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Why increasing cooldowns does not reduce spam, and can even make spam worse.


Master Ketsu.4569

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@KryTiKaL.3125 said:An important thing to remember about the update as well is in the very first post Cal does mention that they intend to go with a speedier release cadence. They are aiming for changes, fixes and updates to come every 4 to 6 weeks as opposed to the 3 to 4 months that we are used to. As well as looking to maybe get some in even sooner than that depending on circumstances. If this actually does end up being the case then that could alleviate problems persisting for too long. A release cadence of 4 to 6 weeks might still seem like a long time for people but its about on par with where GW1 was with its balance change schedule.

I'm glad to hear that at least. Thumbs up there.

As for the beta test weekends I have thought of that as well. That seems like the way that it might be done but supposedly thats not in the cards or they haven't considered it or they can't split it in such a way that it won't affect the game at large rather than be an isolated area. Who knows. I was told by a dev a while ago that there are tech constraints that keep them from doing it. So if thats the case then this is how it needs to be handled as unfortunate as it might be.

It is actually hard with these MMOs. They could always do things the Runescape way. Wish I had remembered last night, but Runescape has in game poll booths in which potential balance and content updates are first polled to the community before implementation. If the devs are looking at something particular to change, they include that in the monthly poll, and you visit the booth in game and vote on whether or not it sounds good to you.

Things are added and changed based on scale and community feedback. Like, if they just wanted to slightly dial back some numbers, they could do it with a 60%-40% community vote. Something as big and game-changing as this patch would probably take at minimum 75% vote in favor to be added because you have to account for things like alts and people who immediately vote yes or no because balance is nearly impossible to look at objectively. The Yea votes always have to outnumber the Nay votes pretty substantially because of that.

It works for Runescape because generally speaking if the strong majority of a community can come together and agree something is broken one way or the other, then it's probably worth looking at.

@ZDragon.3046 said:Dont agree with this several times i have i seen new people going into pvp not understanding whats going on because something kills them and blinks away in less than 3 seconds and there was no tell or they dont understand how their own boon spamming can be punished by something like necromancer because all they know is go go go attack attack attack because the game allows that to work in the majority of situations (depending on the profession)

To be clear i dont want the game to slow down to before HoT days but the game could stand to slow down a tid bit from where it is now without killing it. I thought gw2 was fast action back then after all compared to most other games i had played and i think if it slows down from where it is now it will still be faster than most of the other modern or on going mmos you could play today.

I feel that really. I think the game could stand to slow down some as well, for the sake of new players.

Really, it just comes down to how slow you think fights will be after this update. If it's only slightly; enough to keep the game fast-pace, but giving people time to actually react to things, then i'll love it. If fights just drag on and nothing ever dies, i'll be bored out of my mind, and i'll probably stop playing PvP entirely. Even for dailies, and the occasional fun with a friend in Unranked.

And that's just me. I don't like hardcore bunkery playstyles. I find them incredibly boring to fight and play as. What turns me away, might attract other people. And of course, this would all be after the patch actually releases.

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@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

TL;DR Conclusion: Spam and lack of calculated skill usage is not caused by low cooldowns, but by abilities that are difficult to punish. Increasing the cooldown on a badly designed ability that does too many things does not fix the problem that it does too many things and is badly designed. An ability that is broken to the point where it is always worth using every 10 seconds will still be always worth using every 20s, 30s, and so on. Well designed abilities that have counterplay in mind can have no cooldown whatsoever and not be spammable because using them poorly can result in those skills being punished. The problem isn't cooldowns, the problem is when a move does everything at once and thus ends up with no strategy or skill behind it.

This conclusion is wrong. SF2 and GW2 has many things in common in terms of cooldown. SF2 has cooldowns, you're just not noticing them.

Certain skills, like Guile's Sonic Boom, has a cooldown and in order to put the skill in cooldown, you have to remain in a defensive position and wait for the cooldown to finish before using the skill again. Using the skill prematurely will interrupt the cooldown and result on a fizzled skill, meaning, no Sonic Boom.

In skills like Ryu's fireball, there is a cooldown, yet subtle, but it's there. Once he throws the fireball, he is frozen in that position for certain amount of time preventing him from throwing an infinite number of, or spamming, fireballs in sequence -- a.k.a. skill cooldown.

The dragon punch also have a cooldown. Ever notice how high they jump depending on how strong the dragon punch is? That's a cooldown for the skill. They can't use another dragon punch until they touch the ground. The stronger the skill, the higher they get, and the longer they have to wait before using it again.

The only difference that SF2 has that GW2 doesn't have is risk. For instance, using the strong dragon punch, if you missed it will leave you highly vulnerable to counter attack -- it's a high risk skill. The high risk keeps that skill in check thus it's not used often unless it's a guaranteed hit. In GW2, using a strong skill typically doesn't pose a risk instead it opens a window of opportunity and often times, that window is too short. So, increasing the cooldown keeps that window open for a long time and gives opportunity for counter play. This is the only way to make a strong skill to have a high risk similar to SF2 in GW2.

You are confusing recovery time and animation locks for cooldowns, which GW2 also has. Two extremely different concepts.

@Crackmonster.2790 said:While i think a lot of people are afraid of it breaking the cadence with too many cooldown increases and that the fear is justified, i don't think this particular post highlights why, in fact it feels like not making much meaningful points at all, and most of the comparisons being made here are broken or simply misleading. Wording for facts, then going into opinioin with only vague ideas does not equal any reliable conclusion.

The problem is I've seen this before in the mmo I used to play ( Tera ) and the result is Zerg-meta. Increasing the cooldown of certain skills can be helpful, but the problem is having too high CDs leads to people having too big of an advantage with numbers.

For instance, say you were playing an FPS and an extremely skilled player goes up against two bad players. In this hypothetical game, it takes 80% of a magazine worth of damage to down a player. In many cases, the skilled player can outplay them by downing the first, doing a 1s reload while taking cover, and then downing the second. Now imagine that reloading takes 50 seconds. Who does this benefit the most? Answer: The two bad players. They have enough bullets to kill the good player before being slapped with the CD, but the good player does not and will be hit with that CD while one of the two bads gets to free-fire on him.

In other words, randomly increasing CDs doesn't just slow the game down and have little to do with spam. It's actually a form of lowering the skill ceiling. It allows unskilled players to win more fights they shouldn't win by simply outnumbering.

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@Multicolorhipster.9751 said:

@KryTiKaL.3125 said:An important thing to remember about the update as well is
in the very first post
Cal does mention that they intend to go with a speedier release cadence. They are aiming for changes, fixes and updates to come every 4 to 6 weeks as opposed to the 3 to 4 months that we are used to. As well as looking to maybe get some in even sooner than that depending on circumstances. If this actually does end up being the case then that could alleviate problems persisting for too long. A release cadence of 4 to 6 weeks might still seem like a long time for people but its about on par with where GW1 was with its balance change schedule.

I'm glad to hear that at least. Thumbs up there.

As for the beta test weekends I have thought of that as well. That seems like
the
way that it might be done but supposedly thats not in the cards or they haven't considered it or they can't split it in such a way that it won't affect the game at large rather than be an isolated area. Who knows. I was told by a dev a while ago that there are tech constraints that keep them from doing it. So if thats the case then this is how it needs to be handled as unfortunate as it might be.

It is actually hard with these MMOs. They could always do things the Runescape way. Wish I had remembered last night, but Runescape has in game poll booths in which potential balance and content updates are first polled to the community before implementation. If the devs are looking at something particular to change, they include that in the monthly poll, and you visit the booth in game and vote on whether or not it sounds good to you.

Things are added and changed based on scale and community feedback. Like, if they just wanted to slightly dial back some numbers, they could do it with a 60%-40% community vote. Something as big and game-changing as this patch would probably take at minimum 75% vote in favor to be added because you have to account for things like alts and people who immediately vote yes or no because balance is nearly impossible to look at objectively. The Yea votes always have to outnumber the Nay votes pretty substantially because of that.

It works for Runescape because generally speaking if the strong majority of a community can come together and agree something is broken one way or the other, then it's probably worth looking at.

@"ZDragon.3046" said:Dont agree with this several times i have i seen new people going into pvp not understanding whats going on because something kills them and blinks away in less than 3 seconds and there was no tell or they dont understand how their own boon spamming can be punished by something like necromancer because all they know is go go go attack attack attack because the game allows that to work in the majority of situations (depending on the profession)

To be clear i dont want the game to slow down to before HoT days but the game could stand to slow down a tid bit from where it is now without killing it. I thought gw2 was fast action back then after all compared to most other games i had played and i think if it slows down from where it is now it will still be faster than most of the other modern or on going mmos you could play today.

I feel that really. I think the game could stand to slow down some as well, for the sake of new players.

Really, it just comes down to how slow you think fights will be after this update. If it's only slightly; enough to keep the game fast-pace, but giving people time to actually react to things, then i'll love it. If fights just drag on and nothing ever dies, i'll be bored out of my mind, and i'll probably stop playing PvP entirely. Even for dailies, and the occasional fun with a friend in Unranked.

And that's just me. I don't like hardcore bunkery playstyles. I find them incredibly boring to fight and play as. What turns me away, might attract other people. And of course, this would all be after the patch actually releases.

I don't really know if polling is the right approach considering this games playerbase. Runescape and GW2 are pretty different in regards to actual gameplay, and I don't just mean combat. Runescape might be considered aimed more at a "hardcore" ish type of gameplay, or at least player. Sure there is crafting, and gathering, and general life skill stuff and the combat isn't exactly action combat by any stretch of the imagination, but core gameplay fundamentals in Runescape are definitely more geared towards rewarding those who go hard and has incentive to do so. In contrast GW2 doesn't quite have that. It is very much aimed at casuals, and has been for quite a while now, and I'd argue that a sizable chunk of the playerbase, even in PvP, doesn't quite have much grasp on gameplay mechanics. Just ran into someone in PvE yesterday and they didn't know what "CC" meant and they said they had been playing for 2 years. We have also seen what polling the community does on GW2. Thats how we got the disaster that is solo/duo queue only in Ranked. I wouldn't want to invite that sort of short-sightedness onto future balance updates.

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@Master Ketsu.4569 said:

TL;DR Conclusion: Spam and lack of calculated skill usage is not caused by low cooldowns, but by abilities that are difficult to punish. Increasing the cooldown on a badly designed ability that does too many things does not fix the problem that it does too many things and is badly designed. An ability that is broken to the point where it is always worth using every 10 seconds will still be always worth using every 20s, 30s, and so on. Well designed abilities that have counterplay in mind can have no cooldown whatsoever and not be spammable because using them poorly can result in those skills being punished. The problem isn't cooldowns, the problem is when a move does everything at once and thus ends up with no strategy or skill behind it.

This conclusion is wrong. SF2 and GW2 has many things in common in terms of cooldown. SF2 has cooldowns, you're just not noticing them.

Certain skills, like Guile's Sonic Boom, has a cooldown and in order to put the skill in cooldown, you have to remain in a defensive position and wait for the cooldown to finish before using the skill again. Using the skill prematurely will interrupt the cooldown and result on a fizzled skill, meaning, no Sonic Boom.

In skills like Ryu's fireball, there is a cooldown, yet subtle, but it's there. Once he throws the fireball, he is frozen in that position for certain amount of time preventing him from throwing an infinite number of, or spamming, fireballs in sequence -- a.k.a. skill cooldown.

The dragon punch also have a cooldown. Ever notice how high they jump depending on how strong the dragon punch is? That's a cooldown for the skill. They can't use another dragon punch until they touch the ground. The stronger the skill, the higher they get, and the longer they have to wait before using it again.

The only difference that SF2 has that GW2 doesn't have is risk. For instance, using the strong dragon punch, if you missed it will leave you highly vulnerable to counter attack -- it's a high risk skill. The high risk keeps that skill in check thus it's not used often unless it's a guaranteed hit. In GW2, using a strong skill typically doesn't pose a risk instead it opens a window of opportunity and often times, that window is too short. So, increasing the cooldown keeps that window open for a long time and gives opportunity for counter play. This is the only way to make a strong skill to have a high risk similar to SF2 in GW2.

You are confusing recovery time and animation locks for cooldowns, which GW2 also has. Two extremely different concepts.

Semantics. They are the same thing. They serve the same purpose.

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@Master Ketsu.4569 said:

TL;DR Conclusion: Spam and lack of calculated skill usage is not caused by low cooldowns, but by abilities that are difficult to punish. Increasing the cooldown on a badly designed ability that does too many things does not fix the problem that it does too many things and is badly designed. An ability that is broken to the point where it is always worth using every 10 seconds will still be always worth using every 20s, 30s, and so on. Well designed abilities that have counterplay in mind can have no cooldown whatsoever and not be spammable because using them poorly can result in those skills being punished. The problem isn't cooldowns, the problem is when a move does everything at once and thus ends up with no strategy or skill behind it.

Reading through your post, like most other posts since the patch notes, I really have to wonder.....Did you read the whole thing? You do know and understand that CD's on SOME skills were increased, but not that many, most of the nerfs dealt with skills that did to many things, such has hard CC and high dmg, which is what you are saying should be done.....So I really don't understand the post, though I did read fast through most of it and will look it over better once home.

The CDs on skills were in many cases on mobility and passives, most of which those passives that involved no skill and had little to no counter, much like your Monkey Man. So lets go back to that, as you stated in your post, Super Monkey Blast without a CD makes spam game play the meta, it makes lower skilled players unstoppable, because it does everything, now you nerf that skill, now rather than being defensive and offensive, it only retains one aspect (See hard CC in patch notes), and then you add a CD to it, guess what? Now, since it no longer does everything and has a CD but still has a useful effect, it needs to be planned at the right time in the fight or it will be countered and you are then venerable to the other player.

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@Master Ketsu.4569 said:Warning: This thread became slightly TL;DR. So for people who just want to skim read without going into the evidence or details I have broken it into three parts with a Tl;DR section in bold.

Before I even get into this thread I should add a disclaimer: Most of the patch is actually fine. Anet actually has taken a pretty big step in toning down some of the toxic gameplay that currently exists in the game. Reducing abilities that let you attack+defend at the same time. Reduction of stability spam. Reduction of burst damage. Toning down a lot of the silly condi passives. Overall this isn't bad. This thread is meant entirely for constructive criticism for a patch that for the most part seems to be a geniune attempt to make the game better.

However...

There is one flaw. A very big one, that could seriously harm this games direction due to the fact that it is based on a claim that is demonstrably false.

@"Cal Cohen.2358" said:

Cooldowns and Durations

We want cooldowns to be felt.
Longer cooldowns promote more calculated usage of skills
; if skills are used poorly it should create an opportunity for the enemy to push their advantage. Shorter durations of high impact buffs have a similar effect. Skillful timing is going to be rewarded, and poor usage is going to be exploitable by enemies. In some cases, it’s still going to make sense to have a longer duration attached to a longer cooldown, but most of the time we’re looking at shorter durations for things like stability, protection, quickness, high might stacks, among others.

The part in bold for that quote is incorrect, and dangerously so. The rest of it is actually true, just not the part about cooldowns. Increasing cooldowns does very little to reduce "spammy" gameplay. Nor does it promote more calculated skill usage in any meaningful way. This is not just my own opinion, but a truth that has been proven in the history of PvP gaming. In fact under some circumstances, increases to cooldowns can even increase spam and reduce the skill of the game. To understand why, well...get ready for a long one.

PART I: Street Fighter II, and why button mashing in well designed competitive games doesn't work.

One of the most competitive and highly skilled PvP games in existence, Street Fighter 2, has no cooldowns. So why does buttonmashing in this game not work? How can "calculated skill usage" exist in a game with no CDs at all?

The simplified explanation of that video, is that button mashing doesn't work in well made fighting games because they are balanced around attacks having different recovery time, speed, and power levels. If you randomly mash some special move against a decent player, you will likely miss and "whiff" giving that player a chance to punish the button mashing with a faster attack such as a jab in order to counterattack with their own combo. This way the game can have no cooldowns, but still be highly skill based.

Now for some hypothetical reasoning, lets mix things up in Street Fighter. Lets add a new character, called "Monkey man"
![](
"")Here comes a new Challenger!

Monkey man has a normal set of punches, jabs, kicks, but only has one special move: "Super Monkey Blast"

Super Monkey Blast has the following characteristics:
  1. Monkey Man screams "OOoOk oOOOk Ahh EEEEee! EEEE! EEEEE!" while using
  2. Has zero windup time
  3. Moves Monkey Man from one end of the screen to the other ( similar to Bisons P.Crusher )
  4. Is lighting fast ( less than 100ms for the whole move )
  5. Hits both high and low
  6. Has infinite super frames ( cannot be interrupted )
  7. Immune to damage while using
  8. Deals moderate damage
  9. Deals 50% block damage
  10. Has instant recovery time
  11. Is the highest priority move in the game

Think about those aspects of the Super Monkey Blast along with how fighting games are played, and you will start to notice the problem: Super Monkey Blast has no real counter, and is a defensive+offensive move at the same time that also gets you out of being corner locked. Your opponent still takes some damage if they block it, can't jump over it, can't punish it with a jab to interrupt it, and basically can't do jack to stop you. It is a jab, it is a powerful move, it has no recovery time and thus can't be punished if it whiffs. You can't counter it. You can't block it. You can't stop it from being immediately being used again. It effectively breaks the game. What all this means is that the best strategy to use when playing Monkey Man is to just spam Super Monkey Blast over and over and over.

Now lets "nerf" Monkey Man to have a cooldown on a generic special move... a 10 second cooldown. The resulting new Monkey Man playstyle is changed from using Super Monkey Blast at all times, to playing defensively for 10 seconds and then use Super Monkey Blast. Notice the problem here? Putting a Cooldown on Super Monkey Blast doesn't actually change the fact that the most efficient tactic available when playing Monkey Man is to
use Super Monkey Blast
. It doesn't fix the problem that the move is ridiculously overloaded. The cooldown does put Monkey Man slightly lower on the tier list, but it's more of a band-aid fix. SFII didn't even need cooldowns until we added Monkey Man to the roster. The game was perfectly fine because the abilities are all designed to have counterplay. It only needed a "cooldown increase" when an ability was added to the game that has absolutely no viable counter strategy whatsoever. If you tried to spam a move using any regular character against a skilled player, you will lose because they will just use jabs to interrupt you. Super Monkey Blast is exempt from this, and that's the real problem. The only thing increasing the cooldown for Super Monkey Blast REALLY does is eventually make Monkey Man unplayable. A better fix would be to remove the abilities defensive properties - No more damage immunity, add a recovery time, no more super frames, increase windup - so that it can actually be interrupted.

TL;DR Conclusion: Spam and lack of calculated skill usage is not caused by low cooldowns, but by abilities that are difficult to punish. Increasing the cooldown on a badly designed ability that does too many things does not fix the problem that it does too many things and is badly designed. An ability that is broken to the point where it is always worth using every 10 seconds will still be always worth using every 20s, 30s, and so on. Well designed abilities that have counterplay in mind can have no cooldown whatsoever and not be spammable because using them poorly can result in those skills being punished. The problem isn't cooldowns, the problem is when a move does everything at once and thus ends up with no strategy or skill behind it.

Part II: Translating Fighting game logic to MMORPG PvP - Guest starring Tera Rising.

A big reason I am making this thread is because I have seen what happens when you put overblown skills on high cooldowns. A lot of people don't realize that another MMO out there - Tera - has a very similar combat system to GW2. The only difference is Tera perpetually locks players to an action camera, however the skill use and soft-body style of physics the game uses makes for a good comparison.

Tera used to be a good game. Tera is now a rubbish game that I do not reccomend anyone download or try, lest you wish to waste your time on a dead MMO that is a hollow shell of its former self. How did this happen? Simple, they added a ton of broken abilities to the game that have high cooldowns. They added things like the brawler, which has a move that attacks everyone within a range of about 900 while blocking at the same time that also staggers everyone and then finally CCs them into a knockup that then is followed up by an air combo chain for tons of damage. It's a block, it's an interrupt, it does high damage, it's a CC chain, etc. With these new classes and apex skills, a lot of high CD abilities were added to the game that would Block+Attack+Evade+CC+Close gaps+Stagger+Area of effect+Wipe your kitten for you+Unblockable...
Gee, there is a pattern to this problem that is starting to sound familiar!

Yet, this is only half the story. Tera and GW2 are not fighting games, they are MMOs with action combat. The big key difference is you are in a 3D space with a team of players that are all helping each other. When these busted moves where added to Tera, it created an additional problem:
Since players were more dependent on strong long CD skills, the result is that as soon as another player came to help burst down a single target there was a much greater chance that target was out of CDs, allowing the +1 to happen much faster. The strategy of Tera thus became to stick together while brainlessly spamming area-of-effect abilities while zerging down single targets. This made the game boring, ridiculously lowered the skill cap, and ultimately killed the PvP of the game. Back when I played, you could Queue for PvP in Tera during off hours and it would pop in 10 minutes or so. Now, you can queue for a match during PRIME TIME hours and
it could take HOURS
.

This Zerg-meta can also happen with increasing CDs to defensive moves. In the above video we see a Berserker. Berserkers have a block that has no cooldown, but animation locks the player and only blocks what is in front. The match I posted is between Blacklist and Good-Fight, both teams know what they are doing. You will notice they change targets and swap strategies a lot, even if you have never played Tera.

Now lets say we slap a 10 second CD on the Berserkers block. What happens? Simple, without a way to punish people for focusing her by playing defensively, the best strategy becomes to just gang up and spam skills on the Berserker. Interrupts and jabs are not the only thing that punishes spammy gameplay, but defensive moves can also punish spam. ( PURELY defensive moves, not attack+defend+scream like a monkey+CC at same time nonsense ) Being able to play defensively for at least a little while is a good way to punish people for zerging and spamming. Take that away, and you have a "+1 meta", where it becomes way too easy to kill someone by simply overloading them with more than one player.

TL;DR Conclusion: having broken abilities on long cooldowns just leads to a "zerg meta", where it becomes insanely easy to kill someone by simply +1ing them since their best move is more likely to be on cooldown. In addition, slapping a long cooldown on abilities that are meant to punish the spam of other abilities will result in an adverse effect and increase the spam of the game.

Part III: Suggested changes to the patch

As I stated at the beginning of this thread, a lot of the patch is actually pretty decent. Removing damage from CCs, toning down invulnerability, lowering burst damage in general, reworking of some of the more overloaded skills, reducing the effectiveness of silly condi passives, reducing instant-cast skills, and then reducing sustain to ensure we don't get locked into a "bunker meta". All of those are good changes for the game that 100% should go through.

However, the problem comes with a long list of cooldown increases to most utility skills and weapon slot defenses. This change will, for reasons stated above, completely fail to achieve the stated goal of reducing spam and adding counterplay. Some of these changes actually risks causing the same braindead "Zerg meta" that killed Tera PvP. So I would actually revert most of them.

In addition to re-evaluation of the random cooldown increases, Some specific improvements as well as certain CDs come to mind:
  1. Elementalist-The CD increase on twist of fate especially is way overzealous. The problem with ToF is that it gained stability ( which is being removed ) and way too high sustain of Weaver in general ( which is also being toned down ). While some of the weapon slot evades could use a CD increase so weavers can't 90% evade uptime, hitting ToF this hard will just make it stupidly easy for a roamer to instantly +1 and down any Weaver build, thus making the spec unviable.
  2. Necromancer-Necromancers absolutely do not need a nerf to their movement abilities. Catching a Necro is already easy enough as it is.
  3. Mesmer-Mirage would be better off with a total rework than just slapping it with -50 endurance. This is very much tied to the problem I outlined above with slapping cooldowns on "Super Monkey Blast". Eventually, it just makes the class unplayable. I suspect that this final nerf will probably be the nail in the coffin, dooming Mirage to forever be remembered as a badly designed spec that got nerfed to oblivion. A rework of course takes more effort than removing a dodge, but could be better for the class as a whole. Something to consider for the future maybe.
  4. Thief-"Just increase the cost" is a very similar problem to "just increase the cooldown". It would be better to tone down some overperforming do-everything skills than to just add more initiative.-For instance, Staff thief will still have the best strategy being "Use mostly Staff 5" because staff 5 is both a long evade and high burst damage. A better fix would be to more significantly reduce the base damage on staff 5, and then increase the base damage of other staff skills such as staff 2. This would make thieves have to choose more between attacking or evading. Same logic applies to S/P, S/D, and DD. Increasing init costs just slows the class down, and fixes little.-Thieves will still be able to permastealth.
  5. Engineer-You actually missed quite a few instant casts here. Things like Surprise shot or Incendiary Ammo can add a lot of difficult-to-avoid damage.-Prime light beam is being overnerfed. In fact, all elite CCs sort of are. This is almost worth its own thread.
  6. Ranger-Greatsword 4 is one of the defensive moves that actually should get a CD increase due to currently being hilariously lower than every other block in the game. But a better change may be to nerf the CD to 20, and just reduce the duration to 1.5s instead. It's a counter attack, does it really need to be 3s long?
  7. RevenantSimilar problem to thief "Just increase the cost" is not a good way to nerf skills, especially since Revenants energy system is already quite self-punishing to mistakes.-Riposting shadows to 40 energy is a huge overnerf. 40 energy will leave you with 10 energy after a swap, which renders a stunbreak near pointless since the Rev still won't be able to do much. A better nerf would be to remove fury entirely ( This DEFENSIVE MOVE has no business granting an OFFENSIVE buff ) and remove the endurance gain entirely, replacing it with 6s of vigor. This would require the Rev to think more ahead of time for endurance regen/dodges by changing the endurance gain to a timegate from vigor instead of instant. 40 energy is just a bad idea.-The windup on staff 5 makes it unviable as an interrupt which is bad for the class as a whole as it will make rev the only class in the game without a quick way to punish skill spam with disruption. It's also unnecessary since the damage is already being gutted with every other CC skill.
  8. Warrior-Nerfs to sustain are needed to prevent the nerfs to damage resulting in Bunker-Meta, but Might Makes right is being overnerfed when you consider the fact that might generation is also heavily nerfed.-Absolutely no to the endure pain nerf/buff. We don't need longer duration OP skills on longer CDs. This is exactly the nonsense that this thread is talking about.
  9. Guardian-So one thing that is just as dangerous for spam as a skill that does too many things, is the ability to have a kitten ton of skills that do too many things that can be cast very quickly. This is the main issue with Symbolbrand. Increasing CDs to symbolbrand will not change the fact that the best strategy is to stand on point and buttonmash symbols/mantras/tomes all over the place.-Similar to Necromancer, Guardian does not need nerfs to its movement skills it is already very easy to catch a Guardian.

TL;DR Conclusion: The patch is nice and all, but hopefully it will be getting another pass before being released. It needs a lot of work and randomly increasing cooldowns/energy costs of skills in its current iteration seriously risks causing an effect on the meta that is precisely the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than all-around nerfing CDs, it would be better to take another balance pass at skill that A] Do too many things, and B] are instant cast / low counterplay.

Actually your wrong about staff thief tbh. The best burst combo on staff thief is by far staff 2 + swipe. Btw the damage on this can reach up to 20k on non zerker builds where as vault is like 10-13k at best plus it cannot be used with swipe, so balance this build by buffing staff 2? Just lol I could probably claim staff thief as meta if they did that becuz just dodge until staff 2 plus swipe is up. What we actually should do to balance staff thief is yes nerf damage on vault becuz it’s also a dodge and shouldn’t do “great” damage also, but to slightly nerf staff 2 plus increase initiative as it is at 3 initiative rn, which for one of the best burst skills on thief(higher damage than backstab btw) in the game is just wildly lowEdit: unless your super high iq actually saying we should make staff thief meta then I agree completely

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@"KryTiKaL.3125" said:I don't really know if polling is the right approach considering this games playerbase. Runescape and GW2 are pretty different in regards to actual gameplay, and I don't just mean combat. Runescape might be considered aimed more at a "hardcore" ish type of gameplay, or at least player. Sure there is crafting, and gathering, and general life skill stuff and the combat isn't exactly action combat by any stretch of the imagination, but core gameplay fundamentals in Runescape are definitely more geared towards rewarding those who go hard and has incentive to do so. In contrast GW2 doesn't quite have that. It is very much aimed at casuals, and has been for quite a while now, and I'd argue that a sizable chunk of the playerbase, even in PvP, doesn't quite have much grasp on gameplay mechanics. Just ran into someone in PvE yesterday and they didn't know what "CC" meant and they said they had been playing for 2 years. We have also seen what polling the community does on GW2. Thats how we got the disaster that is solo/duo queue only in Ranked. I wouldn't want to invite that sort of short-sightedness onto future balance updates.

I totally agree. Like I was saying, when Runescape does those polls they require a much larger majority to be in favor of whatever change in order for it to pass because they know that sort of short-sightedness exists.

Like tuning down the defensive bonuses of certain equipment, there's going to be someone who can't afford that equipment in game and therefore immediately votes yes. There's also the hardcore nostalgia people who don't think anything should be changed about the game period, so they immediately vote no for everything.

The numbers are always going to be inflated and biased, but if like 70-80% of players are asking for it, then it's usually worth trying at the very least.

The whole solo/duo vote is opening another can of worms entirely. Because of all that bias, inflation, and short-sightedness previously mentioned, allowing a vote that just barely passes to bring such a drastic change into the structure of ranked games was probably a mistake.

Instead of 20% of the population getting burned, it's very nearly a 50-50 split. That's not accounting for things like alt accounts voting twice or more, and people who just vote one way or the other without care.I don't know about you, but I didn't even hear about that vote until after it happened either. Compare that to RS where the poll booths are a literal in game item.

That failure shouldn't represent polling changes going forward.

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Low/no cooldowns with charge-ups, delays, and/or resources are always preferable to cooldowns alone. Relying so heavily on cooldowns never promotes "skillful" usage of skills; it only promotes reactive gameplay and generally devolves into position-camping, one-dimensional rhythm games rather than a dynamic movement of players on a field.

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@Leonidrex.5649 said:

@Hannelore.8153 said:They could slow this game down to half speed and it still wouldn't be good enough, it became way too fast and noisy over time.

boomer xd

Well I'm in my 30s, and I hate to tell anyone this but capability drops exponentially with age. When you're 30+ you're about half as capable as when you're in your 20s, which is half as capable as when you're in your teens. Its just life, nothing to be ashamed about.

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@TinkTinkPOOF.9201 said:

@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:

TL;DR Conclusion: Spam and lack of calculated skill usage is not caused by low cooldowns, but by abilities that are difficult to punish. Increasing the cooldown on a badly designed ability that does too many things does not fix the problem that it does too many things and is badly designed. An ability that is broken to the point where it is always worth using every 10 seconds will still be always worth using every 20s, 30s, and so on. Well designed abilities that have counterplay in mind can have no cooldown whatsoever and not be spammable because using them poorly can result in those skills being punished. The problem isn't cooldowns, the problem is when a move does everything at once and thus ends up with no strategy or skill behind it.

Reading through your post, like most other posts since the patch notes, I really have to wonder.....Did you read the whole thing? You do know and understand that CD's on SOME skills were increased, but not that many, most of the nerfs dealt with skills that did to many things, such has hard CC and high dmg, which is what you are saying should be done.....So I really don't understand the post, though I did read fast through most of it and will look it over better once home.

Not to pull a "No U" but... did you read the whole patch notes? And I mean everything, including the splits.

Because while random CD increases on weapon skills aren't really present in the general notes, in the PvP Notes they are everywhere and hitting every class.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/96744/balance-patch-preview-pvp/p1I'm not going to get into the other classes because the same silly pattern is present on every class, so I will just post the Heavy armor. Most of these skills do not need any CD nerf, and I have added a ( LOL ) to the CD increases that are especially random as nearly no one even runs them. Things like Warrior Axe OH or Renegade bow getting random increases to abilities that aren't even that good.

Warrior

-Cyclone Axe-Throw Axe-Final Thrust ( LOL )-Dual Strike ( x2 LOL )-Whirling Axe-Crushing Blow ( LOL )-Shield Stance-Wastrels Ruin ( LOL )

Guardian

-Leap of Faith-Mighty Blow ( LOL )-Zealots Embrace ( LOL )-Symbol of Punishment-True Shot-Blazing Edge

Revenant

-Coalescence of Ruin ( LOL )-Phase Smash ( LOL )-Mender Rebuke-Warding Rift-Unrelenting Assault-Deathstrike-Frigid Blitz-Bloodbane Path ( x2 LOL )

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@Master Ketsu.4569 said:TL;DR Conclusion: The patch is nice and all, but hopefully it will be getting another pass before being released. It needs a lot of work and randomly increasing cooldowns/energy costs of skills in its current iteration seriously risks causing an effect on the meta that is precisely the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than all-around nerfing CDs, it would be better to take another balance pass at skill that A] Do too many things, and B] are instant cast / low counterplay.

Your main flaw in approach is assuming one change means the other will not happen.

Increasing cooldowns has nothing to do with if skills should get reduced in amount of things they do. Both needs to happen, it's just far simpler to first increase cooldowns, then continue balance from there instead of randomly reducing what skills do, then increase cooldowns later.

Increasing cooldowns is of central necessity if the goal is to increase cooldown significance. Since this has to happen either way if this goal remains true, it might as well happen first.

Now you can argue that cooldown significance should not get increased, I doubt that is going to find resonance with the developers currently since they want to try their approach first. It has nothing to do with having skills and passives doing to much, that is a different issue which requires different addressing.

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@"Hannelore.8153" said:Well I'm in my 30s, and I hate to tell anyone this but capability drops exponentially with age. When you're 30+ you're about half as capable as when you're in your 20s, which is half as capable as when you're in your teens. Its just life, nothing to be ashamed about.

I wouldn't say it's a matter of capability, it's more that we "slow down" with time which tend to reduce our reactivity. But we are still capable, we tend to be more "efficient" as we age. This is the benefit of experience.

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TL;DR If you like PvP gameplay now ( all of you two people at the back) you will always find reasons to not like the new direction in combat.I'll wait to play it to see how it really works but I'm perfectly sure the game will still be bursty enough and still have fast enough combat. GW2 has by far the most well shorted out PvP (not in general but in relation to other MMOs) and the ridiculously low TTK and power creep worked counter to that. The first thing that needs to happen before balancing the functionality of skills is to reduce the fog of DPS in some way.

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@"Yasai.3549" said:Yup, all they are doing is slowing the game down.

Actual problems aren't being solved, they are just smashing things left and right in hopes that a new meta will appear.

Then proceed to smash that instead.

It has become increasingly clear that the current balance team isn't even interested about "balance"They just wanna throw as many wild changes and hope that something rises out of it, then repeat the process over and over to keep the game "fresh"

What they don't seem to see, is that they aren't putting things into the game as much as they are nerfing and removing.

It's literally gonna end up as a turn based game at this rate, because people will eye each other and drop all their cooldowns the moment an opening shows, then go back to circling each other.

If you actually looked at the notes than you would have seen that they are nit just "smashing left and right" they actually have a structure and theme to it

I hope you also looked at the global changes, which were posted in a different thread, were they introduced new traits and skill mechanics

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I could almost bet this "thorough analysis" comes from someone with an uber PC, uber connection speed and almost no lag because some of the "suggestions" would just doom players who try to take part of big fights but simply can't because they can't handle 469531 costumes and infusions.

A good example of this is Drakkar's fight. Since Bjora Marches have been released every single ice-themed map became buggy and tremendously laggy, even during periods of the day with no many players online and there are so many things happening at inside Drakkar's cave that I personally never had a stable fight, with so much FPS drop that I have to rely on GS #4 when playing my Ranger for example.

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I 100% agree with this. But devils advocate for A-net, I think slowing down the game is a good first step towards trying to correct these issues even if it doesn't accomplish that goal on the first round.

I really do hope they make changes to their suggested patch with thing in mind, particularity your class specific related notes.

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@Daishi.6027 said:I 100% agree with this. But devils advocate for A-net, I think slowing down the game is a good first step towards trying to correct these issues even if it doesn't accomplish that goal on the first round.

I really do hope they make changes to their suggested patch with thing in mind, particularity your class specific related notes.

Slowing the game down may help it with balance..... sure.

But they are changing so many things at once it worries people because Anet has been known to throw these curveball changes which ends up extremely busted in some way and people wonder if they even play their own game.

That's why alot of people have been asking for a public test realm to test changes.

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@Yasai.3549 said:

@"Daishi.6027" said:I 100% agree with this. But devils advocate for A-net, I think slowing down the game is a good first step towards trying to correct these issues even if it doesn't accomplish that goal on the first round.

I really do hope they make changes to their suggested patch with thing in mind, particularity your class specific related notes.

Slowing the game down may help it with balance..... sure.

But they are changing so many things at once it worries people because Anet has been known to throw these curveball changes which ends up extremely busted in some way and people wonder if they even play their own game.

That's why alot of people have been asking for a public test realm to test changes.

I don't disagree and I see the worry. Particularly when I look at class specific things like: "Mirage can only dodge once" when that's going to make 0 sense compared to what other classes can do and have access to while also getting the same toned down numbers.

The HUGE problem I mostly see when it comes to A-netis their historic refusal to "revert" bad changes. Or at least by the very inconsistent standard where they have done so... Almost as if afraid to admit to wrong doing; usually that type of pride coming at the cost of the health of the game. I'm hoping with the new team that this will not be a problem. Where "revisions" particularly ones they clearly got wrong, are going to be considered. Doubly so when we still exist in a game with no test server.

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Low cooldowns don't make this game feel too fast; It's the overpowered multi-functional abilities. It's the abundant quickness and superspeed. It's the absurd level of defensive boons and skills that allow some specs to go HAM and NOT worry about playing defensively because they can't be punished.

Anet should balance based on making dueling as FUN as possible, which would probably entail an abundance of balanced LOW cooldown abilities, each with an almost singular utility.

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I read half of this which was 50% more than I should have read and I should have stopped at the street fighter comparison, again because I don't think this is your first time posting something like this.

You're looking at a singular aspect from a singular perspective and also adding false equivalency by using the Super Monkey Blast. There's some strong abilities in GW2 however nothing is an immunity, while 100-0 the opponents and everything else on a mega cool down and there certainly won't be after the patch. As far as the singular perspective and and aspect go, you're looking at it only from a fight and instance of fight not iterative fights and the complexity of the game mode of PvP at high level with it's tactical and strategic cool down and decision management across a team.

As others have mentioned you've missed the reason for the patch, this isn't the be all end all and they do want to be tackling the bloat of many skills. however they need to set a new power level and a new philosophy going forward. Then they can start bringing everything into line with the new floor.

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@"apharma.3741" said:I read half of this which was 50% more than I should have read and I should have stopped at the street fighter comparison, again because I don't think this is your first time posting something like this.

You're looking at a singular aspect from a singular perspective and also adding false equivalency by using the Super Monkey Blast. There's some strong abilities in GW2 however nothing is an immunity, while 100-0 the opponents and everything else on a mega cool down and there certainly won't be after the patch. As far as the singular perspective and and aspect go, you're looking at it only from a fight and instance of fight not iterative fights and the complexity of the game mode of PvP at high level with it's tactical and strategic cool down and decision management across a team.

You are completely missing the point. There is no false equivalency because I'm not trying to compare SMB to anything in GW2, but rather proving a concept in PvP by adding it to fighting games.

The point of SMB is not a comparison, but a logic flow known as "Reductio ad absurdum" to refute the idea that spam is caused by cooldowns.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/reductio-ad-absurdum

In other words, it's intentionally overblown. It takes the idea that "cooldowns cause spam" and pushes it to the conclusion that we could add an intentionally absurdly broken ability to a game with no cooldowns whatsoever, observe that it is spammy, then give it a cooldown by nerfing it to only be usable every 10 seconds and it would still be spammy even though no other normal move in street fighter 2 has a cooldown. Therefore, the claims that cooldowns cause spam is false. Spam is not caused by cooldowns, but by flaws in overall design that result in a lack of interactivity.

@"rng.1024" said:Did you even play the core game?Let me give you 2 examples:

  • Arcane Shield had a 75 sec cooldown
  • Battle Standard had a 240 sec cooldown

Nothing this patch touches comes even close to those cooldowns, with the exception of auto-proc skills which all have been out of meta at some point.

Was the game balanced and the combat good back then? Yeah it was alot better than it is today. We already have the proof that increasing cooldowns won't wreck balance, in fact coupled with the damage reduction all it does is bring us closer to the pre-expansion pack balance paradigm - but we get to keep bloated skills and elite spech advantages for those who are into that.

I absolutely played the core game and I also played Vanilla Tera, which at the time was nearly the exact opposite philosophy to what core GW2 had. Tera used a skill balance philosophy around having low CD evades/blocks, low CD interrupts/staggers, moderate CD stuns, and moderate CD damage skills that had high animation locks/cast times. If you played a sorcerer and tried to run up to say a warrior, then proceed to randomly throw out high damage AoE spells on him, that Warrior would proceed to absolutely destroy you. He would interrupt every single spell, backstab, then combo you 100-0. This forced people to play smart.

To put it very simply, the comparison between core GW2 and Vanilla Tera in terms of skill gap has a very clear winner: Tera. By far. By 10000000x more. In fact, this is the main reason I am making this thread, because I believe anet is making a critical mistake in understanding what is causing the spam in their game and are about to make changes that not only fail to "promote more calculated skill usage" but in fact do exactly the opposite. The reason you cannot spam in Tera, despite the games physics and style being very similar to GW2, is because those blocks and interrupts ( IE: Methods to punish random spam ) were on such a low CD.

So the super TL;DR is this: Spam is caused by a lack of access to ways to punish spam. The reason you see things in this game, such as monkeybrand, where the best tactic is to mindlessly barf out all your AoEs on the point, is purely because of a lack of true counter to them doing so. While spamming, a monkeybrand gains stability and aegis pretty regularly, has very low cast times, almost zero recovery frames, and no animation locks whatsoever. So of course the best tactic becomes to monkey around on top of the point. Might as well, as there's literally nothing to stop you aside from getting zerged.

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