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Something has to be done about scourges and firebrands.


Doug.4930

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@Mil.3562 said:Does balancing always means nerfing professions? Can we not buff other classes to make them counter these meta classes?

In other words, buff instead of nerf to give us more meta choices. Support Scrappers used to be a good counter to scrouges but weak against power builds. And ANet doesn't like it.

Not everyone likes to play FB snd Scrg. I forced myself to try out both of them and after a few weeks of gameplay, i just don't like their play styles, meta or not.

So for those that play only WvW, it's either you stick to your preferred professions and get blocked from joining squads or play meta classes. Or you stopped playing, totally. It has been so since PoF and ANet is not concerned at all.

Lately, it seems like many players gave up. We are are fedup of waiting and waiting and waiting and...

Merchandise sales and partnerships are their priorities now? How good can your sales be if player base continues to shrink drastically?

have you not realised how much power creep there is already in both WvW and PvP?

Anet should nerf everything across the board, not continuously adding more fire power...... with this vicious cycle of continually adding more and more fire power, the game probably end up you probably will be dying from an auto attack

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necro core just got nerfed and core shouldn't be touched. If you keep this up, necros will be sub par in WVW.

Nerfs to core when core itself is so weak that ANET literally has to make the elites stronger because core is such a weak pitiful mess means they should go after scourge elite and just overhaul it.

And for that matter add some extra play testers for WVW and classes and maybe even a testing area to see where a class is considered overpowered, since people at times don't know and cry about the wrong thing then a class gets completely butchered.

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@Justine.6351 said:

@Arctisavange.7261 said:I find it hilarious people thinking scourge and firebrand are the real issues when you got revenants and eles who crit you for 10-16k damage.

I find it hilarious when people blame hammer rev for the so called pirate ship meta when I deal like 5k damage and get run over by a wall of scourges and firebrands. Ironically my best targets are other glass cannons who believes the lie that it's a pirate ship meta.

Well some people maybe said it wrong and it is really comes to the situation. What successful guilds use is stealth then bomb them out of stealth first with rev then with scourge and then push them. When both doing this it is like semi-pirateship which is the same when both don't use stealth. If we had a real pirateship meta Soulbeasts and Ele would be meta but we haven't. Public zergs are also a very different house number

It also depends on what tier level your server is , weak enemies getting always just pushed

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FB has alot of spam gameplay, it is a bad behavior, just look at revenant forums some say jalis is awfull cause has no boons so it doesn't help the team and its selfish wich is totally false, this is the problem when some dev's ending making bad players getting carried with boooon spam with no effort, alot of players know that stack and spam can make them over-performing within some classes, scourges with their low effort player aoe spam and barrier and FB's(this one isnt has bad has scourge) design are the culprits of the ugly gameplay where every one stacks this 2 for over-performance.

FB since is mostly cones and book virtues are some aoes can be accepted, and just have some minor changes.Scourge can be extremely offensive and defensive at the same time, with alot of big aoes, IT lacks real trade offs...

Note: Start stacking hammer zerker jalis to counter scourges lamers that expect to get carried.

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@"XenesisII.1540" said:"Nerf everyone but my class." - Everyone's opinion.Balance is actually fine, people need to adapt, not playing wvw is also a way of adapting.

Actually they need to nerf the elites and overhaul the cores of the classes to be up to date.

I could see some changes to core ele to make the auras better for instance and maybe some changes could happen to weaver.

Scourge is the one that should be nerfed not core necro not reaper. scourge has too many stuff attached that combined is very unhealthy for the game and extremely bad. having boon corrupt condi corrupt and barriers attached to a single ability is far too strong and some of the stuff needs to be changed and then undo stuff to core that was done because of scourge.

When you literally have a entire core spec under performing and having to buff elites to make them viable because core is outdated and underpowered, you need to fix that. I think they should have fixe it a long time ago actually.

Mirage dodge mechanic is something people complain bout and has some unhealthy stuff about it and should be changed and fix some of the stuff like illusion line to make it better.

I would like to see if druid can compete with firebrand, and if not, buff it and nerf firebrand somehow to add variety. I won-t say much about guard. I heard core is well designed not sure if that's enough for other specs to shine.

Deadeye was very bad for the game too perma stealth one shots is overpowered, and hence why it got nerfed. I don't have much to say about thief in general because I rarely play pvp and only play pvp with thief and I was far from good.

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@Axl.8924 what wil happen is that next elite specs will have to call atention of plebs and gimmicker more than PoF ones did so they will feel forced to move on to the next gimmick, expect strong aoe and stronger spam.

What Anet said they dont do towards armor progression they kinda do it towards next elite spec design.U dont progress by armor stats but u can progress towards overperformance on elite specs.

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@Axl.8924 said:

@"XenesisII.1540" said:"Nerf everyone but my class." - Everyone's opinion.Balance is actually fine, people need to adapt, not playing wvw is also a way of adapting.

Actually they need to nerf the elites and overhaul the cores of the classes to be up to date.

I could see some changes to core ele to make the auras better for instance and maybe some changes could happen to weaver.

weaver? What exactly should change, after the recent buff of weaver?

Scourge is the one that should be nerfed not core necro not reaper. scourge has too many stuff attached that combined is very unhealthy for the game and extremely bad. having boon corrupt condi corrupt and barriers attached to a single ability is far too strong and some of the stuff needs to be changed and then undo stuff to core that was done because of scourge.

Boon corrupt is core necro (and curses in general) is core necro, barriers dont trigger on EVERY ability, core necro was buffed last balance patch.

When you literally have a entire core spec under performing and having to buff elites to make them viable because core is outdated and underpowered, you need to fix that. I think they should have fixe it a long time ago actually.

they buff elites so they can sell expansions, which is a way of making em money. Plus, core nec roam build is among the top builds out thereMirage dodge mechanic is something people complain bout and has some unhealthy stuff about it and should be changed and fix some of the stuff like illusion line to make it better.

the talk is about scourge and fb, mirage is a meme in blobsI would like to see if druid can compete with firebrand, and if not, buff it and nerf firebrand somehow to add variety. I won-t say much about guard. I heard core is well designed not sure if that's enough for other specs to shine.

even in pve, they killed druid in favor of fb and rev. As was expected for people to, again, buy expansions.Deadeye was very bad for the game too perma stealth one shots is overpowered, and hence why it got nerfed. I don't have much to say about thief in general because I rarely play pvp and only play pvp with thief and I was far from good.

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@"Arctisavange.7261" said:Take WSR for example - do you think these guys are steamrolling everyone in EU cause of scourges and firebrands? Think again, its all eles and revenants who are making everything possible. Even yesterday for example i got crited for 16,000 damage by an ele (from maximum long distance) with 1 skill in a blob fight while playing on a scourge with 25k hp. And yes im playing against WSR who knows how to take advantage of any class that is OP and overlooked by clueless players.

Leave scourge and firebrand alone for now. Nerf the revenant and eles where their

Just wait till you see the new thing we've been cooking up...https://i.imgur.com/GphslBo.png

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@Lightning Xv.8705 said:

In a 1v1 scourge is basically unbeatable if you're pure melee and use boons in anyway.

umm you may need to recheck your build if you play a melee class and lose to a scourge 1v1. Scourge is easily CC locked, the barrier application is low enough that you can power through it. The spec lacks the 2nd health bar to do what it normally does and face tank damage because anet refuses to give necromancer real survivablilty.

^^ This right here. Exactly this. If my Scourge is on its own, and I come across any ranged class, I am basically pooched. There are times I barely have a chance to react and I am down from 29K health. DE or Ranger - even some engis. Scourges have no blocks, barriers are weak, damage is poor, and lack of anything to let us run away (a la ranger, DE, engi....hmmm...I see a pattern here...)

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@Voltekka.2375 said:

@Axl.8924 said:

@"XenesisII.1540" said:"Nerf everyone but my class." - Everyone's opinion.Balance is actually fine, people need to adapt, not playing wvw is also a way of adapting.

Actually they need to nerf the elites and overhaul the cores of the classes to be up to date.

I could see some changes to core ele to make the auras better for instance and maybe some changes could happen to weaver.

weaver? What exactly should change, after the recent buff of weaver?

Scourge is the one that should be nerfed not core necro not reaper. scourge has too many stuff attached that combined is very unhealthy for the game and extremely bad. having boon corrupt condi corrupt and barriers attached to a single ability is far too strong and some of the stuff needs to be changed and then undo stuff to core that was done because of scourge.

Boon corrupt is core necro (and curses in general) is core necro, barriers dont trigger on EVERY ability, core necro was buffed last balance patch.

When you literally have a entire core spec under performing and having to buff elites to make them viable because core is outdated and underpowered, you need to fix that. I think they should have fixe it a long time ago actually.

they buff elites so they can sell expansions, which is a way of making em money. Plus, core nec roam build is among the top builds out thereMirage dodge mechanic is something people complain bout and has some unhealthy stuff about it and should be changed and fix some of the stuff like illusion line to make it better.

the talk is about scourge and fb, mirage is a meme in blobsI would like to see if druid can compete with firebrand, and if not, buff it and nerf firebrand somehow to add variety. I won-t say much about guard. I heard core is well designed not sure if that's enough for other specs to shine.

even in pve, they killed druid in favor of fb and rev. As was expected for people to, again, buy expansions.Deadeye was very bad for the game too perma stealth one shots is overpowered, and hence why it got nerfed. I don't have much to say about thief in general because I rarely play pvp and only play pvp with thief and I was far from good.

Nevermind about the auras thing I don't know if that will ever happen to see the unique thing about eles (auras) will ever be strong enough to be really spreading them to groups. Then again technically they do have earth aura which is useful vs ranged attacks but like i don't see much use of the fire aura which is fire dmg.

And you are right they buffed water to make dmg traits stronger, i was merely thinking of support tempest not a dps weaver part. tempest is what i tend to play.

guess i was just hopeful for more for the fire aura. the healing is pretty solid, i just wanted to see stronger auras and to focus more on the auras.

Also Core necro isn't that strong its sustain and other stuff aren't as strong as say reaper and or scourge.

The problem is scourge with its stuff combined in which it becomes overloaded, so nerfing core necro will just make needing more overpowered elites to compete necessary.

All you are doing by gutting classes completely, is killing WVW and pvp and making more people leave.

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@crepuscular.9047 said:

@Mil.3562 said:Does balancing always means nerfing professions? Can we not buff other classes to make them counter these meta classes?

In other words, buff instead of nerf to give us more meta choices. Support Scrappers used to be a good counter to scrouges but weak against power builds. And ANet doesn't like it.

Not everyone likes to play FB snd Scrg. I forced myself to try out both of them and after a few weeks of gameplay, i just don't like their play styles, meta or not.

So for those that play only WvW, it's either you stick to your preferred professions and get blocked from joining squads or play meta classes. Or you stopped playing, totally. It has been so since PoF and ANet is not concerned at all.

Lately, it seems like many players gave up. We are are fedup of waiting and waiting and waiting and...

Merchandise sales and partnerships are their priorities now? How good can your sales be if player base continues to shrink drastically?

have you not realised how much power creep there is already in both WvW and PvP?

Anet should nerf everything across the board, not continuously adding more fire power...... with this vicious cycle of continually adding more and more fire power, the game probably end up you probably will be dying from an auto attack

Exactly. Not asking ANet to buff power builds to counter power creep. Buff support build instead. Lately, much of the nerfs are targetting at buffs, boons and heals, affecting meta support builds.

Maybe the real balance team has been fired and replaced by the dice rolling team that only knows nerfs coding.

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Guardians, Fire Brands, Dragon Hunters all need to experience a great nerf-en-ing. Virtually every other class in this game has at one time or another been so nerfed they were bottom of the barrel EXCEPT Guardian and its variants. It is the only class since pre-release that has been essentially necessary. It needs to go through the painful process of having its attacks, traits and skills nerfed to the point that people complain when a person shows up with one.

Every complains about thieves, mirage, holosmiths, etc... how about they go after the class that is so absurdly OP for so long that everyone just accepts it is the way it is supposed to be.

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@Straegen.2938 said:Guardians, Fire Brands, Dragon Hunters all need to experience a great nerf-en-ing. Virtually every other class in this game has at one time or another been so nerfed they were bottom of the barrel EXCEPT Guardian and its variants. It is the only class since pre-release that has been essentially necessary. It needs to go through the painful process of having its attacks, traits and skills nerfed to the point that people complain when a person shows up with one.

Every complains about thieves, mirage, holosmiths, etc... how about they go after the class that is so absurdly OP for so long that everyone just accepts it is the way it is supposed to be.

it is necessary as a melee squad. but if not melee squad, it is not.

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Touching these classes are same as just touching the surface of the issue.Anet and people need to understand changes that occur throughout the the years and analyse the impact of these changes.

Initially, we have simple skills where you don't have easy to access active and passive team heal. You want team buffs, you have to blast combo fields for it. The vets should remember we use to blast fire, water and lightning fields frequently. The boons duration wasn't as crazy as now, the boonstrips don't affect as many as now. All in all, greater teamplay prevail.

HOT come, things start to go a bit crazy. We have access to greater boons duration, active and passive team heals and more dps. It took awhile but we found out how to abuse the boons thus allow certain level of zerg busting to keep going. However, once everybody knows the correct builds, zerg busting become near to impossible. Still, anet is not waiting for that to happen, they decided the boons are too much so here come the POF's balance.

POF arrived with greater access of boonstrip. They justify these greater access of boonstrip by having firebrand of greater access of boons. Yet, anet and some don't get it. The number boonstrips grow exponentially alongside with your numbers. No matter the amount of firebrand, you are gonna melt. Your boons gonna be stripped instantly, you gonna be bombed to death instantly with the power creep. Anet think nerfing scourge gonna fix this? What a joke. Blob can still perma push you with extra 10 spellbreakers, you still gonna be dead dead dead. Zerg busting era is basically over. It is the blob era now, who own the bigger blob that knows how to smash their buttons win.

The only real fix to the issue is balance revamp throughout the entire game. You gonna review every single piece of gears, runes, food, sigils, skills etc etc. After which, you also need to rebalance the pve mobs due to all these reviews. Then maybe you can fix your game.

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@"DeadlySynz.3471" said:Necromancer doesn't need to be touched. They are slow and dreadfully easy to kill. Guardian on the other hand needs to be gutted. I brought this up yesterday but realized i missed a few more points on what they do. But first look at scourge.

As slanted as the original view of looking primarily at scourges might be, your view is also problematic. The context sadly matters quite a lot; I would argue th scourge design is objectively pretty bad currently: For WvW it is mainly or possibly only used in zerging. But if we are going to complain about that, we should take a look at things at even a wider angle: Where scourge sees use only in zerging, and here it is, despite all the nerfs, vital to the zerg composition, professions like mirage, thief or ranger see use only in roaming. If we are going to discuss fixing a design flaw, let's discuss it on a systemic level.But we're not, we're looking at scourges in the context of WvW zerging.

The main problems (from the viewpoint of other classes) of scourges is the boon corruption and persistent AoEs. The reason for the corruption is the boonspam. But the reason for the boonspam is that without those boons you tough the enemy zerg and are almost instakilled. All these issues are related. You will have to scroll way down to see why I think that.

But first:I will pick one or two of the points provided to look at them:

Now the Guardian, the kingpin of all WvW problems, the class that does too much and does it well. The class that many commanders do (or used to) refuse to leave spawn until they had enough. Also the main reason groups blame the lost of fights.. not enough firebrands. So this is what this class has the ability to do:

  • Party stability to the point if organized correctly, the group is permanently immune to CC (and this is very easy to achieve)

Have you played this game without the guardian stability? Have you tried pushing a zerg where your stab is not adequate? You get pingponged all over the place. As a warrior I can run balanced stance, do full counter (for stab) and stomp and it does not provide anything even near adequate CC protection.The problem with that? You lack that kind of complete protection and you can do nothing. And as a warrior you have a whole sack full of stunbreaks! Despite all that there is nothing you can do, because the moment you break CC you immediately get CCd again. And that means you die.

Being able to do nothing, locking the player out of options, is a very bad design. It takes away player agency, which is never good.

Scourges are part of the problem, as they corrupt the stab. The CC itself actually mostly comes from revs (I believe).Bottom line? There is too much of it. If you wanna reduce the stab of guardians you either also need to reduce CC all over the place, introduce a mechanism that generally mitigates CC or increase CC protection all over the place.

  • Condition removal, between the books and purging flames, nothing else really needs to be said bout this

You also mentioned resistance, further up in your post, I'll put my reply here, though, as IMO it belongs together:I have never seen resistance being the main problem here. The number of cleanses though. The cleanses! If you look at that you might wanna look at the scrappers.I have less of a problem with condis at least as long as condi-ticks in zergfights are not 5-digit numbers per tick - which I have seen. A well-organized enemy group can easily reach those numbers, and if that's the case, lacking the cleanses is no fun either. Most classes lack adequate cleanses to deal with these problems.

  • Condition conversion to boons (this needs to be separated from Condition removal because the fact this class can do both is beyond asinine.

I find it funny that you mention this here. It's primarily scrappers, which do this, and they do it massively. However I can't see how this can be critizized without at the same time taking a close look at the booncorrruption mechanic.

This is all basically coming from 1 single spec! And we wonder why the meta has gone completely stale in WvW. Why are even people complaining about other classes at all? They do 11 things well, while other classes are relegated to 1-2 things well, and maybe if they're lucky, being average at a 2nd or 3rd thing.

I agree this surely is a problem; distributing this to other classes would be beneficial to the diversity of a zerg. Looking at the recent though, I would expect these changes to come with a clear cost, though, and I don't see this happening without having severe consequences on the acceptance of other classes.I'd like to see defensive buffs to other classes, though (without a severe cost attached) so that they could help the zerg prevail in the current metal.

Also you are looking at the FB as doing so many things, without even mentioning that there is another reason the scourge is being used so much and no other AoE classes are used to fulfill the role they do: Area denial. Only the scourge can place down AoEs that stay there for a prolongued time and can be popped as needed. This fact alone contributes so much to the pirate-ship meta that is still so strong these days.

So bottom of the line: If we touch the firebrand and remove stuff, we need to give these options to other classes. We would get better zerg class diversity, but we woud not get rid of the problems. We still need the level of protection we currently recieve from FB, we would just have to get them from other classes. The end result from the view point of a scourge would be the same.

To change this bottom line, to change the result, we need a deeper look:

  • AoEs stack an unlimited number of times multiplying their effect intensity effectively
  • (damaging) Condis stack an unlimited number of times, stacking effect intensity effectively.
  • direct damage "stacks" on you (effectively stacking intensity)
  • CC without stab completely lock you out of your ability to act - the very worst of any design, because it takes away player agency

We also know that cleanses work on whole stacks of condis, removing all burning for example, all poison, etc. One of the reasons that condis need to stack so high is that DoT in WvW is not as relevant. Due to the stacks you need to cleanse them quickly, without it you just drop.The reason you need CC protection in form of stab is, without it you get locked out of any way to act completely. Which means you'll just lie face down and need to respawn.The reason you need protection, aegis, healing is that without it, the damage is so high you fall over immediately.Most damage-protective effects also do not stack intensity but they stack duration. (Resistance possibly being the exception)

If you want to really discuss adressing the problems, take a look at the root cause. Reduce the effectivity of stacking, introducing diminishing returns for stacking effects, which stack in intensity or the equivalent of intensity.If we reduce the intensity of stacked damaging AoEs, if we somehow reduce CC by for example adding an internal immunity cooldown (probably a terrible idea! I know! I'm just throwing out ideas), we can reduce the boonspam.

The goal we should be looking for is making fights not one-push. You want to achieve a clear result with an attack, without the opposition (or yourself) immediately falling over due to the high numbers. Fights should last a number of moves, maybe at least 3-4 pushes / counterpushes not one-push. That's when they feel good. If we can achieve that without the boonspam/healing/stab, all the better.

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