Let's be honest

I am not sure how far cmc's plan goes and how many changes he will numericaly make but I believe that you can't make some proper balance with the elitespecs in this game, since they showed up the game went down in build diversity (curious if you can imagine that we got more to choose), utility's are more overloaded and generally dumbed down because the new utilitys where just way stronger.

I rarely see people actively using blast fields to remove conditions or get some healing thx to overloaded utilitys.Also the boon duration and generation went really really high.

I would like to ask if we can get maybe another type of special tournaments but instead of making 2vs2 4vs4 etc... Banning especs and let it be conquest.

And here are things that I also want to adress:DH f1 is a rly fast spear, I would Consider to make it not unblock able or reduce the projectile speed, it's pretty unfun mechanic but maybe I am just to slow (what I would accept as a not to change thing)Bring back old staff 5 on ele

If I'm being honest the only war is strength war if you respect yourself

@"Avatar.3568" said:I am not sure how far cmc's plan goes and how many changes he will numericaly make but I believe that you can't make some proper balance with the elitespecs in this game, since they showed up the game went down in build diversity

I'll be honest then: this isn't true. There wasn't more build diversity before they introduced the elite specs.You'd only have this feeling because players weren't as much reliant on Metabattle at this time than they are right now. Pre HoT, PvE basically had a single statset used, Berserker, and PvP wasn't faring much better. PvE meta was "rigid", WvW meta was the GWEN hammer train (until they changed stability) and sPvP was the flavor of the month meta.

@Avatar.3568 said:DH f1 is a rly fast spear, I would Consider to make it not unblock able or reduce the projectile speed, it's pretty unfun mechanic but maybe I am just to slow

First off, the only dh build that's the least bit problematic doesn't even use f1. (See permeating wrath)Secondly, it's a .75s cast time + travel time. You can't make it slower.

@Math.5123 said:

@Avatar.3568 said:DH f1 is a rly fast spear, I would Consider to make it not unblock able or reduce the projectile speed, it's pretty unfun mechanic but maybe I am just to slow

You can decrease the cast time by 0.25 and increase the travel time. By 0.25,idk I. Would not change much but the spear travels rly fast and at least I can't tell the animation outside of the spear itself. As I said it can also by a problem With my self

I've only been keeping so much track of the PVP scene, but I am sure that boon application and duration has been nerfed several times in the past year or two. I certainly know it has for WvW, where my two main professions (ele and rev) were gutted for being too boon heavy, with guardian also following suit.

I don't know what Anets current philosophy on combo fields is. I used to think they were purposefully making them useless, on account of combo fields and finishers being too complicated and chaotic for the average player. But then, there are changes to certain professions (scrapper, for example), which try to utilize combo fields as much as possible. Maybe they don't actually have stance on what to do with combo fields.

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@"Avatar.3568" said:I am not sure how far cmc's plan goes and how many changes he will numericaly make but I believe that you can't make some proper balance with the elitespecs in this game, since they showed up the game went down in build diversity

Does GWEN stand for Guardian, Warrior, Engineer, Necro or something?

@Grand Marshal.4098 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@"Avatar.3568" said:I am not sure how far cmc's plan goes and how many changes he will numericaly make but I believe that you can't make some proper balance with the elitespecs in this game, since they showed up the game went down in build diversity

Its a tag of infamous old guild called 'I swear she was eighteen [GWEN]'

@Avatar.3568 said:since they showed up the game went down in build diversityWere we playing the same game?

Pre-HoT was way less varied than any meta we've had this past year.

In my opinion, every single redesign, every single buff they made to "underpowered/unused" skills/traits after pof launch and before CMC damage nerf patch, shows now how horribly bad they were and pure waste of time on dev part (as it shows now with somewhat lower dmg). Either by dumbing game down or making them now overpowered and overloaded.Like reaper redesign quicknes trait should never be introduced/old trait was perfectly balanced at HoT time if dmg and sustain of other would not increase, and now with dmg of other lowered and probably also sustain in future, you are left with design fail trait that was there just to keep up with powercreep at that time and old trait would be much better for overall balance, theme and health of the game (similar also with most other skills). The quickest, easyest way to go with balance would be better to revert everything to pre PoF and start balancing from there and reintroducing elite spec to pvp yet again (or even pre HoT with more relevant combos in mind).Even if they nerf all currently overachieving builds/proffesions, it is just a matter of time new ones that might be even more cheesy and unhealthy will emerge (that were kept in check by current OP builds), because of previous poor balance and redesign choices.There were always "OP" builds, but in my opinion, these OP builds (except start of HoT) were rarely so unhealthy, opresive, unthematic and unfun as they are now, even non meta builds.*also in my opinion ammunition system is horrybad for pvp

@Grand Marshal.4098 said:

@"Dadnir.5038" said:I'll be honest then: this isn't true. There wasn't more build diversity before they introduced the elite specs.You'd only have this feeling because players weren't as much reliant on Metabattle at this time than they are right now. Pre HoT, PvE basically had a single statset used, Berserker, and PvP wasn't faring much better. PvE meta was "rigid", WvW meta was the GWEN hammer train (until they changed stability) and sPvP was the flavor of the month meta.

The "E" stood for Elementalist, but, otherwise, you got the gist of it. Pre HoT players were relying a lot on combo fields and elementalist with it's staff was the best pick for that. Engineer, while able to more or less substitute for an elementalist wasn't "dominant" due to it's water field being "subpar" compared to elementalist's waterfields.

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Grand Marshal.4098 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:I'll be honest then: this isn't true. There wasn't more build diversity before they introduced the elite specs.You'd only have this feeling because players weren't as much reliant on Metabattle at this time than they are right now. Pre HoT, PvE basically had a single statset used, Berserker, and PvP wasn't faring much better. PvE meta was "rigid", WvW meta was the GWEN hammer train (until they changed stability) and sPvP was the flavor of the month meta.

I see, so this was the meta beyond a single Guild. In any case, I have kind of a hard time thinking that water fields aren't used anymore and a support spellbreaker, I always use my blasts on water fields or light fields for sustain. I guess it's simply not effective?

@Grand Marshal.4098 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Grand Marshal.4098 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:I'll be honest then: this isn't true. There wasn't more build diversity before they introduced the elite specs.You'd only have this feeling because players weren't as much reliant on Metabattle at this time than they are right now. Pre HoT, PvE basically had a single statset used, Berserker, and PvP wasn't faring much better. PvE meta was "rigid", WvW meta was the GWEN hammer train (until they changed stability) and sPvP was the flavor of the month meta.

If it can help you understand, at that time engi only had healing turret as water field. Elementalist had the highest damage, the best control, blasts and essential fields. Guardian and warrior were mainly there to "hammer" other zergs while necromancer was just doing a bit of area denial and boon corruption through marks and well of corruption. Engi wasn't an especially popular profession before HoT, it was more often used for roaming freely than zerging (and thus not part of the "meta").

They nerfed the healing from blasting waterfield and, well, conditions weren't really a concern pre-HoT (they were "limited"), I'm not even sure blasting light field worked the same way at the time, even engi's mortar was very different than the current mortar kit.

@Avatar.3568 said:

@Math.5123 said:

@Avatar.3568 said:DH f1 is a rly fast spear, I would Consider to make it not unblock able or reduce the projectile speed, it's pretty unfun mechanic but maybe I am just to slow

Better is to make it blockable. As others mentioned, it kinda is slow already, considering cast time.

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Avatar.3568 said:I am not sure how far cmc's plan goes and how many changes he will numericaly make but I believe that you can't make some proper balance with the elitespecs in this game, since they showed up the game went down in build diversity

Here's the thing. We can't calculate definitively the diversity now versus the diversity back then. There is a way to calculate diversity, and you can mathematically show whether it increased or decreased, but you need at least two sample sets. One from now, and one a period of time before or after for comparison.

When people mention that diversity has gone down it's due to this very important line of thinking that needs to be distinguished; Adding more options should yield more builds.

The above statement is true, in that more options do introduce new combinations to create new builds...but that is not what people are really talking about. What people are really talking about are VIABLE builds.

If you have 20 viable builds before introducing Option A, and you now have 10 viable builds after introducing option A, then build diversity has gone down, even though you've introduced another option.

To drive home the point above, if you have 20 builds, then introducing Option A should increase that number to AT LEAST 21 builds.

The above should fill you in, that simply adding more options does not have any correlation with increases or decreases in diversity. This begs the question as to what exactly changes diversity, and the answer to that is complexity. Hard to explain this one without going into full on detail...but essentially mechanics define how complex the interactions of each choice has with one another. The more combinations that can accomplish goals, survive and become popular and those that can not accomplish goals die out and become extinct. The idea is you want mechanics to have complexity to be able to have a wide range of builds that can accomplish goals.

Using the above example, lets say you have 20 builds, and you introduce option A. Before we said the number of builds should be at least 21...but this number can be considerably higher...exponentially higher, and it's easy to understand why. If you introduce an option A that synergizes with other options on those 20 builds, then for instance, with at least 1 synergy per build, that's 40 builds. 2 synergies per build, and that's 60 builds. If option A could synergize with every trait you've selected in a build, we are talking hundreds....thousands of potentially new builds that use option A.

However, what limits this number is the complexity of the mechanic of that option. If option A requires you to choose option 1 2 and 3, then you are exponentially limiting the number of builds that trait can be used with to any effectiveness. Pretty sure you can start examing skills and traits in the game that are like this, and you notice how only 1 build can actually make use of these kinds of traits and abilities. You might also find how Elite specs are self contained in this way in design, in which in order to use A you need B. If you are using B you need C. Those things contribute to the decrease in complexity of the game, and thus the diversity will suffer when these builds can no longer compete with other builds.

@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@"Dadnir.5038" said:

Snip!

I get what You say, but the fact is that there is neither more or less builds diversity. What was called "flavor of the month" was simply replaced by what we call "meta build" now. Because players simply seek to be the most effective possible when they play and could care less about builds that are slightly less effectives. The only real difference in build diversity is that before players actually tried to pioneer new directions while now almost everybody simply follow the "meta". The number of options didn't go down, they've gone up in fact, what changed is the player's readiness to thread new paths.

Players have lost the notion of viability, they have a misconception of the "meta" being synonimous to "viable". And the worst is that when a non-meta build start to show a bit of efficiency they rush in this very subforum to beg ANet to bring down this build. I'll be mean but in reality it's not that the build diversity has gone done, it's that players hate build diversity.

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:

Snip!

It doesn't make sense to expect people to play less effective builds for the sake of it, to force yourself to play a build that it's "viable" once in a bluemoon when all planets allign vertically compared to a build "meta" that is viable in most typical situations....doesn't make you a PRO...it's actually the opposite

Have you ever played GW1? After 8 years..you could use 4-5 different builds at the highest level of GvG/HA...after 8 years of balance you would see all professions being played at the highest level and here...lol MAT finals are mostly double rev on both sides, engi, occasional necro and thief with same build or some very small variation...is that what you call build diversity?

Yes I can go and win maybe against a complete noob while using a full glyph ele...that doesn't mean it's a viable build

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:

Snip!

I don't full agree with this conclusion, but i don't disagree either. Players indeed have shot down builds the moment they crop up, and it's why i hate the "nerf this nerf that" mentality that was basically supported by CMC ever since he gained control of balance changes.

We have seen builds appear since the nerfs...but then those builds within weeks are taken down...and some of these are not just nerfs to put it under control, but drastic nerfs that "essentially" remove it from accomplishing any meaningful goal.

The truth is that the flavor of the month kind of balance is what we should be having...but that is not the case in gw2 as of right now. I don't think that players lacking the motivation to pioneer new builds is the reason for this...i think that it is just bad balance that makes more and more options not viable....and thus theory crafters like me are pushed more and more toward the current meta builds as those are quickly converging as being the only builds that can actually be used to accomplish SOMETHING rather then being a punching bag with a feather for a weapon.

I've had probably 6 different reaper builds at HOT (Proc-shoutmancer, Heal-Rezbot necro, Condi Reaper, Boonmancer, DM/SR Power Reaper, and then plain ol' Zerk Reaper.) Now i just have 1, which is zerk reaper...and frankly nothing else seems to even work well enough to compare.

@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:

Snip!

Because reaper was op back than