The problem Apharma is there are many things related to this case.
1- Mobility
2- Aoe damage
3- Cc
4- Boons spam
5- boons removal/corrupting/stealing
I play Mesmer and I wvw I don't really spvp, and when I play with my holo friend, it goes like this. Our combination have the following things:
Mobility, massive aoe dmg, cc and well good of both boons removal and some boons + some good condis (vulnerability + cripple).
Now lets say a warrior come having boons etc on him and have their endure pain (protection and stability is what we care for in our case), once these things goes, the warrior is just a toy if you removed shield block ofc (in before someone say dodge, too many things that needs to be dodged), and if some people try to rez and we have some of our skills not on cd and they don't have immunities, they will join the downed warrior or whatever class is downed ( and we are just 2)
Apply the same for firebrands etc.
And don't get me wrong, there are many things that are literally silly in general, but some of them seems situational.
Mobility is something that whenever it exists in a game, you need it or you need something to cover up for it.
there are like 5 classes that have the mobility, and even between them there is difference (mobility wise).
Sorry for the long post, now to answer the question but in a fast and simple way.
Targets with boons = probably hard to kill
Targets without boons = probably easy to kill
there are many situations which sometimes you will find it hard to deal dmg and situations where the damage is super high, let alone the situations where you can't deal damage.
And I will go with the damage is too high in general for both condi and direct damage
So many things needs to be fixed in the game but all I see is just more and more mess created.
@Heartpains.7312 said:
The problem Apharma is there are many things related to this case.
1- Mobility
2- Aoe damage
3- Cc
4- Boons spam
5- boons removal/corrupting/stealing
I play Mesmer and I wvw I don't really spvp, and when I play with my holo friend, it goes like this. Our combination have the following things:
Mobility, massive aoe dmg, cc and well good of both boons removal and some boons + some good condis (vulnerability + cripple).
Now lets say a warrior come having boons etc on him and have their endure pain (protection and stability is what we care for in our case), once these things goes, the warrior is just a toy if you removed shield block ofc (in before someone say dodge, too many things that needs to be dodged), and if some people try to rez and we have some of our skills not on cd and they don't have immunities, they will join the downed warrior or whatever class is downed ( and we are just 2)
Apply the same for firebrands etc.
And don't get me wrong, there are many things that are literally silly in general, but some of them seems situational.
Mobility is something that whenever it exists in a game, you need it or you need something to cover up for it.
there are like 5 classes that have the mobility, and even between them there is difference (mobility wise).
Sorry for the long post, now to answer the question but in a fast and simple way.
Targets with boons = probably hard to kill
Targets without boons = probably easy to kill
there are many situations which sometimes you will find it hard to deal dmg and situations where the damage is super high, let alone the situations where you can't deal damage.
And I will go with the damage is too high in general for both condi and direct damage
So many things needs to be fixed in the game but all I see is just more and more mess created.
I know it's a really simple question and far too simple to do the topic justice but I wanted to simplify it as a way of giving the devs realistic feedback on how people feel about the state of the game. I'm glad you're willing to add context to your answer and I hope others will likewise follow suit as they may feel that damage is too high but also X, Y and Z so would like to make the context of their decision known.
Edit: My personal opinion is that damage is too high but so is healing, damage mitigation and cool downs to low, basically everything is too high which is warping the game considerably and why some classes are seeing big swings in roles and viable builds.
My biggest issue is that the only form of viable mitigation is mitigation. Blocks, evades and invuln. These skills are often packed into the same classes.
Can't lower the damage without lowering the sustain, and we all know that's not going to happen.
Yes! I think it's way too high, I remember a time when being able to land a 11k+ Backstab Crit on thief was huge burst.. and it was much more enjoyable than the burst creep rn where almost every class has a spec which can pump out 20k+ burst combos every 10seconds or so.. Hell you can even burst with conditions in like half a second. STILL!
On a side note: I think everything is too high since PoF. PvP fights always boil down to who runs out of invuls/blocks/evades first (and there's a lot of it..), then the next burst oneshots.
On the other hand as a result of the high dmg there are a lot of mechanics to mitigate dmg, which also enables extreme bunker builds, which is fine for WvW because you can support your team and you aren't a real threat yourself, but in sPvP it's just busted when a bunker camps a point and there's literally no way of decapping that point unless you zerg him down, which then allows the enemy team to control the rest of the map.
But I think every problem and every balance issue comes from the inability of the PvP balancing team to do anything if the PvE balancing team doesn't approve (unless it's tweaking the numbers, which helps a bit but doesn't solve the problem), which is kitten. So I actually don't see a way for GW2 PvP to ever be good (again) tbh and after realizing this, I am actually thinking about quitting GW2 forever.
Like the only thing where Guild Wars 2 has no real competitor in the current MMO market is an actual proper equalized and structured PvP mode and it is so badly balanced that it's just not really enjoyable :<
And no one cares, it's just frustrating.
@Heartpains.7312 said:
The problem Apharma is there are many things related to this case.
1- Mobility
2- Aoe damage
3- Cc
4- Boons spam
5- boons removal/corrupting/stealing
I play Mesmer and I wvw I don't really spvp, and when I play with my holo friend, it goes like this. Our combination have the following things:
Mobility, massive aoe dmg, cc and well good of both boons removal and some boons + some good condis (vulnerability + cripple).
Now lets say a warrior come having boons etc on him and have their endure pain (protection and stability is what we care for in our case), once these things goes, the warrior is just a toy if you removed shield block ofc (in before someone say dodge, too many things that needs to be dodged), and if some people try to rez and we have some of our skills not on cd and they don't have immunities, they will join the downed warrior or whatever class is downed ( and we are just 2)
Apply the same for firebrands etc.
And don't get me wrong, there are many things that are literally silly in general, but some of them seems situational.
Mobility is something that whenever it exists in a game, you need it or you need something to cover up for it.
there are like 5 classes that have the mobility, and even between them there is difference (mobility wise).
Sorry for the long post, now to answer the question but in a fast and simple way.
Targets with boons = probably hard to kill
Targets without boons = probably easy to kill
there are many situations which sometimes you will find it hard to deal dmg and situations where the damage is super high, let alone the situations where you can't deal damage.
And I will go with the damage is too high in general for both condi and direct damage
So many things needs to be fixed in the game but all I see is just more and more mess created.
I see what you mean but my vote of "Yes" was in reference to straight raw damage, without anything else into consideration. It was this morning when I was running unranked after this recent patch and I really began to notice just how HIGH random damage off single attacks have become. I actually like a high DPS meta, but high DPS should be achieved through the use of combos, not random single strike attacks that can 1 shot people.
Last season or two, I felt the DPS was just about right, and I wrote a thread about it actually. I was pointing out to Arenanet that the high DPS meta seems to be something that most people enjoy because fights are faster paced, but the power creep in the DPS department needed to stop. The problem we are gonna start seeing forward of this seasons is that: When DPS keeps going up, the less important attribute tied defenses become, and the more important raw dodges/evades/blocks/invulns/stealth/sheer mobility becomes. The problem here is that the classes that are designed for the most burst are also the classes designed for the most dodges/evades/blocks/invulns/stealths/sheer mobility. So naturally with the increase of DPS over time, heavy things begin to suck and light things become awesome. The only way they can counter-balance this is by providing more and more and more access on certain classes to protection/resistance/stability/multiple sources of small life regens that stack, ect.. ect.. and it is apparent that they have already taken that route, which just leads to messy boon spam 100% uptime on everything, every class spitting every boon possible, and it just feels lazy and unengaging.
This morning in unranked, I was running a Bunker Druid. It was what maybe 3 games in a row I kept getting this Herald either on my team or against me. This guy was launching 1 shots on players with that Herald AoE damage pit, w/e that skill is "Herald is the one class I don't know so well." But I mean this guy was killing people with that 1 skill. He wasn't launching combos, he wasn't doing anything skillful. The guy was just walking to a node and dropping an ultimate damage pit under players and well, gg to anyone was CC'd at the time. I had gotten hit by it a couple times myself. He never downed me with it and I was still able to 1v2 as a Druid with this guy present, just by staying out of that damage pit, but that doesn't change the fact that this one single skill could deal enough damage to down a Bunker Druid who was caught in it, without doing anything else to follow up. The messed up thing is that this is an AoE skill, it isn't even some single strike that is complex to land or anything lol. Anyone on anything that was relatively squishy, would die nearly instantly to this damage if any sort of CC happened that they could not immediately stunbreak and escape that AoE. I reference this 1 skill because I saw it happening earlier, but there are plenty of other attacks in the game right now "single skill use" that is capable of straight 20king someone to the floor. And this isn't to mention how many classes are walking around slapping around auto 1s for 5k 6k. It's getting to be too much.
Probably would be a good idea to step away from the DPS power creep for awhile.
Damage is way too high, but also the defenses are considerably high... If you lower the damage only, we go back to toilet bowl meta where nothing took damage and fights would just be 2 super high sustain trying to bore each other to death.
It's difficult as damage is only high depending on what build you're running. If we lower it any more we'll end up going back to bunker mode which would be the final nail in the coffin for PvP.
Guys, it goes like this,
damage is too high so we need high defenses.
there is too much access to stealth so we need more reveals
many boonspam, so we need more boons removal
too much condi spam, so we need more condi clears etc....
there are too many cc, so we need more stun break/stability
and it goes on ... same can be said when things are the opposite.
Don't take anything I just mentioned very serious or offensive, but this is one of the main issues as I see it. You can't just fix one thing and then wait 3-4months to try and make another change. I understand that some changes requires some observations, time and testing, but I do know that not all the changes are correct/good and not all of them people can say okay I will just play the class I like regardless of the changes.
Please do understand this and don't just agree or be happy/sad with any changes coz you don't like or like a class. I don't play revenant and when I do, I just play revenant for fun, but when Bruce Lee kick (phase something) was changed and considered as bugged (the out of range thing) I wasn't happy about it and glad it was reversed fast enough for the revenants.
Damage can't be too high if fb is still able to survive for ages while focused by 3 dmg classes.
Not to mention soul beasts running around with perma protection and facetanking full burst combos, losing only 5khp~
That is exactly the reason why everyone runs burst builds because oneshotting people is the only way to get any kills through all this faceroll sustain.
Otherwise we would have fb+scourge fighting each other mid and mirages and soulbeast 1v1ing on sides. Skillfull and fun gameplay.
@Derenaya.3479 said:
To high in WvW and To high/Just right (depending on profession) in sPvP.
This is the right answer. PvP is maybe a little high.. but probably not. If we had some of the tankier stat combos back, it'd be perfect IMO.
WvW is a different animal though. You regularly get autoattacked for half your health from 2000 range. Even when I'm running tanky stats (PVT, CVT etc.), I still eat 7.5k Long Range Shots or die to 3 hits of a quickness-unblockable-rapid-fire+air-proc+one-wolf-pack that has hit me before I can physically react even if I had perfect reflexes.
You regularly see Meteors 1-2 shotting squishies (although, I think this is fine. Meteor is a pretty balanced skill .. the damage is just really high)
You regularly see instant teleport combos packing a huge punch, like core guard or, rev oh sword. You also have classes running around without many of the pvp skill splits.
Just in general, PvP feels like "eh, yeah.. it's pretty bursty right now - maybe we could fix that". WvW feels like "I just got hit by a 15k what?".
@dominik.9721 said:
Damage can't be too high if fb is still able to survive for ages while focused by 3 dmg classes.
Not to mention soul beasts running around with perma protection and facetanking full burst combos, losing only 5khp~
Defense is too high, yes. That doesn't mean that damage isn't also too high. They're both way too high.
The class with the most health in the game is also the squishiest class (necro). because health is meaningless compared to the enormous amount of damage and damage avoidance
Especially after the last last balance patch there are already quite many matchups amongst sidenoders which can stall for ages without a +1. Reducing damage further would just result in another bunker meta, which probably was the most frustrating thing ever in 6 years of GW2 PvP history.
Damage is a bit too high, maybe 10-20%. But overall it's closer to where I want it than it had been in the past. I really don't want a return of Chronobunker or Hambow where combat is just boring, takes forever, nothing ever feels impact and fights just drag out for on and on and on.
I think what most people perceive as damage power creep is still the loss of tanky amulets like Soldier's and Sentinels.
When you look at fight duration it's pretty consistent with stuff like League of Legends.
Been saying it is too high and that combat needs to slow way down, for quite a while now.
People are too simple minded to realice that lower damage does not need to equate to 2 hours fights, but right know range, condi and mobility is king has been for a long while.
This damage swing came about after "pros" whined that 2 bunker builds could not kill each other. Of course none of them play the game any longer and we got to deal with this mess.
Conditions need to be normalized:
1- SINGLE PLAYER conditions stack on DURATION.
2- MULTIPLE PLAYERS conditions stack on INTENSITY.
3- REBALANCE condition duration, damage and application.
@Derenaya.3479 said:
To high in WvW and To high/Just right (depending on profession) in sPvP.
This is the right answer. PvP is maybe a little high.. but probably not. If we had some of the tankier stat combos back, it'd be perfect IMO.
WvW is a different animal though. You regularly get autoattacked for half your health from 2000 range. Even when I'm running tanky stats (PVT, CVT etc.), I still eat 7.5k Long Range Shots or die to 3 hits of a quickness-unblockable-rapid-fire+air-proc+one-wolf-pack that has hit me before I can physically react even if I had perfect reflexes.
You regularly see Meteors 1-2 shotting squishies (although, I think this is fine. Meteor is a pretty balanced skill .. the damage is just really high)
You regularly see instant teleport combos packing a huge punch, like core guard or, rev oh sword. You also have classes running around without many of the pvp skill splits.
Just in general, PvP feels like "eh, yeah.. it's pretty bursty right now - maybe we could fix that". WvW feels like "I just got hit by a 15k what?".
especially reapers who are able to really put on the pressure if they get you in melee range amiright? they hit real hard.
I personally voted its fine. Im concerned about classes with too much sustain and cc combined with burst. The reason Its so bad is because some classes have so much cc and burst combined.
Take our friend "The Warrior" tons of sustain combined with cc and dmg.Remember full counter? how insane is that? I found out that it had daze absorb dmg boon strip and condi copy towards enemies along with other stuff and its aoe and unblockable. That is just plain crazy how much stuff it had combined with dmg. If it was single target it definitely wouldn't be so nuts.
Here is my list of characters i got so far:
Elementalist 80 with tempest:Talman nul
Necromancer 80 with reaper:Zex vokar
Mesmer level 80 no chrono yet:Klanga voosh.
Level 80 Ranger with druid spec Jedkhan.
@Derenaya.3479 said:
To high in WvW and To high/Just right (depending on profession) in sPvP.
This is the right answer. PvP is maybe a little high.. but probably not. If we had some of the tankier stat combos back, it'd be perfect IMO.
WvW is a different animal though. You regularly get autoattacked for half your health from 2000 range. Even when I'm running tanky stats (PVT, CVT etc.), I still eat 7.5k Long Range Shots or die to 3 hits of a quickness-unblockable-rapid-fire+air-proc+one-wolf-pack that has hit me before I can physically react even if I had perfect reflexes.
You regularly see Meteors 1-2 shotting squishies (although, I think this is fine. Meteor is a pretty balanced skill .. the damage is just really high)
You regularly see instant teleport combos packing a huge punch, like core guard or, rev oh sword. You also have classes running around without many of the pvp skill splits.
Just in general, PvP feels like "eh, yeah.. it's pretty bursty right now - maybe we could fix that". WvW feels like "I just got hit by a 15k what?".
especially reapers who are able to really put on the pressure if they get you in melee range amiright? they hit real hard.
I personally voted its fine. Im concerned about classes with too much sustain and cc combined with burst. The reason Its so bad is because some classes have so much cc and burst combined.
Take our friend "The Warrior" tons of sustain combined with cc and dmg.Remember full counter? how insane is that? I found out that it had daze absorb dmg boon strip and condi copy towards enemies along with other stuff and its aoe and unblockable. That is just plain crazy how much stuff it had combined with dmg. If it was single target it definitely wouldn't be so nuts.
If you people actually learned to stow weapons and not make it proc ,how insane would that have been ? .Theres much worse damage around where the same doesnt apply.
Atleast youre free to mindlessly spamm around again.
@Derenaya.3479 said:
To high in WvW and To high/Just right (depending on profession) in sPvP.
This is the right answer. PvP is maybe a little high.. but probably not. If we had some of the tankier stat combos back, it'd be perfect IMO.
WvW is a different animal though. You regularly get autoattacked for half your health from 2000 range. Even when I'm running tanky stats (PVT, CVT etc.), I still eat 7.5k Long Range Shots or die to 3 hits of a quickness-unblockable-rapid-fire+air-proc+one-wolf-pack that has hit me before I can physically react even if I had perfect reflexes.
You regularly see Meteors 1-2 shotting squishies (although, I think this is fine. Meteor is a pretty balanced skill .. the damage is just really high)
You regularly see instant teleport combos packing a huge punch, like core guard or, rev oh sword. You also have classes running around without many of the pvp skill splits.
Just in general, PvP feels like "eh, yeah.. it's pretty bursty right now - maybe we could fix that". WvW feels like "I just got hit by a 15k what?".
especially reapers who are able to really put on the pressure if they get you in melee range amiright? they hit real hard.
I personally voted its fine. Im concerned about classes with too much sustain and cc combined with burst. The reason Its so bad is because some classes have so much cc and burst combined.
Take our friend "The Warrior" tons of sustain combined with cc and dmg.Remember full counter? how insane is that? I found out that it had daze absorb dmg boon strip and condi copy towards enemies along with other stuff and its aoe and unblockable. That is just plain crazy how much stuff it had combined with dmg. If it was single target it definitely wouldn't be so nuts.
If you people actually learned to stow weapons and not make it proc ,how insane would that have been ? .Theres much worse damage around where the same doesnt apply.
Atleast youre free to mindlessly spamm around again.
But you can still use it as a defense tool right? I mean if you are low hp you can run away hit full counter, and anyone dumb enough to attack you, you can daze them then punish them for following you no?
I heard it was supposed to be used as defense.Wether or not I do not know.
Here is my list of characters i got so far:
Elementalist 80 with tempest:Talman nul
Necromancer 80 with reaper:Zex vokar
Mesmer level 80 no chrono yet:Klanga voosh.
Level 80 Ranger with druid spec Jedkhan.
Generally speaking, I'm against situations in which a person can die in under 2 seconds. This is currently quite possible with individual builds, let alone coordinated spikes.
Damage is not only too high, but it's also too fast and affords too little risk to users. I absolutely can accept high damage, but only if it has tells or general risk of use. Things like Dark Souls ultra greatswords are a pretty decent example of what could be considered a relatively "balanced" source of high damage: they can't be parried, hyper-armor through a lot of weapons, and will absolutely flatten people in two sets of successful hits, but their attacks are highly telegraphed, and there are often ways to bait or punish them with your own techniques and weapons. GW2 PvP damage is so often just a reactionary, button-press, cooldown-trade with very little finesse or thinking. If there were far more prediction and timing involved in GW2 combat, then I could probably justify damage being so high. Although, on top of damage just being too high, there are other fundamental issues with how a low skill ceiling and unfairness govern GW2 combat:
Spacing in GW2 is often a berth of 900-1500 range. It makes zero logical sense to demand footsies with an opponent based on aimbot-guided ranged damage and instantaneous teleports that can come from off-screen (despite players having a massive FoV) if used at the right angle. It's entirely silly to recognize how GW2 is dominated so thoroughly by mechanics which are so completely removed from basic, player-mechanical movement and on-the-fly positioning via WASD. Footsies in GW2 don't exist because not everyone can just spam teleports and WASD is effectively worthless on its own once combat really gets underway; and this denies GW2 PvP players a universal means to avoid damage. All of the emphasis is put on evasion via dodge, of which there just isn't enough availability when everyone deals lethal damage with their opening rotations and autoattacks. This ends up forcing bad game design decisions like slapping huge, protracted invulns and blocks on every class just so that people don't melt when an opponent gets high on evasion, teleports and/or stability before pressing a load of buttons with effectively zero consequence.
Ranged multi-hit attacks which spit out strikes over a protracted period of time are also out of control and generally unfun to play against in a game with tab-targeting. Limited damage negation which would otherwise be relatively healthy defense options for any game--things like blind, aegis, Arcane Shield or a single-attack-parry which didn't also retaliate instantly from 900 range or in a 360 radius while evading--are generally inadequate due to how they are forced to content with skills which strike upwards of 5 times from range for thousands of damage, but also allow the attacker to move and even maybe evade while doing so. If players are fighting each other in the open (i.e. contesting a point), then it is more or less impossible to manually evade any sort of ranged damage (which means GW2 is a game of cooldowns rather than good movement and mechanical skill). The only relatively balanced instances of multi-hit attacks in GW2 are probably Whirling Defense (despite it getting what is effectively a 195% damage buff over the game's lifetime) due to it being a PBAoE with limited range which roots the user, Flurry for a similar reason, and Meteor Shower due to the 3-second wind-up. If a ranged skill uses tab-targeting or moves the player during activation, it shouldn't be a multi-hit attack (things like Splitblade, however, aren't necessarily multi-hit attacks in this regard since every potential source of this skill's damage is triggered at once rather than over a fixed time period; this attack's efficacy also fades or increases based on range--which makes it much fairer and more interesting to play around than, say, Rapid Fire).
Why has this playerbase constantly asked for evasion periods on attacks? Why has anet constantly added them? Evading while attacking is so awful. Remember those Dark Souls ultra greatswords from earlier? Consider never being able to backstab-punish them now because they just simultaneously evade attacks whenever they perform a heavy attack. Super fun, right? Not artificially difficult and tedious to fight at all. If you're going to make an attack have a tell or move a player in some dynamic manner, just give it a straight pay-off or a flexible purpose that justifies that sort of exposure; DON'T JUST REMOVE THE RISK OF USE.
tl;dr: Damage is only too high because damage in GW2 far out-paces player movement and therefore puts all survival emphasis on the exact sort of mechanics which make playing PvP so un-fun: protracted invuln/block/evasion periods which often allow players to move and still take offensive actions. It takes player skill and execution out of the PvP equation and replaces it with PvE-tier rotation muscle memory along with looking at a minimap.
@Apolo.5942 said:
Been saying it is too high and that combat needs to slow way down, for quite a while now.
People are too simple minded to realice that lower damage does not need to equate to 2 hours fights, but right know range, condi and mobility is king has been for a long while.
This damage swing came about after "pros" whined that 2 bunker builds could not kill each other. Of course none of them play the game any longer and we got to deal with this mess.
Condi is king? Aside from Mirage and Scourge nothing are rocking condition damage. And Reaper is at the very least just as popular of a build for ranked as Scourge if not moderately more popular than Scourge. The reality is condition cleanses and conversion into boons are both extremely over tuned at this point. Most classes can quickly throw off 3-7+ conditions repeatedly over the course of a single fight, or have strong resistance uptime. Scourge and Mirage are the only condition classes capable of keeping up not because their condition damage is high (It's not. Scourge and Mirage are actually some of the lowest condition damage available) but because they have a wide range of conditions (Or in Scourge's case a wide range of conditions and boon corruption) that gives their conditions a chance to dodge condition cleanses entirely.
Condition damage has completely fallen behind Power Damage in the scheme of things. To put this into perspective; Condition Berserker, Condition Firebrand, Condition Weaver, and Condition Holosmith have the higher condition pressure. Far, far beyond what Condition Mirage and Scourge are capable of. But even putting aside other weaknesses in those builds, the single biggest weakness that prevents them from ever becoming meta is the fact that when every class can effortlessly throw off 5+ conditions multiple times a fight, the bulk of their damage being tied down into one or two conditions means their effective damage output is zero.
Arenanet really needs to look at both normalizing the spread of conditions, balancing all classes around 2-3 damaging conditions with more serious ramping power. And also heavily pulling back condition cleanses to compensate for it. Cleanses are the condition damage equivalent to protection. It's supposed to help you negate damage, but at this point unless you're a build that can shotgun 6 conditions at once your effective damage output as condi is 0.
Anet should nerf condition cleanses by 50%+ across the board then trim Mirage's condition spread and condense it into fewer conditions. Right now power damage is absolutely over tuned compared to condition damage 7/9 classes are exclusively running power on a meta level. Mirage is mostly exclusively condi and Necro run a 50/50 split of condi and power.
116 votes, thank you all for your voting and especially to those who posted their opinions in the comments section. Hopefully @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 can get some meaningful feedback from this thread.
I do encourage everyone who voted to make their positions clear as it would really help make sure GW2 goes in a direction you want.
@Apolo.5942 said:
Been saying it is too high and that combat needs to slow way down, for quite a while now.
People are too simple minded to realice that lower damage does not need to equate to 2 hours fights, but right know range, condi and mobility is king has been for a long while.
This damage swing came about after "pros" whined that 2 bunker builds could not kill each other. Of course none of them play the game any longer and we got to deal with this mess.
Condi is king? Aside from Mirage and Scourge nothing are rocking condition damage. And Reaper is at the very least just as popular of a build for ranked as Scourge if not moderately more popular than Scourge. The reality is condition cleanses and conversion into boons are both extremely over tuned at this point. Most classes can quickly throw off 3-7+ conditions repeatedly over the course of a single fight, or have strong resistance uptime. Scourge and Mirage are the only condition classes capable of keeping up not because their condition damage is high (It's not. Scourge and Mirage are actually some of the lowest condition damage available) but because they have a wide range of conditions (Or in Scourge's case a wide range of conditions and boon corruption) that gives their conditions a chance to dodge condition cleanses entirely.
Condition damage has completely fallen behind Power Damage in the scheme of things. To put this into perspective; Condition Berserker, Condition Firebrand, Condition Weaver, and Condition Holosmith have the higher condition pressure. Far, far beyond what Condition Mirage and Scourge are capable of. But even putting aside other weaknesses in those builds, the single biggest weakness that prevents them from ever becoming meta is the fact that when every class can effortlessly throw off 5+ conditions multiple times a fight, the bulk of their damage being tied down into one or two conditions means their effective damage output is zero.
Arenanet really needs to look at both normalizing the spread of conditions, balancing all classes around 2-3 damaging conditions with more serious ramping power. And also heavily pulling back condition cleanses to compensate for it. Cleanses are the condition damage equivalent to protection. It's supposed to help you negate damage, but at this point unless you're a build that can shotgun 6 conditions at once your effective damage output as condi is 0.
Anet should nerf condition cleanses by 50%+ across the board then trim Mirage's condition spread and condense it into fewer conditions. Right now power damage is absolutely over tuned compared to condition damage 7/9 classes are exclusively running power on a meta level. Mirage is mostly exclusively condi and Necro run a 50/50 split of condi and power.
Your signature suggestions are terrible.
In another post I mentioned the fact that condition clears was far too prevalent somewhere and it chokeholds condition builds, but the biggest issue, is that in order for conditions to succeed, it needs to burst people down instantly.
The classes that spread conditions need loads of sustain to keep themselves alive, because if condis don't burst and slowly trickle, then you need enough sustain to watch people die, and you cannot have as many condi cleanses, because you wont be able to kill anyone.Maybe condi cleanses should be limited based on the class such as necros eles and revs being anti condi classes.
In wow, lets take for instance shadow priests:Shadow priests which are big on dots, and do mass spreadable dot that goes from person to person, has relatively decent damage.It doesn't instantly burst people down, but they used to have ways to escape. They also are insta cast. I almost feel like some of the condis need to be either insta cast to be effective, or you need a whole lot of mobility combined to keep you alive, or a truckload of sustain and invulns to keep you alive a really long time.
I also don't think every class should have tons of mobility either. Someone said that every class has so much evades mobility, and there certainly right to a certain extent. Not just thieves are ultra mobile, but mesmers, holosmiths as well are ultra mobile. Maybe something needs to be created that counters mobile, or have a anti mobility spec that's really super strong versus mobile specs to counter all these super mobile specs.
Here is my list of characters i got so far:
Elementalist 80 with tempest:Talman nul
Necromancer 80 with reaper:Zex vokar
Mesmer level 80 no chrono yet:Klanga voosh.
Level 80 Ranger with druid spec Jedkhan.
As a player with thousand of hours on ele, I say the damage is fine as it is, there are ofc some extreme cases where the dmg should be reduced but other than that damage is fine....I don't want go back to "team with more healbots win" era and I am sure the devs thinks the same, therefore in case damage get reduced...it's safe to assume that sustain would follow the same route and get nerfed too so......from a 10 - 8 dmg to sustain ratio we go down to 8 - 6 ratio...what would be the point?
-A wise man once said- "Fight cheese with cheese or be cheesed in return, mind not those who will accuse you of being a cheese as they like cheese themselves"
@AngelLovesFredrik.6741 said:
My biggest issue is that the only form of viable mitigation is mitigation. Blocks, evades and invuln. These skills are often packed into the same classes.
Can't lower the damage without lowering the sustain, and we all know that's not going to happen.
Vitality and toughness used to be a mitigating factors as well, but with damage this high it's largely irrelevant. Run out of blocks/evades/invuln, and you die.
This is a bit tricky for me to conclude but from my pov, I don't have a problem with the current damage itself but the builds that grant the capability to have about the same damage of a glass cannon damage while having far greater sustain and survival than a true glass cannon build.
@Apolo.5942 said:
Been saying it is too high and that combat needs to slow way down, for quite a while now.
People are too simple minded to realice that lower damage does not need to equate to 2 hours fights, but right know range, condi and mobility is king has been for a long while.
This damage swing came about after "pros" whined that 2 bunker builds could not kill each other. Of course none of them play the game any longer and we got to deal with this mess.
Condi is king? Aside from Mirage and Scourge nothing are rocking condition damage. And Reaper is at the very least just as popular of a build for ranked as Scourge if not moderately more popular than Scourge. The reality is condition cleanses and conversion into boons are both extremely over tuned at this point. Most classes can quickly throw off 3-7+ conditions repeatedly over the course of a single fight, or have strong resistance uptime. Scourge and Mirage are the only condition classes capable of keeping up not because their condition damage is high (It's not. Scourge and Mirage are actually some of the lowest condition damage available) but because they have a wide range of conditions (Or in Scourge's case a wide range of conditions and boon corruption) that gives their conditions a chance to dodge condition cleanses entirely.
Condition damage has completely fallen behind Power Damage in the scheme of things. To put this into perspective; Condition Berserker, Condition Firebrand, Condition Weaver, and Condition Holosmith have the higher condition pressure. Far, far beyond what Condition Mirage and Scourge are capable of. But even putting aside other weaknesses in those builds, the single biggest weakness that prevents them from ever becoming meta is the fact that when every class can effortlessly throw off 5+ conditions multiple times a fight, the bulk of their damage being tied down into one or two conditions means their effective damage output is zero.
Arenanet really needs to look at both normalizing the spread of conditions, balancing all classes around 2-3 damaging conditions with more serious ramping power. And also heavily pulling back condition cleanses to compensate for it. Cleanses are the condition damage equivalent to protection. It's supposed to help you negate damage, but at this point unless you're a build that can shotgun 6 conditions at once your effective damage output as condi is 0.
Anet should nerf condition cleanses by 50%+ across the board then trim Mirage's condition spread and condense it into fewer conditions. Right now power damage is absolutely over tuned compared to condition damage 7/9 classes are exclusively running power on a meta level. Mirage is mostly exclusively condi and Necro run a 50/50 split of condi and power.
Your signature suggestions are terrible.
In another post I mentioned the fact that condition clears was far too prevalent somewhere and it chokeholds condition builds, but the biggest issue, is that in order for conditions to succeed, it needs to burst people down instantly.
The classes that spread conditions need loads of sustain to keep themselves alive, because if condis don't burst and slowly trickle, then you need enough sustain to watch people die, and you cannot have as many condi cleanses, because you wont be able to kill anyone.Maybe condi cleanses should be limited based on the class such as necros eles and revs being anti condi classes.
In wow, lets take for instance shadow priests:Shadow priests which are big on dots, and do mass spreadable dot that goes from person to person, has relatively decent damage.It doesn't instantly burst people down, but they used to have ways to escape. They also are insta cast. I almost feel like some of the condis need to be either insta cast to be effective, or you need a whole lot of mobility combined to keep you alive, or a truckload of sustain and invulns to keep you alive a really long time.
I also don't think every class should have tons of mobility either. Someone said that every class has so much evades mobility, and there certainly right to a certain extent. Not just thieves are ultra mobile, but mesmers, holosmiths as well are ultra mobile. Maybe something needs to be created that counters mobile, or have a anti mobility spec that's really super strong versus mobile specs to counter all these super mobile specs.
All good points. I really want to see all the condition cleanses and conversions straight up reduced by 50%-75%. I genuinely think that's needed. Mesmers should have their cover conditions trimmed and their damaging conditions condensed into fewer conditions, mostly torment and confusion for thematic reasons with maybe a bit of burning with the torch skills. I think the reason you've seen tons of power creep when it comes to conditions cleanses is because Anet is a bit too focused on the only two meta builds keeping up and is power creeping cleanses in an arm race.
But like let's say a Burn Firebrand vs. a Core Guardian. The Firebrand has a lot of self sustain just like the core guardian, it has easy application of it's condition skills. But that burn Firebrand will never be able to hurt the Core Guardian. How could it? The Firebrand has almost entirely burning and a little bit of bleed. And that's somehow supposed to punch through this:
2x Condition Cleanse on Heal with Lesser Smite Condition
2x Condition Cleanse on Virtue of Resolve
2x Condition Cleanse on Smite Condition.
12x Condition Conversion on Contemplation of Purity
Condition Immunity during Renewed Focus
2x condition Cleanse on Virtue of Resolve
Now I'm not saying that Core Guardian is OP. It's not and it fits into the meta moderately well, but it's condition cleanses are so over the top for anything not a Scourge or a Mirage and against Mirage at least it can survive for a while.
Or warriors who have:
Healing Signet 6 seconds resistance
12x Condition Cleanse with Signet of Stamina
6x Condition Cleanse x 2 with Shake it Off
Maybe running Berserker Stance still 4 seconds resistance
Unless you're a Mirage or Scourge you aren't going to be able to punch through that with condition damage. Period.
The problem isn't that burst damage output is too high, it's that ALL damage output is too high. People can auto-attack you for almost as much as their burst so you need to avoid EVERYTHING.
For some classes damage is to high for others its not enough. Gaurds, Warrios, Necros, Mesmers, Holos, are all putting out enormous damage right now. so much so that any light class just gets eaten in seconds.
I main fa ele, and any holosmith, warrior, mesmer, gaurd, just insta kills me if i do not have defense abilities available like twist of fate, or obsidian flesh at the ready. Ele cant even take auto attacks without them hitting it for over 3k and im not jokeing.
What needs to happen is Normalizing everyone toughness so that were all at the same lvl so that this game can become 1 step closer to a balanced fight. The only way to get more toughness should be threw an amulet or build, not because of lore or original class design. Guild wars has moved beyond that and has become something more. Having unequal stat balance between professions in a fighting game is broken from the start. id really love to see HP and Toughness normalized but id take Toughness if i had to pick one.
Playing ele without toughness or healing stats, and water/arcane or sometimes earth is just simply suicide. I'm literally getting hit by autoattacks for 2-4k depending on the class, with a base health of 11k hp, (~16.8k hp with amulets with vit) light armor and thus lowest toughness level in the game you can imagine that 3-5 autoattacks (thats about 2-3 seconds for most classes) can end me by just right clicking, and thats not accounting all the other skills and condis flying at me.
I think there is a sweet spot where fights dont last 3 minutes vs 3 seconds, I would prefer if fights were more along the lines of 25-50 seconds, so that you could go through 1-2 rotations of spells, and by the second rotation you should be at 10-20% hp, where the fight can be decided by clutch, smart and premeditated plays, rather than by who ran out of dodges/invulnerability first (hint, usually not the ele unless they are troll self-sustain weaver). Right now fights are; see enemy coming out of stealth, you are missing 60% of your hp, get CC'ed, stunbrea-get CC'ed lose 30% hp while getting blinded/slowed/interrupted heal, and hope you can dodge all of the second rotation that already started. It is probably fun for the holo/soulbeast/thief/mesmer but the receiving end is that of frustration.
HaHaa unblockable/unreflectable too btw HaHaa
Just dodge it's fine
Yes but but but but ,you need to setup with damage modifiers and whatnot ! And !!! You have low sustain ! So its all justified,right ? Nothing to see here.
Both damage and sustain are too high and both are caused by the constant increase in available boons and increased boon duration. It's boon application that needs to be toned down.
@dominik.9721 said:
Damage can't be too high if fb is still able to survive for ages while focused by 3 dmg classes.
Not to mention soul beasts running around with perma protection and facetanking full burst combos, losing only 5khp~
Defense is too high, yes. That doesn't mean that damage isn't also too high. They're both way too high.
The class with the most health in the game is also the squishiest class (necro). because health is meaningless compared to the enormous amount of damage and damage avoidance
I think the dangerous combination is too much mobility sustain combined with damage, something which people are now complaining about soulbeast.
I don't know if soul beast is that sustainable and high dmg, but having a very uneven terrain is bad for the game.Having for instance some classes with few to no available mobility and invulns like necro, where their survivability is in their shroud and hp cant keep up with invulns.
Some classes have more invulns and mobility than others, like the way mesmers used to.
Some classes also have far too much CC spam available, and this here is a problem. I don't think getting rid of cc or having too much stability is a good idea, as you need just the right amount of combination of cc to stability ratio, and lastly: Not every class needs the same tools, as I worry that would create watering down the game classes.
Necros for instance don't need to be super mobile like mesmers, and intead I would like them to keep their uniqueness without watering down too much, same goes for every class.
Here is my list of characters i got so far:
Elementalist 80 with tempest:Talman nul
Necromancer 80 with reaper:Zex vokar
Mesmer level 80 no chrono yet:Klanga voosh.
Level 80 Ranger with druid spec Jedkhan.
Preface: Diamond/Master rank Moba thinking here. I am very probably off base as this is an RPG and not a Moba.
I think Damage is too low. HOLD ON! Not like "man, my 4s cd ability that hits for 10k and pierces from 1200 range is not enough". I mean Damage is too low in that there are too many mitigators. Two evades and a block or invuln would be absolutely correct that damage is too high. But we have builds rolling around with enough ways to reduce power damage or eliminate it altogether (ignoring that condi builds just don't hit as hard, minus Mirage). Meta classes can go invulnerable to power damage without fighting back for up to 10 seconds by chaining cooldowns and stamina well. To this extent, power damage kind of HAS to hit as hard as it does because it has to find a hole in that window. Likewise, power damage builds usually need to be able to survive that window as well to immediately down the opponent before those cooldowns and stamina regenerate, again looking at upper escholon. Good power damage builds also know to go tankier and include crowd control to further reduce the ability of one hit builds and other "Brawler" (Bruiser in Moba) builds.
Basically, I think damage kind of has to be as high as it is because defensive capabilities are where they are at. I don't like getting deleted for being ill prepared just as much as the next person, but I know why it happens. To pull damage back would mean cutting defense where possible. There's a really good reason you can't get Soldier or Dire stats in spvp, and its not because Anet is lazy. I am however confused as to why condition builds are so weak. I get that they are meant to whittle and not burst (minus burn, torment, or confusion...which Mirage dishes out all 3), but I don't get why they are just straight up unusable when Weakness and Protection exist.
Tl;dr- Damage and Defense always rise in parallels. If defense goes up, damage goes up. If damage goes down, defense has to go down. Damage is straight forward: Damage per ability over cooldown of that ability. Defense is the same, but also needs to take in duration while applying for Invulnerability, Healing, Stuns, Evasions, and similar. Anything that stalls the time damage can be dealt to you.
I am ready to get shredded for thinking of this like a moba.
HaHaa unblockable/unreflectable too btw HaHaa
Just dodge it's fine
Yes but but but but ,you need to setup with damage modifiers and whatnot ! And !!! You have low sustain ! So its all justified,right ? Nothing to see here.
Or here.Yes i know wvw is no pvp.
That guy tried to one shot my friend and I when we were playing eles, we saw him stacking stealth and ran the other way so he couldn't surprise us, his unblockable ran out so a reflect and swirling winds ended the insane damage and he was forced to leave. We can never catch him but he ran into some allies who 3v1 ganked him. I dread to think the numbers he'd have got on marauder eles, probably close to 20k.
151 votes so far, I really would encourage people to put something in the comments regarding their choices, it would really help to any devs if they look at it.
As someone relatively new to PVP, damage appears... insane. As does CC.
There are classes that can burst for 20k-30k in about three seconds. That's the potential damage output of just one player. Now add an additional four enemies, and teamfights are just clown fiestas. I'm sure experienced players can make decent sense out of what's happening in teamfights, but as a new-ish player, when 2-3 people target you at the same time, you get deleted faster than you can cast your heal skill. I repeat: You go from 100% to 0% faster than you can activate your heal skill. And I usually play with somewhat tanky amulet stats. It seems the only way to mitigate this are the different forms of invulnerability, which many people in this thread have confirmed.
When damage gets so high that you need multiple insta-cast invulnerabilities to participate, something has gone very wrong. And this doesn't even touch on the flood of CC that comes pouring out of players, rendering my character into a digital ping-pong ball.
Comments
Depends who am I facing.
But mostly, yes.
The problem Apharma is there are many things related to this case.
1- Mobility
2- Aoe damage
3- Cc
4- Boons spam
5- boons removal/corrupting/stealing
I play Mesmer and I wvw I don't really spvp, and when I play with my holo friend, it goes like this. Our combination have the following things:
Mobility, massive aoe dmg, cc and well good of both boons removal and some boons + some good condis (vulnerability + cripple).
Now lets say a warrior come having boons etc on him and have their endure pain (protection and stability is what we care for in our case), once these things goes, the warrior is just a toy if you removed shield block ofc (in before someone say dodge, too many things that needs to be dodged), and if some people try to rez and we have some of our skills not on cd and they don't have immunities, they will join the downed warrior or whatever class is downed ( and we are just 2)
Apply the same for firebrands etc.
And don't get me wrong, there are many things that are literally silly in general, but some of them seems situational.
Mobility is something that whenever it exists in a game, you need it or you need something to cover up for it.
there are like 5 classes that have the mobility, and even between them there is difference (mobility wise).
Sorry for the long post, now to answer the question but in a fast and simple way.
Targets with boons = probably hard to kill
Targets without boons = probably easy to kill
there are many situations which sometimes you will find it hard to deal dmg and situations where the damage is super high, let alone the situations where you can't deal damage.
And I will go with the damage is too high in general for both condi and direct damage
So many things needs to be fixed in the game but all I see is just more and more mess created.
yes
everything is too high
damage, ability to avoid damage, healing, boons, disables, ability to ignore disables, etc...
I know it's a really simple question and far too simple to do the topic justice but I wanted to simplify it as a way of giving the devs realistic feedback on how people feel about the state of the game. I'm glad you're willing to add context to your answer and I hope others will likewise follow suit as they may feel that damage is too high but also X, Y and Z so would like to make the context of their decision known.
Edit: My personal opinion is that damage is too high but so is healing, damage mitigation and cool downs to low, basically everything is too high which is warping the game considerably and why some classes are seeing big swings in roles and viable builds.
Is damage too high?
To high in WvW and To high/Just right (depending on profession) in sPvP.
My biggest issue is that the only form of viable mitigation is mitigation. Blocks, evades and invuln. These skills are often packed into the same classes.
Can't lower the damage without lowering the sustain, and we all know that's not going to happen.
~ God Tier Guardian
The last balance patch seemed to be a step in the right direction, although there is still much work to do reducing the current power creep.
Yes! I think it's way too high, I remember a time when being able to land a 11k+ Backstab Crit on thief was huge burst.. and it was much more enjoyable than the burst creep rn where almost every class has a spec which can pump out 20k+ burst combos every 10seconds or so.. Hell you can even burst with conditions in like half a second. STILL!
On a side note: I think everything is too high since PoF. PvP fights always boil down to who runs out of invuls/blocks/evades first (and there's a lot of it..), then the next burst oneshots.
On the other hand as a result of the high dmg there are a lot of mechanics to mitigate dmg, which also enables extreme bunker builds, which is fine for WvW because you can support your team and you aren't a real threat yourself, but in sPvP it's just busted when a bunker camps a point and there's literally no way of decapping that point unless you zerg him down, which then allows the enemy team to control the rest of the map.
But I think every problem and every balance issue comes from the inability of the PvP balancing team to do anything if the PvE balancing team doesn't approve (unless it's tweaking the numbers, which helps a bit but doesn't solve the problem), which is kitten. So I actually don't see a way for GW2 PvP to ever be good (again) tbh and after realizing this, I am actually thinking about quitting GW2 forever.
Like the only thing where Guild Wars 2 has no real competitor in the current MMO market is an actual proper equalized and structured PvP mode and it is so badly balanced that it's just not really enjoyable :<
And no one cares, it's just frustrating.
I see what you mean but my vote of "Yes" was in reference to straight raw damage, without anything else into consideration. It was this morning when I was running unranked after this recent patch and I really began to notice just how HIGH random damage off single attacks have become. I actually like a high DPS meta, but high DPS should be achieved through the use of combos, not random single strike attacks that can 1 shot people.
Last season or two, I felt the DPS was just about right, and I wrote a thread about it actually. I was pointing out to Arenanet that the high DPS meta seems to be something that most people enjoy because fights are faster paced, but the power creep in the DPS department needed to stop. The problem we are gonna start seeing forward of this seasons is that: When DPS keeps going up, the less important attribute tied defenses become, and the more important raw dodges/evades/blocks/invulns/stealth/sheer mobility becomes. The problem here is that the classes that are designed for the most burst are also the classes designed for the most dodges/evades/blocks/invulns/stealths/sheer mobility. So naturally with the increase of DPS over time, heavy things begin to suck and light things become awesome. The only way they can counter-balance this is by providing more and more and more access on certain classes to protection/resistance/stability/multiple sources of small life regens that stack, ect.. ect.. and it is apparent that they have already taken that route, which just leads to messy boon spam 100% uptime on everything, every class spitting every boon possible, and it just feels lazy and unengaging.
This morning in unranked, I was running a Bunker Druid. It was what maybe 3 games in a row I kept getting this Herald either on my team or against me. This guy was launching 1 shots on players with that Herald AoE damage pit, w/e that skill is "Herald is the one class I don't know so well." But I mean this guy was killing people with that 1 skill. He wasn't launching combos, he wasn't doing anything skillful. The guy was just walking to a node and dropping an ultimate damage pit under players and well, gg to anyone was CC'd at the time. I had gotten hit by it a couple times myself. He never downed me with it and I was still able to 1v2 as a Druid with this guy present, just by staying out of that damage pit, but that doesn't change the fact that this one single skill could deal enough damage to down a Bunker Druid who was caught in it, without doing anything else to follow up. The messed up thing is that this is an AoE skill, it isn't even some single strike that is complex to land or anything lol. Anyone on anything that was relatively squishy, would die nearly instantly to this damage if any sort of CC happened that they could not immediately stunbreak and escape that AoE. I reference this 1 skill because I saw it happening earlier, but there are plenty of other attacks in the game right now "single skill use" that is capable of straight 20king someone to the floor. And this isn't to mention how many classes are walking around slapping around auto 1s for 5k 6k. It's getting to be too much.
Probably would be a good idea to step away from the DPS power creep for awhile.
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Damage is way too high, but also the defenses are considerably high... If you lower the damage only, we go back to toilet bowl meta where nothing took damage and fights would just be 2 super high sustain trying to bore each other to death.
Everything needs to be trimmed down.
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It's difficult as damage is only high depending on what build you're running. If we lower it any more we'll end up going back to bunker mode which would be the final nail in the coffin for PvP.
I'd prefer killed or be killed than bunker meta.
Guys, it goes like this,
damage is too high so we need high defenses.
there is too much access to stealth so we need more reveals
many boonspam, so we need more boons removal
too much condi spam, so we need more condi clears etc....
there are too many cc, so we need more stun break/stability
and it goes on ... same can be said when things are the opposite.
Don't take anything I just mentioned very serious or offensive, but this is one of the main issues as I see it. You can't just fix one thing and then wait 3-4months to try and make another change. I understand that some changes requires some observations, time and testing, but I do know that not all the changes are correct/good and not all of them people can say okay I will just play the class I like regardless of the changes.
Please do understand this and don't just agree or be happy/sad with any changes coz you don't like or like a class. I don't play revenant and when I do, I just play revenant for fun, but when Bruce Lee kick (phase something) was changed and considered as bugged (the out of range thing) I wasn't happy about it and glad it was reversed fast enough for the revenants.
Damage can't be too high if fb is still able to survive for ages while focused by 3 dmg classes.
Not to mention soul beasts running around with perma protection and facetanking full burst combos, losing only 5khp~
That is exactly the reason why everyone runs burst builds because oneshotting people is the only way to get any kills through all this faceroll sustain.
Otherwise we would have fb+scourge fighting each other mid and mirages and soulbeast 1v1ing on sides. Skillfull and fun gameplay.
This is the right answer. PvP is maybe a little high.. but probably not. If we had some of the tankier stat combos back, it'd be perfect IMO.
WvW is a different animal though. You regularly get autoattacked for half your health from 2000 range. Even when I'm running tanky stats (PVT, CVT etc.), I still eat 7.5k Long Range Shots or die to 3 hits of a quickness-unblockable-rapid-fire+air-proc+one-wolf-pack that has hit me before I can physically react even if I had perfect reflexes.
You regularly see Meteors 1-2 shotting squishies (although, I think this is fine. Meteor is a pretty balanced skill .. the damage is just really high)
You regularly see instant teleport combos packing a huge punch, like core guard or, rev oh sword. You also have classes running around without many of the pvp skill splits.
Just in general, PvP feels like "eh, yeah.. it's pretty bursty right now - maybe we could fix that". WvW feels like "I just got hit by a 15k what?".
Defense is too high, yes. That doesn't mean that damage isn't also too high. They're both way too high.
The class with the most health in the game is also the squishiest class (necro). because health is meaningless compared to the enormous amount of damage and damage avoidance
Especially after the last last balance patch there are already quite many matchups amongst sidenoders which can stall for ages without a +1. Reducing damage further would just result in another bunker meta, which probably was the most frustrating thing ever in 6 years of GW2 PvP history.
Damage is to high. Healing' & sustain is too high. Both got to be balance at same time.
72 votes, that's a lot. Thanks for the replies and clarifying why you voted for what you chose.
Is damage too high?
Damage is a bit too high, maybe 10-20%. But overall it's closer to where I want it than it had been in the past. I really don't want a return of Chronobunker or Hambow where combat is just boring, takes forever, nothing ever feels impact and fights just drag out for on and on and on.
I think what most people perceive as damage power creep is still the loss of tanky amulets like Soldier's and Sentinels.
When you look at fight duration it's pretty consistent with stuff like League of Legends.
Best Dressed Memser NA.
Been saying it is too high and that combat needs to slow way down, for quite a while now.
People are too simple minded to realice that lower damage does not need to equate to 2 hours fights, but right know range, condi and mobility is king has been for a long while.
This damage swing came about after "pros" whined that 2 bunker builds could not kill each other. Of course none of them play the game any longer and we got to deal with this mess.
Conditions need to be normalized:
1- SINGLE PLAYER conditions stack on DURATION.
2- MULTIPLE PLAYERS conditions stack on INTENSITY.
3- REBALANCE condition duration, damage and application.
especially reapers who are able to really put on the pressure if they get you in melee range amiright? they hit real hard.
I personally voted its fine. Im concerned about classes with too much sustain and cc combined with burst. The reason Its so bad is because some classes have so much cc and burst combined.
Take our friend "The Warrior" tons of sustain combined with cc and dmg.Remember full counter? how insane is that? I found out that it had daze absorb dmg boon strip and condi copy towards enemies along with other stuff and its aoe and unblockable. That is just plain crazy how much stuff it had combined with dmg. If it was single target it definitely wouldn't be so nuts.
Here is my list of characters i got so far:
Elementalist 80 with tempest:Talman nul
Necromancer 80 with reaper:Zex vokar
Mesmer level 80 no chrono yet:Klanga voosh.
Level 80 Ranger with druid spec Jedkhan.
it's too high. I shouldnt be doing or taking 7k dmg autoattacks every three miliseconds no matter what kind of stupid glass build i have or see.
If you people actually learned to stow weapons and not make it proc ,how insane would that have been ? .Theres much worse damage around where the same doesnt apply.
Atleast youre free to mindlessly spamm around again.
But you can still use it as a defense tool right? I mean if you are low hp you can run away hit full counter, and anyone dumb enough to attack you, you can daze them then punish them for following you no?
I heard it was supposed to be used as defense.Wether or not I do not know.
Here is my list of characters i got so far:
Elementalist 80 with tempest:Talman nul
Necromancer 80 with reaper:Zex vokar
Mesmer level 80 no chrono yet:Klanga voosh.
Level 80 Ranger with druid spec Jedkhan.
but what if we could do more damage?
Found the Anet dev
Generally speaking, I'm against situations in which a person can die in under 2 seconds. This is currently quite possible with individual builds, let alone coordinated spikes.
The great god Lagki demands sacrifice!
Damage is not only too high, but it's also too fast and affords too little risk to users. I absolutely can accept high damage, but only if it has tells or general risk of use. Things like Dark Souls ultra greatswords are a pretty decent example of what could be considered a relatively "balanced" source of high damage: they can't be parried, hyper-armor through a lot of weapons, and will absolutely flatten people in two sets of successful hits, but their attacks are highly telegraphed, and there are often ways to bait or punish them with your own techniques and weapons. GW2 PvP damage is so often just a reactionary, button-press, cooldown-trade with very little finesse or thinking. If there were far more prediction and timing involved in GW2 combat, then I could probably justify damage being so high. Although, on top of damage just being too high, there are other fundamental issues with how a low skill ceiling and unfairness govern GW2 combat:
tl;dr: Damage is only too high because damage in GW2 far out-paces player movement and therefore puts all survival emphasis on the exact sort of mechanics which make playing PvP so un-fun: protracted invuln/block/evasion periods which often allow players to move and still take offensive actions. It takes player skill and execution out of the PvP equation and replaces it with PvE-tier rotation muscle memory along with looking at a minimap.
Condi is king? Aside from Mirage and Scourge nothing are rocking condition damage. And Reaper is at the very least just as popular of a build for ranked as Scourge if not moderately more popular than Scourge. The reality is condition cleanses and conversion into boons are both extremely over tuned at this point. Most classes can quickly throw off 3-7+ conditions repeatedly over the course of a single fight, or have strong resistance uptime. Scourge and Mirage are the only condition classes capable of keeping up not because their condition damage is high (It's not. Scourge and Mirage are actually some of the lowest condition damage available) but because they have a wide range of conditions (Or in Scourge's case a wide range of conditions and boon corruption) that gives their conditions a chance to dodge condition cleanses entirely.
Condition damage has completely fallen behind Power Damage in the scheme of things. To put this into perspective; Condition Berserker, Condition Firebrand, Condition Weaver, and Condition Holosmith have the higher condition pressure. Far, far beyond what Condition Mirage and Scourge are capable of. But even putting aside other weaknesses in those builds, the single biggest weakness that prevents them from ever becoming meta is the fact that when every class can effortlessly throw off 5+ conditions multiple times a fight, the bulk of their damage being tied down into one or two conditions means their effective damage output is zero.
Arenanet really needs to look at both normalizing the spread of conditions, balancing all classes around 2-3 damaging conditions with more serious ramping power. And also heavily pulling back condition cleanses to compensate for it. Cleanses are the condition damage equivalent to protection. It's supposed to help you negate damage, but at this point unless you're a build that can shotgun 6 conditions at once your effective damage output as condi is 0.
Anet should nerf condition cleanses by 50%+ across the board then trim Mirage's condition spread and condense it into fewer conditions. Right now power damage is absolutely over tuned compared to condition damage 7/9 classes are exclusively running power on a meta level. Mirage is mostly exclusively condi and Necro run a 50/50 split of condi and power.
Your signature suggestions are terrible.
Best Dressed Memser NA.
116 votes, thank you all for your voting and especially to those who posted their opinions in the comments section. Hopefully @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 can get some meaningful feedback from this thread.
I do encourage everyone who voted to make their positions clear as it would really help make sure GW2 goes in a direction you want.
Is damage too high?
In another post I mentioned the fact that condition clears was far too prevalent somewhere and it chokeholds condition builds, but the biggest issue, is that in order for conditions to succeed, it needs to burst people down instantly.
The classes that spread conditions need loads of sustain to keep themselves alive, because if condis don't burst and slowly trickle, then you need enough sustain to watch people die, and you cannot have as many condi cleanses, because you wont be able to kill anyone.Maybe condi cleanses should be limited based on the class such as necros eles and revs being anti condi classes.
In wow, lets take for instance shadow priests:Shadow priests which are big on dots, and do mass spreadable dot that goes from person to person, has relatively decent damage.It doesn't instantly burst people down, but they used to have ways to escape. They also are insta cast. I almost feel like some of the condis need to be either insta cast to be effective, or you need a whole lot of mobility combined to keep you alive, or a truckload of sustain and invulns to keep you alive a really long time.
I also don't think every class should have tons of mobility either. Someone said that every class has so much evades mobility, and there certainly right to a certain extent. Not just thieves are ultra mobile, but mesmers, holosmiths as well are ultra mobile. Maybe something needs to be created that counters mobile, or have a anti mobility spec that's really super strong versus mobile specs to counter all these super mobile specs.
Here is my list of characters i got so far:
Elementalist 80 with tempest:Talman nul
Necromancer 80 with reaper:Zex vokar
Mesmer level 80 no chrono yet:Klanga voosh.
Level 80 Ranger with druid spec Jedkhan.
As a player with thousand of hours on ele, I say the damage is fine as it is, there are ofc some extreme cases where the dmg should be reduced but other than that damage is fine....I don't want go back to "team with more healbots win" era and I am sure the devs thinks the same, therefore in case damage get reduced...it's safe to assume that sustain would follow the same route and get nerfed too so......from a 10 - 8 dmg to sustain ratio we go down to 8 - 6 ratio...what would be the point?
-A wise man once said- "Fight cheese with cheese or be cheesed in return, mind not those who will accuse you of being a cheese as they like cheese themselves"
Vitality and toughness used to be a mitigating factors as well, but with damage this high it's largely irrelevant. Run out of blocks/evades/invuln, and you die.
This is a bit tricky for me to conclude but from my pov, I don't have a problem with the current damage itself but the builds that grant the capability to have about the same damage of a glass cannon damage while having far greater sustain and survival than a true glass cannon build.
All good points. I really want to see all the condition cleanses and conversions straight up reduced by 50%-75%. I genuinely think that's needed. Mesmers should have their cover conditions trimmed and their damaging conditions condensed into fewer conditions, mostly torment and confusion for thematic reasons with maybe a bit of burning with the torch skills. I think the reason you've seen tons of power creep when it comes to conditions cleanses is because Anet is a bit too focused on the only two meta builds keeping up and is power creeping cleanses in an arm race.
But like let's say a Burn Firebrand vs. a Core Guardian. The Firebrand has a lot of self sustain just like the core guardian, it has easy application of it's condition skills. But that burn Firebrand will never be able to hurt the Core Guardian. How could it? The Firebrand has almost entirely burning and a little bit of bleed. And that's somehow supposed to punch through this:
2x Condition Cleanse on Heal with Lesser Smite Condition
2x Condition Cleanse on Virtue of Resolve
2x Condition Cleanse on Smite Condition.
12x Condition Conversion on Contemplation of Purity
Condition Immunity during Renewed Focus
2x condition Cleanse on Virtue of Resolve
Now I'm not saying that Core Guardian is OP. It's not and it fits into the meta moderately well, but it's condition cleanses are so over the top for anything not a Scourge or a Mirage and against Mirage at least it can survive for a while.
Or warriors who have:
Healing Signet 6 seconds resistance
12x Condition Cleanse with Signet of Stamina
6x Condition Cleanse x 2 with Shake it Off
Maybe running Berserker Stance still 4 seconds resistance
Unless you're a Mirage or Scourge you aren't going to be able to punch through that with condition damage. Period.
Best Dressed Memser NA.
The problem isn't that burst damage output is too high, it's that ALL damage output is too high. People can auto-attack you for almost as much as their burst so you need to avoid EVERYTHING.
For some classes damage is to high for others its not enough. Gaurds, Warrios, Necros, Mesmers, Holos, are all putting out enormous damage right now. so much so that any light class just gets eaten in seconds.
I main fa ele, and any holosmith, warrior, mesmer, gaurd, just insta kills me if i do not have defense abilities available like twist of fate, or obsidian flesh at the ready. Ele cant even take auto attacks without them hitting it for over 3k and im not jokeing.
What needs to happen is Normalizing everyone toughness so that were all at the same lvl so that this game can become 1 step closer to a balanced fight. The only way to get more toughness should be threw an amulet or build, not because of lore or original class design. Guild wars has moved beyond that and has become something more. Having unequal stat balance between professions in a fighting game is broken from the start. id really love to see HP and Toughness normalized but id take Toughness if i had to pick one.
Playing ele without toughness or healing stats, and water/arcane or sometimes earth is just simply suicide. I'm literally getting hit by autoattacks for 2-4k depending on the class, with a base health of 11k hp, (~16.8k hp with amulets with vit) light armor and thus lowest toughness level in the game you can imagine that 3-5 autoattacks (thats about 2-3 seconds for most classes) can end me by just right clicking, and thats not accounting all the other skills and condis flying at me.
I think there is a sweet spot where fights dont last 3 minutes vs 3 seconds, I would prefer if fights were more along the lines of 25-50 seconds, so that you could go through 1-2 rotations of spells, and by the second rotation you should be at 10-20% hp, where the fight can be decided by clutch, smart and premeditated plays, rather than by who ran out of dodges/invulnerability first (hint, usually not the ele unless they are troll self-sustain weaver). Right now fights are; see enemy coming out of stealth, you are missing 60% of your hp, get CC'ed, stunbrea-get CC'ed lose 30% hp while getting blinded/slowed/interrupted heal, and hope you can dodge all of the second rotation that already started. It is probably fun for the holo/soulbeast/thief/mesmer but the receiving end is that of frustration.
Damage is too low. Ur all nuts
EDIT: I WANT TO SEE BODIES ON THE FLOOR CRYING FOR HELP. RIGHT NOW I FEEL LIKE ITS A SAUSAGE PARTY AND WE'RE ALL PLAYING TICKLE MY NUTSAC
Dmg is currently to high if you don't use defensive cooldowns properly.
Dmg is to low if you are obvious and don't set up properly.
Honestly I'd much prefer damage being to high than anything else. I'd rather a game where people make plays and die, instead of endless sumo on point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/a6j1wd/when_your_favourite_gamemode_does_not_get_updated/
HaHaa unblockable/unreflectable too btw HaHaa
Just dodge it's fine
Yes but but but but ,you need to setup with damage modifiers and whatnot ! And !!! You have low sustain ! So its all justified,right ? Nothing to see here.
Or here.Yes i know wvw is no pvp.
Both damage and sustain are too high and both are caused by the constant increase in available boons and increased boon duration. It's boon application that needs to be toned down.
I think the dangerous combination is too much mobility sustain combined with damage, something which people are now complaining about soulbeast.
I don't know if soul beast is that sustainable and high dmg, but having a very uneven terrain is bad for the game.Having for instance some classes with few to no available mobility and invulns like necro, where their survivability is in their shroud and hp cant keep up with invulns.
Some classes have more invulns and mobility than others, like the way mesmers used to.
Some classes also have far too much CC spam available, and this here is a problem. I don't think getting rid of cc or having too much stability is a good idea, as you need just the right amount of combination of cc to stability ratio, and lastly: Not every class needs the same tools, as I worry that would create watering down the game classes.
Necros for instance don't need to be super mobile like mesmers, and intead I would like them to keep their uniqueness without watering down too much, same goes for every class.
Here is my list of characters i got so far:
Elementalist 80 with tempest:Talman nul
Necromancer 80 with reaper:Zex vokar
Mesmer level 80 no chrono yet:Klanga voosh.
Level 80 Ranger with druid spec Jedkhan.
Preface: Diamond/Master rank Moba thinking here. I am very probably off base as this is an RPG and not a Moba.
I think Damage is too low. HOLD ON! Not like "man, my 4s cd ability that hits for 10k and pierces from 1200 range is not enough". I mean Damage is too low in that there are too many mitigators. Two evades and a block or invuln would be absolutely correct that damage is too high. But we have builds rolling around with enough ways to reduce power damage or eliminate it altogether (ignoring that condi builds just don't hit as hard, minus Mirage). Meta classes can go invulnerable to power damage without fighting back for up to 10 seconds by chaining cooldowns and stamina well. To this extent, power damage kind of HAS to hit as hard as it does because it has to find a hole in that window. Likewise, power damage builds usually need to be able to survive that window as well to immediately down the opponent before those cooldowns and stamina regenerate, again looking at upper escholon. Good power damage builds also know to go tankier and include crowd control to further reduce the ability of one hit builds and other "Brawler" (Bruiser in Moba) builds.
Basically, I think damage kind of has to be as high as it is because defensive capabilities are where they are at. I don't like getting deleted for being ill prepared just as much as the next person, but I know why it happens. To pull damage back would mean cutting defense where possible. There's a really good reason you can't get Soldier or Dire stats in spvp, and its not because Anet is lazy. I am however confused as to why condition builds are so weak. I get that they are meant to whittle and not burst (minus burn, torment, or confusion...which Mirage dishes out all 3), but I don't get why they are just straight up unusable when Weakness and Protection exist.
Tl;dr- Damage and Defense always rise in parallels. If defense goes up, damage goes up. If damage goes down, defense has to go down. Damage is straight forward: Damage per ability over cooldown of that ability. Defense is the same, but also needs to take in duration while applying for Invulnerability, Healing, Stuns, Evasions, and similar. Anything that stalls the time damage can be dealt to you.
I am ready to get shredded for thinking of this like a moba.
That guy tried to one shot my friend and I when we were playing eles, we saw him stacking stealth and ran the other way so he couldn't surprise us, his unblockable ran out so a reflect and swirling winds ended the insane damage and he was forced to leave. We can never catch him but he ran into some allies who 3v1 ganked him. I dread to think the numbers he'd have got on marauder eles, probably close to 20k.
Is damage too high?
151 votes so far, I really would encourage people to put something in the comments regarding their choices, it would really help to any devs if they look at it.
Is damage too high?
Maybe the devs are too high when balancing damage.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xzpndHtdl9A
I saw what bunker meta can do to pvp. I will NEVER advocate any leaning toward that again.
I'd rather my hp pool get erased in a second if someone set up an amazing burst on me than play a chess match on side nodes.
The "Balance" is a fantasy -- another mortal superstition.
As someone relatively new to PVP, damage appears... insane. As does CC.
There are classes that can burst for 20k-30k in about three seconds. That's the potential damage output of just one player. Now add an additional four enemies, and teamfights are just clown fiestas. I'm sure experienced players can make decent sense out of what's happening in teamfights, but as a new-ish player, when 2-3 people target you at the same time, you get deleted faster than you can cast your heal skill. I repeat: You go from 100% to 0% faster than you can activate your heal skill. And I usually play with somewhat tanky amulet stats. It seems the only way to mitigate this are the different forms of invulnerability, which many people in this thread have confirmed.
When damage gets so high that you need multiple insta-cast invulnerabilities to participate, something has gone very wrong. And this doesn't even touch on the flood of CC that comes pouring out of players, rendering my character into a digital ping-pong ball.