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Increasing TTK, Undoing Old Split Changes and Eliminating Skill Splitting


Swagger.1459

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Giving an individual player the build tools to kill another player with 1 hit, or even in a few seconds with combos, is not healthy for this mode... This low TTK issue is also magnified when you have large numbers of players facing off against other large numbers of players too... So I’d like to present a few, FOR WvW AND SPVP ONLY, suggestions to increase the Time To Kill (TTK) and help make battles more hard fought, with more give and take to them. This will not screw over PvE because, as I typed, it's FOR WvW AND SPVP ONLY.

  • Increase base Health of professions. 30k for Ele, Guard and Thief. 35k for Engi, Mes, Ranger and Rev. 40k for Necro and War.

  • Increase numbers on personal heal skills and HP modifiers on personal heal skills.

  • Decrease all weapon and slot skill cool-downs by 50% to help maintain the fast paced skill decision making combat.

  • Reduce critical hit modifiers by 25%.

  • Double the health and damage output of NPC sentries, guards and lords.

  • Increase siege damage on players by 25%.

The benefits of the changes are...

  • This could possibly mean that the team wouldn't need to devote time and resources to "Skill Splits" between modes, unless there were some edge cases.

  • Previous splits could be undone, and more focus could be devoted to creating new "stuff", improving weapons for wvw and spvp play, tackling outstanding concerns... and evolving professions and mechanics in a positive direction for 2019 and beyond. https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/62555/putting-fun-back-into-designs-and-balancing

  • Gear isn’t devalued at all. Players can still choose to use high damage builds.

  • Damage output by an individual build set up that seems “broken” now, will not seem so “broken” after... Massive 1 hit and multi-hit bursts become more manageable for the player on the receiving end because they are given time to react and fight back.

  • Having higher health numbers provides a “safety net” for both devs and players during the time it takes to address or fix things that are found to be “broken”.

  • Less forum QQ from us players, and maybe a rise in more productive conversations about wvw, spvp, professions and combat mechanics.

(Edit Note 11/20/18- Yes, I'm bumping this thread.... The wvw and pvp forums are constantly being barraged with OP this and that, nerf this and that, 1 shot brag videos... constantly. Something needs to change to create a healthier environment for players fighting against other players modes, because the damage output is far beyond "broken" when compared to player health. Increasing base health, and a few other things mentioned below,... INSIDE WVW AND SPVP ONLY... across professions will create better balance for combat AND have a positive impact on players of all skill and experience levels.)

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Not going to pass an opinion on 1-3 but if there was any increase to Lords' health it would need to come with a major improvement to the way they scale. It's currently far easier to kill a Keep Lord with five people than with 50 which makes no sense at all. I dread to think how long it would take a full zerg to kill a Lord with double the current HPs.

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TTK is a problem. Issue is it's related to game balance and this would just be a bandaid fix. Due to the increased in spam via expansions (defensive and offensive) TTK is pushed in both extremes. You can have 1 shot cases (more prevalent/serious in roaming) or immortality that isn't intuitive to witness.

If it were me. Reduce non-combo healing. Re-look at combos...like buff combo-healing/buffing (not just water fields!). This is to stop spammy sustain metas while promoting the use of coordinated sustain between multiple players...leaving the opportunity for an actual counter bomb by the enemy team. Like Pre-HoT...

Reducing cool-downs is technically a blanket nerf to the spam problem, but so many would rage. Also it'd affect thieves the least. Ironic.

I do dislike ferocity. It's just an extra variable that needs to be balanced out (should just flat line it to 200% so power is the only concern). Alas, it's probably out of the wheel house of WvW's dev team.

Not really for increasing NPC stuff at this time (especially with the iron guards buff). PPT stuff has the same issue where paper stuff is too fast and T3 is far too long that causes people to avoid it all together due to it being a waste of time during balanced situations.

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Things can get a little ridiculous in WvW these days when you stack food/stats/damage buffs. I've seen Soulbeasts autoattacking for 8k damage at 1500+ range. That's an autoattack - a quickness unblockable rapid fire (including sigil procs) can hit for ~40k in about 1s.

That means you can literally 'pew pew' most squishy classes in the game from about 1.5x their max engagement distance.

Of course, it's not just soulbeast. That's just an easy example. The damage has been ramped up all over. Most classes burst way harder than they used to. The game is much less about being tanky and much more about chaining hard invulns to survive damage.

Still, it's better than condi meta :)

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Health, vitaly and toughness is the same like at gw2 launch.Power and condi creep increased with the two expansions, but health remained to be the same as before.They put in more blocks, invulns, evades, boons, and more and more defensive machanics to professions to compensate damage creep. But health still remains the same.Do u see the problem?

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Everything is a trade off. Want to hit like a truck you are probably a little glassy. Last man standing? probably don't deal that much damage. There is a measure of power creep IMO but its slight. I play several classes and a few are out of balance but not all. Personally I love a long fight "when I'm up against a player that can play their class that well, but no, I don't want an epic confrontation of lore, legend, and time with every fight when I would also like to make progress on my reward tracks. Just my 2 cents.

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@"Kamara.4187" said:Everything is a trade off. Want to hit like a truck you are probably a little glassy. Last man standing? probably don't deal that much damage. There is a measure of power creep IMO but its slight. I play several classes and a few are out of balance but not all. Personally I love a long fight "when I'm up against a player that can play their class that well, but no, I don't want an epic confrontation of lore, legend, and time with every fight when I would also like to make progress on my reward tracks. Just my 2 cents.

Lol... this is the entire problem. Its not a tradeoff. Once, that was mostly true. We had less powerfull trait system with real sacrifices, somewhat less flexible gearstats, less choices of runes/sigils/foods/etc and less powerfull traits and skills. But since several years back everything has just gone off the rails. You can build for insane tankiness or insane damage true, but you can build for high damage and high tankiness at the same time as well. Stuff like the dd staff permaevade roflstomper or spellbreaker that literally blocks people to death while regening 5% hp a sec or condi scourge that despite nerf still can dump 5-7K+ damage a second on you in an instant... HoT or PoF, just as bad.

The only time you have to make a tradeoff is if you want healing power in you build, since those gearsets are still fairly limited no matter how you combine it. And incidently, totally not worth.

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@Dawdler.8521 said:

@"Kamara.4187" said:Everything is a trade off. Want to hit like a truck you are probably a little glassy. Last man standing? probably don't deal that much damage. There is a measure of power creep IMO but its slight. I play several classes and a few are out of balance but not all. Personally I love a long fight "when I'm up against a player that can play their class that well, but no, I don't want an epic confrontation of lore, legend, and time with every fight when I would also like to make progress on my reward tracks. Just my 2 cents.

Lol... this is the entire problem. Its
not
a tradeoff. Once, that was mostly true. We had less powerfull trait system with real sacrifices, somewhat less flexible gearstats, less choices of runes/sigils/foods/etc and less powerfull traits and skills. But since several years back everything has just gone off the rails. You can build for insane tankiness or insane damage true, but you can build for high damage and high tankiness at the same time as well. Stuff like the dd staff permaevade roflstomper or spellbreaker that literally blocks people to death while regening 5% hp a sec or condi scourge that despite nerf
still
can dump 5-7K+ damage a second on you in an instant... HoT or PoF, just as bad.

The only time you have to make a tradeoff is if you want healing power in you build, since those gearsets are still fairly limited no matter how you combine it. And incidently, totally not worth.

shrugs I don't disagree with you on spellbreaker or scourge. Bigger health bars for everyone would not be a one shot fix for everything, and in fact could throw off windows of opportunity for different group sizes in terms of clearing camps while fending off enemy. Slower fights also= less points, and loot being made for both the winner and loser. Addressing individual classes directly for imbalances would be a more efficient fix rather than slinging a bucket of health across the board is all I'm saying.

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@mov.1246 said:Health, vitaly and toughness is the same like at gw2 launch.Power and condi creep increased with the two expansions, but health remained to be the same as before.They put in more blocks, invulns, evades, boons, and more and more defensive machanics to professions to compensate damage creep. But health still remains the same.Do u see the problem?

Pretty much this. In addition to more defensive mechanics, there is also much easier healing in the game.

Damage is super high to kill people quickly.

However at the same time, if burst damage were not high enough, it would never break the healing and defensive CD cycle. Bunker would reign supreme.

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I agree the Time To Kill needs to go up but not on how to do it, the healing from skills/traits needs to go down about 20%, the cool downs of defensive skills need to go up by about 20% and damage right across the board needs to go down by about 20%.

Things I have had happen today:Rev: 8k Coalescence of Ruin my day at 0 range for 8k, 16k (all my health) at max range. 5k Auto. 9k precision strike which is spammable. 5k phase traversal which is now unblockable.Thief: 2.6k steal into 8k Larcenous Strike, repeatedly. 4-6k auto as a single hit from the auto.Mesmer: 6k Mind Wrack x2 with another 2.5-2.7k x3 Mirror Blade and follow up 3.5k Mindstab and I can do this a lot more now. 3-4k burn ticks from stealth. Burst 20 confusion onto someone through repeated blind and CoF.Necro: 6 of them just filling every inch of space near them with pulsing AoE and corrupts where you get 14 torment if you're not running away fast enough.Guardian: 100%, 20%, 100% again, 30% oh no wait 100% again.Warrior: Taking damage, 50%, Immune, Immune, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, full health now because 5 people won't stop attacking the bubble, oh wait we don't know when he's using full counter because it always shows.Engineer: 7 stacks of burn, oh sheee, cleanse and off he rocket boots into the distance. Holoforge, bam, 6k, 5k, 4k, AoE bam bam bam flashy lights and wooooosh rocket boots.Druid: Seriously are they all minstrels now because I crit these for 2k on full zerk glass mesmer as above and they just jump around stealthing and running away while letting the pet do the work.

All this is just some examples of the silly stuff I run into or in the case of mesmer what I can do. Damage is far too high and the problems started with the HoT creep but the problem has also had it's insidious side. ANet have been buffing weapons and skills people don't use, sure some were needed (looking at you signet of water) but there's creep happening in areas where they were fine it's just something better came along in the expansion replacing it entirely.

At the same time we got minstrels giving insane healing the game wasn't designed to have, we have skills that just flat heal people for insane amounts and high amounts of defensive skills or high uptime of defensive buffs.

Remember when the mark of a good player was that they knew what combo fields were and how to use them? Now I barely see anyone using them, you have to go to PvP to see that kind of stuff and only really from a top streamer.

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@Swagger.1459 said:Giving an individual player the build tools to kill another player with 1 hit, or even in a few seconds with combos, is not healthy for this mode... This low TTK issue is also magnified when you have large numbers of players facing off against other large numbers of players too... So I’d like to present a few, FOR WvW ONLY, suggestions to increase the Time To Kill (TTK) and help make battles more hard fought, with more give and take to them. This will not screw over PvE or SPvP because, as I typed, it's FOR WvW ONLY.

1- Increase base Health of professions. 30k for Ele, Guard and Thief. 35k for Engi, Mes, Ranger and Rev. 40k for Necro and War.

2- Decrease all weapon and slot skill cool-downs by 50% to help maintain the fast paced skill decision making combat.

3- Reduce critical hit modifiers by 25%.

4- Double the health and damage output of NPC sentries, guards and lords.

5- Increase siege damage on players by 25%.

lol, 30k for ele and teef? How bad are you? I played the game prior HoT just fine but ever since then damage is skyrocketing.It needs to be flat out nerfed.

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@GDchiaScrub.3241 said:If it were me. Reduce non-combo healing. Re-look at combos...like buff combo-healing/buffing (not just water fields!). This is to stop spammy sustain metas while promoting the use of coordinated sustain between multiple players...leaving the opportunity for an actual counter bomb by the enemy team. Like Pre-HoT...

i really miss this one, back then we got to work together to heal us up - now we just have classes that do this for us on their own. there is more counterplay to avoiding a group to heal up with combos, then having to pick out every single supporter one by one. i do think combos should be me important for group fights while reduce individual AoE support/damage/cc. i know with current weak combos and everything being a combo field is an issue. maybe make skills not apply a combo field unless you hold a certain key while casting it so you can organize it better andgive us more powerful combos . maybe even chain combos like when you blast a fire field 5 times it becomes a lava field, that is else not available, with better combos etc.

for overall TTK pretty much what apharma said - would need to tone down everything.

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I feel like stacking multipliers with high glassy builds is part of the issue.Less traits, utilities and consumables need to grant a flat +x% bonus to anything and instead grant a flat number. Moreover the x->y stat bonuses need to go and instead be flat numbers.

~ Kovu

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POwer creep helps bad players to casual players who dont care to understand how stuff works, somewhat efficient, "balance TTK" and make builds sacrifice one thing for another i feel that is completell the oposite Anet wants, that would make game to difficult for most players, since most want results w/o understand what is happening.

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@coro.3176 said:Things can get a little ridiculous in WvW these days when you stack food/stats/damage buffs. I've seen Soulbeasts autoattacking for 8k damage at 1500+ range. That's an autoattack - a quickness unblockable rapid fire (including sigil procs) can hit for ~40k in about 1s.

That means you can literally 'pew pew' most squishy classes in the game from about 1.5x their max engagement distance.

Of course, it's not just soulbeast. That's just an easy example. The damage has been ramped up all over. Most classes burst way harder than they used to. The game is much less about being tanky and much more about chaining hard invulns to survive damage.

Still, it's better than condi meta :)

Sounds like a great way to kill a scourge.... lol. Too bad players can't be bothered (or dare be seen) on the ranger class... lol

Aside from that, I like the changes. I'll throw my 2 cents in as well at some other changes:

  • TTCC (Increase time in between CC's), add in a 2 second cool down in between CC's so a player simply can't be locked down or knocked around like a ping pong ball
  • Change how base movement speed works: Medium armor classes remain the same speed as now. Heavy armor classes move 33% slower, and light armor move 33% quicker.
  • Have the amount of siege placed in a structure based on it's Tier. Tier 1 = 1 piece of siege, Tier 2 = 2, and Tier 3 = 3, then done, that's the max
  • Put a new trap in the game that blocks siege deployment, but make the trigger AoE something like 2000, so any player in that range when the trap goes off, blocks siege deployment for say 15 min. I'd also go as far as to say, siege cannot be traded in between players when siege deployment is blocked
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@DeadlySynz.3471 said:

@coro.3176 said:Things can get a little ridiculous in WvW these days when you stack food/stats/damage buffs. I've seen Soulbeasts autoattacking for 8k damage at 1500+ range. That's an autoattack - a quickness unblockable rapid fire (including sigil procs) can hit for ~40k in about 1s.

That means you can literally 'pew pew' most squishy classes in the game from about 1.5x their max engagement distance.

Of course, it's not just soulbeast. That's just an easy example. The damage has been ramped up all over. Most classes burst way harder than they used to. The game is much less about being tanky and much more about chaining hard invulns to survive damage.

Still, it's better than condi meta :)

Sounds like a great way to kill a scourge.... lol. Too bad players can't be bothered (or dare be seen) on the ranger class... lol

Aside from that, I like the changes. I'll throw my 2 cents in as well at some other changes:
  • TTCC (Increase time in between CC's), add in a 2 second cool down in between CC's so a player simply can't be locked down or knocked around like a ping pong ball
  • Change how base movement speed works: Medium armor classes remain the same speed as now. Heavy armor classes move 33% slower, and light armor move 33% quicker.
  • Have the amount of siege placed in a structure based on it's Tier. Tier 1 = 1 piece of siege, Tier 2 = 2, and Tier 3 = 3, then done, that's the max
  • Put a new trap in the game that blocks siege deployment, but make the trigger AoE something like 2000, so any player in that range when the trap goes off, blocks siege deployment for say 15 min. I'd also go as far as to say, siege cannot be traded in between players when siege deployment is blocked

one issue with 1-3 siege per object is that players would argue alot wich siege would be the one to be placed on the limited slots and where. if i plant lets at the palace on rbl northwest wall an AC cause my opponents attack there, they move to northwall next to the gate. so i place another AC there. then they move to west gate i plant a ballista above, so they move to south and no know if they dont touch those 3, i wont be able to build anything at inner - not that they would even mind 1-3 siege shooting at them anyway.basically there are too many sides you can attack from to limit it this low, you can also not salvage your own siege so you can place it somewhere else. would you also be limited to 1-3 offensive siege per same object? or can you move into my SMC and build in there 10 AC to ensure my zerg wont run in to keep you from taking it?

Edit: anyway this is not really the topic, should open another thread to discuss this.

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As a Holosmith I feel conflicted on this issue. I myself am capable of bursting people to 0 HP in a good amount of time. Meanwhile, people can do the same to me*. The end result is balance, but it may feel unsatisfying.

On my way from Godslore to Ascension Bay, I need to be weary of daredevils, that can down me near instantly. If I can avoid their initial attack, though, they are confused and I can burst them to zero instead. Same with power Mesmers. Two enter the duel, one leaves it alive. The loser has either been shattered or enlightened.Sometimes we both land on our backs, the fight turns awkward, but the duel continues 'till one of us has to use the waypoint.

In groups, this is actually interesting, because the size advantage of your group can be negated by a decisive strike. Our group (blue) managed to capture a red tower, because a green group had already broken in. They did the work for us, breached the gate, killed the Lord of that tower, all that was left to do for them was to claim the objective. But my group of four overwhelmed their group of six, because we caught them with all their cooldowns blown.In a way, the TTK reminds me of CS:GO. (It feels weird, but not unpleasant.)

Unfortunately, that dynamic doesn't work when I am confronted with someone who isn't as glassy as I am. Then it looks something like this:

Warrior: Taking damage, 50%, Immune, Immune, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, full health now because 5 people won't stop attacking the bubble, oh wait we don't know when he's using full counter because it always shows.This is, of course, not limited to warriors, the poster just managed to evoke a particular mental image. I have seen groups of glassies fail, because they focused our tank, who just didn't care, while we downed them one by one.I have seen my group go down to a single bunker, becuase our damage was mitigated.

The current TTK leads to a quick resolution, merciless fights, immovable object clash with (not so) unstoppable forces. And I'd be completely fine with it, if not for one thing:

It becomes very hard to actually gauge your opponent.

When the differece between strong opponent or "merely" good opponent is whether they kill me in 0.75 seconds or 1 seconds, that doesn't tell me anything about the fight, or the opponent.Likewise, when the difference between a weak and a feeble opponent becomes impercievable, it doesn't feel like the rush of battle.I guess half the time we feel like Saitama, one punching our enemies, only to be brought back to reality when they do the same to us. Well that and the occasional bunker, who feels like he's swatting glassy flies, rather than fighting dangerous opponents.

*Pew Pew classes can also oneshot themselves, when they get a face full of Magnetic Shield.

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@joneirikb.7506 said:Agree with those that say we should rather look at reducing the power creep of the elite-spez etc, rather than messing with all the other stats.

I'm imaging that stopping making damage modifiers stack, and only use the highest one would be an interesting change. Though I could be wrong.

would result in a very dull bunker meta and only condition damage in offensive builds.

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