the protection boon alone is making 80%+ of the builds unviable

I have mentioned this in the past but not in its own thread. The boon protection is just way too stupid and way too gamebreaking. 33% damage reduction is insane and at this point with how inflated the dmg is in path of power creep you pretty much can't play builds without protection because everyone does way too much damage and you need protection else you're just gonna get 1shot by random stuff

the problems here are two, the physical/normal damage (not condition) is way too highprotection is way too strong

the solution is simple, nerf both damage and protection and that way you only buff protection-less statuses and people and then perhaps we can get way more builds to be viable because right now if you want to try playing an X or Y build you can't do it cus you either lack damage either lack defense and that's why there are so few meta builds (and all of them have so much in common > ferocity, protection or toughness (or both))

reducing dmg by 13-15% and protection from 33% to 20% sounds like the perfect solution to me, it's not a drastic change so it's not gonna rework or change the face of the game it'll just adjust it to be better and 20% dr from protection is still super strong but builds without it will stand a slightly better chance against the outrageous burst. I don't think it'll fully fix the game but it's a step in the right directionif you wanna fix the game then nerf the ridiculous ferocity/power scaling or have an anet developer go stream some pvp against some of the top holos so you can see what i'm talking about

and here i thought you will complain about the lack of boonhate for some professions.i know your of the opinion that power is too strong compared to condition damage and like to share that in many threads, but when you choose to complain about a boon in that regard why protection? i certainly would rather complain about resistance, because that boon is really strong against a damage type.

anyway yes i also prefer playing powerbuilds with boonhate because of the abundance of protection, yet i would rather have each profession access to boonhate than nerfing either protection or damage. because that would make damage reductions in form of other effects/traits/stats have greater effect and would probably reduce overal dmg vs sustain. one has to be carefull when pushing a little from damage to sustain, you can end up in bunker meta really fast.

..... you shouldn't make the boon useless. 15% dmg reduction would be too little.

nerf dmg, and reduce players options of gaining protection. for example, ranger gets protection on dodge for like 2 seconds including other things that gives ranger protection like utilities etc. combine protection on dodge with vigor and congrats now you can spam protection even more. the problem isn't the boons themselves, it's the ACCESS to said boons.

I think the issue is that you have builds that have a stupidly high protection uptime while retaining all their offensive capabilities. But if you nerf protection, you'll still retain the problem where damage is way too high and instead of 80% inviable builds, you'll have near 100% because everyone will be getting 1-2 tapped left and right.

@"Jeknar.6184" said:But if you nerf protection, you'll still retain the problem where damage is way too high and instead of 80% inviable builds, you'll have near 100% because everyone will be getting 1-2 tapped left and right.

Agreed.Holosmiths, Revenants, Soulbeasts, Core Guardians, Warriors etc.etc. straight up delete people without high protection uptime.Damage has been inflated so massivly over the last xpacs, while armor and health-pools havent been adjusted at all.In vanilla a 5k firegrab was considered a "burst" skill ....and thats a 25 second CD, melee skill.

The amount of skills that can take more than a third of players health on its lonesome that are flung around in GW2 PVP , would literally be unacceptable in any other MMO.

Protection is the only boon who can save you for those stupid cheesy high damage spikes.

In my opinion protection should be -33% incoming power and CONDI damage as well.The power damage is nuts in specs with low risk, for example holosmith dish out a crazy high damage while being tanky, sustain and have many tools to get away with., or boonbeast which does a pretty high damage even running paladin's amulet and being sustain and tanky almost as much as a druid.

I don't mind oneshot burst builds on professions which are super glassy and go down in a single skill as well.

If you play a glass cannon build with oneshot potential you shouldn't have the sustain of a damn bunker.

I agree with the OP. I did also notice this issue.

Protection is equivalent to ~2800 armor when running full berserk or marauder gear which is too strong up to game breaking for its uptime on certain specs.

With the current damage levels protection almost does nothing. Add the over remnant boon rip/corruption and protection is almost obsolete. Same for toughness as well.

Honestly, outside evasion, dodging, distortion and blocking not much can be done to reduce damage. Damage reduction capabilities are running close to obsolete.

Want to hear something crazy? In year 1 & 2, it would take a full team of DPS oriented characters to stack up behind a corner and lure a dungeon mob of bandits in CM to be able to kill them over the course of a 10-15s burn, and that's considering the group was very experienced and not trying to avoid the mobs with stealthing because they were dangerous to engage and took a very long time to kill. Nowadays, in fact just the other day, I was running into the middle of previously labeled "must perma avoid mobs" in CM, such as where there are 20+ bandits including elites, standing in one room blocking you from running up steps, and mulching all of that down law mower style on a Power Reaper, in like 6s solo. The power DPS output in this game is seriously 4x to 5x higher than it was in year 1 & 2. A single character now if sent back in time to year 1, could speed run certain dungeons solo, just as fast as a group of 5 players.

So yeah, when you consider that health pools, base armor, toughness values have not increased with this large amplification of damage output, it might make sense as to why everything is now given high protection uptime. I'm not saying the power creep is correct or anything, I'm just saying that the high prot uptime as well as other overly frequent booning, was probably the easiest way to keep this damage in balance competitively, without trying to overhaul the basic fundamentals of classes such as health pools.

@incisorr.9502 The real culprit of this problem is the power creep, not the defense creep. The defense creep is a necessary symptom of the power creep. If they tried to nerf protection uptimes right now without addressing the power creep, the DPS would be headed into a nuclear situation.

@Zenix.6198 said:

@"Jeknar.6184" said:But if you nerf protection, you'll still retain the problem where damage is way too high and instead of 80% inviable builds, you'll have near 100% because everyone will be getting 1-2 tapped left and right.

Warriors and protection boons ?! Where ? Maybe with guard counter trait ? Trait that 99% warriors do not use ? That is yours high protection uptime ? I swear you guys have no idea what you talkin about .. you just stupidly complain about anything even if it doesn't make sense.

@incisorr.9502 said:I have mentioned this in the past but not in its own thread. The boon protection is just way too stupid and way too gamebreaking. 33% damage reduction is insane and at this point with how inflated the dmg is in path of power creep you pretty much can't play builds without protection because everyone does way too much damage and you need protection else you're just gonna get 1shot by random stuff

the problems here are two, the physical/normal damage (not condition) is way too highprotection is way too strong

the solution is simple, nerf both damage and protection and that way you only buff protection-less statuses and people and then perhaps we can get way more builds to be viable because right now if you want to try playing an X or Y build you can't do it cus you either lack damage either lack defense and that's why there are so few meta builds (and all of them have so much in common > ferocity, protection or toughness (or both))

reducing dmg by 13-15% and protection from 33% to 20% sounds like the perfect solution to me, it's not a drastic change so it's not gonna rework or change the face of the game it'll just adjust it to be better and 20% dr from protection is still super strong but builds without it will stand a slightly better chance against the outrageous burst. I don't think it'll fully fix the game but it's a step in the right directionif you wanna fix the game then nerf the ridiculous ferocity/power scaling or have an anet developer go stream some pvp against some of the top holos so you can see what i'm talking about

You would not only need to reduce protection and damage but also other things that got way too common nowadays like cc, stab, healing, invulns, blocks and dodges, stealth, boonapplication, corrupts, etc. Funny you want to reduce protection and damage since mirage does not bother at all with damage reduction cause it avoids all damage.

Protection , RANDOM PULSING 1x STACK stability , and resistance. Resistance needs to be deleted or treated as an invulnerability like 1s per 60s CD.Protection and stability uptime needs to go from 100% back to 30% and that is on non damage builds and classes.

Most CC decrease by hafl to 1second.

Global damage decrease by 30%.Global damage of "CC , setup or defensive" abilitties decrease by 50%.

ABSOLUTE REMOVAL OF PALADINS AMULETS.Probably all 4-stat ones too, but definetly the ones with 2/4 defensive stats.

Increase of mobility and combo field interactions on the classes and weaponsets which are lacking.Buff projectile/whirl finishers to compete against leap and blast.The goal is to incentivize creativity, positional kiting and improvized cross proffesion combos should seperate the pros from spammers.

gw2 fixed, i accept paypal.Just look at competition, blizzard vanilla is otw.

wow it's like people don't even read the post they are answering to

i suggested to nerf protection by 13% to make it give you 20% dmg reduction while also nerfing the damage in general which in turn results that protection has less influence on the game and builds with less protection get slightly better and don't get butchered. Overall the damage on people with protection remains the same because it's " more or less fine " but the damage when protection is down gets reduced

I didn't suggest to only nerf protection and keep the same damage, i already acknowledge that there is too much damage in the game. As for resistance - resistance is very limited for classes and lasts short durations so it's " mostly fine " atm at least

@Luna.6203 said:

@Zenix.6198 said:

@"Jeknar.6184" said:But if you nerf protection, you'll still retain the problem where damage is way too high and instead of 80% inviable builds, you'll have near 100% because everyone will be getting 1-2 tapped left and right.

Instead of complaing about my "stupid complaint" how about your carefully read that section again.

Nerf mirage.

I think protection uptime would be a better thing to argue over cuz 33% to 20% is going to a whole lot more harm then good, especially in wvw.

There was a time when protection and stability were scarce and precious... New maps and new mechanics brought powercreep instead of forcing players to adapt their Gear/GamePlay and playing as coordinated groups, so there can be pve solo heroes in an mmo.

@MyPuppy.8970 said:There was a time when protection and stability were scarce and precious... New maps and new mechanics brought powercreep instead of forcing players to adapt their Gear/GamePlay and playing as coordinated groups, so there can be pve solo heroes in an mmo.

Well said

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:I think protection uptime would be a better thing to argue over cuz 33% to 20% is going to a whole lot more harm then good, especially in wvw.

read my post before answering to it

@Patrick.2987 said:

@"incisorr.9502" said:I have mentioned this in the past but not in its own thread. The boon protection is just way too stupid and way too gamebreaking. 33% damage reduction is insane and at this point with how inflated the dmg is in path of power creep you pretty much can't play builds without protection because everyone does way too much damage and you need protection else you're just gonna get 1shot by random stuff

the problems here are two, the physical/normal damage (not condition) is way too highprotection is way too strong

the solution is simple, nerf both damage and protection and that way you only buff protection-less statuses and people and then perhaps we can get way more builds to be viable because right now if you want to try playing an X or Y build you can't do it cus you either lack damage either lack defense and that's why there are so few meta builds (and all of them have so much in common > ferocity, protection or toughness (or both))

reducing dmg by 13-15% and protection from 33% to 20% sounds like the perfect solution to me, it's not a drastic change so it's not gonna rework or change the face of the game it'll just adjust it to be better and 20% dr from protection is still super strong but builds without it will stand a slightly better chance against the outrageous burst. I don't think it'll fully fix the game but it's a step in the right directionif you wanna fix the game then nerf the ridiculous ferocity/power scaling or have an anet developer go stream some pvp against some of the top holos so you can see what i'm talking about

This. Actually, i'm not really disagreeing with the OP, but game is at a state where nerfing only 1 thing won't change much and you would need to " nerf " everything. You have builds who can do too much everything and, like Trevor said, it's really hard to debate on balancing.

I agree with protection being lowered to 20% damage reduction. As for the power downscaling, I believe a pass has to be made in order to normalize coefficients - simply avoiding 0,6 and turning it into 0,5, in order to shave off some sustained dps wherever possible without doing a %-sweep which will wreck specific builds. Maybe even classify skills (these are 1,5 coefficient, these are 3.0 coefficient) allowing us better predictability of incoming damage numbers meaning we can theorycraft around them and leave the actual dps to hitting with your skills and good timing while avoiding the bursts, not like it is now with "avoid the opener or you're toast either way".

The boon itself is fine, the uptime is not, so i'd rather see the latter nerfed. It should not be possible to keep protection up 100% of the time (or close to that) - and same applies to other boons too.

@"incisorr.9502" said:wow it's like people don't even read the post they are answering to

i suggested to nerf protection by 13% to make it give you 20% dmg reduction while also nerfing the damage in general which in turn results that protection has less influence on the game and builds with less protection get slightly better and don't get butchered. Overall the damage on people with protection remains the same because it's " more or less fine " but the damage when protection is down gets reduced

33%-20% reduction is a 13% nerf? Someone left school too early i guess. This is about a 40% nerf but hey who cares anyway these days.

@Patrick.2987 said:

@"incisorr.9502" said:wow it's like people don't even read the post they are answering to

i suggested to nerf protection by 13% to make it give you 20% dmg reduction while also nerfing the damage in general which in turn results that protection has less influence on the game and builds with less protection get slightly better and don't get butchered. Overall the damage on people with protection remains the same because it's " more or less fine " but the damage when protection is down gets reduced

learn to read

absolutely flabbergasted, why are you people even allowed to post on the forum?

protection is currently 33% dmg reduction, -13% makes it go down to 20% damage reduction

at the same time i suggested to reduce damage by 13-15%

that way the damage remains the same on targets with protection uptime but 13-15% lower on targets without

holy shit

@incisorr.9502 said:

@Patrick.2987 said:

@incisorr.9502 said:wow it's like people don't even read the post they are answering to

i suggested to nerf protection by 13% to make it give you 20% dmg reduction while also nerfing the damage in general which in turn results that protection has less influence on the game and builds with less protection get slightly better and don't get butchered. Overall the damage on people with protection remains the same because it's " more or less fine " but the damage when protection is down gets reduced

To repeat a nerf by -13% would bring a 33% dmg reduction to 20% reduction does not make your maths correct.