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How to fix the WvW meta with two changes


RisenHowl.2419

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@SkyShroud.2865 said:

@SkyShroud.2865 said:The problem is you are looking at blob vs blob.

which do you see more often, 20v20 or 50+v50+?

or more realistically, 20v50+. which is where changing sand savant and antitoxin runes will have the most impact. full squad is a minimum of 10 scourge, each capable of a 50k+dps bomb that can collectively one shot anything under 30 people as soon as they get into <300 range. 500k total bomb after sand savant nerf becomes a 300k bomb, which you can actually fight back against, giving smaller guilds a chance to fight against a full squad again.

That is the problem here. Guilds don't field 50+. Your wish for dynamic in blob can and will impact the guilds that fight outnumbered. Fighting outnumber biggest problem isn't the amount of aoe because aoe has been a thing for 7 years but the amount of boonstripping available from 2 different classes and likewise how mount can catch up and overcome any forms of cc and adsorb part of the damages. So what if you nerf scourge, you still have another class capable of boonstripping and since you nerf the dps of scourge, why would there be a chance small squad to deal with outnumbered? Their collective dps would drop as well. For blob fight, you just gonna shift the meta into pirateshipping with herald.

Guilds field 20-30, then have another 20+ pugs follow whether the tag is open or not. That's been the norm for years man =/

They're already nerfing scourge scepter, dropping the 10 target shade corrupts down to 6 target corrupts would be the icing on the cake.

What do you think would be healthy changes for the meta? Mount down to 6k hp?

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@RisenHowl.2419 said:

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:yep, these changes are right on.also herald boon spam is atrocious and needs addressing.

Agreed, draconic echo needs to lose the 10 target facets. It should be 5 target and the trait gives +1s base duration per tick

I see where you are coming from and to an extent I do agree with you: 600 radius boons for 10 people is very good, especially by getting so much value out of no concentration investment. However, as someone who has been a diehard Ventari/support player for about 3.5 years (although I don't play it much in WvW anymore because zerg lag has been so bad for me), Draconic Echo has been a godsend for the spec and I would be devastated to see the 10-target aspect be removed. I don't really know what a solution would be, but it has given the spec a lot of leverage and in my eyes it is only a few changes away from having a legit spot in comps. Removing DE would be a step back.

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@"Pterikdactyl.7630" said:

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:yep, these changes are right on.also herald boon spam is atrocious and needs addressing.

Agreed, draconic echo needs to lose the 10 target facets. It should be 5 target and the trait gives +1s base duration per tick

I see where you are coming from and to an extent I do agree with you: 600 radius boons for 10 people is very good, especially by getting so much value out of no concentration investment. However, as someone who has been a diehard Ventari/support player for about 3.5 years (although I don't play it much in WvW anymore because zerg lag has been so bad for me), Draconic Echo has been a godsend for the spec and I would be devastated to see the 10-target aspect be removed. I don't really know what a solution would be, but it has given the spec a lot of leverage and in my eyes it is only a few changes away from having a legit spot in comps. Removing DE would be a step back.

That's a valid concern I haven't considered, would adding some of the utility back in the ventari traitline be effective? I'm not very familiar with Ventari Rev past the basics.

Adding utility to Ventari would work well from a WvW standpoint since you can't take it with an offensive Rev build, the other options are too good

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@Acyk.9671 said:

@"Pterikdactyl.7630" said:

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:yep, these changes are right on.also herald boon spam is atrocious and needs addressing.

Agreed, draconic echo needs to lose the 10 target facets. It should be 5 target and the trait gives +1s base duration per tick

I see where you are coming from and to an extent I do agree with you: 600 radius boons for 10 people is very good, especially by getting so much value out of no concentration investment. However, as someone who has been a diehard Ventari/support player for about 3.5 years (although I don't play it much in WvW anymore because zerg lag has been so bad for me), Draconic Echo has been a godsend for the spec and I would be devastated to see the 10-target aspect be removed. I don't really know what a solution would be, but it has given the spec a lot of leverage and in my eyes it is only a few changes away from having a legit spot in comps. Removing DE would be a step back.

That's a valid concern I haven't considered, would adding some of the utility back in the ventari traitline be effective? I'm not very familiar with Ventari Rev past the basics.

Adding utility to Ventari would work well from a WvW standpoint since you can't take it with an offensive Rev build, the other options are too good

You wanna push for range shiro herald instead of melee herald?

O.o? I'm missing something I think lol. I was saying you can't run ventari traitline on a dps herald, the other 4 options are so much stronger that even if the devs added a bunch of boon utility to it no one would take it.

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@Justine.6351 said:And a couple months after the patch people will start complaining about CoR damage again because it still does damage to their uber awesome unkillable build.

I don't think that's likely, it's a pretty sizable nerf and people will actually be able to see and avoid it. Top end hits should still do ~10k, which puts it on part with other builds running glass

The complaints get bad when anything can pull 15k+, which is a pretty reasonable time to complain lol

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@RisenHowl.2419 said:

@"Justine.6351" said:And a couple months after the patch people will start complaining about CoR damage again because it still does damage to their uber awesome unkillable build.

I don't think that's likely, it's a pretty sizable nerf and people will actually be able to see and avoid it. Top end hits should still do ~10k, which puts it on part with other builds running glass

The complaints get bad when anything can pull 15k+, which is a pretty reasonable time to complain lol

Glass cannons eat glass cannons. Sorry but people saying "hur dur I take 15k cor and meteors on my super awesome facetank build" are fairly lolworthy. And it's always people who show only a damage number but mysteriously have the rest of the important information missing or lol blacked out. I have yet to see someone post a vid of a rev actively chunking out those repeated big numbers so we can actually see those huge stacks of vulnerability.

When I get those kinds of numbers it's on staff ele, soulbeasts and thieves with the occasional meme glass build like moronic cleave reaper.

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@RisenHowl.2419 said:-Scourge can now be a viable support elite spec in pve, pvp, and wvw. You know, like it was advertised to be-Carpet bombing goes away, reducing load on the servers. Two birds, meet one stone-Other melee classes become viable. Shakes up the meta after two years of pirate ship

While I do agree with your assessment, that other classes do become viable, I am not convinced that carpet-bombing would go away, and the pirate-ship meta could be overcome with the proposed changes alone. Why would not other AoE classes replace Scourge for bombs? Because the scourge-shades last too long on a too short CD? Wouldn't meteor storms become an issue? I know their CD is long, but with less scourges, there could be more room for tempests / weavers. The area of meteor storms is pretty large, which could compensate for the CD somewhat. The damage is also pretty high.

There might be other AoE powers, which could become interesting. Maybe I am wrong; please help me to understand why.

I do agree on the assessment, that condi would become more viable again, with less cleansing available; I am not convinced that it might not be overpowering, leading once more to a condi-heavy meta. Even now I still, despite all the cleansing available, see battles die to condis, though of course not nearly as many as, say, a year back.

IMO changes to the underlying subsystems are necessary. The problem with conditions, boons and cleanses are, that their effects are not symmetrical: (damaging) conditions stack, for all practical purposes, an unlimited amount of times. Helpful boons do only stack duration (and not intensity) or they stack only a limited amount of times; sometimes 5 times, sometimes 25 times.Cleanses on the other hand do not care about the number of times condis are stacked. They clear a whole stack of one (or several) types of conditions.These assymetrical subsystems create an environment, which is hard to control. IMO we would need changes, which bring the subsystems more in line with each other to create a controllable environment, which in turn can be balanced in the end.

The same goes for damaging AoEs. While every single AoE has a limited number of targets it can hit, you can still stack an unlimited number of AoEs for very high amounts of damage on a very short time. As AoEs always create area denial, hit several targets at once, they are in zerg fights always a preferable option. AoEs also create area denial over a set duration, adding additional incentive to use area effects over single-target or even normal multi-target hits.As long as they can be stacked an unlimited amount of times, the AoE meta will always be more relevant IMO, than single target damage.There is also an assymetrical system when it comes to helpful stacked AoEs. Everyone who ever tried blasting a smoke field, while someone else create a fire field atop will know that. You cannot stack helpful AoEs the same way you can stack harmful AoEs.

IMO we would need changes to the way AoE stacking currently works; my suggestion would be to introduce diminishing returns for stacked damaging AoEs.Maybe I am wrong; in this case I'd also like help in understanding why.

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@LetoII.3782 said:

@SkyShroud.2865 said:The problem is you are looking at blob vs blob.

That problem isn't going away though.

It kinda is though.I've enjoyed seeing blobs of driverless backline Garbo builds trying to hide behind each other, already. That's a situation very likely to get more common as the game mode empties out.

This.

Ktrain groups met with a smaller percentage of players that know how to focus and coordinating, get wrecked.

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@nthmetal.9652 said:

@RisenHowl.2419 said:-Scourge can now be a viable support elite spec in pve, pvp, and wvw. You know, like it was advertised to be-Carpet bombing goes away, reducing load on the servers. Two birds, meet one stone-Other melee classes become viable. Shakes up the meta after two years of pirate ship

While I do agree with your assessment, that other classes do become viable, I am not convinced that carpet-bombing would go away, and the pirate-ship meta could be overcome with the proposed changes alone. Why would not other AoE classes replace Scourge for bombs? Because the scourge-shades last too long on a too short CD? Wouldn't meteor storms become an issue? I know their CD is long, but with less scourges, there could be more room for tempests / weavers. The area of meteor storms is pretty large, which could compensate for the CD somewhat. The damage is also pretty high.

There might be other AoE powers, which could become interesting. Maybe I am wrong; please help me to understand why.

I do agree on the assessment, that condi would become more viable again, with less cleansing available; I am not convinced that it might not be overpowering, leading once more to a condi-heavy meta. Even now I still, despite all the cleansing available, see battles die to condis, though of course not nearly as many as, say, a year back.

IMO changes to the underlying subsystems are necessary. The problem with conditions, boons and cleanses are, that their effects are not symmetrical: (damaging) conditions stack, for all practical purposes, an unlimited amount of times. Helpful boons do only stack duration (and not intensity) or they stack only a limited amount of times; sometimes 5 times, sometimes 25 times.Cleanses on the other hand do not care about the number of times condis are stacked. They clear a whole stack of one (or several) types of conditions.These assymetrical subsystems create an environment, which is hard to control. IMO we would need changes, which bring the subsystems more in line with each other to create a controllable environment, which in turn can be balanced in the end.

The same goes for damaging AoEs. While every single AoE has a limited number of targets it can hit, you can still stack an unlimited number of AoEs for very high amounts of damage on a very short time. As AoEs always create area denial, hit several targets at once, they are in zerg fights always a preferable option. AoEs also create area denial over a set duration, adding additional incentive to use area effects over single-target or even normal multi-target hits.As long as they can be stacked an unlimited amount of times, the AoE meta will always be more relevant IMO, than single target damage.There is also an assymetrical system when it comes to helpful stacked AoEs. Everyone who ever tried blasting a smoke field, while someone else create a fire field atop will know that. You cannot stack helpful AoEs the same way you can stack harmful AoEs.

IMO we would need changes to the way AoE stacking currently works; my suggestion would be to introduce diminishing returns for stacked damaging AoEs.Maybe I am wrong; in this case I'd also like help in understanding why.

Scourge currently has a 10 target cap, this change would reduce that cap to 6. That's a pretty big change to the carpet bomb mechanic currently in place, there isn't another class with comparable area denial that could be used to fill the gap. The only other classes with ranged, low cd aoes that aren't projectiles are guards, revs, and eles. all of which would stay meta for exactly that reason. weaver's a really difficult class to play well while dealing top end damage and they're easily countered by the 11k base hp pool- if anything hits one they die lol

Sand savant almost doubles the radius at which shades apply their effects in addition to a 60% increase in targets. They're the biggest reason why other melee classes can't be used- they can't get within 300 range of the enemy group without getting rocked by the 300 shade radius. If you try you get all your boons corrupted and eat a ton of CC/damage

After all the nerfs to scourge condition output, just take a look at their skills- 2s torment on f1-4 and 7x5s on f5, 5s icd on dhuumfire, etc they're no longer useful as a condition class in wvw. the output is too low, even with the conditions from corrupting. If you want to check it out, download arcdps and open the personal skills screen. They've been nerfed into the ground because the dev team wasn't willing to touch sand savant

I think it's a lot more likely we'll see a change to sand savant before we see an overhaul of the boons and conditions systems or the aoe system. The goal here is making it as easy a change to implement with the highest impact possible. It would be very low effort to add a modifier to sand savant that changes manifest sand shade from a damage dealing skill into a healing one, that makes it appealing to the understaffed balance team.

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