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Won't power reaper be efficient in organized groups


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@Lahmia.2193 said:

@"Nimon.7840" said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

I can understand their desire to keep Necromancer low because of this. However, all of this is speculation, since Anet won't say a word on their PVE balance philosophy. To be frank, I suspect they don't actually have one, given what recently happened with the engineer. So, it is easier to give each profession
enough
DPS, and let the players sort out their interpersonal problems personally.

I think this post is key to understand why some classes are balanced this way in PvE.

There HAS to be a lowest and highest damage class. However class balance is not pure damage, this poster breaks it down a bit but I generally just categorize them into defense and utility. Power reaper for example has one of the best passive defense in PvE. It has strong utility with very good CC, remember utility is not just boons. CC is an incredibly important aspect of raiding since many different fights has it in spades. Hell when my group did Qadim 2.0 CM, I was the solo breaker for the spawning adds.

So with the two categories being high, the damage has to be lower. The closest comparison to power reaper at this moment is power holo, they have decent defense and very strong CC. So their damage is on the lower range but still higher than reaper because their defense is weaker.

The real discussion is not that "omg anet hates necros I'm gonna kms". The real discussion is how big the damage gap should be and how important the other factors such as defense, utility and difficulty to play should be. For example right now Power reaper benches around 31.5k. The highest is around 39k as condi weaver. The current gap is a bit too big although that's more condi weaver benching too high. So ideally where do you want it to be? If is up me, probably around 32k-35kish. Where the lowest should be necros and highest for eles and thieves. The difference between the lowest and highest dps by about 10%. Of course burst damage starts to muddle things a bit as well due to phasing and mechanic skipping but that's another can of worms.

I'd happily allow every class to be 16k health baseline if the damage of each profession was closer together (difficulty and how much support it gives taken into account). On that note I just looked at condi weaver rotation and I'm not surprised it can do so much. It's condi engi levels of rotation there.

Is not just HP but rather core mechanics as well. For example DH is naturally "tanky" die to F3 and heal skill allowing massive healing. You do not want homogenized classes especially because there are other aspects of balance than just give more damage. Utility such as CC for example is incredibly important and is completely ok if a class has lower damage but strong utility via things such as CC. Not to mention this sort of massive game change is incredibly late to do at this point. It is better to design raid encounters that allow the individual classes to work than to give everybody the same defense.

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@Nimon.7840 said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

Well. Faster kill= less mechanics to do = less likelier to fail the encounter

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

Which would mean, that that doesn't count for warrior?Has high health as wellDoes slightly more dps with two support skills equipped while boosting everyone's dmg with them?Or does a lot more dps on a DPS role?

Don't bother arguing Nimon, this person is in a complete different world than the rest of us are: he lives in his own truth bubble and won't get out of that. I mean, if he comes up with the Warrior's weak ranged game: while its strongest DPS build (the condi berserker currently benching 36k) has a big 1200 range longbow rotation part ....

Wait. Where did I say, that warrior has weak ranged game or that warrior is weak? I was saying the opposite. Lul

Ah, interpunction ... :) I meant:Don't bother arguing, Nimon. This person (Blood Red Arachnid) is in a complete different world ... cause he/she is the one coming with arguments like that (not you).I think he/she is playing a different game or something.

I didnt want to put even more energy in this, but another example: it's almost laughable how this person thinks almost all mechanics being health interval based ... I mean, I literally don't know ANY endgame encounter where there aren't timed interval mechanics: from green circles up to telegraphed boss attacks .... pfffff

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@Agrippa Oculus.3726 said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

Well. Faster kill= less mechanics to do = less likelier to fail the encounter

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

Which would mean, that that doesn't count for warrior?Has high health as wellDoes slightly more dps with two support skills equipped while boosting everyone's dmg with them?Or does a lot more dps on a DPS role?

Don't bother arguing Nimon, this person is in a complete different world than the rest of us are: he lives in his own truth bubble and won't get out of that. I mean, if he comes up with the Warrior's weak ranged game: while its strongest DPS build (the condi berserker currently benching 36k) has a big 1200 range longbow rotation part ....

Wait. Where did I say, that warrior has weak ranged game or that warrior is weak? I was saying the opposite. Lul

Ah, interpunction ... :) I meant:Don't bother arguing, Nimon. This person (Blood Red Arachnid) is in a complete different world ... cause he/she is the one coming with arguments like that (not you).I think he/she is playing a different game or something.

I didnt want to put even more energy in this, but another example: it's almost laughable how this person thinks almost all mechanics being health interval based ... I mean, I literally don't know ANY endgame encounter where there aren't timed interval mechanics: from green circles up to telegraphed boss attacks .... pfffff

Yep. I mean: imagine cm earth boss with very bad DPS. That would make you loos the whole platform xDOr having to deal with a lot of shackles on dhuum...

It's all about skipping those mechanics as good as you can, cause they potentially wipe the group, or parts of the group

And there's also max-health-% dmg attacks. Where more health gives you exactly nothing and makes it just harder for the healer to heal it back up.

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@Lahmia.2193 said:

@"Nimon.7840" said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

I can understand their desire to keep Necromancer low because of this. However, all of this is speculation, since Anet won't say a word on their PVE balance philosophy. To be frank, I suspect they don't actually have one, given what recently happened with the engineer. So, it is easier to give each profession
enough
DPS, and let the players sort out their interpersonal problems personally.

I think this post is key to understand why some classes are balanced this way in PvE.

There HAS to be a lowest and highest damage class. However class balance is not pure damage, this poster breaks it down a bit but I generally just categorize them into defense and utility. Power reaper for example has one of the best passive defense in PvE. It has strong utility with very good CC, remember utility is not just boons. CC is an incredibly important aspect of raiding since many different fights has it in spades. Hell when my group did Qadim 2.0 CM, I was the solo breaker for the spawning adds.

So with the two categories being high, the damage has to be lower. The closest comparison to power reaper at this moment is power holo, they have decent defense and very strong CC. So their damage is on the lower range but still higher than reaper because their defense is weaker.

The real discussion is not that "omg anet hates necros I'm gonna kms". The real discussion is how big the damage gap should be and how important the other factors such as defense, utility and difficulty to play should be. For example right now Power reaper benches around 31.5k. The highest is around 39k as condi weaver. The current gap is a bit too big although that's more condi weaver benching too high. So ideally where do you want it to be? If is up me, probably around 32k-35kish. Where the lowest should be necros and highest for eles and thieves. The difference between the lowest and highest dps by about 10%. Of course burst damage starts to muddle things a bit as well due to phasing and mechanic skipping but that's another can of worms.

I'd happily allow every class to be 16k health baseline if the damage of each profession was closer together (difficulty and how much support it gives taken into account). On that note I just looked at condi weaver rotation and I'm not surprised it can do so much. It's condi engi levels of rotation there.

This is the price we pay to have variation in theme. There ARE games out there where the differences are in name only ... and you know, they are boring as hell. Sure, everyone is balanced because the difference in name doesn't affect function. It's a real trade off and at this point, I don't see how Anet could fix that if their path it to continually offer more and more variation.

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@Nimon.7840 said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

Well. Faster kill= less mechanics to do = less likelier to fail the encounter

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

Which would mean, that that doesn't count for warrior?Has high health as wellDoes slightly more dps with two support skills equipped while boosting everyone's dmg with them?Or does a lot more dps on a DPS role?

Don't bother arguing Nimon, this person is in a complete different world than the rest of us are: he lives in his own truth bubble and won't get out of that. I mean, if he comes up with the Warrior's weak ranged game: while its strongest DPS build (the condi berserker currently benching 36k) has a big 1200 range longbow rotation part ....

Wait. Where did I say, that warrior has weak ranged game or that warrior is weak? I was saying the opposite. Lul

Ah, interpunction ... :) I meant:Don't bother arguing, Nimon. This person (Blood Red Arachnid) is in a complete different world ... cause he/she is the one coming with arguments like that (not you).I think he/she is playing a different game or something.

I didnt want to put even more energy in this, but another example: it's almost laughable how this person thinks almost all mechanics being health interval based ... I mean, I literally don't know ANY endgame encounter where there aren't timed interval mechanics: from green circles up to telegraphed boss attacks .... pfffff

Yep. I mean: imagine cm earth boss with very bad DPS. That would make you loos the whole platform xDOr having to deal with a lot of shackles on dhuum...

It's all about skipping those mechanics as good as you can, cause they potentially wipe the group, or parts of the group

And there's also max-health-% dmg attacks. Where more health gives you exactly nothing and makes it just harder for the healer to heal it back up.

If you want to take the really extreme case, yeah that is the case. But, I'm assuming that all parties are competent in this scenario. We're talking about 10%-30% differences between professions for sustained DPS on fights that take a handful of minutes to complete. If it takes you 30 seconds to move between phases, converting every single DPS build into a reaper would only change that from 33-39 seconds. That's not a lot, certainly enough to hit enrage timers nor bury you in unfinished mechanics.

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@Obtena.7952 said:

@"Nimon.7840" said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

I can understand their desire to keep Necromancer low because of this. However, all of this is speculation, since Anet won't say a word on their PVE balance philosophy. To be frank, I suspect they don't actually have one, given what recently happened with the engineer. So, it is easier to give each profession
enough
DPS, and let the players sort out their interpersonal problems personally.

I think this post is key to understand why some classes are balanced this way in PvE.

There HAS to be a lowest and highest damage class. However class balance is not pure damage, this poster breaks it down a bit but I generally just categorize them into defense and utility. Power reaper for example has one of the best passive defense in PvE. It has strong utility with very good CC, remember utility is not just boons. CC is an incredibly important aspect of raiding since many different fights has it in spades. Hell when my group did Qadim 2.0 CM, I was the solo breaker for the spawning adds.

So with the two categories being high, the damage has to be lower. The closest comparison to power reaper at this moment is power holo, they have decent defense and very strong CC. So their damage is on the lower range but still higher than reaper because their defense is weaker.

The real discussion is not that "omg anet hates necros I'm gonna kms". The real discussion is how big the damage gap should be and how important the other factors such as defense, utility and difficulty to play should be. For example right now Power reaper benches around 31.5k. The highest is around 39k as condi weaver. The current gap is a bit too big although that's more condi weaver benching too high. So ideally where do you want it to be? If is up me, probably around 32k-35kish. Where the lowest should be necros and highest for eles and thieves. The difference between the lowest and highest dps by about 10%. Of course burst damage starts to muddle things a bit as well due to phasing and mechanic skipping but that's another can of worms.

I'd happily allow every class to be 16k health baseline if the damage of each profession was closer together (difficulty and how much support it gives taken into account). On that note I just looked at condi weaver rotation and I'm not surprised it can do so much. It's condi engi levels of rotation there.

This is the price we pay to have variation in theme. There ARE games out there where the differences are in name only ... and you know, they are boring as hell. Sure, everyone is balanced because the difference in name doesn't affect function. It's a real trade off and at this point, I don't see how Anet could fix that if their path it to continually offer more and more variation.

In my young and naive days I toyed with a couple of ideas for different kinds of MMOs. From a turn-based MMO with a complicated environmental effects + combination system, to a squad based RTS style game with six-way PVP combat. In each of those, I made the conscious decision not to paint myself into the corner that Anet has with GW2. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer GW2's system to any trinity game, but GW2's system still bears all of the hallmarks of a role based game.

The reason why I hate the trinity system is because it isn't a series of strengths. It is a series of weaknesses. All players are inept by default. Which, for one, doesn't make sense from a roleplaying perspective, and two, is frustrating to play for everyone who isn't a DPS role. If damage is how anything gets done in the game, then it is a pretty bad idea to make it so 2/3rds of the group dynamic is restrained by being incapable of doing damage. While it isn't fun to play, for a trinity game it "works" because the DPS players have a series of holes in their toons that need to be filled by support roles. But in an action game a la Phantasy Star or Guild Wars 2 where everybody is capable of being self-sufficient, giving one class less damage in exchange for un-needed excess in other areas seems like a bad design. If an elementalist with 11k HP is capable of thriving on their own, then what is the point of the necromancer with its 19k HP?

Building a game to not have this problem is fairly simple. You start by normalizing damage, and then giving each class its gimmick. You have the DPS + Tank, the DPS + Healer, the DPS + Buffer, the DPS + Debuffer, the DPS + Manipulator, DPS + mana bar, and then you can divide that up into more groups with a special/physical damage split, an elemental system, varying attack ranges, etc. Then, you have a series of classes where everyone is effective, but there is still group dynamics and structured compositions for dealing with different encounters.

Fixing a game, however, is not simple. GW2 sort-of did the above with their design, but they balanced DPS around defenses. This is because GW2 was built PVP upward, where trading off offense for defense makes sense. The PVE impact of their design is largely happenstance. As much as I would like to see offense normalized in PVE, to do this while maintaining a sense of parity between the professions would require rebuilding each profession from the ground up. It would be very time consuming for very little payoff, since most players here are fine with the legacy system anyway. So, Anet makes PVE content easy enough to be beaten by anyone of moderate competency, and lets us solve the interpersonal hurdles personally.

Now, if only they could make it so the DPS rotations didn't hurt so much to do.

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@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@"Nimon.7840" said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

I can understand their desire to keep Necromancer low because of this. However, all of this is speculation, since Anet won't say a word on their PVE balance philosophy. To be frank, I suspect they don't actually have one, given what recently happened with the engineer. So, it is easier to give each profession
enough
DPS, and let the players sort out their interpersonal problems personally.

I think this post is key to understand why some classes are balanced this way in PvE.

There HAS to be a lowest and highest damage class. However class balance is not pure damage, this poster breaks it down a bit but I generally just categorize them into defense and utility. Power reaper for example has one of the best passive defense in PvE. It has strong utility with very good CC, remember utility is not just boons. CC is an incredibly important aspect of raiding since many different fights has it in spades. Hell when my group did Qadim 2.0 CM, I was the solo breaker for the spawning adds.

So with the two categories being high, the damage has to be lower. The closest comparison to power reaper at this moment is power holo, they have decent defense and very strong CC. So their damage is on the lower range but still higher than reaper because their defense is weaker.

The real discussion is not that "omg anet hates necros I'm gonna kms". The real discussion is how big the damage gap should be and how important the other factors such as defense, utility and difficulty to play should be. For example right now Power reaper benches around 31.5k. The highest is around 39k as condi weaver. The current gap is a bit too big although that's more condi weaver benching too high. So ideally where do you want it to be? If is up me, probably around 32k-35kish. Where the lowest should be necros and highest for eles and thieves. The difference between the lowest and highest dps by about 10%. Of course burst damage starts to muddle things a bit as well due to phasing and mechanic skipping but that's another can of worms.

I'd happily allow every class to be 16k health baseline if the damage of each profession was closer together (difficulty and how much support it gives taken into account). On that note I just looked at condi weaver rotation and I'm not surprised it can do so much. It's condi engi levels of rotation there.

This is the price we pay to have variation in theme. There ARE games out there where the differences are in name only ... and you know, they are boring as hell. Sure, everyone is balanced because the difference in name doesn't affect function. It's a real trade off and at this point, I don't see how Anet could fix that if their path it to continually offer more and more variation.

In my young and naive days I toyed with a couple of ideas for different kinds of MMOs. From a turn-based MMO with a complicated environmental effects + combination system, to a squad based RTS style game with six-way PVP combat. In each of those, I made the conscious decision not to paint myself into the corner that Anet has with GW2. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer GW2's system to any trinity game, but GW2's system still bears all of the hallmarks of a role based game.

The reason why I hate the trinity system is because it isn't a series of strengths. It is a series of weaknesses. All players are inept by default. Which, for one, doesn't make sense from a roleplaying perspective, and two, is frustrating to play for everyone who isn't a DPS role. If damage is how anything gets done in the game, then it is a pretty bad idea to make it so 2/3rds of the group dynamic is restrained by being incapable of doing damage. While it isn't fun to play, for a trinity game it "works" because the DPS players have a series of holes in their toons that need to be filled by support roles. But in an action game a la Phantasy Star or Guild Wars 2 where everybody is capable of being self-sufficient, giving one class less damage in exchange for un-needed excess in other areas seems like a bad design. If an elementalist with 11k HP is capable of thriving on their own, then what is the point of the necromancer with its 19k HP?

Building a game to not have this problem is fairly simple. You start by normalizing damage, and then giving each class its gimmick. You have the DPS + Tank, the DPS + Healer, the DPS + Buffer, the DPS + Debuffer, the DPS + Manipulator, DPS + mana bar, and then you can divide that up into more groups with a special/physical damage split, an elemental system, varying attack ranges, etc. Then, you have a series of classes where everyone is effective, but there is still group dynamics and structured compositions for dealing with different encounters.

Fixing a game, however, is not simple. GW2 sort-of did the above with their design, but they balanced DPS around defenses. This is because GW2 was built PVP upward, where trading off offense for defense makes sense. The PVE impact of their design is largely happenstance. As much as I would like to see offense normalized in PVE, to do this while maintaining a sense of parity between the professions would require rebuilding each profession from the ground up. It would be very time consuming for very little payoff, since most players here are fine with the legacy system anyway. So, Anet makes PVE content easy enough to be beaten by anyone of moderate competency, and lets us solve the interpersonal hurdles personally.

Now, if only they could make it so the DPS rotations didn't hurt so much to do.

GW2 is definitely a step in the right direction away from trinity but I think if Anet made any bigger of a jump, people just wouldn't have connected with the game. You're view is very reasonable and demonstrates a good grasp of what the reality of this game is. Too bad more players are still stuck in their own heads when they complain about 'balance'.

I do believe of all that games I've played, SWTOR does (or did) the balance thing right if anyone wants to take a look; it's a holy trinity and everyone has almost the same ability to do DPS with bearable rotations. It's main problem was that there wasn't much room for error, or your performance took a massive dive.

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@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:

The necromancer's defense is just an illusion in PvE. The necromancer defense is based around health point which is pointless when bosses strike as a %age of health point. This is mainly why the necromancer's community feel that it's unfair to have their damage reduced in PvE due to having "more" survivability. Especially when there is a double damage cost to this surviability (Yes soaking damage with the shroud drop the dps).

Your arguments about profession's role are all good but don't fit GW2's PvE. GW2's PvE is ruled by 2 roles, DPS and support. The game however also include "tanking" abilities and debuffing but those have effects reduced to an insignificant level in PvE. And that's where the issue lie because in term of design and thematic this is where the necromancer's niche is.

Ultimately the developpers balance things by assuming that dps, support, debuffing and "survivability" are on equal ground but reality show that the design of the environment in gw2 make half of these points of balance weaker or infinitely less relevant than the other 2. This allow players to narrow builds options and build the meta around the 2 most relevant and rewarding aspects: damage and support. And indirectly this also push the necromancer whose thematic and design favor the 2 least relevant aspects in an unattractive state.

Ultimately, the necromancer and it's specialization mainly need ANet to balance the PvE environment in such a way that survivability and debuffing matter. What GW2's end game encounter lack ultimately to make the necromancer and it's focus relevant are:

  • Bosses phases/mechanisms that make survivability a must, allowing players to outlast their foes (Yes enrage timer destroy this possibility which is why I don't like GW2's raids design)
  • A simple way to make boon corruption always valuable in bosses encounter (when the breakbar can't be broken and there is no boon to corrupt, count boon corruption effect as if they were corrupting vigor. When the breackbar can be broken and there is no boon to corrupt, count boon corruption effect as if it were corrupting stability)

Ultimately it boil down to this 2 points to make the necromancer "viable" in PvE end game: rethink the design philosophy of the raid encounters and minor change to the interaction of boon corruption and the breakbar system.

When ANet choose to "buff" power reaper's damages at the cost of it's survivability and it's condi potential, they already turned their back to the true way to fix the necromancer's "imbalanced" state in PvE end game. They added more and more powercreep to try to fix the necromancer/reaper in PvE and only ended up breaking it in PvP when the issue was the environment in PvE. ANet will never balance the professions as long as PvE have an imbalance in what players need to prioritize.

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@Obtena.7952 said:

@"Nimon.7840" said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

I can understand their desire to keep Necromancer low because of this. However, all of this is speculation, since Anet won't say a word on their PVE balance philosophy. To be frank, I suspect they don't actually have one, given what recently happened with the engineer. So, it is easier to give each profession
enough
DPS, and let the players sort out their interpersonal problems personally.

I think this post is key to understand why some classes are balanced this way in PvE.

There HAS to be a lowest and highest damage class. However class balance is not pure damage, this poster breaks it down a bit but I generally just categorize them into defense and utility. Power reaper for example has one of the best passive defense in PvE. It has strong utility with very good CC, remember utility is not just boons. CC is an incredibly important aspect of raiding since many different fights has it in spades. Hell when my group did Qadim 2.0 CM, I was the solo breaker for the spawning adds.

So with the two categories being high, the damage has to be lower. The closest comparison to power reaper at this moment is power holo, they have decent defense and very strong CC. So their damage is on the lower range but still higher than reaper because their defense is weaker.

The real discussion is not that "omg anet hates necros I'm gonna kms". The real discussion is how big the damage gap should be and how important the other factors such as defense, utility and difficulty to play should be. For example right now Power reaper benches around 31.5k. The highest is around 39k as condi weaver. The current gap is a bit too big although that's more condi weaver benching too high. So ideally where do you want it to be? If is up me, probably around 32k-35kish. Where the lowest should be necros and highest for eles and thieves. The difference between the lowest and highest dps by about 10%. Of course burst damage starts to muddle things a bit as well due to phasing and mechanic skipping but that's another can of worms.

I'd happily allow every class to be 16k health baseline if the damage of each profession was closer together (difficulty and how much support it gives taken into account). On that note I just looked at condi weaver rotation and I'm not surprised it can do so much. It's condi engi levels of rotation there.

This is the price we pay to have variation in theme. There ARE games out there where the differences are in name only ... and you know, they are boring as hell. Sure, everyone is balanced because the difference in name doesn't affect function. It's a real trade off and at this point, I don't see how Anet could fix that if their path it to continually offer more and more variation.I agree that you don't want a
perfect
balance that way (or at least, I don't) ... but I've also seen games that put the factor
time
into their balancing equation, where the best DPS is (completely) different every 3 months or so, as well as the worst DPS of course (and support, healing, etc.). Diablo 3 was an example of that, I really liked that philosophy. And because it would change regularly anyway, PUGs weren't to snappy too try new builds and accept a lot more diversity in their teams, etc. Or at least, that was my experience.
Now
it looks like their game is in an automatic support state orso (not much difference with GW2, btw), I think Diablo 4 might be in the making ... ?!??? (also similarities with GW there, maybe???)
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@Obtena.7952 said:I do believe of all that games I've played, SWTOR does (or did) the balance thing right if anyone wants to take a look; it's a holy trinity and everyone has almost the same ability to do DPS with bearable rotations. It's main problem was that there wasn't much room for error, or your performance took a massive dive.

From my experience swtor's healers and tanks are/were completly broken. It bring me to a few years, but both roles make the scrapper that suffered so many complaints laughably weak in comparison.

However, if you say this with the freedom of role choices for each classe, I do agree that it's in a better state that GW2.

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@Xxnecroxx.4039 said:just don't play necro/scourge/reaperno matter what you spec there is a class that can and will do it betterdamage? HA what a joke, necros are not supposed to be allowed to do damagehealing? Druids do it better in every wayboon sharing? yeah no, just nothe only thing we are allowed to be is boon corrupt bots AND NOTHING ELSE, that is how anet sees necros

I mean flat out wrong. Scourge actually provides more healing per second than druid and has access to a ton of barrier to mitigate damage entirely in the first place. Heal scourge has single handedly made matthias and many other raid bosses a joke because of barrier/transfusion/insane amounts of condi cleanse. My group runs a heal scourge as an offhealer because it's flat out better than double druid.

Necro benching at over 30k how is that low? Sure it's lower benchmarks than other classes at top end play but i can count on one hand the number of times i see players consistently able to pull off even 30k so all in all, doesn't matter. Their damage is fine.

Boon sharing- Okay fine, necro wasn't designed around the concept though so i don't care.

The only aspect of necro i'd change a bit is maybe a bit more damage on scourge, but even then, condi scourge is still in a decent spot.

All in all, necro right now is in a better spot than it has ever been in.

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@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:I do believe of all that games I've played, SWTOR does (or did) the balance thing right if anyone wants to take a look; it's a holy trinity and everyone has almost the same ability to do DPS with bearable rotations. It's main problem was that there wasn't much room for error, or your performance took a massive dive.

From my experience swtor's healers and tanks are/were completly broken. It bring me to a few years, but both roles make the scrapper that suffered so many complaints laughably weak in comparison.

However, if you say this with the freedom of role choices for each classe, I do agree that it's in a better state that GW2.

I think that's an EXCELLENT example of how balance is not even fully achieved EVEN when DPS is equivalent across classes. Even when DPS is equal, you still get 'broken' classes ... that's because balance isn't just about achieving an optimal DPS rotation. That's why when people QQ about Reaper DPS and lack of balance, those people are ignorant.

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@Agrippa Oculus.3726 said:

@"Nimon.7840" said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

I can understand their desire to keep Necromancer low because of this. However, all of this is speculation, since Anet won't say a word on their PVE balance philosophy. To be frank, I suspect they don't actually have one, given what recently happened with the engineer. So, it is easier to give each profession
enough
DPS, and let the players sort out their interpersonal problems personally.

I think this post is key to understand why some classes are balanced this way in PvE.

There HAS to be a lowest and highest damage class. However class balance is not pure damage, this poster breaks it down a bit but I generally just categorize them into defense and utility. Power reaper for example has one of the best passive defense in PvE. It has strong utility with very good CC, remember utility is not just boons. CC is an incredibly important aspect of raiding since many different fights has it in spades. Hell when my group did Qadim 2.0 CM, I was the solo breaker for the spawning adds.

So with the two categories being high, the damage has to be lower. The closest comparison to power reaper at this moment is power holo, they have decent defense and very strong CC. So their damage is on the lower range but still higher than reaper because their defense is weaker.

The real discussion is not that "omg anet hates necros I'm gonna kms". The real discussion is how big the damage gap should be and how important the other factors such as defense, utility and difficulty to play should be. For example right now Power reaper benches around 31.5k. The highest is around 39k as condi weaver. The current gap is a bit too big although that's more condi weaver benching too high. So ideally where do you want it to be? If is up me, probably around 32k-35kish. Where the lowest should be necros and highest for eles and thieves. The difference between the lowest and highest dps by about 10%. Of course burst damage starts to muddle things a bit as well due to phasing and mechanic skipping but that's another can of worms.

I'd happily allow every class to be 16k health baseline if the damage of each profession was closer together (difficulty and how much support it gives taken into account). On that note I just looked at condi weaver rotation and I'm not surprised it can do so much. It's condi engi levels of rotation there.

This is the price we pay to have variation in theme. There ARE games out there where the differences are in name only ... and you know, they are boring as hell. Sure, everyone is balanced because the difference in name doesn't affect function. It's a real trade off and at this point, I don't see how Anet could fix that if their path it to continually offer more and more variation.I agree that you don't want a
perfect
balance that way (or at least, I don't) ... but I've also seen games that put the factor
time
into their balancing equation, where the best DPS is (completely) different every 3 months or so, as well as the worst DPS of course (and support, healing, etc.). Diablo 3 was an example of that, I really liked that philosophy. And because it would change regularly anyway, PUGs weren't to snappy too try new builds and accept a lot more diversity in their teams, etc. Or at least, that was my experience.
Now
it looks like their game is in an automatic support state orso (not much difference with GW2, btw), I think Diablo 4 might be in the making ... ?!??? (also similarities with GW there, maybe???)

Sure, there is lots of flavour out there. If GW2 isn't a flavour people like because of 'balance', it's pretty silly for them to complain about it. It would be hard to make this a selling point of the game but ...

... the fact is that lack of traditional balance in this game is an attractive feature for the philosophy this game is designed around. Basically, people can play like a scrub and still succeed and have fun. That doesn't require balance. Therein is the trade off ANY player that commits to playing this game makes.

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@Obtena.7952 said:

@"Nimon.7840" said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

I can understand their desire to keep Necromancer low because of this. However, all of this is speculation, since Anet won't say a word on their PVE balance philosophy. To be frank, I suspect they don't actually have one, given what recently happened with the engineer. So, it is easier to give each profession
enough
DPS, and let the players sort out their interpersonal problems personally.

I think this post is key to understand why some classes are balanced this way in PvE.

There HAS to be a lowest and highest damage class. However class balance is not pure damage, this poster breaks it down a bit but I generally just categorize them into defense and utility. Power reaper for example has one of the best passive defense in PvE. It has strong utility with very good CC, remember utility is not just boons. CC is an incredibly important aspect of raiding since many different fights has it in spades. Hell when my group did Qadim 2.0 CM, I was the solo breaker for the spawning adds.

So with the two categories being high, the damage has to be lower. The closest comparison to power reaper at this moment is power holo, they have decent defense and very strong CC. So their damage is on the lower range but still higher than reaper because their defense is weaker.

The real discussion is not that "omg anet hates necros I'm gonna kms". The real discussion is how big the damage gap should be and how important the other factors such as defense, utility and difficulty to play should be. For example right now Power reaper benches around 31.5k. The highest is around 39k as condi weaver. The current gap is a bit too big although that's more condi weaver benching too high. So ideally where do you want it to be? If is up me, probably around 32k-35kish. Where the lowest should be necros and highest for eles and thieves. The difference between the lowest and highest dps by about 10%. Of course burst damage starts to muddle things a bit as well due to phasing and mechanic skipping but that's another can of worms.

I'd happily allow every class to be 16k health baseline if the damage of each profession was closer together (difficulty and how much support it gives taken into account). On that note I just looked at condi weaver rotation and I'm not surprised it can do so much. It's condi engi levels of rotation there.

This is the price we pay to have variation in theme. There ARE games out there where the differences are in name only ... and you know, they are boring as hell. Sure, everyone is balanced because the difference in name doesn't affect function. It's a real trade off and at this point, I don't see how Anet could fix that if their path it to continually offer more and more variation.I agree that you don't want a
perfect
balance that way (or at least, I don't) ... but I've also seen games that put the factor
time
into their balancing equation, where the best DPS is (completely) different every 3 months or so, as well as the worst DPS of course (and support, healing, etc.). Diablo 3 was an example of that, I really liked that philosophy. And because it would change regularly anyway, PUGs weren't to snappy too try new builds and accept a lot more diversity in their teams, etc. Or at least, that was my experience.
Now
it looks like their game is in an automatic support state orso (not much difference with GW2, btw), I think Diablo 4 might be in the making ... ?!??? (also similarities with GW there, maybe???)

Sure, there is lots of flavour out there. If GW2 isn't a flavour people like because of 'balance', it's pretty silly for them to complain about it. It would be hard to make this a selling point of the game but ...

... the fact is that lack of traditional balance in this game is an attractive feature for the philosophy this game is designed around. Basically, people can play like a scrub and still succeed and have fun. That
doesn't
require balance. Therein is the trade off ANY player that commits to playing this game makes.

But that's exactly why I like the ever changing balance philosophy even better, it really accommodates to the casual AND veteran players. Casuals get a free ride on the uncertainty that's always there (and they won't care or even know about it). Veterans can theorycraft and try/experience different flavours on regular intervals.

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@Agrippa Oculus.3726 said:

@"Nimon.7840" said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

I can understand their desire to keep Necromancer low because of this. However, all of this is speculation, since Anet won't say a word on their PVE balance philosophy. To be frank, I suspect they don't actually have one, given what recently happened with the engineer. So, it is easier to give each profession
enough
DPS, and let the players sort out their interpersonal problems personally.

I think this post is key to understand why some classes are balanced this way in PvE.

There HAS to be a lowest and highest damage class. However class balance is not pure damage, this poster breaks it down a bit but I generally just categorize them into defense and utility. Power reaper for example has one of the best passive defense in PvE. It has strong utility with very good CC, remember utility is not just boons. CC is an incredibly important aspect of raiding since many different fights has it in spades. Hell when my group did Qadim 2.0 CM, I was the solo breaker for the spawning adds.

So with the two categories being high, the damage has to be lower. The closest comparison to power reaper at this moment is power holo, they have decent defense and very strong CC. So their damage is on the lower range but still higher than reaper because their defense is weaker.

The real discussion is not that "omg anet hates necros I'm gonna kms". The real discussion is how big the damage gap should be and how important the other factors such as defense, utility and difficulty to play should be. For example right now Power reaper benches around 31.5k. The highest is around 39k as condi weaver. The current gap is a bit too big although that's more condi weaver benching too high. So ideally where do you want it to be? If is up me, probably around 32k-35kish. Where the lowest should be necros and highest for eles and thieves. The difference between the lowest and highest dps by about 10%. Of course burst damage starts to muddle things a bit as well due to phasing and mechanic skipping but that's another can of worms.

I'd happily allow every class to be 16k health baseline if the damage of each profession was closer together (difficulty and how much support it gives taken into account). On that note I just looked at condi weaver rotation and I'm not surprised it can do so much. It's condi engi levels of rotation there.

This is the price we pay to have variation in theme. There ARE games out there where the differences are in name only ... and you know, they are boring as hell. Sure, everyone is balanced because the difference in name doesn't affect function. It's a real trade off and at this point, I don't see how Anet could fix that if their path it to continually offer more and more variation.I agree that you don't want a
perfect
balance that way (or at least, I don't) ... but I've also seen games that put the factor
time
into their balancing equation, where the best DPS is (completely) different every 3 months or so, as well as the worst DPS of course (and support, healing, etc.). Diablo 3 was an example of that, I really liked that philosophy. And because it would change regularly anyway, PUGs weren't to snappy too try new builds and accept a lot more diversity in their teams, etc. Or at least, that was my experience.
Now
it looks like their game is in an automatic support state orso (not much difference with GW2, btw), I think Diablo 4 might be in the making ... ?!??? (also similarities with GW there, maybe???)

Sure, there is lots of flavour out there. If GW2 isn't a flavour people like because of 'balance', it's pretty silly for them to complain about it. It would be hard to make this a selling point of the game but ...

... the fact is that lack of traditional balance in this game is an attractive feature for the philosophy this game is designed around. Basically, people can play like a scrub and still succeed and have fun. That
doesn't
require balance. Therein is the trade off ANY player that commits to playing this game makes.

But that's exactly why I like the ever changing balance philosophy even better, it really accommodates to the casual AND veteran players. Casuals get a free ride on the uncertainty that's always there (and they won't care or even know about it). Veterans can theorycraft and try/experience different flavours on regular intervals.

Right and we get that all time ... Anet is always flipping things over. Almost every balance patch is a random set of changes that give people the ability to try and experience different things. The introduction of more especs as well. This game is well suited to anyone that DOESN'T like repetitive and stale play. The class changes we get are ACTUALLY causing people to rethink how they play all the time.

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@Obtena.7952 said:

@"Nimon.7840" said:

Fractals with pugs is a whole different story.But people here want necro to be on par with other classes in organised groups!Mostly in raids.

I wouldn't mind some clarity in this myself. On the engineer forum, I remarked that with the recent holosmith buffs that Necromancers are meant to be the lowest DPS class, since as soon as any other class (except power rev) gets lower than them, they immediately get buffs. Technically, this makes necromancers a unit of measurement, since they're supposed to be the lowest of all other classes.

Biggest problem here is that Anet is colliding against the social hurdle to raiding. If we just went with objective requirements you could complete most raids with snowflake builds, assuming the player was competent. 28k peak DPS is more than enough to beat everything in the game with flying colors. Anything more is vanity. However, the community doesn't see it like that. The end-game is full of wannabe speed runners.

This puts Anet into a catch-22 like scenario. See, they still balance DPS around non-DPS factors. Stuff like effective health, ease of use, boons, attack range, etc. In a certain way, they're right to do so if you consider the individual player experience in a box. If you were to make it so scourges and reapers did 39k DPS tomorrow, Anet would be flooded with complaints from Thieves and Elementalists. "It's not fair that they do so much damage while having so much health!" they'll say. "I don't get rewarded for playing a frail profession that's harder to play! There's no reason to take an Elementalist over a Necromancer!" It doesn't matter if these buffs are PVE only. Anet will still get complaints. Keep in mind, the amount of players actually concerned with maintaining maximum DPS that won't switch classes to get it is very small.

I can understand their desire to keep Necromancer low because of this. However, all of this is speculation, since Anet won't say a word on their PVE balance philosophy. To be frank, I suspect they don't actually have one, given what recently happened with the engineer. So, it is easier to give each profession
enough
DPS, and let the players sort out their interpersonal problems personally.

I think this post is key to understand why some classes are balanced this way in PvE.

There HAS to be a lowest and highest damage class. However class balance is not pure damage, this poster breaks it down a bit but I generally just categorize them into defense and utility. Power reaper for example has one of the best passive defense in PvE. It has strong utility with very good CC, remember utility is not just boons. CC is an incredibly important aspect of raiding since many different fights has it in spades. Hell when my group did Qadim 2.0 CM, I was the solo breaker for the spawning adds.

So with the two categories being high, the damage has to be lower. The closest comparison to power reaper at this moment is power holo, they have decent defense and very strong CC. So their damage is on the lower range but still higher than reaper because their defense is weaker.

The real discussion is not that "omg anet hates necros I'm gonna kms". The real discussion is how big the damage gap should be and how important the other factors such as defense, utility and difficulty to play should be. For example right now Power reaper benches around 31.5k. The highest is around 39k as condi weaver. The current gap is a bit too big although that's more condi weaver benching too high. So ideally where do you want it to be? If is up me, probably around 32k-35kish. Where the lowest should be necros and highest for eles and thieves. The difference between the lowest and highest dps by about 10%. Of course burst damage starts to muddle things a bit as well due to phasing and mechanic skipping but that's another can of worms.

I'd happily allow every class to be 16k health baseline if the damage of each profession was closer together (difficulty and how much support it gives taken into account). On that note I just looked at condi weaver rotation and I'm not surprised it can do so much. It's condi engi levels of rotation there.

This is the price we pay to have variation in theme. There ARE games out there where the differences are in name only ... and you know, they are boring as hell. Sure, everyone is balanced because the difference in name doesn't affect function. It's a real trade off and at this point, I don't see how Anet could fix that if their path it to continually offer more and more variation.I agree that you don't want a
perfect
balance that way (or at least, I don't) ... but I've also seen games that put the factor
time
into their balancing equation, where the best DPS is (completely) different every 3 months or so, as well as the worst DPS of course (and support, healing, etc.). Diablo 3 was an example of that, I really liked that philosophy. And because it would change regularly anyway, PUGs weren't to snappy too try new builds and accept a lot more diversity in their teams, etc. Or at least, that was my experience.
Now
it looks like their game is in an automatic support state orso (not much difference with GW2, btw), I think Diablo 4 might be in the making ... ?!??? (also similarities with GW there, maybe???)

Sure, there is lots of flavour out there. If GW2 isn't a flavour people like because of 'balance', it's pretty silly for them to complain about it. It would be hard to make this a selling point of the game but ...

... the fact is that lack of traditional balance in this game is an attractive feature for the philosophy this game is designed around. Basically, people can play like a scrub and still succeed and have fun. That
doesn't
require balance. Therein is the trade off ANY player that commits to playing this game makes.

But that's exactly why I like the ever changing balance philosophy even better, it really accommodates to the casual AND veteran players. Casuals get a free ride on the uncertainty that's always there (and they won't care or even know about it). Veterans can theorycraft and try/experience different flavours on regular intervals.

Right and we get that all time ... Anet is always flipping things over. Almost every balance patch is a random set of changes that give people the ability to try and experience different things. The introduction of more especs as well. This game is well suited to anyone that DOESN'T like repetitive and stale play. The class changes we get are ACTUALLY causing people to rethink how they play all the time.

Wellll ...... NOT merely enough though.Here have a look at this patch of Diablo 3: https://us.diablo3.com/en/blog/22863534As you can see, you see a lot of changes of double, triple or even quadruple the impact on what it did before. And they're not on meaningless objects/skills/mechanics/etc. either, we're talking about set bonus changes for example, which are one of the most important aspects in that game. Look it doesn't have to be THAT crazy, but the 5% axe dmg bonus :) pales in comparison of course! The changes ANet normally is pushing through are not really changing anything in the grand scheme of things, really.

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@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

Well. Faster kill= less mechanics to do = less likelier to fail the encounter

Not really. The mechanics are set at fixed health intervals for most bosses, and at the rates we're discussing are about 10%-30% per person. This isn't including durability or ease of use, or other factors. If you look at snowcrow's list of recommendations for each boss, for everything other than Chrono + Druid there is a wide swath of green and red squares for each build on every profession. So overall, it is a little more complicated than just more DPS = Easier.

Most mechanics are on a timer. The only mechanics on a health interval is the frozen orb statue event in w5 or orbs at qadim 2.0. Phases are mostly gated behind health but thats something different. Fewer mechanics lead to fewer chances to screw up and easier kills. Thats why fractals with decent players are easier with 5 good dps than with a healer and some roleplaying scourges. You wont even see most mechanics that way.Having dps that are 30% below is not massive? It's essentially low manning a raid with 8 players if all 6 dps players are playing weaker builds compared to the stronger ones. That's not a problem for good players but it can become a problem for a lot of players and pugs really fast.

Shroud counting as healthbar is not helping, it's a handicap most of the time. Can't be healed in it -> no way to get scholar back. Unavoidable damage which got added A LOT in recent content cuts the uptime really hard. Reaper is comepletely useless on Vale guardian for example.A pug bombed you on Sabetha? Rest of the group gets healed to full in 1 sec but reaper just lost most of his damage. Most of the utilities are useless in pve. Wells need a pve rebalance. Stuck with 3 minions because the 300/700 single target dps are still better than every utility if boon corrupt is not needed which is 99% of the time. Shouts are garbage in every game mode.I even completely gut my damage if i try to use poison cloud and there isn't a support perma cleansing condis for me.It would already help if reaper could use utilities in shroud so he doesn't need to leave it to strip protection and has the 180power from signet baseline. Maybe even rework the minions into something less passive. That would also fix the afk farm problem. They could be strong summons lasting for a short period of time and scaling with player stats instead of being permanent. Reaper being able to buff fury would also make it a lot stronger.

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@Nephalem.8921 said:Most mechanics are on a timer. The only mechanics on a health interval is the frozen orb statue event in w5 or orbs at qadim 2.0. Phases are mostly gated behind health but thats something different. Fewer mechanics lead to fewer chances to screw up and easier kills. Thats why fractals with decent players are easier with 5 good dps than with a healer and some roleplaying scourges. You wont even see most mechanics that way.

That's not a meaningful distinction. The things you have to do at each phasing are as mechanical as anything in between.

@Nephalem.8921 said:Having dps that are 30% below is not massive? It's essentially low manning a raid with 8 players if all 6 dps players are playing weaker builds compared to the stronger ones. That's not a problem for good players but it can become a problem for a lot of players and pugs really fast.

It's not massive at all. Incompetent pugs aren't carried by high DPS. They're carried by good heals and support players. Doing slightly more damage isn't going to stop players from flubbing the mechanics. Likewise, if we presume pugs are incompetent, then they'd just die while playing Weaver and Deadeye. The baseline DPS of Greatsword Reaper is on par with every other class in the game, so the worse players do the smaller the difference between dps gets.

In fractals, if I am on a pug group, I would much rather play a Necromancer than a Warrior, Mesmer, or Elementalist. On those teams, necromancers are great. I can disable enemy groups with for extended periods of time with Nightfall and Well of Darkness, I can gather enemies up to damage them down with Grasping Darkness, I can rip all of their boons with Well of Corruption, absorb unholy amounts of damage with "Rise!", self buff to 25 might, solo break bars with the Flesh Golem, heal myself greatly and rez well with the Blood Magic traits, block orbs/projectiles with Corrosive Poison Cloud, and cleanse conditions with Well of Power. This is no exaggeration, either. I've been on teams where I've needed almost all of this. But if I am on a Warrior, the most I can do is pop Endure Pain and hope they aggro on me. With Elementalist, I use Sand Storm and hope I don't get clobbered by attacks that do more than my entire health bar. On mesmer, all of my boons are multipliers, so 1.5 times nothing is nothing.

@Nephalem.8921 said:Shroud counting as healthbar is not helping, it's a handicap most of the time. Can't be healed in it -> no way to get scholar back. Unavoidable damage which got added A LOT in recent content cuts the uptime really hard. Reaper is comepletely useless on Vale guardian for example.A pug bombed you on Sabetha? Rest of the group gets healed to full in 1 sec but reaper just lost most of his damage. Most of the utilities are useless in pve. Wells need a pve rebalance. Stuck with 3 minions because the 300/700 single target dps are still better than every utility if boon corrupt is not needed which is 99% of the time. Shouts are garbage in every game mode.

The thing about having a laser focus on raids is that raids isn't all of GW2. It's not even "most of the time" in GW2. However I digress: having laser focus on just necromancer will make it so you lose sight of all of the little problems that other classes have. Losing DPS due to shroud damage is on par with what other classes have to deal with:

Revenant: Loses massive amounts of damage if the 10 energy threshold is missed, which is going to happen any time anything other than "nothing" happens. The timing is literally split second and has little to no leeway.Warrior: Berserk mode is on a timer, and losing out due to enemy movement, enemy CC, poorly timed mechanics or phasing. They have almost no range, and if the rage skills miss everything goes wrong.

Engineer: The condi rotation is objectively the hardest in the game, and it fails terribly if the enemy moves slightly in one direction. Also, engineers blow themselves up if you're off slightly with photon forge.Thief: It can't move and only hurts one target at a time. The rotation screeches to a halt every time you get the quickness stolen skill, and if malice or initiative gets messed up the DPS flatlines. Suffers from prone-to-death syndrome.Elementalist: All of its defensive skills and utilities require swapping out of the DPS rotation to use them. It has no ranged abilities and frequently suffers from a slight case of death.Mesmer: Chrono has its DPS drops to Necromancer levels if the enemy doesn't have permanent slow. Has no way to apply permanent slow. Depends wholly on illusions for damage, whether it is continuum split or infinite horizon.Ranger: Don't play much ranger.

Guardian is the only profession I know that doesn't have any big linchpins in its rotation. Spear of Justice is quite reliable, and the tomes don't require split second timing or expire if something goes wrong. The DPS rotations in GW2 are some of the most difficult and chaotic I've ever played, to the point where I'd argue it is needlessly so. Every profession specific mechanic is a handicap in some way, because the professions aren't balanced around not having them.

@Nephalem.8921 said:It would already help if reaper could use utilities in shroud so he doesn't need to leave it to strip protection and has the 180power from signet baseline. Maybe even rework the minions into something less passive. That would also fix the afk farm problem. They could be strong summons lasting for a short period of time and scaling with player stats instead of being permanent. Reaper being able to buff fury would also make it a lot stronger.

What I would like to see is the baseline damage under full buffs for all melee weapons be raised to about 23k while reducing some of the burst, normalizing DPS for most professions at around 35k for perfect rotations. Less for ranged weapons, maybe more for conditions. Class identity shouldn't be tied around one being the DPS, or another not being the DPS. The global melee weapon buff is to make mistakes less punishing and bad players more tolerable. For necromancers, this would have the additional benefit of making shroud loss less punishing.

As it stands currently, the average base melee DPS is at 17k for most weapons most professions, and less for all the rest. Of the 7 professions I tested, the only one significantly higher than that was Thief, which sits at 25k.

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@Dadnir.5038 said:People only look at the damage potential of the different profession and count on the support to provide all boons. Unfortunately, despite all those advantage you listed the reaper is still pretty close to be bottom of the barrel in term of damage potential.

Reaper sure have it's pros but those are not advantages that the average simple minded player will take into consideration willingly. Those players only seek to be able to do the maximum damage possible in the shortest amount of time because that's the best way to disregard bothersome bosses mechanisms in this game. The encounter design only really reward maximum dps, this is a flaw in itself but it tend to satisfy the point of view of the raiding crew.

Encounter design always has and will be the problem. Especially for necro which has its strengths clearly based around soft control and boom denial which do nothing for current PvE.

I'd love to see a raid where the encounter is just NPC 15 scourges and 5 firebrands playing somewhat organized lol.

Can you imagine how the community would react to every single benchmark being thrown out the window, and where gasp PvP builds would need to be considered, with play being more than just spamming rotations?

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@Dadnir.5038 said:

@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:

The necromancer's defense is just an illusion in PvE. The necromancer defense is based around health point which is pointless when bosses strike as a %age of health point. This is mainly why the necromancer's community feel that it's unfair to have their damage reduced in PvE due to having "more" survivability. Especially when there is a double damage cost to this surviability (Yes soaking damage with the shroud drop the dps).

Your arguments about profession's role are all good but don't fit GW2's PvE. GW2's PvE is ruled by 2 roles, DPS and support. The game however also include "tanking" abilities and debuffing but those have effects reduced to an insignificant level in PvE. And that's where the issue lie because in term of design and thematic this is where the necromancer's niche is.

Ultimately the developpers balance things by assuming that dps, support, debuffing and "survivability" are on equal ground but reality show that the design of the environment in gw2 make half of these points of balance weaker or infinitely less relevant than the other 2. This allow players to narrow builds options and build the meta around the 2 most relevant and rewarding aspects: damage and support. And indirectly this also push the necromancer whose thematic and design favor the 2 least relevant aspects in an unattractive state.

Ultimately, the necromancer and it's specialization mainly need ANet to balance the PvE environment in such a way that survivability and debuffing matter. What GW2's end game encounter lack ultimately to make the necromancer and it's focus relevant are:
  • Bosses phases/mechanisms that make survivability a must, allowing players to outlast their foes (Yes enrage timer destroy this possibility which is why I don't like GW2's raids design)
  • A simple way to make boon corruption always valuable in bosses encounter (when the breakbar can't be broken and there is no boon to corrupt, count boon corruption effect as if they were corrupting vigor. When the breackbar can be broken and there is no boon to corrupt, count boon corruption effect as if it were corrupting stability)

Ultimately it boil down to this 2 points to make the necromancer "viable" in PvE end game: rethink the design philosophy of the raid encounters and minor change to the interaction of boon corruption and the breakbar system.

When ANet choose to "buff" power reaper's damages at the cost of it's survivability and it's condi potential, they already turned their back to the true way to fix the necromancer's "imbalanced" state in PvE end game. They added more and more powercreep to try to fix the necromancer/reaper in PvE and only ended up breaking it in PvP when the issue was the environment in PvE. ANet will never balance the professions as long as PvE have an imbalance in what players need to prioritize.

Without providing a specific quotation, I'm not sure exactly which post you're responding to. I've said quite a bit here, so "my argument" can be many things.

If you're talking about how players will complain about imbalance if necromancers matched ele and thief damage, that isn't an argument of what to do something insomuch as it is a possible explanation for why Anet balances this way. From an emotional standpoint, it makes sense to make it so complicated, high risk professions should do more damage. It feels right. However, players pick their classes for thematic reasons more than operational ones. I.E. why so many people complain that elementalists don't feel like a true spellcaster. For any practical sense, the complicated, high risk professions are just user-unfriendly and put undue standards on players to perform. I hate having to fight an interface to function on a basic level.

EDIT: Well, some pick for thematic reasons. I mentioned it before, but players who pick their classes for functional reasons generally don't take much issue with switching to another class for performance reasons. /EDIT

If you're talking about that idealized class system in a fictional game with normalized damage... I'm aware. A game has to be built from the ground up like that. Guild Wars 2 has 27 specializations, but does not have 27 meaningful axis of strength scattered through these professions. At least, not ones that are specific enough to each profession that they require build specialization in just that one role. I don't the issue isn't the lack of roles, though. In a trinity debate thread a year ago, I came up with 16 different roles that GW2 has, with each fitting into 5 broad categories (buffer, debuffer, environmental effects, controller, miscellaneous). Each profession has multiple tidbits from each role, creating a series of well-rounded but different classes to play.

While you are correct that necromancer's strengths don't play well to raids, I don't think your solution is the best. Giving more bosses boons is fine, but requiring high health isn't. The biggest problem with making higher health and defenses mandatory is that it is mechanical discrimination. That is, factors present in game that prevent you from playing. This... is a whole new beast. See, what Necromancers face currently is social discrimination. It isn't that necromancers can't beat fractals or raid bosses, but that they aren't necessarily the best at it. If you have an accepting, tolerant, casual, or apathetic commander, you can take a necromancer into the vast majority of raid bosses and still do fine. The problem comes from particularly intolerant and elitist commanders, who aren't happy with necromancers because they don't win hard enough. That issue exists between keyboard and chair.

Anet can help with this by bringing the classes closer together in terms of peak benchmarks. Anet isn't completely free of responsibility here. I can't help but think that our current high damage is unintended. The last time we had a bunch of professions sitting at 38k was when PoF launched, and they were all nerfed heavily.

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@DeceiverX.8361 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:People only look at the damage potential of the different profession and count on the support to provide all boons. Unfortunately, despite all those advantage you listed the reaper is still pretty close to be bottom of the barrel in term of damage potential.

Reaper sure have it's pros but those are not advantages that the average simple minded player will take into consideration willingly. Those players only seek to be able to do the maximum damage possible in the shortest amount of time because that's the best way to disregard bothersome bosses mechanisms in this game. The encounter design only really reward maximum dps, this is a flaw in itself but it tend to satisfy the point of view of the raiding crew.

Encounter design always has and will be the problem. Especially for necro which has its strengths clearly based around soft control and boom denial which do nothing for current PvE.

I'd love to see a raid where the encounter is just NPC 15 scourges and 5 firebrands playing somewhat organized lol.

Can you imagine how the community would react to every single benchmark being thrown out the window, and where
gasp
PvP builds would need to be considered, with play being more than just spamming rotations?

Well there is 2 paths out of that:

  • Either the scourge/FB NPCs have a boss breakbar system and the raid party will still focus on dps.
  • or the scourge/FB NPCs don't have the breakbar system and the raid will focus on dps and CCs.

It will just be a contest of strength, which ultimately don't change much how they behave at the moment. This is due to the fact that ultimately NPCs will reveal a patern of behavior that will allow the raid party to focus on strategy and chase after the quickest way to slay the group of ennemy.

No, like I said a bit above is that the encounter design need to make survivability more relevant (probably with boss phases where they are totally immun to damage until the group resolve a random puzzle while sustaining bothersome loss of health. It could also be a boss that is near undamageable for a few minutes and lose some defense as time pass, favorising the ability to outlast your foe more than the ability to destroy it... etc.) and boon corruption as reliable as it is in PvP environment by making it interact with the breakbar system.

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@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:While you are correct that necromancer's strengths don't play well to raids, I don't think your solution is the best. Giving more bosses boons is fine, but requiring high health isn't. The biggest problem with making higher health and defenses mandatory is that it is mechanical discrimination. That is, factors present in game that prevent you from playing. This... is a whole new beast. See, what Necromancers face currently is social discrimination. It isn't that necromancers can't beat fractals or raid bosses, but that they aren't necessarily the best at it. If you have an accepting, tolerant, casual, or apathetic commander, you can take a necromancer into the vast majority of raid bosses and still do fine. The problem comes from particularly intolerant and elitist commanders, who aren't happy with necromancers because they don't win hard enough. That issue exists between keyboard and chair.

I disagree, having raid focused on dps like they are right now is already mechanical discrimination since it rule out low damage parties. You just can't defend the current system with it's enrage timer and at the same time say that encounters focused on survivability would be mechanical discrimination, This very timer is already a mechanical discrimination. Why would it be more acceptable than another mechanical discrimination?

What I argue for is more variety in the encounter design. Having encounters that favor survivability should be as valid as the very common encounter that only favor damage. GW2's devs already proved with guild missions that they are able to create encounter that aren't purely based on dps why should raids be so single minded?

The issue isn't the commanders/raid community alone, the issue is also in the encounters design which are all unimaginatively singlemindely focused toward dealing the most damage possible in the shortest time possible. If you give room for inate survivability to become a strength then the professions that can exploit it the best will become meta in these encounters. The issue is that no encounter leave room for this.

Anet can help with this by bringing the classes closer together in terms of peak benchmarks. Anet isn't completely free of responsibility here. I can't help but think that our current high damage is unintended. The last time we had a bunch of professions sitting at 38k was when PoF launched, and they were all nerfed heavily.

No, like I said, ANet continue to assume that all 4 aspects equal, which isn't wrong in PvP environment but totally wrong in PvE environment. Buffing/nerfing numbers create an illusion of balance that can only satisfy players for a short time. There will always be a highest dps and there will always be a lowest dps. If you don't vary encounters focus like it's the case right now, only the highest dps will be favored while the lowest dps will always cry.

You can try to balance number for years, rotate between profession for the highest numbers, yet you'll never achieve balance and will always be at risk of creating a powercreep cycle. It's a matter of priority, fixing encounter design and mechanic "hole" should have priority over fixing numbers in PvE. For numbers value, PvP should be where numbers are the priority.

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@Dadnir.5038 said:I disagree, having raid focused on dps like they are right now is already mechanical discrimination since it rule out low damage parties. You just can't defend the current system with it's enrage timer and at the same time say that encounters focused on survivability would be mechanical discrimination, This very timer is already a mechanical discrimination. Why would it be more acceptable than another mechanical discrimination?

What I argue for is more variety in the encounter design. Having encounters that favor survivability should be as valid as the very common encounter that only favor damage. GW2's devs already proved with guild missions that they are able to create encounter that aren't purely based on dps why should raids be so single minded?

The issue isn't the commanders/raid community alone, the issue is also in the encounters design which are all unimaginatively singlemindely focused toward dealing the most damage possible in the shortest time possible. If you give room for inate survivability to become a strength then the professions that can exploit it the best will become meta in these encounters. The issue is that no encounter leave room for this.

Enrage timers are there to punish bad play more than they are to punish particular professions or builds. There is a lot of leeway with those timers, and raids are far more accessible than the community gives them credit for. There isn't a low damage profession to speak of. Though the relative gap between the highest benchmark and Necro seems large at 26.9%, in an absolute sense the 31k DPS that reaper outputs is solid. Enemies haven't been adjusted to be stronger with the recent power creep, so from a Reaper to next balance patch Reaper perspective, they're doing good. Most of the time, when an encounter fails, it is because of failed mechanics and not due to enrage.

Creating an effective health check would be harder, for many reasons. For one, you can't be nearly as lax with a health check as you would the enrage timer. Otherwise... it's just ambient damage that will get healed away. That's already in fractals and raids. Second, creating a soft health check won't encourage bringing a more durable profession or build. It will encourage bringing more healers instead. We already have this kind of health check in the game. They're called Hand Kiters. Third, the difference in effective health between professions is much more massive than the differences between DPS. While power weaver and power necromancer differ by 14.7% in DPS, they differ by 65.0% in effective health. If you include shroud with it's damage reduction and assume no degen, it is 338%. If you assume half of shroud degens away during the health check and none gets recovered, it is 201%. Those differences are huge. For a hard health check to at least threaten a necromancer, it would have to kill the low HP professions multiple times over. Fourth, durability is managed by changing gear, which is expensive to buy and occupy inventory space. Having to purchase a full soldier set just for that one part isn't something that players would look forward to.

I'm not even sure how it would be done. We already have raid bosses with different varieties of pressure. If it is any consolation, Mighty Teapot remarked in his raid videos that it is good to bring durable classes to raids for newcomers, because their high health alleviates the pressure of the mistakes they make. He said this while on a heal scourge. It isn't that higher health has no effect, it is that it has less effect the better you are at the game. I don't think that raids are as single-minded as you portray them, since most guides I see involve several people running around to handle all of the various mechanics.

@Dadnir.5038 said:

No, like I said, ANet continue to assume that all 4 aspects equal, which isn't wrong in PvP environment but totally wrong in PvE environment. Buffing/nerfing numbers create an illusion of balance that can only satisfy players for a short time. There will always be a highest dps and there will always be a lowest dps. If you don't vary encounters focus like it's the case right now, only the highest dps will be favored while the lowest dps will always cry.

You can try to balance number for years, rotate between profession for the highest numbers, yet you'll never achieve balance and will always be at risk of creating a powercreep cycle. It's a matter of priority, fixing encounter design and mechanic "hole" should have priority over fixing numbers in PvE. For numbers value, PvP should be where numbers are the priority.

Bridging the gap would still ease discrimination. Think of it this way: If the gap was between 100k vs. 30k, discrimination would be ubiquitous. If it was 50k vs. 30k, you'd face a lot, but you could still get into parties. If it was 33k vs. 30k, you'd face almost none at all. If it was 30k vs. 30k, then there wouldn't be any discrimination. It's a very simple relationship, and since you can beat all of these raids with 10k DPS, the only real problems you'll face are community enforced. I'm not saying that you can't have a variety of encounters. Hell, I encourage it. But, adjusting numbers down is a quick and easy way to solve a lot of community problems without having any sort of negative repercussions. Any tactical hole you fill with encounter design would be to compensate for disparities in DPS that need not exist in the first place.

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@Dadnir.5038 said:

@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:While you are correct that necromancer's strengths don't play well to raids, I don't think your solution is the best. Giving more bosses boons is fine, but requiring high health isn't. The biggest problem with making higher health and defenses mandatory is that it is mechanical discrimination. That is, factors present in game that prevent you from playing. This... is a whole new beast. See, what Necromancers face currently is social discrimination. It isn't that necromancers can't beat fractals or raid bosses, but that they aren't necessarily the best at it. If you have an accepting, tolerant, casual, or apathetic commander, you can take a necromancer into the vast majority of raid bosses and still do fine. The problem comes from particularly intolerant and elitist commanders, who aren't happy with necromancers because they don't win hard enough. That issue exists between keyboard and chair.

I disagree, having raid focused on dps like they are right now is already mechanical discrimination since it rule out low damage parties. You just can't defend the current system with it's enrage timer and at the same time say that encounters focused on survivability would be mechanical discrimination, This very timer is already a mechanical discrimination. Why would it be more acceptable than another mechanical discrimination?

What I argue for is more variety in the encounter design. Having encounters that favor survivability should be as valid as the very common encounter that only favor damage. GW2's devs already proved with guild missions that they are able to create encounter that aren't purely based on dps why should raids be so single minded?

The issue isn't the commanders/raid community alone, the issue is also in the encounters design which are all unimaginatively singlemindely focused toward dealing the most damage possible in the shortest time possible. If you give room for inate survivability to become a strength then the professions that can exploit it the best will become meta in these encounters. The issue is that no encounter leave room for this.

Anet can help with this by bringing the classes closer together in terms of peak benchmarks. Anet isn't completely free of responsibility here. I can't help but think that our current high damage is unintended. The last time we had a bunch of professions sitting at 38k was when PoF launched, and they were all nerfed heavily.

No, like I said, ANet continue to assume that all 4 aspects equal, which isn't wrong in PvP environment but totally wrong in PvE environment. Buffing/nerfing numbers create an illusion of balance that can only satisfy players for a short time. There will always be a highest dps and there will always be a lowest dps. If you don't vary encounters focus like it's the case right now, only the highest dps will be favored while the lowest dps will always cry.

You can try to balance number for years, rotate between profession for the highest numbers, yet you'll never achieve balance and will always be at risk of creating a powercreep cycle. It's a matter of priority, fixing encounter design and mechanic "hole" should have priority over fixing numbers in PvE. For numbers value, PvP should be where numbers are the priority.

Your argumentation is absolutely spot on, although there are more solutions to this issue imo:I mentioned it before, but a far more dynamic approach to balancing would definitely help imo. At the very moment, balance patches are:

  • rare: at best every 3 months, but sometimes not even
  • insignificant: it doesn't change anything if you look at the bigger picture
  • (subjectively) not fun/engaging at all: all the patches come across as that dreadful quarterly meeting that the devs must attend to while they were much rather doing something else.

Make the patches more fun and wild, more engaging, more dynamic and hit more often: every 2 months orso. Stir up the playing field and community, cause it's been quite static for years now. Always the same complaints on the forums and reddit: (let me get my glass sphere) I can tell that next patch, the Mesmer mains are going to complain about another nerf to their profession, can't they just leave Chrono alone .... While all other mains (mostly Guardian and Revenant) complain about how Chrono is still the most optimal support out there ... Necro mains will always complain (me including :) ) because they're still the lowest DPS out there, Engies will complain because their rotation is o so hard, but they're not the highest DPS out there ... how is that even fair, right? ... And I could go on like that ... it's always the same old song.

I believe that significantly changing numbers, but also the functionality of skills/traits/etc. in far lesser time-frames than what we're used to right now, really helps in changing the community as well. Any wild composition/build might well be the next optimal comp, right?! And if I see speedclearing guilds like SnowCrows taking already quite a lot of time to benchmark and theorycraft optimal comps after a patch hits, imagine how much longer it takes if patches really changes things significantly. People are going to try new AND old builds again, instead of always going for that same old familiar comp. every single time. It's boring as hell!

Big disclaimer: I'm talking about PvE only here. I haven't really given it much thought how such an approach would impact WvW and PvP, although shaking up the pirate ship (WvW) and the Scourge-FB-babysit-comp (PvP) a little bit (read: significantly :) ) wouldn't hurt imo!

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@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:People only look at the damage potential of the different profession and count on the support to provide all boons. Unfortunately, despite all those advantage you listed the reaper is still pretty close to be bottom of the barrel in term of damage potential.

Reaper sure have it's pros but those are not advantages that the average simple minded player will take into consideration willingly. Those players only seek to be able to do the maximum damage possible in the shortest amount of time because that's the best way to disregard bothersome bosses mechanisms in this game. The encounter design only really reward maximum dps, this is a flaw in itself but it tend to satisfy the point of view of the raiding crew.

Encounter design always has and will be the problem. Especially for necro which has its strengths clearly based around soft control and boom denial which do nothing for current PvE.

I'd love to see a raid where the encounter is just NPC 15 scourges and 5 firebrands playing somewhat organized lol.

Can you imagine how the community would react to every single benchmark being thrown out the window, and where
gasp
PvP builds would need to be considered, with play being more than just spamming rotations?

Well there is 2 paths out of that:
  • Either the scourge/FB NPCs have a boss breakbar system and the raid party will still focus on dps.
  • or the scourge/FB NPCs don't have the breakbar system and the raid will focus on dps and CCs.

It will just be a contest of strength, which ultimately don't change much how they behave at the moment. This is due to the fact that ultimately NPCs will reveal a patern of behavior that will allow the raid party to focus on strategy and chase after the quickest way to slay the group of ennemy.

No, like I said a bit above is that the encounter design need to make survivability more relevant (probably with boss phases where they are totally immun to damage until the group resolve a random puzzle while sustaining bothersome loss of health. It could also be a boss that is near undamageable for a few minutes and lose some defense as time pass, favorising the ability to outlast your foe more than the ability to destroy it... etc.) and boon corruption as reliable as it is in PvP environment by making it interact with the breakbar system.

I still agree with you, but I don't even mean adding PvE mechanics like break bars. Break Bars still give too much of an advantage to the party. I mean literally do spammed stability/outright immunity to CC, massive block uptime, huge AoE cleave and boon corruption towards the party, etc. One person goes in alone as a DPS build, they straight up die through downed state in sub-two second windows. Scourge demands sustain-based builds, flanks, and ranged cleave away from a frontliner setup in WvW, and if designing an encounter to feature that is desired, mimicking WvW is how its easily-achieved.

Most of the actions in WvW are pretty scripted and predictable. That's easy to automate and create some logic for, and then put behind some randomization for timings as to when they'll engage, etc. You also don't want it to be perfect in execution as being outnumbered is pretty much unwinnable into real players.

They can do plenty to improve the necro's relevance in raids, and I've suggested almost all of what you said in the past, but most of the current fundamental approach to PvE (optimization for damage ruling certain classes out) don't change by adding timers onto things.

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