce class diversity in a meta where the majority of classes only have one viable build as is. Personally, I think a more TF2-style approach, where the core classes are all standard/viable, and the elite specs are sidegrades, would make the most sense.

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@Arklite.4013 said:

@"Eugchriss.2046" said:Revs and soulbeasts have their tradeoffs. Only holo is lacking ( a real) tradeoff right now.

Nothing should have a trade off. This concept needs to stop.

...Why? Trade-offs increase class diversity

They have done the complete opposite.

Outside of daredevil, which was a 2 for 1 special of blatant power creep, every trade off has obliterated the specs. Chrono, mirage and druid all suck. Hard.

Daredevils "trade off" killed base thief, by the way. Base thief was better pre-trade off because as I said, DD's was blatant power creep.

You know what DOES increase diversity? Every elite being good, not BUTCHERING an elite so the base class can be stronger. Again, look at mesmer, it's the best example of WHY trade offs are a failure of a design decision and ruin the game.

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@Shiyo.3578 said:

@Eugchriss.2046 said:Revs and soulbeasts have their tradeoffs. Only holo is lacking ( a real) tradeoff right now.

Nothing should have a trade off. This concept needs to stop.

...Why? Trade-offs increase class diversity

They have done the complete opposite.

Outside of daredevil, which was a 2 for 1 special of blatant power creep, every trade off has obliterated the specs. Chrono, mirage and druid all suck. Hard.

I'm going to assume you have an explanation that you'll edit into your post? Right now every class has 3 specs that fill different niches. Look at Guardian - Core, DH, and FB are all vastly different builds that do different things (and core and FB even have variations within the spec). By making elite specs a direct upgrade, you'd be making ~1/3rd of the profession's builds obsolete. If you want to use a build that runs 3 of the original trait lines, you're immediately suboptimal because the class effectively only has two specs now. Your anti-trade off idea is like going back in time an expansion.

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@Shiyo.3578 said:

@"Eugchriss.2046" said:Revs and soulbeasts have their tradeoffs. Only holo is lacking ( a real) tradeoff right now.

Nothing should have a trade off. This concept needs to stop.

...Why? Trade-offs increase class diversity

They have done the complete opposite.

Outside of daredevil, which was a 2 for 1 special of blatant power creep, every trade off has obliterated the specs. Chrono, mirage and druid all suck. Hard.

Daredevils "trade off" killed base thief, by the way. Base thief was better pre-trade off because as I said, DD's was blatant power creep.

You know what DOES increase diversity? Every elite being good, not BUTCHERING an elite so the base class can be stronger. Again, look at mesmer, it's the best example of WHY trade offs are a failure of a design decision and ruin the game.They didn't get "butchered". They were brought back in check. Again, the only reason why they "suck hard" is because you re comparing them to how they were just after pof/hot released. If you really want to know how much they suck, then you should compare them with core. If the e-spec performs way less than core then yes it sucks. But rn chrono/mirage are on the same level than core. Same for druid/soulbeast. Pretty much every spec is close to its core after feb patch, except holo, scrapper, DE, tempest and maybe berzerker.
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@Shiyo.3578 said:

@"Eugchriss.2046" said:Revs and soulbeasts have their tradeoffs. Only holo is lacking ( a real) tradeoff right now.

Nothing should have a trade off. This concept needs to stop.

...Why? Trade-offs increase class diversity

They have done the complete opposite.

Outside of daredevil, which was a 2 for 1 special of blatant power creep, every trade off has obliterated the specs. Chrono, mirage and druid all suck. Hard.

Daredevils "trade off" killed base thief, by the way. Base thief was better pre-trade off because as I said, DD's was blatant power creep.

You know what DOES increase diversity? Every elite being good, not BUTCHERING an elite so the base class can be stronger. Again, look at mesmer, it's the best example of WHY trade offs are a failure of a design decision and ruin the game.

Replying again as you have edited your post.

Your issue is with the implementation of the balance of these trade-offs, not with the philosophy of elite specs having trade-offs. However, in your mind, there should never be a situation when core is better than an elite spec. You have not explained why, only given examples of changes made to classes as a result of their elite specs.

To call back to my mention of TF2, which is a relatively well-balanced game, every class comes with a set of stock weapons, and you later get alternatives with trade-offs. An example is the soldier's black box - your maximum ammo capacity decreases from 4 to 3, but in exchange, you're healed when you hit someone. It is not distinctly better or worse than the default rocket launcher, and both are viable options that do different things. In your scenario of elite specs being downright better than core specs, the alternate weapons would be direct upgrades to the stock weapons, which only reduces the number of potential builds players can use. There are fundamentally no upsides to this. The only issue you've stated about trade-offs is with Anet's implementation of them, not the concept, which you're arguing against.

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@Shao.7236 said:

@Eugchriss.2046 said:Revs and soulbeasts have their tradeoffs. Only holo is lacking ( a real) tradeoff right now.

Nothing should have a trade off. This concept needs to stop.

It needs to, otherwise it's a straight upgrade. Herald and Renegade were always upgrades over core just because of extra utility in general until Ancient Echo was made to be a thing. It's just one button yeah but they make a great difference when well used.

every traitline is an upgrade, thats the point of it.the trade off for elite is not taking 3 core traitlines and instead off getting 2x core and 1x elite. if they are not close in power its balance issue and thats about it.

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@Leonidrex.5649 said:

@Eugchriss.2046 said:Revs and soulbeasts have their tradeoffs. Only holo is lacking ( a real) tradeoff right now.

Nothing should have a trade off. This concept needs to stop.

It needs to, otherwise it's a straight upgrade. Herald and Renegade were always upgrades over core just because of extra utility in general until Ancient Echo was made to be a thing. It's just one button yeah but they make a great difference when well used.

every traitline is an upgrade, thats the point of it.the trade off for elite is not taking 3 core traitlines and instead off getting 2x core and 1x elite. if they are not close in power its balance issue and thats about it.

Yes, but overshadowing the entire profession with a variation is not what it should do. I can put clear differences and benefits from one another of my favorite professions, more or less of those I am not as experienced with, but it should be that way.

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